Murder on Lovers' Lane (Brody and Hannigan Mysteries)

by Paula Graves

  Murder on Lovers' Lane

  A Brody and Hannigan Mystery

  by

  Paula Graves

  Published by Paula Graves

  Copyright 2011 Paula Graves

  Cover Art Design Copyright 2011 Paula Graves

  All rights reserved. Except for the use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or part in any form by electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the author, Paula Graves, paulagraves@charter.net.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblances to the actions persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Other books by Paula Graves

  Harlequin Intrigue Series

  Forbidden Territory

  Forbidden Temptation

  Forbidden Touch

  Cowboy Alibi

  Case File: Canyon Creek, Wyoming*

  Chickasaw County Captive*

  One Tough Marine*

  Bachelor Sheriff*

  Hitched and Hunted*

  The Man from Gossamer Ridge*

  Cooper Vengeance*

  Major Nanny

  *Cooper Justice series

  Independently Published:

  Code Name: Willow

  Playing Dead in Dixie

  Chapter One

  The night was unnaturally quiet, Brody thought. Even the cicadas, never ones to let a late summer evening go to waste, seemed hunkered down and silent, waiting for—what?

  Something was about to happen. Something wicked.

  "You're channeling Lovecraft again." Stella Hannigan's voice broke into his thoughts, flat and amused.

  Lowering his binoculars, Lee Brody slanted a look at his partner.

  "You have a little furrow in your brow," she explained, lifting her own spyglasses to peer through the front windshield of his Ford Taurus. They were parked a half block from Alvin Morehead's rental house, where they suspected he was holed up, waiting for a chance to go hunting again. "The one you get when you're convinced the world has suddenly turned harsh and iniquitous, and we're the only creatures left among the living who can stop the coming malevolence."

  "Don't you feel it?" Brody let his gaze linger on his partner's delicate features a little longer than necessary. "There's evil in the air."

  "That's high ozone and particulates," she drawled.

  "Any movement?"

  She dropped her binoculars. "How sure are we that Alvin Morehead's the Lovers' Lane killer, anyway? While we're sitting here—off duty, might I add—some other psychopath may be killing poor, horny kids elsewhere."

  "Morehead fits our profile."

  She stifled a yawn. "We don't have a profile, Brody. The FBI hasn't been called in. The brass won't even admit this could be a serial killer."

  "Come on—six murders, bodies positioned in the same way, shot with the same weapon, all at known make out spots—"

  "When you say 'make out' spots like that, it gets me kinda hot," she murmured, her voice dry as a desert. Even though he knew she'd tossed out the innuendo to diffuse some of his pent-up frustration, it still made his jeans feel about two sizes too small. He gave her a pointed look and saw a hint of a smile touch the corners of her lips.

  He cleared his throat. "We know at least one of each couple murdered was a student at the community college. Morehead works there—"

  "So do literally scores of other people, not to mention hundreds of students. Are they all on your suspect list? Should I pencil in a few hundred more off-duty stakeouts until we've covered them all?"

  Brody sighed. While Hannigan's hard-headed pragmatism and brutal honesty were among her more annoying qualities, they were also the qualities that had made them such good partners for the past four years. She kept him grounded, made him think through his flashes of inspiration to find a useful course of action.

  She'd saved his ass more times than he wanted to remember.

  They were two of the six detectives working Robbery/Homicide at the Weatherford, Alabama, Police Department. The other detectives rotated between partners, pairing up based on who was around when a call came in, but the lieutenant had figured out long ago that none of the other detectives cared to be paired with Hannigan or Brody. It seemed the only person who could stand either of them was the other.

  "Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right about Morehead," Hannigan said. "What do you expect to happen tonight?"

  Brody sat forward, his gaze moving to the darkened house framed by the windshield of the Ford. "That."

  Hannigan followed his gaze. "Son of a—"

  Alvin Morehead was on the move.

  As he drove, Brody's whole body seemed to hum with excitement. He so loved being right, Hannigan thought, splitting her attention between her partner and the tail lights of Alvin Morehead's tan Chevrolet Malibu.

  Lee Brody didn't look like a cop. He looked like a movie star, all lean, well-proportioned muscles and perfect, perfect features, from his soulful brown eyes to his artfully dimpled chin. He wasn't beautiful—he was far too masculine to fit that description. But sometimes, he took her breath away, though she fought not to let it show.

  The last thing she ever wanted was to let it show.

  Brody kept a careful distance from Morehead's vehicle as it cruised up Tremaine Street and hung a left at Gladden Drive, taking them closer and closer to Weatherford's nightclub district. "How many make out places in this city—seven? Eight?"

  "How would I know?" she shot back.

  He glanced at her, a smile playing with his lips.

  "Shut up," she muttered.

  "Well, there has to be a reason your high school nickname was Hoover Hannigan."

  She was going to kill her brothers for sharing that piece of information with her partner last week. They'd surprised her on her birthday for the first time in, well, ever. She had a sneaking suspicion Brody might have been behind the impromptu celebration of the big three-oh.

