All the Blue-Eyed Angels (39 page)

“I never said I didn’t think of you that way, Solomon,” he repeated softly.

“But the other night… This whole visit—”

He rolled his eyes, but he still didn’t let me go. “Your marriage just fell apart. You just lost a baby, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been working twenty-eight hours a day trying to solve a mystery that’s been dogging you since you were a kid. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but it didn’t seem like the best time to make a move.”

I tried to remember the basic mechanics of breathing in and out. “And now?” I asked.

His lips hovered just a milli-second from mine. “I guess we’ll see,” he said.

The conversation was clearly headed in a direction I hadn’t expected. Before we could get there, my cell phone rang. Diggs looked mildly amused.

I let it ring once more.

“You should probably get that.” He took a step back so I could dig through my purse. My knees were shaking and a lot of parts that had been solid before I walked into the office had liquefied in the past five minutes.

It was Juarez. Now, Diggs looked
really
amused. He grinned, eyes sparkling when I answered.

“Are you at a computer?” Juarez asked without preamble.

I was still stuck at the part where Diggs had me pressed against the desk, so it took a second to switch gears. Once I had, I pushed Diggs out of the way none-too-gently and turned his laptop toward me.

“I just sent you something,” Juarez said.

I checked my e-mail and clicked on a link he’d forwarded. It led to a breaking news story in Olympia, Washington.

Former Senator Jane Bellows Found Murdered In Her Home.

I froze. Diggs scanned the headline over my shoulder.

“That’s the woman, right?” Juarez asked. “That was the phone number Noel had written down with your father’s name next to it?”

“Yeah. That was her.”

A former senator.

“I’m booking a flight,” Juarez said. “Are you coming?”

I looked at Diggs. He nodded like he knew exactly what was happening.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

I hung up the phone.

Diggs glanced at his watch. “When do we leave?”

Coming in June, 2012:
Sins of the Father
Book Two in the Erin Solomon Series

Hank Fortier has been serving a life sentence in the Maine State Prison since 1984 for the brutal murder of his twelve-year-old daughter—a crime he claims he didn’t commit. When the bodies of five other girls are found in a shallow grave just over the Canadian border, all of them missing since the ‘80s, Fortier sees a chance to finally prove his innocence... And exact his revenge on the man he’s convinced was actually behind his little girl’s death: Adam Solomon.

Sins of the Father
finds Erin Solomon continuing her quest to find her father, leading her down a path of dark secrets, painful truths, and deadly obsessions. When Erin and a critically injured Diggs are stranded in the northern Maine woods with a serial murderer intent on making them his next victims, it will take everything they have to survive, and finally learn the truth about Erin’s father’s past—and the trail of bodies in his wake.

Read on for an excerpt.

Sunday, August 12

The Jeep is upside down in the brush when J. finds it, deep in a ravine off a logging road nobody travels anymore. One headlight is still on. The tires are spinning. There’s the sweet smell of gasoline in the air. It’s damp out, and it’s hot. Heat lightning streaks the night sky while a bloated yellow moon tries to belly its way through the clouds.

The driver comes to first—the blond reporter with the perpetual smirk. Diggs. He’s not smirking now, though. He’s got blood down the left side of his face and a cut above his eye. When J. shines his flashlight inside the Jeep, he stops the beam at a sliver of metal the size of his thumb buried deep in the reporter’s thigh. He takes a step back. Hides in the darkness, listening. He can’t stop smiling.

“Wake up, dammit. Open your eyes, Solomon,” the reporter says.

There’s panic in his voice now, ragged and pure. J. stands not too far off with his left hand curled around his rifle and his right resting on a battered white birch. It would be so much simpler if the woman just died, here and now. Fast. Painless. Over. Put a bullet in both their skulls, and move on. Killing is the easy part—he knows that well. It’s the ghosts that come later that’ll end you.

It’s only when he hears Erin’s whimper inside the mangled car, a soft cry that raises up all those demons he’s been trying to bury for so long, that he realizes how little he’s really changed in the past forty years. Just like that, he’s fifteen again—Breathless and bloody, flushed with the promise of that first kill. The truth is, fast and painless is the last thing he really wants.

There’s movement inside the Jeep now. A bolt of lightning cracks down the center of a sky muddy with clouds, and in the light he can see the man wrestling with the woman’s seatbelt. He’s still talking to her—whispering now, surprisingly calm. She’s alive, then.

J. chambers a bullet and positions himself so he’s got a better view of the action, waiting while the man pulls her out in stops and starts—like some monstrous, bloody birth, extracting his partner from the useless hunk of metal.

When she’s finally clear of the wreck, Diggs stops, gasping for breath. J. studies them in the dim glow of that dying headlight: she still with eyes closed, forehead bloodied, her right arm hanging at an odd angle. Diggs brushes the hair from her forehead.

“We’ve gotta get out of here, Sol,” he says, softer now. His voice catches. He shakes her. “Come on, Erin.”

J. shifts where he stands, not ten feet from them both. A mosquito buzzes in his ear. He feels it light on his neck, just above his jugular. He slaps at it lightly, and that single sound—skin on skin, as sharp as a cracked whip—echoes through the night.

Diggs stops moving, panic clear in his eyes. Everything is sweeter in that moment; the hunter aches with the power of it all. The poetry. He flips the switch on his flashlight and shines it directly in Diggs’ eyes. The reporter blinks. Wets his lips. J. shivers when the man positions himself in front of the woman; it’s a tableau he’s seen before. Forty years vanish in the blink of an eye.

“I’ll get her to leave,” Diggs says. “We’ll drop the story, I swear. Just let her go. Let us leave here.”

J. doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t move. Diggs puts his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare. His chest rises and falls fast, like he’s just run a marathon.

“Look, we don’t know who you are,” Diggs tries again. Despite the situation, he is surprisingly calm. Logical. J. finds himself unexpectedly annoyed. “We’ll just go. Neither of us have a clue—I’ll make sure she goes home. We won’t come back here.”

And still, J. remains silent. A flash of annoyance crosses the reporter’s face. J. tightens his grip around the barrel of his gun, pleased at the reaction.

“What the hell do you want from us?” Diggs asks. Fear creeps into his voice, edging out his usual assurance. “Just let her go, all right? I’ll give you whatever you want.”

J. breathes in. Breathes out. Feels the dampness in the air. He smells soil and pine and blood and fear. He lifts his gun and takes aim.

“I want you to run.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jen Blood was born and raised in midcoast Maine. She is a freelance writer and editor with writing credits in Down East, The Bark, PIF, and a number of newspapers, websites, and periodicals around the country. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine, does seminars and one-on-one tutorials on writing, editing, and social media for authors, and in her free time hangs with her intrepid hounds on the Maine coast.