by Debra Webb
How come she could clear up everyone else’s problems but never her own?
And why was it this damned frustrating packaging required her to pry it open every single time? They really should design these things better.
She stared at the number of pills left. Wait. That wasn’t right. Today was the thirteenth. She should be having her period by the fifteenth, which meant she should be into the blue-green pills now, not still in the white ones.
Searching her bag again, she unearthed her phone and checked her period calculator. Wasn’t that a handy app?
There it was. She was right. There should only be one of the white pills left, at most. But there were four. Not a good thing.
A trickle of terror kicked her heart into higher gear.
Surely she hadn’t forgotten as many as that? Yeah, she’d forgotten one here or there in the past but never more than one in a month.
Jess shoved her hair back from her face. Had she gotten behind after her room at the Howard Johnson Inn was vandalized? Things had been a little crazy for a few days and she’d gotten abducted by that crazy little gangbanger. Lil had gotten sick in the midst of all that.
And she wasn’t even going to throw Eric Spears into the mix. He had turned her life completely upside down. She shuddered when the image of that gun pointed at her flashed in her head. What if that guy had pulled the trigger? What if . . .
He hadn’t. She couldn’t think about the what ifs; she had a bigger problem at the moment. There were lots of excuses for why she might have forgotten this many pills but none were good enough. This was serious business.
No . . . this was life-altering business.
‘Okay. Deep breath.’ The chances that she had missed two or more days in a row were slim. So, this might not be as bad as it looked.
And maybe her calculations were off. She could be right on schedule. Maybe she’d entered the dates wrong in the app in the first place.
‘That has to be it.’
Jess popped a pill into her mouth and ducked her head under the faucet. She swallowed and felt better already.
She swiped her mouth with the back of her hand and stared at her flushed skin and tousled hair.
The fear attempted to swell again. Shaking her head, she turned her back to her reflection. She peeled off Dan’s ruined shirt and climbed into the shower.
She was worrying for nothing. The Pill was 99.99 percent accurate, wasn’t it? Something like that.
There were better odds of winning the lottery than of her getting pregnant. Hadn’t she read that somewhere?
7.30 A.M.
Since Jess had showered first, she’d scrambled eggs and made toast while Dan showered and shaved. They sat together at the kitchen island and asked the usual questions.
‘You sleep well last night?’
‘I did.’ She sipped her juice. ‘You?’
‘Like a rock.’
They sounded like an old married couple. Very few things had ever scared her more.
Afterward, Dan loaded the dishwasher while Jess grabbed her stuff and readied to go. The meal wasn’t as elegant and delicious as one Gina Coleman would have whipped up but it served the purpose.
‘Cooking classes, my ass,’ she muttered as she headed back into the kitchen. She could take a cooking class if she wanted to, but she didn’t have time. She was too busy stopping killers and keeping Birmingham safe.
Maybe that was a little over the top.
Loading up in his SUV and heading to the office together was another of those couple things. She’d stayed overnight with him a few times during the last Spears ordeal when she first got back to Birmingham, but things had been so frantic then that she hadn’t really thought about how it felt to take each of these steps. Only how it looked to everyone watching them.
This morning felt . . . comfortable yet awkward somehow.
Didn’t make any sense but there it was.
‘I’ll just pick up my car when we stop at my place. I hate being stranded.’ It made her feel completely powerless.
‘I know how you feel about that,’ he ventured, ‘but I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone out in the open in a vehicle he can tie you to. Not after what happened yesterday.’
As much as it annoyed her that whenever he learned about an incident that involved her safety, he wanted to take control and protect her, he had a point she couldn’t ignore.
‘I won’t go anywhere without Wells or Harper. And I’ll ride in their vehicles. You have my word.’ She wasn’t a fool. The guy had scared the bejesus out of her. ‘The Audi will stay in the city parking garage.’
Her cell clanged. She checked the screen. Lori.
‘Harris.’
Jess heard Burnett answer his phone as well. Simultaneous calls were never a good sign.
