She cleared her throat. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
Gaining her composure, she asked the first question. “How did you know Abigail Tucker?”
“Abby was my wife.” He seemed to relax in his seat and prepare for the round of questions.
“Can you tell me how the two of you first met?”
“Originally? Or when we started dating?”
“Originally.” The more she could tell her viewers, the better. They’d see the relationship Abby and John had developed and shared, and would care even more about the fact that she’d been taken from this world, along with her child.
“I met her the first day of seventh grade. Abby’s family had moved to Macon over the summer, because her father had taken a job teaching Social Studies at Central. She was kind of nervous about starting at a new school, and at that awkward age, twelve, where you want to be popular, but you don’t know how. I’d been elected the class representative for the Junior SGA, and one of my jobs was to make the new kids feel welcomed.”
“How did you do that?”
“I introduced her to folks, took her around the school and helped her learn the ropes. I tried to help her blend, but she was still pretty shy until lunch that first day, when I thought I’d help her out by carrying her tray.”
“You were flirting.”
“Hey, I was thirteen. It was in my nature to flirt.” He gave her a sly smile and Lexie found herself wishing she could’ve seen him back then trying to impress the pretty girl.
“What happened when you carried her tray?”
“So, I’m walking across the lunchroom with these two trays filled with hard tacos, limp salads and fat cinnamon rolls, and sure enough, someone had spilled taco grease on the floor.”
“Taco grease?”
“Yeah, that red stuff they try to make you think is taco sauce, but you know it’s just the grease they didn’t drain.” He laughed. “We didn’t mind, though. If you ask me, that’s what made them taste good.”
She could picture him, the confident teenaged SGA rep determined to impress every girl at school with his suave, debonair style. And falling up short. “So, what happened when you and your two trays of food had a run-in with the taco grease?”
“Kaboom.”
She laughed. “And Abby suddenly didn’t feel so bad about the first day of school?”
“How could she? This guy trying his best to impress her had ended up sprawled on the lunchroom floor covered in limp salad and taco grease. She felt pretty near perfect after that.”
Lexie realized they’d ventured off the original question, but her viewers would like the personal story, and she planned to include the entire taco grease scene in her report.
“Tell me about your time later, when the two of you began a more personal relationship.”
“From that day on, we were always friends. Every now and then, we’d take a turn at trying out the boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but throughout high school, we were more friends than anything. She dated other guys. I dated other girls. But we always seemed to come back to each other when things didn’t turn out so great with other people.”
“Was she a member of the Fellowship?” This question had been added to the past few interviews, the ones conducted after they learned the killer had been a member of the group.
“No, which had a lot to do with why we didn’t pursue a more intense relationship back then. As a deacon, my father had no intention of me dating someone from outside the Fellowship.”
“But later that changed?”
“He was killed in ’88, around the same time that Brother Moses left and the group fell apart. After that, mine and Abby’s relationship grew into something more than friendship. Before long, we started seeing each other exclusively.”
Lexie honed in on the detail she hadn’t heard before. “You said your father was killed. How did he die?”
John’s mouth dipped down on one side, then he took a deep breath and answered, “A friend of his called him to his home, said he and his wife were arguing and that she had a gun. He asked Dad to come over and try to talk to her.”
“So he died answering a domestic disturbance call?” Lexie found herself amazed at the many layers of this man and at all of the heartache in his past.
“Yeah, but the call didn’t go to the station. The guy called my father at home.”
“What happened?”
“By the time he showed up, she’d shot her husband and waited on Dad. The minute he got out of the car, she shot him, then she turned the gun on herself.
“Oh, John, I’m so sorry.”
He swallowed, then cleared his throat. “After his death, Abby and I grew closer.”
“And the two of you married—when?” Lexie’s heart still ached from John’s loss of his father, but her mind realized he wanted the interview to move past that particular pain.
“We married in 1991.”
“So you’d been married eight years when she died?”
“Yes.” His jaw twitched, and his hand tightened on the wheel.
“And the child she carried, it was your first?”
“We tried to get pregnant before. Both of us wanted to have kids the minute we got married. We wanted to be young parents, but it just didn’t happen. We figured it was because of our stressful jobs, or that’s what we heard, that stress could cause things not to happen as easily. I worked homicide and Abby worked fulltime as a court reporter. Both are stressful jobs, of course.”
“But then she did get pregnant.”
His hand opened on the steering wheel, then gripped it again. “We considered going to a fertility specialist, but then she got pregnant.”
“And the two of you were anxious to have that child. Elated that your dream had come true, right?” She knew his response would touch her viewers’ hearts, as it would touch hers.
But she wasn’t prepared for his answer.
John reached over and pressed the stop button on the recorder. “This can’t go on the air, okay?”
“All right.” She wondered what could be worse than discussing what happened to his father and his wife. “What is it?”
