by Webb, Debra
Cyrus nodded. “I was informed of this turn of events a little while ago.”
Of course he’d already heard. He knew everything that went on in this county. He likely knew Addy was on her way well before Irene did. The surprise he’d shown moments ago had been nothing more than for show . . . for her benefit. The bastard. Even now he played his games.
No matter what he claimed, he would have some inkling about the Prescott woman’s fate. No one came into Cyrus Cooper’s territory and took a breath without his knowledge.
Somehow Irene had to ensure Addy never found out . . . about any of this. “No one can know what we’ve talked about, Cyrus. No one.”
His gaze held hers. She wanted to look away, but she didn’t dare. She needed him to promise despite knowing what that would mean.
“This will be our little secret, Irene.”
Vomit rose in her throat. She would rather die than owe this man anything more than she already did. But she would likewise do anything to spare her daughter this particular truth. Anything.
“The Prescott woman appears to be out of the way for now,” he went on. “Whatever she had hoped to accomplish by coming to you is irrelevant under the circumstances.”
That was another thing Irene would have to live with. The idea that she had lied to that poor woman. Dear God. Had her lies sent Prescott in search of the truth elsewhere? Had that search ended in tragedy?
Irene had to get out of this house. She pushed to her feet, her legs unsteady. “Thank you for your time, Cyrus.” She rounded the table, tried to veer beyond his reach.
She wasn’t quite fast enough. He grabbed her hand as she passed. “Try not to worry, Irene.” Those doughy fingers squeezed hers, making her shudder inside. “No one’s ever going to know our little secrets.”
She wrenched her hand free of his and rushed out the door. Managing to climb into her car before her knees gave way, she was halfway down the mile-long drive before she had to slam on the brakes and open the car door.
The bitter bile strangled her as she retched it from her throat.
She’d made a pact with the devil . . .
There would be a hefty price to pay. Just like before.
Irene prayed that Cherry Prescott had not been a part of that price.
Chapter Five
Jackson County Sheriff’s Office
3104 Magnolia Street
Pascagoula, Mississippi, 7:20 P.M.
Adeline sat in the dark for a moment.
She studied the four-story courthouse. Christmas lights were strung in the windows and wreaths hung on the doors. As a kid, she’d gone to the courthouse many times with her dad when he had business to take care of. The marble-floored main lobby with its soaring ceiling had enthralled her. During the Christmas season a towering tree stood in the center of the main lobby. Sometimes Santa would hang out there and give away lollipops.
Despite her curiosity, the deputies walking around with their guns on their hips had sent her hiding behind her daddy’s legs. She’d been certain that bad people lived in the courthouse even though Santa had made it one of his regular annual stops.
Funny, she’d found out much later that, to some extent, her childhood theory had been all too true. Even at twenty she hadn’t fully realized that truth. She’d been so damned excited to make the cut as a deputy for the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department. At the time she was only the second female to accomplish the feat. She’d been damned naïve. Truth and justice had been her ideals. Her father had finally come around and at least pretended to be happy for her. He’d wanted her to succeed. He just hadn’t wanted it to be in law enforcement. His approval had been her ultimate goal in spite of her fierce independence.
When she’d made the switch from tutus and tights to uniforms and service revolvers, he hadn’t been anywhere near ready to see it happen.
My little angel can’t be a cop.
A smile tugged at her lips. She’d always been her daddy’s little angel. All the Cooper men hereabouts had boys. Adeline was the only girl for three generations. The only Cooper offspring with blond hair and blue eyes, too. Her mother had insisted that Adeline had gotten the blond hair and blue eyes from Great-aunt Joan on her side of the family.
Long before becoming a cop, the frilly dresses and fancy bows her mother had insisted she wear as a child notwithstanding, Adeline had spent a whole hell of a lot of time trying to prove she could do anything the Cooper boys could do. At eight she’d cried her eyes out because all the boys had gotten guns and holsters for Christmas and she’d gotten a damned baby doll.
