Dirty Little Secrets (Romantic Mystery) Book 1 in the J.J. Graves Series (2 page)

The more I looked around at the crowd, the more I realized it was mostly women who lined the streets, probably wanting to catch an early morning glimpse of Jack Lawson. Between his looks and his money, there weren’t many women in the county who would turn down an opportunity to become his wife. Jack wasn’t really interested in a wife, but between you and me, he’d auditioned about eighty percent of the women in Virginia for the job.

“I see you brought your fan club with you,” I said in retaliation for the outfit remark.

He winced and rubbed his fingers along the short growth of his beard. “That’s not funny. I almost didn’t respond to Johnny’s 911 this morning.”

Jack’s had the unfortunate pleasure of being manipulated by many well-meaning parents who were desperate to marry their daughters off. He’s had thirty-two false alarm 911 calls this year where he was either met at the door by a naked woman or parents who just happened to have a home-cooked meal served with a side of their single daughter.

Johnny Duggan was the latest conspirator in the plot to snag the sheriff for his daughter. Stella was a middle-aged, third grade teacher who had a pair of shoulders the New York Jets could put to good use and who always wore her underwear a size too small so it looked like she had four ass cheeks whenever she wore pants. Johnny Duggan was down to his last chance of getting her out of his house.

Johnny was currently huddled in the back of a police cruiser, sipping coffee with shaking hands and giving a statement to one of Jack’s officers. He was a small man and had worked as the groundskeeper for the county for as long as I could remember, which was why he’d stumbled across Fiona’s body at such an ungodly hour of the morning. His skin was toffee brown and wrinkled from the sun and age, but when he smiled his whole face lit up and it was easy to ignore the fact that he sometimes looked like a dried raisin.

“He still trying to set you up with Stella?” I asked.

“Yeah, poor bastard,” Jack said with a tight lipped smile. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll be the sacrificial lamb to save that man’s sanity.” Jack handed me a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. “I had to tell him that I was having a wild and crazy affair with you to get him off my back.”

“I haven’t had one of those in a while. Was it good?”

“The best I’ve ever had,” he said soberly.

“Good to know I haven’t lost my technique.”

We stood in silence for a couple of minutes. I drank my coffee and warmed my insides, while Jack observed the crowd. I noticed Floyd Parker from the Gazette talking to anyone who might have any interesting gossip to spread around. He wrote frantically in the little red notebook he habitually carried, his eyes shrewd and calculating. The jerk.

Floyd was huge. Like,
The Rock
huge. But he wore wire-framed glasses to break away from the jock image. (Really he looked like the love child of Clark Kent and the Incredible Hulk—minus the green). Floyd had played some college ball at Virginia Tech, but I think his grades were too good to keep him from being anything other than second string. He was a handsome man and could almost give Jack a run for his money in the women department.

And yes, I can admit to one night of frenzied passion with him when I was away at med school and incredibly lonely. It was a moment of pure insanity. Not one I’m proud of, and he never lets me forget it. But even if I didn’t hate him for seeing me naked, I’d still hate him for what he’d done after my parents had died. Floyd Parker was lucky I didn’t run him down with my Suburban every time I saw him in the street.

Floyd caught my gaze, looked me over from head to toe, and smirked. I restrained myself from grabbing the gun Jack had strapped in his shoulder holster and pumping Floyd full of lead. I compromised by shooting him the bird instead. Jack smothered his laugh with a cough, and my mood lightened for a brief moment until I thought about the body I was about to see.

“All right. I’m ready,” I said, tossing my cup in a plastic sack. I put my hand on Jack’s arm and gave it a comforting squeeze. “Thanks, Jack, for giving me a minute. This is harder than I thought it would be.”

Jack nodded and we walked over to the crime scene together. Fiona’s gunmetal grey Ford Taurus sat on the side of the road and faced in the opposite direction of her house. The Taurus had to be at least ten years old, but it still looked new. George was meticulous about things being in order and tidy in appearance, which was probably the only reason he never put marks on Fiona’s face.

