Bones Of Contention: The McKinnon Legends - The American Men Book 3 (7 page)

“Josh, no. You have no idea what you are getting into here.” She wondered if she really knew the depths of the danger she was in as well. She recognized the methods of this killer. No mere mortal could protect her if this killer was intent on coming for her.

“Personally, Dr. Gillman, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what I’m walking into. I owe it to you for your help. Our victim has a name and her family can finally have closure. You can have closure, too.”

“You would do that for me?” she asked softly.

“Yes. Yes, I would.” He cupped her face with both his hands. It was a gesture almost too familiar for his only having met her less than an hour earlier. “I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m sorry I had to drag you through it.”

She covered his hands with hers, then gently took them away from her face. “I..I have never dealt well with needless loss of life. I just need a little time. So, if you will excuse me, I need to call Debbie’s folks. You know where to find me if I need to assist you further.” She held the office door open.

He was being dismissed. He could see that clearly, as well as the fact she was in no condition for further questioning or for rational discussion.

“Jamie, don’t make me leave just yet,” he said taking a step closer. He did not want to leave her alone and grieving. She needed a friend and a shoulder to lean on.

“It is better this way.” She stiff-armed him splaying her palm in his chest preventing him from coming any closer. He covered her fingers with his, not sure what his next move should be.

He nodded. “All right, but call me if you think of anything else or need anything, a shoulder or sympathetic ear.”

“Thank you, Josh. David, can you please show Sheriff McKinnon the way out?” she asked the graduate student who was passing in the hallway.

They stood there for a moment. He had no choice unless he wanted to make a scene. He didn’t. There was always later. If she thought she was done with their relationship, she had another thing coming. She was now his star witness in a very cold, five-year-old case. She was also the best in the business at what she did for a living. He would be back. Somehow that pleased him.

“Ma’am.” He smiled, released her fingers, and politely tipped his hat after placing it back on his head. He walked past her without a backwards glance. He did not need to look back to know she was no longer standing there. The soft closing of her office door followed by the sound of her mournful cries was still echoing down the granite hallway.

It almost stopped his heart.

With a positive identification of his Jane Doe, the county morgue released Debbie’s remains to her family, and as hard as Josh had tried to keep it low-key the media was all over this one. There were just too many details making it primetime news. Currently, he had declined interviews with Larry King, Fox News, and Good Morning America.

He was being touted as the new breed of law enforcement, daring to use new or unorthodox methods to solve crimes. He had kept his source confidential trying to keep Jamie out of the media spotlight per her request. Unfortunately, someone leaked her identity to
National Intrigue
, a grocery store rag, which thrust her into the national spotlight.

She had not gotten a moment’s peace since the positive identification of her friend. Her phone ringing off the hook, in spite of her unlisted number, kept her awake through the subsequent nights following Sherriff McKinnon walking through her office door. She had finally resorted to taking the phone off the hook.

It was big news, and the first couple of days dozens of reporters hounded her every waking moment and much of her nights, too. Her yard was a muddy quagmire where the reporters had trampled what little grass she had managed to coax to life before fall had set in. City police had managed to ticket most for trespassing, forcing them to move to other more public places to harass her.

Debbie appeared to be the forth victim attributed to a string of bizarre killings which started in the fall of 2004 and abruptly ended in the spring of 2005. The cloud of fear and terror which had hung heavily over the college town of Lubbock, Texas, eventually dissipated as weeks and then months went past without another victim. Now, interest was renewed in the four brutal unsolved murders in which all of the victims were missing the same body parts. “Trophies” as Josh called them.

The reporter caught her outside the science building and cornered her next to her car. The interview was quick. They always were. Her attorney, at Josh’s insistence, had coached her on exactly what to say, and, just as importantly, what not to say concerning the ongoing investigation.

Why they persisted was beyond her, and after more than a week she was still receiving no less than a dozen requests per day for exclusive interviews. Eventually there would be something more interesting to capture the attention of the news media. Unfortunately, it had been a very slow week in the news.

Impossible, VanDarious thought as he watched the evening entertainment news.

He instantly recognized Jamie standing just outside the science building at the university. How could his plan have gone so wrong? He had made sure to catch her that night beside her car.

He pulled his hair in anger, clearing off the side table in one angry swipe of his arm. Storming to his bedroom, he cautiously pulled a case down from the top shelf of the closet. Laying it on the bed, he unlocked the combination lock and was careful opening it so as not to break the contents.

Pulling out the last jar in the row of four, he jerked the label off tossing it aside. This jar did not contain the heart and the seventh, last true rib of Jamie Gillman.

The Williams girl was an interloper.

She was unfit for the final sacrifice, explaining why the key she had worn around her neck for safe keeping would not open the door to his true home in the fourth dimension.

This woman dared to pass herself off as someone worthy of sacrifice to the goddess of the Sidhe Peoples. He would have to start all over again, and this time he would not make the same mistake. Now, he knew where the doctor worked and soon would know where she lived.

He had to start over, but what did he care? He had lived in this God forsaken world since long before the coming of the Christian messiah. He had seen prophets come and go and come again. He had lived here long enough to see the rise and fall of all the great empires. What was another month or even a year? He had learned patience by force, if not by choice.

Only this time, he would fight the forces with a vengeance. Perhaps the single sacrifice he presented five years ago for each phase of the moon had not been enough to gain repentance and favor of the Goddess Sanguine, or Jamie must have masked herself using some unknown magic to thrust her image onto an innocent woman. That was the only explanation for his mistaking the Williams woman for his true target.

