“I thought he was caught up in his payments.”
“He was, but it was short-lived, believe me. I should have known. It was just too effin’ good to be true. Damn it all, why can’t the guy be a dad, huh?” She dropped her oversize purse onto the floor and shot Reed a glance that convinced him right now all the men in Morrisette’s life were suddenly considered big-time losers. Including him. Morrisette had a reputation for being tough, a woman hell-bent to do a man’s job, a prickly female cop whose tongue was razor-sharp, her opinions unpopular, her patience with “good ol’ boys” nil and her language as blue as any detective’s on the force. She wore snakeskin boots that were far from department issue, spiked platinum hair that looked as if Billy Idol had been her hairdresser, and had an attitude that would make any young punk think twice about taking her on. Reed had suffered many a sympathetic glance from other cops who pitied him for his bad luck in the partner draw. Not that he cared. In the short time he’d been back in Savannah, Reed had learned to respect Sylvie Morrisette, even if he did have to walk on eggshells upon occasion. This morning her face was flushed a color bordering carmine and she looked as if she could spit nails.
“Can he do that—reduce the payments?” Reed had been opening his mail but, for the moment, set his letter opener on a desk that was a jungle of papers.
“If he can find himself a wimp of a judge who’ll buy into his pathetic, poor-pitiful-me act. So, Bart lost his job, so what? He should get off his ass and find another means of gainful employment—you know, like normal people do? Instead, he thinks he’ll cut back on me and the kids.” She rolled her eyes and straightened her petite frame, from the worn heels of her boots to the top of her spiked blond hair. Her west Texas drawl was stronger than ever when she was on a tear and she was on a major one this morning. “Bastard. That’s what he is! A card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, fucking bastard.” She stalked to the window and glowered outside at the gray Savannah winter. “Jesus, it’s not as if he pays us millions to begin with. And they’re his kids.
His
kids. The ones he always complains about not seeing enough!” She stomped a booted foot and swore under her breath. “I need a drink.”
“It’s nine in the morning.”
“Who cares?”
Reed wasn’t too concerned. Morrisette was known to go into overdrive in the theatrics department, especially when her kids or one of her four ex-husbands was involved. Her domestic traumas reinforced his vow to remain single. Spouses were trouble and cops didn’t need any more than they already had. “Can’t you fight him?” Reed drained a cup of tepid coffee, then crushed the paper cup and tossed it into an overflowing wastebasket.
“Yeah, but it’ll cost. I’ll need a damned attorney.”
“The town’s lousy with them.”
“That’s the problem. Bart’s got a friend who owes him a favor—a lawyer friend. So he called in his marker and she filed a motion or whatever the hell it is. A woman. Can you believe it? Where’s the sisterhood, huh? That’s what I’d like to know. Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of female bond where ya don’t go trompin’ all over another woman’s child support?”
Reed didn’t touch that one with a ten-foot pole. As far as he knew, Morrisette wasn’t part of any sisterhood. She ran roughshod over men and women with equal vigor. He picked up his letter opener again and began slitting a plain white envelope addressed to him in care of the Savannah Police Department. The address was written in plain block letters: DETECTIVE PIERCE REED. The return address seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
“So, this is it,” Morrisette groused. “My kids’ future in the toilet because Bart built this woman a fence for her dogs a few years back and whamo—she goes after my paltry support check.” Morrisette’s eyes slitted. “There oughta be a law, ya know. Don’t people in the legal profession, and I use the term loosely, have better things to do than file stupid lawsuits to screw little kids out of a piece of their father’s paycheck?” She raked her fingers through her already unruly hair before storming back to the desk and scooping up her legal papers. Flopping into a side chair, she added, “I guess I’ll be putting in for overtime, and lots of it.”
“You’ll get through this.”
“Screw you,” she spat. “The last thing I expected from you, Reed, is platitudes. Okay? So stuff ’em.”
He swallowed a smile. “Whatever you say.”
“Yeah, right.” But she seemed to cool off a bit.
“Why don’t you sue Bart for
more
money? Turn the tables on him.”
“Don’t think I haven’t considered it, but it’s the old adage of tryin’ to get blood out of a damned turnip.”
