Field of Graves(30)

He sat back in the chair, took a smaller sip of the beer, picked up an empty notepad from the coffee table. Began writing out the thoughts in his head. Time to trade the mind of one madman for another.





21



Taylor was wide-awake. She had gone home after the press conference and hit the bed completely exhausted, hoping a good night’s sleep would help her think clearly in the morning. Instead, she kept reviewing the facts of the case. The whiteboard from the squad room shone brightly in her mind’s eye, the faces of the dead girls running over and over through her head.

After an hour of tossing and turning, she finally accepted sleep wasn’t going to come anytime soon. She got out of the bed and made her way to her pool table, flipped on the TV as she walked by for noise.

Racked the balls. Took the break. Smoothly cracked the balls into their respective pockets. She felt the tension go out of her shoulders as she finally started to relax. The rain was still coming down. The local weather station had broken into the late-night feed to give radar warnings for the severe thunderstorms moving through the area. Tomorrow’s storms were supposed to be even worse.

Taylor kept a small refrigerator in the back corner of the room. She made her way there and grabbed a bottle of ice-cold Miller Lite. She sipped and mused, expertly sinking ball after ball, reracking, breaking, playing eight ball against herself.

With a delicate meow, her cat jumped up on the table and began batting at the balls. Taylor couldn’t help but laugh. The kitten adopted from the local shelter and named Jade for her green eyes was at the very least Taylor’s best confidante. She had adopted her on a whim. She’d gone into the animal shelter to serve a warrant, saw the scruffy kitten sneeze, and fell in love. She was surprised to realize that she never felt alone when the cat was around.

She racked the balls again, shifting her thoughts to the weird aspects of the case at hand. She hadn’t given the drug angle too much thought. These were college kids, who did stupid things like drink and do drugs to excess. Was it possible straitlaced Shelby had decided to lighten up a little bit, and fell in with the wrong crowd? According to Gladys, Jordan was a habitual user, but no one from her crowd knew Shelby.

The limited connections bothered her. The beer and fatigue were dragging her mind into Park.

Getting more in depth with Shelby’s background had been hard; there was little new information to be gained. Calls around campus had given them a few answers, but left more questions in Taylor’s mind.

She was sure the girl was seeing someone. They hadn’t found any kind of birth control in her things; the campus clinic had no record of her being a gynecological patient with them; they only had a single record on her—she’d received antibiotics for a bout with bronchitis earlier in the semester. No one else had been able to confirm or deny her out-of-class activities—apparently even the students in Shelby’s program didn’t know her well. Her advisor had lauded her with praise. Taylor sensed it was heartfelt, not just laurels for the dead. Her parents obviously cared for her. She was a hardworking scholarship student who seemingly kept her nose clean. So why would someone want to rape her, leave her body at the Parthenon, and cover her with herbs?

The herbs told Taylor that whoever had killed Shelby cared about her, in some sick, twisted way. Even though her body had been abused, she had been given some kind of tender send-off, a show of reverence.

She racked up the balls again.

Jordan Blake was a different story. Her file made much of the tale self-evident. Jordan was out of control. She’d been on academic probation since she arrived freshman year. She’d been booted out of her sorority pledge class, was in and out of the health clinic for three pregnancy scares. Nobody they talked to could give them any definitive ideas on where she had been in the days before her death. It seemed Jordan Blake was friends with everyone and no one.

Irrefutable fact—the girl was pregnant when she was killed. She’d been stabbed and thrown in the river. Even if the detritus on her body comprised the same herbs they’d recovered from Shelby, this wasn’t a crime of love. It was a crime of hate. Or passion.

Sam’s comment about the killer being the baby’s father rolled through her head.

Good girl, bad girl. Angel, devil. How could the same man have so much love for one and so much hatred for the other?

Taylor put up her cue and perched on the edge of the table. There was a thought niggling in the back of her mind, but she was too tired to gain access to it. She gave up for now, hoping it would rear its head in the morning. Maybe she could sleep her way to an answer.

Tossing the empty beer bottle away, she made her way back to her bed, hoping she was foggy enough to escape the nightmares about dead girls begging for her help to find them justice.

She wasn’t.

Bullets were flying in the darkened sky. She heard them whizzing by her head, felt the heat as they ripped through her hair. She saw him go down. She was screaming, clawing at him, trying to get away from the hand that reached up and grabbed her by the throat. She fell beside him. He was dead. She could see the entrance wound, glistening silver in the moonlight. Her hands were slick with blood: It covered all of her, drowning her in its viscous blanket, dragging her down into the weeds as they curled and spread over her body. There was no hope. There was no pain. She gave up her struggle and lay serenely next to the empty soul beside her, waiting for the strangling vines to drag her into the earth to decompose along with him. She heard a voice, turned to hear better. Jordan Blake’s empty eyes stared back at her. She jumped, and tried to roll away, but the vines held her tight. Only her head could move, and she turned away, not wanting to see. When she opened her eyes again, Shelby Kincaid lay beside her, wearing a crown of thorns, hands reaching for Taylor’s face, silently mouthing, “Please...”