“I’d have loved that child, no matter what. And if things had worked out between us, we’d have raised him or her as our own, but you know from the reports that Abby and I had separated. The stresses of our jobs had taken over, and she didn’t understand why I had to spend so many hours away from home working on the Sunrise Killer case. She—turned to someone else.” He inhaled, exhaled. “The baby was his.”
Lexie’s chest clenched. She hadn’t known. If she had, she’d have never put him through this interview, through having to relive not only the pain of losing his wife to a killer, but also the pain of losing her to another man. “I’m sorry.” She hated how weak the two words sounded in comparison to the heartfelt emotion behind them.
“Don’t be. I loved her, even after I found out. But the truth is, I didn’t even know about the baby until after she died. She never told me, and it’d been too long since the two of us had been together for the baby to have been mine.”
“Do you know who—”
“A cop, he worked with me on the case. We were friends. He left Macon though, after he confessed the affair to me. I haven’t spoken to him since.”
She nodded, not knowing what else to say.
“Do you have enough for the story?”
“Yes.” She did, more than enough.
“I didn’t mean to keep that from you, but I don’t like to talk about the problems Abby and I had, or the fact that she cheated. And if I hadn’t been so involved in that case, and spent so much time away—”
Lexie leaned across the seat. Starting at the tiny crinkles beside his eye, she brushed the backs of her fingertips down the side of his face, then moved closer to press her lips against his neck. “You can’t blame yourself for that. You were doing your job.”
His throat pulsed against her lips. She stayed there, close
to him, giving him her warmth, showing him compassion for what he’d experienced by showing him she cared.
She had plenty of information to provide an accurate picture of Abby Tucker without sacrificing the private aspects that would remain solely with John. She closed her eyes, rested her head against his shoulder.
“Lexie.”
She opened her eyes, eased away from him…and viewed the very place that had been the backdrop of her nightmares for the past twenty-eight years.
“Pull over.” Her words came out scratchy and raw, and she swallowed past the instant fear that rippled down her spine. After all these years, she’d returned to the scene of the crime.
John steered to the side of the road and parked. The red and blue lights from the cops still on the Fellowship grounds flashed a constant reminder that hours ago, Hannah Sharp and Logan Finley had been found in the woods less than a quarter of a mile from where he now parked. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure, but I need to get out, and I need to get closer to where we were.”
He nodded. He’d been around survivors before when they returned to a crime scene where a loved one died. Although detectives brought them back to the scene to learn whether they remembered any details of the crime, he knew why they hadn’t brought Lexie back to the scene so long ago. No way should an eight-year-old have to endure a forced memory of her aunt being murdered. Plus, she had already blocked the images from her memory. Even if the cops thought it might help solve the crime, they wouldn’t have been willing to sacrifice her sanity to do it, and one of those cops had been his father, a good man who would never do anything to harm a child.
Now, however, Lexie had matured into a knowledgeable woman ready to face the demons of her past. One demon in particular, the one who’d killed her aunt on this road.
“I’ll need to go clear this with the guys on the scene. They should recognize my vehicle, but just in case, I need to let them know I’m here.”
“All right.”
“Wait for me before you start trying to remember more. Stay in the truck until I get everything cleared. I don’t want you to do this alone.”
She chewed her lower lip, frowned at the road before her, and nodded.
John climbed out of the truck and hadn’t breached the boundary of the woods before running into Pierce. “I thought they were done. What are they looking for?” He indicated the CSI team, still scouring the ground they’d covered earlier.
“Agent Jackson wanted them to search again for anything the killer could’ve left behind. She has no doubt, and neither do I, that he’s been here. Someone cleared that brush. But I believe if he left any clues behind, they were destroyed when the team started digging. I thought she might be onto something, but I never dreamed we’d find them so quickly.”
“We wouldn’t have, if we hadn’t had so many members on the task force who’d once belonged to the Fellowship. It only made sense if he buried them here, they’d be at the spot for the altar.”
“Yeah, well, CSI came back to look, but I think we’re about to call it a day. We haven’t found anything new.”
“No one called me.”
“You’d have been called if anything turned up. But I knew you were working on the interview for the TV station, and that’s important as well, in light of the new bodies being found. I can’t help but think someone out there knows something.”
John nodded. He suspected no one knew anything at all about the killer except the woman sitting in his truck. However, although she may have seen him in the past, she couldn’t remember him now. And until she did, the fact that she’d witnessed one of the murders wouldn’t help the case.
“We’ll be out of here soon. Were you wanting to take another look around as well?”
“Yeah. I’ve got Lexie with me. She wanted an accurate depiction of the scene to describe for her story.” A half-lie, but he couldn’t tell the captain the truth, not until they caught the killer.
“Good idea. Elijah came earlier snapping photos of the area for the Telegraph. The newspaper will depict the scene; it’d be good for her to see everything herself too, though. You know, I don’t like to feed the media, but in this case, I agree with Jackson. The best way to oust this guy is to put his actions out there for the world to see. And this place, I’ve gotta tell you, gives me the creeps.”