“She finally decided to leave him, huh?” I asked.

“Looks like it,” Jack said. “I spoke with the sister this morning. She said Fiona talked to her last night about eight o’clock. Said she was ready to get out, leave for good. They had an appointment this afternoon to meet with an attorney to file for divorce.”

I looked inside the open trunk and noticed the neatly lined suitcases.

“The sister lives in Florida, so she wasn’t expecting her until sometime this morning,” Jack said.

“Did she have car trouble?” I asked.

“Ran out of gas. We haven’t gotten a confession out of George yet. He’s still busy playing the grieving husband, so he hasn’t told us yet if the empty gas tank was his idea. My thoughts are that this was very well planned out, to the last detail, just the way he likes it.”
I followed the tread of another set of tires behind Fiona’s car and watched the last of the crime scene guys take more photos.

Jack pointed to the deep treads in the mud. “Her killer pulled in right behind her. He knew she wasn’t going to try and hike her way into town in freezing temperatures, and chances were less than slim that someone would drive by and see her that late at night. She had the standard blankets in her backseat like anyone else with a brain in this area. We found a cell phone in the bottom of her purse, fully charged, but instead of staying inside out of the wind and calling for help, she gets out. Why?”

“Panic, maybe?” I said and shrugged my shoulders. “If she thought her husband was going to come after her maybe she decided she’d take her chances with the elements instead of staying in one place where he could find her.”

“Yeah, that was my first thought, but look at her footprints. The ground was soft after yesterday’s rain. She steps out of her car and goes around the back to meet whoever pulled in behind her. There’s no indication she was trying to run away. Her trunk was closed when we found her this morning, so she wasn’t trying to get anything and get back inside. I’d thought at first she might have been getting another jacket. There’s one back there.”

I looked at Jack in confusion, knowing I was missing something important, and then the light bulb went off.

“You don’t think it was George?” I hissed in a shocked whisper. It wasn’t an opinion I wanted anyone else to hear. In a small town like Bloody Mary, the citizen’s had a tendency to declare guilt first and ask questions later. I knew this from experience. And they wouldn’t care for their sheriff to have a different opinion. It sure as hell wouldn’t help him win the next election.

“That’s for you to help me find out,” he answered, his teeth gritted in a smile so hard I was surprised they didn’t turn to dust.

Jack ran his hands through his hair in a gesture I recognized as frustration. He knew how small towns worked, and he knew he was walking a fine line. He’d forgotten his hat again, so I pulled the spare I always kept out of my pocket and handed it to him. Jack was damned good at his job. He was way overqualified to be the sheriff of a podunk town, and no matter how unpopular his theories, I would always back him a hundred percent.

I squeezed his arm in support. “I’ll look into it,” I assured him.

He nodded in gratitude and pulled the ski cap down low over his ears. “This is how I see it. She runs out of gas and realizes she’s still too close to home. Not too much time passes before someone else pulls up behind her, and by the size of the tire treads it looks to be some kind of truck.”

“George has a truck,” I said, playing devil’s advocate. “And who else would be traveling this road that late at night?”

“I know, and we’ll test the treads and take samples from the bottom of his tires, but don’t you think that if Fiona recognized her husband’s truck behind her, she’d dig out the cell phone from the bottom of her purse?”

“What if his lights kept her from seeing who it really was?”

“Listen, Jaye, I know you want it to be George. Hell, even I want it to be George. There’s not a man in this county who deserves to be in jail more than he does, but we have to look at every possibility. My gut is screaming over this.”

The last time Jack’s gut had screamed over anything, he’d been shot three times and forced to retire from a job he’d loved.