In school, she had found her way into more than her fair share of scrapes and scuffles, gotten caught smoking behind the boys’ locker room. All much, much to her daddy’s dismay. To top it off she’d given up her virginity at the ripe old age of seventeen to Wyatt Henderson.
Tall, gorgeous. Captain of the football team. Wyatt had been the hometown hero who always carried the team to victory. She and her little world had worshipped him.
She blinked away the past, allowed her gaze to refocus on the courthouse. He was in there. She stared at the first-floor windows, the only ones still lit by more than strung-up holiday lights past the five o’clock hour. Wyatt was waiting for her arrival.
During every minute of those six hours of hard driving she’d played out how this would go down in about five hundred different ways. She would be her usual cocky self. Nine years had passed. They were both adults. She’d had plenty of sex with other men in the intervening time.
She was a cop. He was a cop.
There was an investigation to be dealt with.
What was the big deal?
Yet, she sat here, her palms sweating and her pulse hammering as if it was Saturday night and she was still a sophomore anticipating her first kiss from the senior who just happened to be captain of the football team.
“That’s truly fucked up, Cooper.” She shoved the cell phone into her coat pocket and grabbed the sealed evidence envelope. The sooner she got this initial awkwardness over, the sooner they could get down to the business of investigating this case. She wasn’t here to reminisce.
She climbed out of her Bronco, pushed the door shut with her shoulder. It wasn’t even eight o’clock and already the streets of downtown Pascagoula were rolled up for the night. No one could deny the city’s Southern charm, with its lovely old antebellum homes and the sea as its lifeblood. Even with industry hovering in the background amid the live oaks laden with Spanish moss, Pascagoula had all the quaint appeal of the fishing villages that dotted the New England coast.
Only this was the Gulf of Mississippi, where the drug trade thrived in that same sea, providing its coastal villages with crucial lifeblood. The trouble wouldn’t be seen in the light of day when those who lived and worked in Pascagoula swathed themselves in the city’s quiet dignity. The devil’s work started after dark, deep in the bayous along those twisting riverbanks. All the dirty little secrets and ugliness of living on the gulf were played out in the places the sun never reached.
Drugs. Murder.
Most of it transpiring under the direction of Cooper law.
Adeline glanced over her shoulder twice as she crossed the street. Being here was a direct violation of that unwritten law. She might be a Cooper but she wasn’t welcome this side of the Alabama line.
She didn’t have to wonder if Cyrus Cooper knew she was here. He would know. And he wouldn’t be pleased.
That was tough.
It wasn’t like she’d come back because she wanted to.
She’d gotten a personal invitation. One she couldn’t decline, much less ignore.
The ground-floor door on the west side of the building that led directly into the sheriff’s department was unlocked. Usually by this hour it was locked and all but the folks on night duty had gone home. A buzzer allowed anyone with an emergency to make their presence known.
He had left it unlocked.
For her.
The department�
�s cramped lobby was empty. A small Christmas tree in the corner twinkled with colored lights. A few gifts lined the green skirt beneath it, giving the impression that the department operated like one happy little family. And maybe it did . . . now. But that hadn’t been the case a decade ago.
The once gray walls had been painted a pale blue that reminded her of the sky on a clear day. That was one thing she missed about living on the gulf. The sky was a canvas that the weather spilled nature’s most vivid colors onto—far more vivid than any back in Huntsville. The clouds seemed closer to the ground here. As if God had purposely lowered heaven toward the earthly inhabitants along the gulf. Too bad the influence had done little to keep those inhabitants safe from the scum that flocked here, much less the tragedies like Hurricane Katrina.
Nothing like being back in paradise.
In the corridor beyond the small lobby the first door to the right opened into the office of the sheriff’s secretary. Adeline walked straight through the empty office and into the boss’s inner sanctum. The large padded envelope she carried bumped the wreath on his door and she stalled, reached out to right it.