Reed glanced up at her and grinned. “You might not get anything but the squeezing might be fun.”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“You brought it up,” he reminded her as he extracted a single sheet of white paper from the envelope.
“Don’t remind me. My luck with men.” She sighed through her nose. “If I were smart I’d become a nun.”
“Oh, yeah, that would work,” Reed mocked. He unfolded the single page. There was nothing on the paper save a few lines written in the same neat block letters that had been used in the envelope’s address:
ONE, TWO,
THE FIRST FEW.
HEAR THEM CRY,
LISTEN TO THEM DIE.
“What the hell is this?” Reed muttered.
Morrisette was on her feet in an instant. She rounded the desk and studied the simple note. “A prank?”
“Maybe,” he muttered.
“A warning?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. You think maybe this is a benign nutcase or a bonafide psychotic?” She frowned, her worries about court-ordered child support reduction seeming to have disappeared. “I don’t like the mention of ‘listen to them die.’ God, there are some real sickos in the world.” She studied the block lettering, then scrutinized the envelope. “Mailed directly to you.” Her eyes narrowed on the postmark. “From here in Savannah. And the return address is downtown on Abercorn…Jesus, just around the corner.”
“Colonial Cemetery,” Reed said as it came to him.
“The cemetery. Who would send a letter from there?”
“Another crackpot. This letter’s a crank,” he said, frowning. “Someone who read about the Montgomery case and wants to jerk my chain.” Since last summer when he’d been on the trail of a killer who had a vendetta against the Montgomery family, Reed had gotten a lot of press. Too much of the kind of publicity he abhorred. Credited with cracking the case, Pierce Reed was suddenly looked upon as a hero and sought after as an expert by other departments, by reporters who were still reliving the case, even by the attorney general in Atlanta. His reputation had been exaggerated and his personal life picked and prodded ever since capturing Atropos, a woman determined to decimate one of Savannah’s wealthiest and most infamous families.
In the past six months, he’d been quoted, photographed, and interviewed more times than he wanted to think about. He’d never liked the limelight, had always been an intensely private man. He had a few demons of his own, secrets he’d rather keep hidden, but hell, who didn’t. Reed would have preferred to go about his job without the inconvenience of fame. He hated all the attention, especially from those reporters who seemed fascinated with his past, who had taken it upon themselves to find out every little piece of information about him and to tell the world what made Detective Pierce Reed tick. As if they had any idea. He picked up the letter and envelope with a handkerchief, then found a plastic bag in his desk drawer. Carefully, he slipped the envelope and note into the bag. “I think it’s nothing, but you never know. Better keep it in case it ends up being evidence.”
“Evidence of what? That there’s another looney on the loose?”
“There’s always another looney on the loose. I’ll keep it just in case and then send out a BOLO over the local system and through NCIC, just in case any other department in the country has gotten anything like it.” He turned to his computer, accessed the National Crime Information Center run by the FBI. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said to Morrisette. “In the meantime, I think I’ll take a break and walk over to the cemetery.”
“You think you’ll find something?”
“Nah. Not really. But you never know.” He stuffed his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. “As I said, it’s probably just a crank. Someone getting his jollies by making a vague threat against the department.”
“Not the department. This particular crazy has zeroed in on you.” Sylvie was adjusting her shoulder holster. “I’m coming with you.”
He didn’t argue. It would have been useless. Sylvie was the kind of cop who followed her instincts and bent the rules—the kind of hardheaded woman who couldn’t be talked out of a decision once she’d made it. He slid the plastic bag into a file drawer.
They walked outside through a side door and the winter wind slapped Reed hard on the face. The weather, usually mild in December, had a definite bite to it, the product of a cold snap that was roaring down the East Coast and threatening crops as far south as Florida. Morrisette, fighting the stiff breeze, managed to light a cigarette as they walked the few blocks past Columbia Square. Colonial Cemetery, Savannah’s oldest, was the final resting place to over seven hundred victims of the nineteenth century yellow fever epidemic and was the site of far too many duels in centuries past. General Sherman had used this plot of land in the middle of Savannah as a campground during the Civil War, or, as many of the locals referred to it, the War of Northern Aggression. Shade trees, now barren of leaves, seemed to shiver in the wind, and dry leaves skated down the pathways that cut through the ancient gravestones and historic markers where so many people believed demons resided.