‘Chief, there’s been another murder. It’s Aaron Taylor. The maid found him a few minutes ago.’ Lori gave Jess the address.
Why the hell hadn’t the guy gotten out of town like he said? Or at least accepted a surveillance detail? What was wrong with these people? ‘I’m on my way.’
And then there were two.
Cahaba Valley Road, 9.00 A.M.
Like his friends, Aaron Taylor lived in a mansion. A modern beauty with an infinity pool that flowed practically right up to the French doors at the rear of the house.
Paramedics had pulled Taylor out of the pool but he’d been long dead. Overnight at least. The skin around his hands and feet was wrinkled and loosening from the body. His eyes glistened, which indicated he had been underwater since his death.
Jess leaned down to peer into his open mouth. She couldn’t see any vomit or pink froth from the battle to draw in oxygen but it might have washed away. Lividity along the face, chest, and abdomen told her that he had been facedown on the bottom of the pool since his heart stopped beating. A nasty lump on the back of his head suggested someone had either rendered him unconscious or attempted to. Either way, he had died just the same.
‘One of the techs is going into the pool for the small statue near where the victim was recovered. That may be the weapon used to give him that massive lump.’
‘What about the skimmer?’ She looked from the pool to Harper. ‘That’s too light to have been used for cracking his head. Maybe it fell in accidentally or was already there?’
‘They’ll retrieve that as well.’
Jess had unbuttoned the victim’s shirt to check the lividity along his chest. She pushed the material away from his shoulders and found a mark on his left shoulder. She pointed to it. ‘Maybe the blow to the head didn’t put him down the way the killer hoped. He had to use the skimmer pole to hold him under the water until he stopped struggling.’
‘There’s a nearly empty fifth of bourbon over there,’ Harper mentioned. ‘He may not have done a lot of struggling.’
‘True. As fit as this guy was, that pole wouldn’t have held him under if he hadn’t been incapacitated to some degree.’
Just another reason to stay sober when your friends were dropping like flies. Dammit. Why the hell hadn’t he listened to her and gone to that lake house? Or at least accepted the surveillance detail she had offered?
Lori joined them on the patio. ‘The house is untouched as far as we can tell. No ransacking. The maid says everything appears to be right where it’s supposed to be.’
Jess stood. ‘Does she know where Mrs Taylor might be?’ Jess hoped they didn’t have another victim around here somewhere. Taylor had mentioned taking his wife out of town; maybe he’d sent her on ahead and had intended to join her but waited too late.
His checkbook and a pen waited on the table next to the dwindling fifth of bourbon. Maybe he’d thought he could negotiate his way out of this. Evidently he’d thought wrong.
‘She said Mrs Taylor’s makeup bag isn’t here, which means she didn’t stay here last night.’ Lori glanced around and added, ‘Apparently the lady of the house often spends nights away from home.’
&
nbsp; Do tell. ‘We need to track down the lady.’
Reporters were already gathered in front of the house. No matter that the mayor wanted this investigation kept low-key, Taylor’s murder was going to turn the tide. Carson’s death hadn’t been connected to Baker’s in the media. Most of the coverage had been about his former celebrity status as a pro ball player. With this third murder, the connection would click. Three murdered friends in the space of four days. The blitz would hit by the evening news whether the mayor liked it or not.
‘Man, I hope the rest of this day goes better than the beginning,’ Lori grumbled, dragging Jess’s attention back to her. ‘I had a flat on the way over here.’ She frowned at Jess. ‘And you’re wearing the same clothes you wore yesterday.’
‘Does the maid know how to find Mrs Taylor?’ Jess asked, ignoring her comment.
‘She gave me her cell number.’
That reminded her. Jess glanced around the patio. ‘Did you find Taylor’s cell phone?’
‘It’s in the water,’ Harper answered. ‘Right next to the statue. And for the record,’ he added with a pointed look at Lori, ‘I mentioned yesterday that tire looked a little low.’ He turned to Jess and gave his head a shake. ‘Don’t worry, Chief. I didn’t notice the outfit was the same.’