This time he would sacrifice four for each phase of the moon. That should be enough to gain his ends, his twisted mind raced. Blood of the innocent would be spilled to gain him reentry to the dwelling place of all the mysterious creatures. He wanted to return, no he needed to return to the fourth dimension of space and time. It was a place he longed to return, as he too was one of the creatures. He did not belong in this world, yet he had been exiled here topside since before the time of the Macedonians and Mesopotamians of the ancient Middle East.

Glancing at his wall calendar, he saw he had to act quickly. Tonight was a new moon.

The terror was coming back, and this time he would do it right.

In the ensuing days following the revelation of his killing the wrong woman, local police in four different counties of two different states had found victims number five, six, seven and eight. Too bad none of the agencies realized it.

“Dr. Gillman?” Jamie’s student assistant buzzed her office.

“Yes, Leslie.” Jamie tried not to sound perturbed. She was on a tight deadline, placing the finishing touches on a paper she was preparing for the publishers.

“There is a man out here who claims to have found your car.”

“Found my car? What are you talking about? Oh! My car!”

She slammed the phone down. Not bothering with the elevator, she took the stairs down the three flights to the first floor waiting area. She saw her lab assistant demurely smiling up at someone. Leslie was a very shy girl around good-looking men. Whoever this was must be a lady killer.

She waited for the stranger to turn around before acknowledging his presence.

“May I help you? I’m Dr. Gillman.” She extended her hand.

“I’m Trey Jackson. Can we go someplace private?” the handsome stranger asked.

“Yes, of course. Leslie, I’ll be in my office. Hold all my calls, please.”

“Even the Sheriff's?” Leslie asked.

She hesitated. “In this instance, even the Sheriff McKinnon's,” she tossed over her shoulder as the elevator doors opened.

“I have your car,” Trey divulged after she closed her office door, leaning up against it momentarily before pushing off and gesturing her guest to have a seat.

“Really? How did you come by it?” Jamie was a little suspicious of the timing. After five years both Debbie’s body and her AWOL car turn up just a little over a week of each other. It was just too coincidental and sudden. The probability factor was astronomical as she made the calculations in her head. She had a better chance of being struck by lightning not only once, but twice.

“I purchased a hundred-acre tract of land about ten years ago off Highway 349 and have been an absentee owner. I am living in Florida at present. The only reports I get are updates and a few aerial shots of the outer acreage every couple of years.”

“You don’t do a visual inspection?” Jamie asked surprised. She would never dream of buying land and not keeping a closer eye on it than a few reports now and then.

“No, because it really does not matter what condition the old buildings are in at present. I’ll eventually bulldoze them anyway. I bought it more for the mineral rights than the development prospects.”

“So, why now after ten years did you finally decide to take a closer look?” she asked point-blank, suspicious of the timing.

“I wouldn’t have except I received the aerial shots a week or so ago and noticed something had changed from the ones taken two years ago. I went back and took a look at the shots for the last five or six years and the changes were subtle, but there none the less.”

“Changes? What kind of changes?”

“There was sufficient damage to the old barn in the last wind storm a couple weeks back. That damage allowed us to get a look inside. Yesterday, I decided to go out and have a look around. The roof was almost totally gone and one door was blown off. Low and behold, what do you think I found?”

He was toying with her.

“My car.” She smiled thinking how this man was quite engaging.

“Your car was still partially covered up with an old tarp, so I figured it was abandoned or forgotten. By the way, I love the steering wheel cover,” he smiled winking in a conspiratorial manner.

Damn, she thought. He is one very slick operator, cute, but slick. Aging well too, she thought. In his early fifties, he still looked very nicely maintained, tanned, and toned. He had great teeth and full hair graying distinguishingly at the temples.

She asked how he knew it belonged to her.

“I tracked you down using the old insurance card still in the glove box.”

She wondered how he tracked her down to the university.

“I saw the reports on the national news about your friend. I’m sorry for your loss. That is how I knew you were here on the campus. You know, you are much more attractive in person. Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

Damn, she thought for a second time. He was forward, too.

“Is my car still in your barn?” she asked dodging the question.

“No. There was some slight water damage due to the exposure, but other than that it still runs like a scalded dog. I parked it right outside. Dinner? Yes?” he asked smiling mischievously at her.

She declined gracefully claiming she had other plans. She did. She needed to paint the inside of her house. He acknowledged it was short notice. They settled on the following Tuesday, agreeing to meet him for lunch. Dinner was too formal and too soon.

“I’ll call you soon and firm it up,” he said, dropping the keys on her desk along with his business card and left saying he was looking forward to their lunch engagement.

Reaching out, she lightly touched the keys resting on her desk. She remembered tossing this very ring to Debbie who waived bye and thanked her with a promise to put gas back into it before she got home from work.

Jamie never saw her again.

Life was fragile, she acknowledged with a sigh, and like it or not she needed to call Josh. It was going to pull him right back into the fray, something she was trying to avoid for his sake. However, the car was part of a murder investigation. She had no other choice.

It had been a long twenty hour stretch on patrol, and Josh was definitely looking forward to his lounge chair and some sleep watching the six o’clock news. He was pulling into his driveway when Sissy called him on his cell patching Jamie through.

“Hey, I’m glad you called. Are you all right?” Josh asked genuinely concerned.

“I’m better. Thank you for asking,” she lied. She had been having nightmares.

Josh did not quite believe her. There was something in her voice that told him she was not better. “I’ve tried to call to check on you, but you never called me back. You’re beginning to give me a complex,” he teased softly.

She was feeling just a little guilty for not returning his calls. It was her way of avoiding him. She had just figured it out now that she had a few days to step away from the events in her office. That was usually not like her. She probably owed him an apology.

“I know, I’m sorry. I’ve been busy,” she offered the lame excuse.