Elizabeth scribbled their names on the front of the file folder, holding the autopsies of the two new victims. “What did he want from you?”
Doc closed his eyes, as if going back in time to the last day he saw his friend alive. “He wanted to talk about the town, and the possibility there was a serial killer among us.”
“And?” she braced for his answer, pretty sure she already knew what drove her father. It was the same that would have kicked up her gut instinct.
“I told him that to me it seemed that there was a very good possibility that we definitely had something to worry about. Salem has been notoriously quiet for decades. I have lived here my whole life, and now in the matter of a few days we had three bodies.”
Nodding her head, she tapped her fingers on the file. “And now I have two.”
“You have the same look on your face that he had on his that day.”
Elizabeth smiled at the comparison, it was a huge compliment. “I’m going to review those three files, and check into them tomorrow. I’m feeling less and less convinced that these deaths are all just random killings by five individuals,” she paused, “I don’t believe in coincidences either. I’m starting to believe we have one killer, and that means Salem has big trouble brewing.”
“Like father, like daughter.”
Elizabeth laughed. Wasn’t that the truth?
Sitting at the big mahogany desk, Elizabeth stared at the laptop. It was now or never. She had to get some guts and just dive right into the task. As she pushed the power button, it whirled to life and started up. Slowly, the screen came on and the box to enter the password popped up.
“Well, crap,” Elizabeth muttered as she began entering all the possible passwords that came to mind. When she was out of ideas, she blankly stared at the screen. Elizabeth might need to just accept that she wasn’t a computer whiz and this might be out of her scope of ability.
Then it hit her!
On the wallpaper was a thirty year old picture. The three smiling faces touched her, especially since the woman had been dead for almost twenty six years. A ghost of a smile touched her lips, as she knew the password her father had chosen. Elizabeth entered her mother’s name, and immediately the screen dissolved. Soon the files loaded and began to appear on the desktop.
Eureka!
As Elizabeth navigated her father’s files, she couldn’t help but smile. It was blatantly clear where she got her compulsive tendencies from, and it was her old man.
As she clicked on each icon, she scanned and read all the information. Elizabeth wasn’t sure what she was searching for, but she knew it had to be in there somewhere.
There was a shortcut to his email, and Elizabeth tried to access it, watching it open slowly and again asking for a login password. The email was his private account, and had been the one she used to message him, and tell him what was going on in her life. The last time she emailed him, was days after she was shot. The message sat in his inbox, calling to her. She opened it, taking note of the day and time. It was the day of her partner’s funeral and the same morning she had gotten the call.
Reading over it, she recalled how vague she had been in the message to him. The last thing she wanted was to make him worry. Had she known this was to be her last correspondence, she would have said so much more.
“Dad, I’m coming home. I love you.”
The message was to the point, and spoke nothing of the pain she was living in that moment. Little did she know that more hurt was on the horizon.
Reading it again, it sucked her back to that moment in time, forcing her relive it all over. Wiping her eyes, she knew that all this was necessary and had to be done. Elizabeth forced herself to search the sent emails. There was nothing there she hadn’t seen before. As she continued, Elizabeth searched the spam folder and the drafts file.
It was there she got lucky.
Inside the drafts was her father’s last correspondence with the world, and it was addressed to her. She swallowed and clicked on the message. As it loaded, she braced herself as she saw the date and time. It was the day he died. In fact, it was roughly the time he’d passed away too. She knew because she had asked Doc a million times, and studied the numbers like an obsessed mad woman. It was her father; she simply couldn’t let it go.
Dear Lyzee,
I miss you baby girl! I am neck deep in a mess here, and I was wondering if you had some time for your old man. It seems I have some unusual deaths, and I need you to take a look at them for me. I think I see something, but I need neutral cop eyes to double check.
I love you.
~Dad
Her heart pounded at the words. The tears were next to follow. There was something deep inside of her that ached so completely at his words. Elizabeth closed the laptop, unable to continue her search. It was all still too raw in her heart.
“I love you, Dad. I’m so sorry,” she whispered through the tears, as she locked up the house. After she showered, she fell into a restless sleep, plagued with dreams she didn’t quite understand, and lots of black ravens chasing her through Salem.
The ravens kept asking her name, as they stared at her with incredibly midnight blue eyes.
As they came closer, her heart began to pound.
Yet, she wasn’t afraid.
Oddly, she felt safe.
Wednesday Mid-morning
Sitting on her desk were the files that Deputy Morel had promised her. Alongside them was a waiting cup of steaming, hot coffee. Now Elizabeth could officially get to work.
If anything, she was very lucky. Her staff was super-efficient, especially her secretary Martha. Elizabeth had just sat down and was opening the first file, when there was a knock on the door. Speaking of Martha, it was time for her morning update and the paper.
“Sheriff, you have a busy day. Doc called and he has the dental records on their way. We also had one missing person report filed early this morning.”
“Who is it, Martha?” she asked, sipping her coffee.