Before Jess could summon a witty comeback, her detectives had gotten back to the business at hand. Damn but they needed to find this Todd Penney. If he was the killer in this case, he had just reached a status that wouldn’t make his mama so proud.
Serial killer.
‘Found this in the shrubbery.’
Jess turned to Officer Cook, who held a familiar wrinkled page.
Another journal entry. ‘Bag it and let’s have a closer look.’
An evidence tech placed the page into a protective bag and passed it to Jess.
Lori and Harper gathered around to read another glimpse of Todd Penney’s and Lenny Porter’s encounters with the Five.
As much as she needed to stay objective, Jess couldn’t help feeling bad for Todd and Lenny. Aaron Taylor had been a total asshole in high school but that didn’t mean he deserved to die like this.
‘I guess he got his wish,’ Lori noted, referring to the author’s frustration.
‘Cook.’ Jess passed the journal entry back to him. ‘Nudge that handwriting expert. We need to know if he can confirm from Todd Penney’s DMV signature if this is his handwriting. He’s taking far too long to give us an answer.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Sergeant, where are we on locating Penney? He has to be close.’
‘His face was in all the newspapers again this morning,’ Harper said. ‘He’s lying low somewhere because everyone in the city knows we’re looking for him as a person of interest in this case and no one has laid eyes on him.’
‘He hasn’t reported back to work,’ Lori added. ‘As soon as I was notified of Taylor’s murder, I called Penney’s boss at home. Then I called his mother. She isn’t answering her phone,’ she added before Jess could ask.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
‘Lori, find Taylor’s wife before she hears about this.’ Jess scowled. Hells bells. She needed her car. ‘You’ll have to drop me at the office first. I’m going to round up the final two of the Five. One or both knows more than they’re telling. I’m betting if they want to stay alive, they’ll start talking.’
Birmingham Police Department, 10.52 A.M.
‘Do you have any idea where your friend Kevin is this morning?’
Eyes red from crying, Juliette Coleman shook her head. ‘I tried to call him three times on the way over here. He’s not at home and he’s not answering his cell.’
Gina hugged her sister close but kept her comments to herself.
‘His wife has no idea where he is?’
Juliette shook her head. ‘She said he worked late at the paper last night and she went to bed. She had no idea he hadn’t come home until she got up this morning. But no one at the paper has seen him this morning.’
Looked as if they were going to need to issue another APB in this case. Unless they already had another victim whose body just hadn’t been found yet. Her frustration cranked up another couple of notches.
‘Juliette, I’m going to be totally honest with you.’ Jess readied to finish ruining the woman’s day. It was Friday the thirteenth after all. And another man was dead. Not to mention yet another was unaccounted for. ‘We’ve had no luck finding Todd Penney. He’s here in Birmingham. We’ve confirmed that much with his mother. But we can’t find him. He’s lying low and he appears very good at it. But that alone doesn’t make him a murderer.’
‘It’s him,’ Juliette insisted. ‘It has to be him.’
‘How do you know it’s him?’ Jess gave her a second to absorb the impact of that question. ‘His friend died twelve years ago. Penney has a very successful life out in California. Why would he come back out of the blue and start killing people? It’s not the anniversary of Porter’s death. No special date has passed at all as best I can tell.’
Still Juliette said nothing.
‘That leads me to believe there’s a reason we haven’t uncovered yet,’ Jess reasoned.
‘What are you implying?’ Gina Coleman asked.
‘For a man to start a killing spree, there has to be a motive. Considering the one event all three victims have in common, we have to assume the motive is related to Lenny Porter’s death and that it’s been festering all that time. And now, after twelve years, he’s decided to do something about it. The problem is, we haven’t found a trigger.’
‘A trigger?’ Juliette asked, looking confused or guilty, maybe both.