Wyatt looked up from a pile of folders on his desk.
She’d made it to his desk and placed the package there by the time he stood. “Took me a half hour longer than I expected,” she said by way of greeting. “Traffic on I-10 through Mobile was hell.”
“Addy.” He nodded, sized her up a moment. “You . . . look good.”
The pained expression on his face told her that wasn’t exactly what he’d intended to say. “You, too, Sheriff Henderson.” And he did. His coal-black hair was a little shorter. He’d gained a couple more laugh lines around those hazel eyes. Looked a few pounds heavier, not quite as wiry as he had been as a kid. The official uniform was crisp, but then he’d always managed to be able to keep that freshly dressed look all day. She never could.
He gestured to the package. “Let’s get this to the conference room—that’s where we’ve set up our command center—and have a look.”
“First you gotta sign.” She tugged the chain-of-evidence form from the top of the package and placed it on his desk. “I’m officially turning the evidence over to you. Something happens to it, it’s on you.”
He signed the form, the pen strokes bold and efficient. Then he passed a copy of the form back to her. “Now we’re official.”
“Thank you.” She folded her copy and stuffed it into her coat pocket.
“I’ll show you the timeline we’ve set up. Believe it or not, we know how to play by the rules down here, too.”
She didn’t rise to the bait. Her insistence that he sign the form wasn’t a personal jab. It was business. She had a chain of command. One internal affairs investigation this year was more than enough.
He reached for the envelope at the same time she did. Their fingers brushed, eliciting a series of warm pulses along her limbs. The traitorous reaction jacked up the tension already interfering with her ability to focus.
Ultimately she let him take the damned package. He’d signed for it, after all. Mainly she hoped like hell he hadn’t heard her breath catch or seen the widening of her eyes when they touched. Stupid and immature. Giving herself grace, she acknowledged that those letters—or coming back here; maybe both—had her more than a little off balance.
She followed him from the room. “You were going to bring me up to speed on where your investigation is,” she prompted. That was part of the deal. He’d assured her chief that he would give her a full-on briefing as soon as she arrived. No details withheld.
“We’ve established a timeline through our interviews. We don’t have much,” he confessed, then confidently added, “Yet. At this point we have the usual. Interviews with friends and family. I’ve got three volunteers taking calls around the clock. We’ve had a couple of hits from folks who saw her in town the day she disappeared. Several hundred volunteers have been combing a five-mile radius around the scene where her vehicle was discovered. About half an hour ago we called off the search for the night.”
“Any marital problems?” Adeline had the presence of mind to ask as they moved along the corridor. It felt surreal being here . . . with him . . . listening to his voice. She was having far more trouble maintaining a professional bearing than she’d anticipated. “Spouse been cleared of suspicion?”
“No marital or family problems. Nothing out of the ordinary at work. Her husband is, of course, still a person of interest, but I don’t think he had anything to do with her abduction.” Wyatt paused at the conference room door to let her enter before him. “According to her friends, Cherry Prescott has the perfect life.”
“Nobody has a perfect life,” Adeline muttered. She’d been a cop far too long to believe that was even remotely possible for any human. “You just haven’t pushed the right friend hard enough yet.”
“I’m interviewing a couple of her closest friends for the third time tomorrow,” Wyatt said, his tone on the defensive side. “I’m familiar with the drill.”
“Girlfriends?” she guessed. Those were the ones who usually knew the most and held back any secrets the longest. A good, solid female bond was hard to crack.
Wyatt nodded. “I don’t have anything conclusive, just a hunch.”
Which meant he thought one or more of the friends was holding out on him.
The deputies poring over the material stacked along the conference room table glanced up as she and Wyatt entered the room. Deputy Rex Womack Adeline recognized from before. The female at his side, she didn’t.
“Womack,” Wyatt announced, “you remember Detective Cooper?”