It was all bunk as far as Reed was concerned. And this morning, this burial place seemed as much a park as a graveyard even though dark, thick-bellied clouds scudded overhead.
Only a few pedestrians wandered through the tombstones and nothing about them looked suspicious. An elderly couple held gloved hands as they read the markers, three teenagers who probably should have been in school smoked and clustered together as they whispered among themselves, and a middle-aged woman bundled in ski cap, parka and wool gloves was walking a scrap of a dog wearing a natty little sweater and pulling on its leash as it tried to sniff every old tombstone. No one seemed to be lurking and watching, no graves appeared disturbed, no cars with tinted windows rolled slowly past.
“Don’t we have better things to do?” Sylvie asked, struggling to keep her cigarette lit. She drew hard on the filter tip.
“You’d think.” Still, Reed scanned the dried grass and weathered grave markers. He thought of the cases that he was working on. One was domestic violence, pure and simple. A wife of twenty years finally had decided enough was enough and before suffering another black eye or cracked rib had shot her husband point-blank while he slept. Her attorney was crying self-defense and it was up to Reed to prove otherwise—which wasn’t that hard, but didn’t make him feel good. Another case involved a murder-suicide pact between lovers, in this case a couple of gay boys, one seventeen, the other almost twenty. The trigger man, the younger of the two, was still hanging on to life in the hospital. If and when he got off the ventilator and came to, he’d find himself looking at a murder charge. The third recent homicide case wasn’t as defined. A body pulled out of the Savannah River two days before. No ID and not much left of her. Just another Jane Doe. No one seemed to be looking for her, no missing persons reports were on file for a black woman whom, the ME thought, was around thirty years old, had type O-positive blood, extensive dental work, and had borne at least one child.
Yeah, he did have better things to do. But as his gaze swept the cemetery that was the final resting place of Savannahians who died two hundred and fifty years ago, a graveyard where it was rumored ghosts resided, he had the unnerving sensation that the crank letter wasn’t the last he’d hear from its author.
One, two, the first few. Hear them cry, listen to them die.
What the hell did that mean?
No doubt, he’d soon find out.
“I seen him,” Billy Dean Delacroix insisted excitedly, the pimples on his boyish face a brighter red in the cold wind. At fifteen he was a pistol. “That ol’ buck started up over ta the hill. But he won’t get far. I nailed him, I did, he’ll be drop-pin’ soon. I seen his white tail a-flashin’, come on, Pres!” Billy Dean took off at a dead run, galloping through the undergrowth with the easy gait of a track star, his pappy’s big-eared dog streaking beside him.
Prescott Jones, Billy’s second cousin, older by six months and heavier by fifty or sixty pounds, struggled to keep up. Berry vines pulled at his old jeans, ripping at the denim while branches scratched his face, nearly knocking off his glasses as he dashed along the old deer trail that wound along the banks of Bear Creek. A raccoon, peering from behind his dark mask, waddled quickly out of the way and deep into the bracken. Overhead, a hawk slowly circled.
Prescott was panting by the time he reached the crest of the hill, sweating beneath his hunting jacket and his pa’s old thermal shirt. Billy Dean, dressed head to toe in camouflage, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the ugly red-coated dog.
“Son of a bitch,” Prescott muttered, gasping for breath. Sometimes Billy Dean could be such a bastard, running off ahead and all. He wondered if Billy had even hit the buck hard, probably just clipped him and they’d be chasing the wounded sumbitch for miles.
Prescott caught sight of some red spots on the dried grass near the trail, enough to change his mind and make him think that the deer had been wounded badly. Good. He couldn’t handle much more of this fast-assed traipsing through the wilderness. Truth to tell, Prescott enjoyed everything about hunting but the actual tracking of the prey. Oh, he liked to shoot a squirrel, buck or fox as much as the next guy. Even fantasized about killing himself a bear or a gator and having it stuffed, but all in all, hunting was a lot of work and he much preferred the beer, weed and a bit of crank now and again that went along with the actual hunt. He liked campfires and making up stories about whores and big game, all the while getting high. The hunting itself, the tracking game, the wounding game, the gutting game and the hauling out of the game was kind of a pain.