Jess pushed a copy of the latest journal entry across her desk. ‘Yesterday we discovered a storage unit,’ she explained to the two women. ‘That storage unit was covered with pages like this.’ Anger and disgust started to build inside Jess. ‘Long narratives detailing how five smart, attractive, rich kids tortured two young men whose only shortcoming was that they didn’t have it all.’
Plain old pissed off now, Jess spread crime scene photos of Scott’s, Elliott’s, and Aaron’s bodies in front of the women. Juliette gasped. Gina glared at Jess.
‘Your three friends are dead not just because they were selfish assholes when they were teenagers.’ Jess struggled to contain her outrage. ‘They’re dead because something occurred recently. A conversation, a meeting, something. And that something triggered their murders. There’s only you and Kevin left. Are we going to let whoever is responsible for these murders just keep following this obvious pattern or are you going to start telling me the whole truth?’
‘Are you accusing my sister of something?’ Gina demanded.
Jess looked her square in the eye. ‘Absolutely. I’m accusing her of not telling me the whole story.’ She turned to Juliette then. ‘Three of your friends are dead,’ she repeated. ‘Another is unaccounted for. Are you going to keep pretending that you don’t know anything until you’re all dead?’
‘We need a lawyer,’ Gina announced. ‘Let’s go, Jules.’
‘Just one more little detail.’ Jess opened a folder and withdrew Scott Baker’s phone records. She’d gotten to the office this morning to find them waiting for her. Why the hell it sometimes took as much as three days she would never understand. They were still waiting for Todd Penney’s, Elliott Carson’s, and now Aaron Taylor’s. Evidently she needed to add Kevin O’Reilly to that growing list. ‘Scott called Todd Penney just over one week before he died. They spoke again the day before he was murdered. You and Scott were lovers. Did he mention to you that he’d spoken to Todd?’
Gina stood. ‘Don’t say anything else.’ She kept that glower tuned at full power on Jess.
Juliette held up her hands. ‘Okay.’
Mouth gaping, Gina stared at her sister.
‘We were doing drugs that night.’
‘Oh my God!’ Gina cried.
‘If you’d like your sister to leave the room,’ Jess said
to Juliette, ‘we can go on without her.’ Jess ignored the mega evil eye that earned her. Gina would need a few more cooking classes to get her Zen after this.
‘No.’ Juliette shook her head. ‘I want her to stay.’ She fell silent for a long moment; then she began, her voice taking on a distant quality. ‘None of us did drugs. We didn’t even smoke pot.’ She glanced at her sister. ‘But that night was the last night of our youth, you know? Starting on graduation day, we would be adults. College, jobs, marriage, and children lay ahead of us.’
Jess didn’t prompt her with more questions. Just let her talk.
‘We decided that one night would be ours. Completely. We could do anything we wanted and it didn’t count. We swore never to talk about it. Like it never happened.’
‘How did Lenny Porter become involved?’ Jess had a feeling he didn’t just show up.
‘The guys wanted guinea pigs. We’d spent the whole year screwing around with them – why not include them in the big bash? So Scott and the others invited Lenny and Todd.’ She stared at her hands. ‘Lenny did everything they told him. Whatever stupid thing it was, he did it. He took the drugs but not just the pot and coke we did – the hard stuff, like acid. He was their puppet. They were getting off on watching his reactions to the drugs.’
‘What about Todd?’
‘He played along at first but then he tried to get Lenny to leave. Finally he left without him. But he was tripping too. The acid really screwed with their heads.’
As much as Jess wanted to explain to this woman that four people were dead and she was partly responsible, she waited for the rest.
‘The guys started goofing around close to the edge of the building. Scott, Aaron, and Elliott were acting totally insane. I sobered up pretty quickly. I begged them to stop but it didn’t do any good. They just kept getting closer and egging each other on. I was done. I told them I was leaving. I turned my back for a second. A second! And Lenny jumped.’
‘So the three who have died, your friends, were at the edge with him but he was the only one who jumped.’