Womack nodded. “Looks like you went and grew up, little girl.” Womack had been on the force since Jesus crossed over from Louisiana and hailed the plot of ground between it and Alabama as Mississippi . . . or so the story went.
“And you look exactly the same, Rex,” she offered with a genuine smile. Rex Womack was one of the few who hadn’t completely turned on her nine years ago. He’d been a wary sort of mentor to her despite the fact she was a woman when it wasn’t cool to be a woman in uniform in the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department. Womack was as thin and wiry as ever. His thick head of hair had surrendered to age, gray claiming what male-pattern baldness hadn’t.
“Deputy Charlene Sullenger,” Wyatt said as he indicated the female deputy next to Womack, “is new to the department, but damned indispensable.”
Charlene fluttered her long lashes. “Thank you, Sheriff.” Her goofy smile told Adeline that she had a major crush on her boss—which could be part of why she was so indispensable.
Retract the cat claws, Adeline. It’s unbecoming.
“You Tom’s little sister?” Adeline asked Sullenger. The girl looked a whole hell of a lot like her brother and that wasn’t exactly a bad thing, but it wasn’t a compliment, either. The Sullenger nose was her most prominent feature but the big-ass boobs likely kept anyone male from noticing. Strawberry-blond hair and green eyes. Couldn’t be over twenty-two or -three.
Just stating the facts.
Charlene cocked her head and eyed Adeline. “I sure am. Tom told me all about you, Detective.”
Adeline would just bet that he had. Tom Sullenger belonged to Cyrus Cooper. If he was still in this department, then little had changed in Jackson County, Mississippi.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Wyatt said, dragging Adeline’s attention back to him. He deposited the padded envelope on the conference table and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
While he got a look at the evidence and the analysis reports she’d delivered, Adeline studied the timeline that had been created on a long chalkboard-style white board. Prescott’s vehicle had been discovered at 5:17 P.M. on Tuesday. Her husband had been contacted two hours later. No purse, no cell phone found in the car.
The next item on the board stopped Adeline cold. The cut-and-paste letter.
She was born a princess for all to see. Her light was so bright that they coul
d no longer see me.
“Did she receive this letter by mail or anonymous delivery?” Adeline tapped the letter, which was safely encased in a plastic evidence bag and mounted with double-stick tape to the whiteboard. According to the date and time annotated, Prescott had received her letter three days before Adeline’s had been left in her mailbox.
“Anonymously delivered about a week ago, her husband believes.” Wyatt joined Adeline at the whiteboard. He posted the evidence, including the Polaroid she’d brought, and logged the appropriate information. “When did you get yours?”
“The first one, about four days ago. The rest came today, as the chief explained on the phone.”
Wyatt studied the Polaroid. “Damn.” He shook his head. “This makes it hard to hold out hope.”
“Definitely lessens the likelihood of finding her alive,” Adeline said, giving voice to what she knew he was thinking—what she herself was convinced of. “He wants us to know there’s a strong chance she’s dead and that there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“I briefed the family after our conference call.”
The desolation in his tone tugged at long-buried emotions Adeline was determined not to feel. Relaying that kind of news was the hardest part of being a cop. “It never gets easier, does it?”
Wyatt shook his head then looked from the Polaroid to her. “You know of any connection whatsoever between you and Prescott?”
“Nope.” Adeline studied the family photo that had been posted amid the other evidence. Prescott, her husband, and two kids. Wyatt wanted to keep the idea that the victim was a wife and mother, a daughter, in front of all the cops working the case. “But that’s why I’m here. I intend to find out.”
“You aren’t honestly considering staying for the duration?”
Adeline turned to face him. “Of course I’m staying.” When he would have interrupted, she held up both hands and plowed on. “I’m not going any-damned-where until this is finished. You can exclude me from the investigation, but that won’t send me away. I’ll work my own investigation. With or without your blessing.”