“Patricia Parker, and her momma is real worried about her. She never came home last night. I know standard procedure is forty eight hours, but with the bodies…” She let it drop, knowing the sheriff understood.
In this case, it was better safe than sorry.
“It’s not a problem, Martha. Just get me the report she filed. I’ll head over to Doc’s this morning and take care of it all at once.” She tried to place a face to the name of the missing girl, but she just couldn’t. Her father would have been able to, but she been away for too long. The only thing bouncing around in her brain was the visual of the bodies that were snacked on by the lake creatures. Her skin crawled at the memory of the vacant, sightless eyes.
Yuck, she really hated dead eyes.
“Also, Mayor Argot called too. He wants an update as soon as you get a chance.” The woman rolled her eyes at his name. “Because it’s re-election season this fall, and he wants an easy win.”
Elizabeth laughed at the woman’s sharp sarcasm. “Martha, maybe he’s just concerned.”
“Yeah, and I was a Victoria Secret model,” she answered, posing against the door, seductively.
Now that was funny. The woman couldn’t be an inch over five feet tall and was almost sixty. “Okay, let me deal with Doc, the missing person report, and then I’ll call him back as soon as I have some more information.”
Elizabeth didn’t plan on disclosing the chlorine water situation, especially to a man who was just the figure head of the town. Will Argot would be blabbing that detail just about everywhere. “Anything else I need to be worried about on this fine day?”
“Well, we have had non-stop calls from worried citizens.”
“I’m not surprised. Salem is a small community, and if I wasn’t sheriff, I’d be worried and calling too. What are you telling them?”
“That Sheriff LaRue is working on it and not to worry.”
Elizabeth nodded, wanting desperately to get into the files on her desk.
&n
bsp; “We also had a visit from the weasel.”
That drew her attention back to Martha. That was her not-so-affectionate nickname for Henry Forbes, the local newspaper guy. Once he sniffed a story, he dug and dug to get to it. Now that the town had two bodies, she was sure he would start sniffing around. Her only hope was he didn’t make the connection with the three other deaths. “What did he want?”
“Oh, we had the usual request. Forbes wanted the call log for the paper of all the crimes, and to ask questions about the bodies in the lake. Oh, and to request a personal interview with you about the women.”
“Great,” she muttered, not wanting any part of that funfest.
“I’ll stall for you as long as I can, Sheriff,” said Martha, smiling. “It’s part of the job description.”
Elizabeth laughed and focused on the files once the woman was gone. They needed her attention before she headed out to see Doc. After all, there had to be something here if her father was obsessed with digging into their deaths. It was just a matter of time, before the obsession fully consumed her now too.
If there was something there, she’d find it.
After an hour of studying the files, Elizabeth sat back in her chair, steepled her fingers and started analyzing what she had just read. Victim one and two had perished in a fire. The blaze had started with an accelerant and matches. The bodies of Tara Scott and Melissa Martin were doused and then lit. It was a particularly nasty way to die, especially since they were still breathing at the time. When the fire department had arrived, to put out the flames and retrieve the bodies, they were little more than crispy corpses. No evidence remained, and that was probably why the killer had chosen fire. Any skin under the nails, semen, or fibers had been destroyed in the heat.
Elizabeth reread her father’s hand scribbled notes in the file. It appeared the thing that made him scratch his head the most was that the two girls didn’t seem to know each other. So how did they end up dying together? Like her father had believed, Elizabeth was beginning to suspect that the house was a convenient dumping ground.
“Gee, just like the lake,” she muttered to herself.
The third victim, Melody Howe was found hanging from a tree in the park. The autopsy said cause of death was strangulation, but her hyoid remained intact. That made no sense to her. Every dead body she’d ever encountered while working for the FBI, the hyoid had snapped when a victim was found at the end of a noose.
What else she couldn’t understand was how this girl, so full of life, decided to end it all. She had a good job working as a secretary, no depression, and no meds in her system. Why commit suicide?
More notes were scribbled in the file.
‘Talk to Doc about the tree and the hyoid.’
Apparently, it bothered her father too. That meant she was on the right track.
“Well ladies, if you were indeed murdered, I will figure this all out and find your killer. I’ll get you justice.” She made the vow.
Elizabeth had more questions now and needed to head to the morgue for answers. As far as she was concerned, the reasons that drew her father’s attention now fully had hers.
* * *
Blackhawk sat at his meticulously organized desk. He was filing the official paperwork regarding the previous day’s scene. The report, much like everything about him, was carefully ordered and succinct. He knew that his boss wasn’t going to be happy, and not because of the outcome. They had saved the tax payers a bundle, but the cowboy antics nearly got him killed.
Yeah, Gabriel Rothschild was going to hand him his ass, and the paperwork was just there to make it official.
Ethan knew what he did was incredibly dangerous, but just seeing that little girl made it justifiable to him.