  Unfortunately, Grady, Ellis and Carl had taken the first opportunity to make her life miserable by telling Brody all her childhood secrets. And Brody, of course, had lapped it up like a kitten in a puddle of spilled milk.

  Irritating ass.

  She sighed. "They called me that because I used to eat really fast in the lunch room."

  "So you'd have time to do that night's homework during lunch period?"

  Dead on, but she wasn't going to admit it aloud. He already thought she was a brainiac nerd, pragmatic to a fault. Hell, the whole department did. She supposed it was a good thing, in most ways—at least nobody thought she'd made detective as a diversity hire.

  So she let that be her thing. Every detective had a thing. Walt Billings was Mr. Cheerful, tooling around everywhere he went with a big ol' grin on his face. It wasn't great for interviewing the victim's family after a death, of course, but it was perfect for disarming potentially hostile witnesses. Suspects got sucked in by the grin all the time.

  Brody was the magician. He had the wild ideas, the flashes of intuition. He was the one who could look at a suspect and know, in his gut, whether he was the one or not.

  Which left Hannigan to be Lady Logic. She was the one who tested Brody's insane theories, ran them through the fire of her empirical pragmatism. She honed the raw material of his genius into something practical. Useful.

  Good grief, she
thought bleakly, did that make her a blacksmith?

  Yeah, that was attractive.

  "Have we lost him?" She peered through the increasing traffic on Butler Avenue, a four-lane thoroughfare that wound its way through the city center. While it was no sprawling metropolis like Birmingham, Weatherford wasn't a small town, either. The downtown district spanned several blocks and boasted many multi-story buildings towering over the wide streets and avenues of the city center.

  They were moving through the south end of town, the nightclub district. At nine on a Friday night, traffic was thick around the clubs and bars.

  But Alvin Morehead's tan Chevy was no longer in sight.

  Brody grimaced as he peered ahead through the traffic tangle. "I thought we were only a couple of blocks behind him."

  "Think he made us?"

  "In this traffic? I doubt it." Brody muttered a profanity. "I knew I should have let you drive. You're better at tailing."

  "Just keep going. I'll check the side streets as we pass to make sure he didn't turn off. He's up there somewhere."

  She peered down each cross street as they passed, aided by the slow creep of traffic through the club district. But she didn't see the Malibu anywhere. Not ahead, not behind, not down any of the side streets. They drove for another twenty minutes, weaving in and out of the downtown district with no luck.

  "Maybe we should backtrack." Brody sounded ill. His certainty that Morehead was their suspect meant he'd feel personally responsible if Morehead had slipped their tail and went on to commit murder.

  The only thing harder to deal with than Brody on a mission was Brody wallowing in guilt.

  "We should have talked some of the other guys into backing us up," Brody muttered as they neared the far edge of the club district without spotting Morehead's Chevy. "They could've picked up the tail if we lost him—"

  She didn't bother telling him the other detectives working the case already thought he was a total flake for latching onto Morehead as the killer. The whole unit had been working the murders, gathering some promising leads on the Lovers' Lane killer that pointed away from Alvin Morehead, the mild-mannered maintenance man. No way in hell would they have given up a Friday night off for a Brody-style wild goose chase.

  "He's not here." Brody's despair roiled through the car like a storm cloud, heavy with foreboding.

  "So let's do a tour of the hormone hotspots," she suggested in an attempt to ward off the worst of his sinking mood.

  He managed a harmless leer at her, despite his gloom. "I thought you didn't know where the primo make out spots were, Hoover Hannigan."

  "I have brothers, remember?" Plus friends in high school who'd been eager to brag about their exploits.

  She'd been to a make out spot a time or two herself, actually, despite her bookish reputation. Sadly, both of those guys had assumed her limited social skills at the time made her desperate and grateful for attention. Grateful enough to put out without raising a stink.

  They'd learned otherwise.

  "Parkwood is about four miles north of here—let's try there first," she suggested.

  "Parkwood's a make out spot?" Brody sounded skeptical. And slightly aggrieved. "My dentist's office is there."

  "It's not like they're doin' it in the dentist chairs," she retorted, slipping deeper into the rural Alabama drawl she'd never been able to fully eradicate. "The parking lot has a nice view of the river."

  "Romantic," he murmured, losing a little of his moroseness. "Did you ever park there?"

  She angled a look at him.

  "Sorry. Did your brothers ever park there?"

  She ignored that as well, gazing up the road toward the Parkwood Building, a sprawling, single-story office building that housed Brody's dentist, an ophthalmologist and a hair and nail salon.

  The building was dark and shuttered for the night, but at the far end of the parking lot, overlooking the Okaloosa River, most of the parking slots were already filled. Plenty of fogged-up windows in view but no sign of Alvin Morehead's tan Chevy.

  "Looks okay here," Hannigan ventured.

  "Yeah." Gloom began to sneak back into Brody's expression. "Maybe he was just going out for a beer. He's probably at a bar right now, watching a ball game or something."

