Not One of Us(9)

Four more of the neighbors wandered up the driveway. A baby squalled where it sat propped against her mother’s hip. “You all right, Reba?” an older man in the crowd asked, pushing forward.

We left Granger to deal with the gathering crowd.

Dempsey led us around the side of the house. Once we were out of range for the others to hear, he spoke. “Forensics has been called and are en route.”

This was bad. Very bad. A tingle of apprehension ran down my spine. I was about to get my first murder case—or possibly it was a clear case of suicide. Either way, what lay inside that house was going to be my first on-the-job brush with an unnatural death.

I strode to the rear of the small house. The back door was cracked open a couple of inches.

“The door was open when we arrived,” Dempsey informed us. “No sign of forced entry, though.”

Plenty of folks in the backwoods didn’t bother locking their doors at night. My folks never had while we were growing up, and my three siblings and I had survived into adulthood.

I scanned the small yard, which backed up to a densely wooded area. Nothing seemed amiss, but someone could have hidden here earlier, lying in wait to murder the residents inside.

“We looked through the window here,” Dempsey said, pointing at a window to the left. It was the old-fashioned kind with roll-out panes that were cranked out from inside. “That’s when we discovered the body,” he continued. “Granger and I immediately entered through the back door and checked to see if the victim might still be alive.” He paused a heartbeat. “He wasn’t.”

Oliver nodded. “Who is the victim?”

“According to the neighbor, the house belongs to a Ms. Letitia Strickland, who died earlier in the week. Her son, Raymond, was down here for the funeral.”

Raymond Strickland. The name instantly clicked, followed immediately by another name, another image: Jackson Ensley. My gut roiled. Once again, I tasted the sour tang of Jackson’s tongue thrust down my throat, his hips grinding painfully into me, my back scraping against cold leather in the back seat of his car. The rising terror as his hand covered my mouth, stifling my screams.

I shut down the memory, snuffing it out as quickly and completely as a candle doused by water. Too bad I hadn’t heard earlier that Strickland was in town and that our call this morning would lead to his mother’s home. Surprising, since the crime was still talked about, almost as much as the mysterious disappearance of the Cormier family years later.

“Ahh . . . Raymond Strickland,” I drawled, trying my best to appear nonchalant, wishing I’d had time to prepare for this reminder of the past.

“The one and only,” Dempsey confirmed.

Oliver frowned. “Who’s this victim? Enlighten me.”

Joe Oliver had been working for the sheriff’s department only four months. After Sheriff Lancaster died unexpectedly, Oliver was brought in from Mobile County to supervise the office until elections were held that fall to vote in a new sheriff. The county commission and mayor’s decision to do so rankled several of the investigators hoping to fill the vacancy left by Lancaster’s death. Temporarily running the office would have given them a leg up on the competition to impress voters.

“Ray was convicted of murder when I was a senior in high school,” I volunteered. “Shot his best friend in the back of the head, supposedly in a drug deal gone bad,” I explained before turning to Dempsey. “When did he get out of prison?”

“Been a good little while, but he’d never showed his face here until his mother died.”

Oliver cut our reminiscence short. “We’ll take a quick look around until forensics arrives.”

He slipped a pair of rubber gloves from his pockets, and I did the same. As I pulled the latex over my hands, I couldn’t resist peeking through the window. A double bed took up much of the room. And on the bed . . . I blinked once, then twice.

The victim, a tall man wearing boxers, lay facedown on the mattress. His head was a mangled mess. Blood and gray matter splattered the walls and white sheets. Long, thin strands of dark hair, streaked with silver and mixed with blood, hung down his neck and shoulders.

My mouth went dry, and I instinctively pulled away from the window. It didn’t seem real. The morning was too pretty, too calm, and the damn birds were chirping up a storm. As if to mock me, a finch chattered close by as it winged its way toward the woods. Everything was too normal—except for the man inside.

I gave myself a moment to get it together before following Oliver up the back porch steps. This was my first time seeing a body, and I wanted to respond in a calm, professional manner. If I didn’t, I’d never hear the end of it at the station.

The day of reckoning had finally arrived. I wasn’t going to blow it. I’d worked too hard trying to gain everyone’s respect to lose it now. I needed this job. My kids depended on my paycheck.

Oliver pushed through the door, and I followed him inside. The back entrance opened into a kitchen so tiny its width could be spanned by holding out my arms in both directions. All was clean and tidy. A mountain of plastic food containers sat atop a folded kitchen towel, clean and neatly stacked. Whether Ray was an ex-convict or not, his mother must have been a decent sort of person for the community to have dropped off casseroles for her son in this time of family tragedy. Now the emptied containers had been washed, ready for their owners to return and pick up.