“When’s your meeting?” questioned his partner, Lily Sanderson, as she tapped her pen nervously. Just watching Blackhawk so calm and unfazed about the meeting, pissed her off. He was cool and controlled, from his pressed dress shirt to his pulled back hair.
“In a couple hours, you?” he replied, meeting her stare. She had been his partner now for a good year. They had been through a great deal together, and he trusted her completely. Did he like her? He wasn’t quite there with a conclusion yet. They were polar opposites, and that bothered him, and he was sure it made her nuts too. Daily, he had to put his trust in her, as his life depended on it. As of late, she seemed a little too hostile and very unhappy.
Sanderson looked and dressed like the typical agent. The woman may be short, but tough came in all sized packages. She towed the company line, but never wanted to risk anything, or go outside the boundaries. It stifled her, giving everyone the impression that she wasn’t FBI material. If you were going to dedicate your life to the Feds, you had to just do it; it was the equivalent to selling your soul. Lily just seemed disillusioned lately towards him and their partnership.
“Mine is right before yours. It seems they want my account first, before they either fire us or demote us to janitorial staff.” If they did that she would seriously kick his ass.
Blackhawk laughed at the visual bouncing around in his head. He knew Gabe wouldn’t make him a janitor. That was too easy a punishment. He would create something truly painful.
“I’m glad you think this is funny, but you know how Gabe is a stickler for rules. You broke his big one, yet again.”
Ethan leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, but that little girl lived.”
“And you almost didn’t, Ethan.” There was a reason they called him Cowboy. He was a danger to his own wellbeing.
The irony was that Ethan Blackhawk didn’t resemble a cowboy. In fact, he was more suited to play the role of Indian. When she first started working with him, Lily found his appearance to be exotic and a great distraction as they worked, but now she wanted away from the professional suicide that Blackhawk seemed hell bent on committing.
It was common knowledge that he went through partners like tissues. At first the mystique made working with him fun, and then the fun became just plain dangerous. “If we both don’t get a suspension for this, I’ll be shocked.”
Ethan grinned, eyes sparkling, “Well, I did say I wanted a vacation.”
He had no idea…
* * *
Elizabeth stood in the morgue over the first dead body. Something about the little patches of missing flesh from the nibbling fish, rather than the bloated-ness from the water and death, made her sick. She was glad she wasn’t going to have to see the sightless eyes that were snacked on by the fish.
That was her small silver lining.
The two girls lay side by side, as the ME studied the missing person report, trying to match birthmarks, tattoos and hair color to either one. When he looked back up at her, she knew then that the one was indeed a match.
“This one is Patricia Parker. She has a tattoo on her lower ankle of a starfish. On her right knee is a birthmark in the shape of a circle. Plus, she matches height and hair color. The poor child was only nineteen,” Doc sighed at the waste of life. “I feel like I can conclusively say this is an exact identification. We don’t need a family visual if we both sign off on it.”
She’d sign anything he asked to keep some poor parent or loved one from having to take on that task. “Anything on the second body as of yet?”
“The x-rays are just in from the local dentist. I'm going to start working on that now. We don’t have a huge town, but we do have enough people that’ll take me the rest of today at least.”
“Doc,” she touched his shoulder. “I got my father’s files on the three victims before he died, and I checked his laptop.”
“What did you find?” he asked, sitting and pulling out a chair for her. “Did you find anything significant, or should I assume that you have questions like he did?”
Elizabeth sat, crossing her legs before she began, “He was concerned. He couldn’t find any connection between Tara Scott, victim one, and Melissa Martin, victim two. They were complete strangers but in the same fire.”
Doc Trudeaux poured them both a cup of tea and handed her one. “Honestly, that’s not my area of specialty, Lyzee. He came in and wanted the scientific facts. I gave him all I had. The girls had drugs in their system. They were smoking cannabis or another herbal, and they had smoke in their lungs. From what I could discern, the bodies were doused with kerosene and lit on fire. I can only tell that they did breathe in smoke during the fire.”
“It seems like a violent way to go.”
“It is, especially if they were coherent and awake at the time.”
“Can we discuss the third victim?”
He leaned forward and patted her cheek with his worn hand. “We certainly may, but I am up there in age. I need to see the file, if you don’t mind.”
Elizabeth smiled gently at her friend. He reminded her of her own father in so many ways. “Right here,” she passed it to him, watching him carefully as he took in all the information, processing it.
“Okay, I’m ready. What’s your question?”
“My dad had one question in his folder; he didn’t understand how she got up into the tree. Do you know what he meant by that?” she asked, hopefully.
“I can only tell you what we discussed.”
“Okay. Trust me I’ll take anything at this point.”
“The hyoid bone, you may have noticed,” he paused, flipping back through the pages to the autopsy picture of the y-incision, “that it wasn’t broken.”
“But she was strangled to death with a rope. Shouldn’t it have snapped?”
The Killing Times (An FBI Romance Thriller (book 1)) Page 4