  "Probably," she agreed, although she discovered, to her surprise, that she didn't believe it. Brody had a way of infecting her no matter how hard she tried to inoculate herself against him.

  Circling, they headed back to the main strip. Traffic hadn't slowed a bit, and Brody had to swerve to keep from hitting an intoxicated blonde who stumbled out into the street right in front of him. The tipsy woman flipped him off and threw in a few curses for good measure, making him grin as he brought the car back into his lane. "I have a way with women."

  She smiled bleakly, knowing he did, indeed, have a way with women. He'd certainly wrapped her around his finger with alarming speed.

  If they weren't partners—

  She stopped herself right there. Even if they weren't partners, she was not the kind of tall, leggy, socially sophisticated woman she'd seen on Brody's arm the handful of times she'd met his dates.

  He came from money, from a family well placed in what passed for good society in these parts. He never seemed to give a thought to how privileged he was. How he could have chosen almost any other job besides law enforcement. His law degree made him overqualified and his family money made him underpaid.

  She might be the perfect partner for him at work, but little Estella Hannigan, whose daddy was from Sand Mountain and whose mother grew up dirt poor on the seedy side of Chickasaw County, was no match for Lee Brody in any other way.

  "Isn't there a make out spot over near Buck's Bluff?"

  "I think so." She frowned, annoyed by her wandering thoughts. "I think it's near the playground."

  "Apt," he murmured, a hint of amusement in his voice.

  As usual, most of his gloom fled with his renewed sense of purpose. She'd been filing away mental notes on him for four years now, locking them up in a little file cabinet in the back of her mind labeled Leland Stafford Brody, III. She could almost predict his every move, despite his certainty that he was utterly unpredictable.

  Was it possible to know a person too well? She'd always heard that familiarity bred contempt, but her increasing understanding of her partner had only bred—

  What? Desire?

  She attacked that thought with the ruthless ferocity she normally saved for vicious perps and meddling brothers. She did not desire Brody. There was no room in their relationship for the distraction of attraction.

  His perfect, perfect lips were not eminently kissable....

  The sound of a siren rose in the distance. Brody's forehead creased again, not with his "I have a wild idea" expression but his "I have a sick feeling I know what this is about," grimace. She found herself sharing his sense of foreboding, especially as the sirens grew louder the nearer they drew to Buck's Bluff.

  They reached the entrance to the small park just as the patrol car, with its flashing blue lights and wailing sirens, pulled onto the narrow service road that led up the hill into the park.

  Brody reeled off a series of bleak curses as he steered the Ford uphill in the patrol unit's wake. They wound through scrubby brush to a bluff overlooking Cherokee Valley to the east.

  "It may not be connected," Hannigan said, though she couldn't muster much conviction. They should have backtracked in search of Morehead as Brody had suggested instead of continuing on to Parkwood.

  She should have listened to her partner's instincts.

  "I should have listened to you," he murmured.

  She looked at him in surprise. "What?"

  His gaze pointed forward, toward the blue-lit scene at the top of the bluff. Two uniformed officers had already emerged from the cruiser, approaching a lone car that sat at the edge of the bluff, its driver and passenger doors open. Two bodies spilled out, one on either side, their clothing dark with blood. It was a familiar sig
ht now, after four identical crime scenes.

  It took a second for Hannigan to register the make and color of the vehicle.

  "Alvin Morehead isn't the killer," Brody said morosely as Hannigan stared at the tan Chevrolet Malibu and its bloody former occupants.

  "He's the victim," she finished for him.

  Chapter Two

  "You weren't entirely wrong." Lieutenant Crane settled his big frame into the small steel and vinyl chair across from Brody's desk, the expression on his craggy face incongruently gentle. "Your basic victimology was correct."

  Brody shook his head. "The other six victims were years younger than Morehead and his companion."

  The lieutenant threw a look at Hannigan, who sat quietly at the desk next to Brody's, typing up a report. Her fingers flew like the wind across the keyboard, though her gaze focused squarely on Brody and the lieutenant.

  She was his personal paladin, he knew. Always at the alert, ready to watch his back or defend his honor, whichever he required at the moment.

  He didn't deserve her. He was a nightmare to work with, excitability and moroseness rolled into one unmanageable son of a bitch nobody else in the world would put up with.

  Nobody should have to put up with him.

  "Stop feeling sorry for yourself," she muttered once the lieutenant wandered off to handle paperwork on the new case.

  "We were so busy trying to catch him—on my word alone—that we didn't realize we needed to save him."

  "We're ahead of where we were." She pretended to look at the report she was typing on her desktop unit. But he knew she was secretly gauging his mood. She would intervene if his growing sense of despair became too oppressive.

  He forced himself out of his navel-gazing and tried to see the evening's events from her more practical perspective. "We certainly know more about this victim than we knew about the previous victims at the time of the murders."

  "Gives us a head start, don't you think?" She sounded nonchalant, but he heard the irrepressible optimism lurking behind her neutral tone. Though she prided herself on being a cynical realist, she had the delightfully quaint notion that any problem could be solved if you applied enough study and legwork.