John remembered traveling down this hidden path several times each week as a kid. He’d listened to countless sermons, learned endless rules, and experienced the fear of “all powers unknown” from Brother Moses upon this land. It’d been a combination of horrible and awe-inspiring at the same time. Right now, horrible claimed control. “It does the same for me.”
“I’ll go back and make sure they haven’t found anything else. It’ll be dark soon. Guess if Ms. McCain wants to take a look around, you guys should get started. If the CSI group finds anything of interest, I’ll give you a yell. If not, we’ll be out of here soon.” He slapped John on the back. “We’re getting close, Detective. I can feel it.”
“Good, because we’re running out of time.” John returned to the truck, where Lexie sat, her arms wrapped around her middle while she stared at the road ahead. He opened the door. “You sure you want to do this?”
Less than an hour ago, she’d asked him the same question, regarding his interview about Abby. Both of them understood the difficulties involved with this case, with this killer, and with the memories haunting them as a result of the murders.
He wouldn’t have thought less of her if she chose to leave, to flee the scene of so much pain. But he knew Lexie McCain, so he understood that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she faced the demons. And part of him wanted her to find a means to close this door from her past, so that perhaps she could find the will to open a door for her future with him.
“I have to do this.” She climbed from the truck.
John wrapped an arm around her. “Okay. Where were you?”
She pointed ahead. “Over that hill.”
They started walking, while thick clouds covered the last bits of sun, and the temperature dropped. It didn’t look very far at first, but as they walked, John realized that he should’ve offered to drive. “I didn’t realize it was this far.”
“I did. I remember looking out from the top. It wasn’t paved back then.”
“No, it wasn’t. They didn’t pave the county roads until the early nineties.”
“I slipped and fell, busted my lip and chipped this tooth.” She indicted her front right incisor, shaped odd along one side. “I didn’t want to get it fixed. It reminds me of Aunt Bev.”
John’s throat closed at the sound of emotion in her quivering voice. So much pain for an eight-year-old to endure. So much pain for a grown woman to remember.
They reached the top of the hill, and Lexie stopped walking, then turned to view the road behind her. The police cars were leaving, the red and blue pulsing lights fading as they returned to Macon.
“There was a house.” She pointed to the lower left, to a flat meadow that buffered the edge of the woods.
“I believe I remember a house being there. I guess they tore it down at some point.”
“The man who lived there—I can’t remember his name—but he was out in his garden. He wiped his head with a red handkerchief, and that’s when I saw him. I remember wondering if I should yell at him or not.” She sucked in a small gulp of air. “I thought maybe he was the killer and trying to act busy to trick me.” A glaze of tears covered her dark green eyes. “Strange, isn’t it? I mean, I’d heard the killer drive away, but in my head, I still believed he could be anywhere, even standing in the middle of that field.”
“What did you do?”
“I had to decide whether to scream, to try to get his attention and get help for Aunt Bev, or to be quiet, to keep the killer from coming back and hurting her again, or from hurting me.” She wrapped her hands around her stomach and shook her head, remembering the terror of the decision.
/> “And you yelled for him to come help.”
“I yelled as loud as I could, and I prayed he got there in time.” She continued shaking her head as she spoke. “He saw me, and he yelled back toward his house, and a woman came out on the porch, then she ran back inside. I guess she’s the one who called the police. It must have been his wife, but I never saw her again. I just turned around and started running back to the car, back to Aunt Bev, while he followed.”
“Was she still alive when you got there?”
“Yeah, but her breathing sounded strange. I think the killer knocked her unconscious, because I thought she might already be dead when I left the car, but then she kind of gurgled, and the blood was everywhere.”
“Then what happened?”
Lexie turned and started down the backside of the hill. He caught up to her and wrapped his arm around her while she moved. She didn’t speak for a while, but continued to walk, while a soft mist fell from the darkening sky. “Over this next hill.”
They topped the hill. Lexie moved even closer to John. “Right there. That’s where we were. The ambulance came, and the police came—and your father—and they all tried to save her. They took us to the hospital in Atlanta, because they thought the doctors there might be able to save her, but they couldn’t.”
“They saved the baby, though.”
“Yes. When they realized Aunt Bev had died, they took Angel—Olivia. Aunt Carol held me tight and kept my head buried in the crook of her neck. Then she told me Aunt Bev had gone to heaven, but that the baby was okay. I don’t even remember when she told me. I can’t remember if we were here, or if we were at the hospital in Atlanta.” Lexie paused. “At the hospital. That’s right, because Granddaddy got there while she held me. He came in frantic, his face all creased with worry and he asked about Aunt Bev. Someone, I guess a doctor, told him they couldn’t save her. I remember his scream; it made my heart clench. They were trying to tell him about Angel, but he couldn’t hear the words. He grabbed his chest.” Her jaw twitched at the painful memory, throat visibly tightened, as though she struggled to keep emotions at bay. “The rest of the day is a blur.”
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