He pointed to the clearly imprinted treads in the now frozen mud. “He pulls up behind her, and let’s say she doesn’t recognize the vehicle. She feels relief, maybe gratitude that luck should be on her side tonight. She’s invincible and has just taken the biggest step of her life. She gets out of the car calmly and takes four steps towards him. Have you noticed that as clear as the tire treads are in the mud, there are no footprints from him that show us the initial meeting?”

I had noticed, but I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, so I let Jack continue to paint his picture.

“That tells me he deliberately kept to the pavement. He probably got out on the passenger side.”

“So maybe he just didn’t want to get muddy.”

“Maybe. So he comes up to her, talks to her a bit. Maybe he tells her to grab her purse, that he’ll take her into town. I don’t know. But for some reason she turns her back and he strikes a blow to the back of her head. You’ll have to tell me once you get her in if it was multiple times, but my gut says once. He just wanted to incapacitate.”

There was a small amount of blood on the ground near the trunk, and the crime scene team had already numbered and photographed it for their report.

“Then what?” I asked.

“We found more blood in the back seat of the car. The blankets were shoved to the floorboard. That’s where he raped her. He tied her up and waited until she was coherent before the rape, then left the rope on the seat. Didn’t tidy up after himself.”

I shivered as we made our way to the other side of the car. To Fiona. Jack had painted a clear picture in my mind, and after I got her on the table I’d be able to tell him for sure if his theories were correct.

The December air was brittle with cold, and the wind chill was several degrees below freezing. The sun peeked through the bare trees and cast everything in a pinkish hue. The only good thing about the temperature was that Fiona Murphy was well preserved.

Fiona hadn’t died with dignity. Her naked body was sprawled face down, her arms and legs at abnormal angles. I ignored the yellow spray paint the crime scene unit had used to trace around the body and moved around her so I could snap pictures from different angles. When I was through, I squatted down beside her to get a closer look.

“God, her body’s a mess. Some of these bruises look weeks old,” I said as I ran my gloved finger down her back and around to the side of her ribs. “The ones along the spine look fresh. And I’ll make sure when I get her back to the lab, but by the coloring I’d say they’ve been there no more than a day.”

There was blood matted to the back of her blond hair where the initial blow had been struck. It had turned black and flaky overnight.

“He posed her here,” Jack said. “Everything about this scene is deliberate. Look at the footprints.”

I looked down at three precise footprints labeled with a yellow tag. I stood up and moved back so I could take a look at my own. My footprints were visible, but they were smeared. The killer’s were a different story. 

“They’re perfect.”

“I know. He places her body here, poses her arms and legs, and then plants three perfect footprints next to the body. Look how close together they are. He either has extremely short legs or was trying to shuffle slowly with the body in his arms.”

“And if he was shuffling slowly, there would be smears,” I finished for him.

“What do you want to bet that those perfect footprints are the same size as George Murphy wears?”

“You think someone deliberately set up George? Who would do such a thing?

“I don’t know. Maybe one of the hundreds of people in this town he’s managed to piss off.”

When put that way, the list of suspects could go on forever. I flexed my leather gloves that were tightening with the cold, took a deep breath and turned the body over. A long, red silk scarf was wrapped around Fiona’s throat and mud was caked on the side of her face. I tried to look at the scene dispassionately through the lens of my camera, documenting the broken capillaries in the eyes due to the strangulation and the swollen tissues around the neck. Her face was the palest marble, and the hopelessness that had been imprinted on her face over the years had vanished in death.

“There’s no facial bruising,” I said. “George has always been careful about that for the most part, but there are bruises on almost every other surface of her body—bastard. Apparent cause of death appears to be strangulation. And I’ll definitely rule it as a homicide. After everything she’s been through, someone chokes her to death. I’d say she’s been dead no longer than six or seven hours, but it’s hard to tell. I can’t gauge the time of death accurately by body temperature because of the weather, so I won’t be able to give you a firmer TOD until I get her on my table. The sister’s story about the phone call helps narrow it down a little, but that’s the best I can do right now.”