Time of Death

“Nope. She’s Perdue to me. And I’m that cocky, know-it-all SOB as far as she’s concerned.”

“Whoa there. Did she actually call you that—to your face?”

Derek took another swig from his bottle. “Not to my face. I happened to overhear her a few months back when she was talking to Nic Powell about me.”

The buzzer Holt had laid on the bar went off, red lights blinking and the black disk vibrating. “That’s us. Our table’s ready.”

An hour later, with steaks, baked potatoes, and half a dozen yeast rolls consumed, Derek and Griff compared notes over after-dinner coffee. The loud shit-kicking music and the din of customers provided audio camouflage for their conversation, but they were both careful about mentioning any names in such a public place.

“The murders are too similar to be a mere coincidence,” Derek said. “If we knew for sure the mountain cabin victim had received threatening letters, it would erase any doubts I might have. But the truth of the matter is the bodies being nude and their having been shot several times wouldn’t link them, but the fancy masks being placed on their faces tells a different story.”

“The nudity and the masks are part of the killer’s MO, right?”

Derek grinned. “Went through the training course at Quantico, huh?”

“Yep. When I was with the Birmingham PD.”

“Then you know two murders don’t make a serial killer,” Derek said. “But the fact that the UNSUB has threatened a third person—one connected to the other two victims by past association, if nothing else—indicates this guy has the potential and if he isn’t stopped, he’ll go on killing.”

“Seems he definitely has a hard-on for former porno stars. No pun intended.” Holt grinned.

“Yeah, seems so. But my gut tells me that there’s more to it than that.”

“Like what?”

“Not sure yet.”

“This Hammonds woman in Dunmore—seems she’s Maleah’s new sister-in-law’s best friend, so the case is going to get personal, at least for Maleah.”

Derek nodded. “If I were Sanders, I’d take Maleah off the case and assign an impartial agent. But I’m an easygoing kind of guy and not prone to rocking the boat by questioning the captain’s orders.”

“I know Sanders,” Holt said. “If Maleah can’t do her job, he’ll replace her.”

“Any chance you could persuade him to do that before I arrive in Dunmore tomorrow? It would save me a hell of a lot of trouble if I didn’t have to deal with her.”

Holt chuckled. “Something tells me that if there’s a man alive who can handle Maleah Perdue, it just might be you.”

Mike kissed Hannah’s forehead, said good night, and closed her bedroom door. He moved to the next room, peeked in, and grinned when he saw that M.J. was already asleep, his long-legged little body sprawled across the rumpled covers. He tiptoed across the floor, lifted M.J. just enough to grab the covers with one hand, and pulled them up and over his son.

As he headed toward his small home office, an eight-by-eight space that had once been a walk-in-pantry, he thought about what a lucky man he was to have two great kids, a loving and helpful mother, and a job he truly liked. If Molly were still alive, his life would be damn near perfect.

Even after four years, he still missed her as if she’d left them only a few months ago. His sweet Molly. She had been everything a man could ask for in a wife. They’d had a good life. They’d been happy.

He knew that when Lorie Hammonds had come back to town, Molly had worried about how he would react, but she had never brought up the subject. At least not to him. He might never have known about her insecurities where Lorie was concerned if his mother hadn’t come to him.

“You need to make it perfectly clear to your wife that Lorie Hammonds is your past and that she and the kids are your present and future,” his mother had told him.

He’d been dumbfounded that Molly had felt Lorie could pose a threat to their marriage.

“I’ll tell her that she has nothing to worry about,” Mike had assured his mother. “The only feelings I have for Lorie now are loathing and disgust.”

“I’d keep that to myself. Those are powerfully strong feelings. It’s best if Molly doesn’t see how much Lorie still affects you.”

“She doesn’t—”

“You forget who you’re talking to, boy. I was around when Lorie left you high and dry. You loved that girl with everything in you. Those kinds of feelings don’t die. You just bury them deep and hope and pray you can keep them buried.”

He had denied that beneath his seething animosity for Lorie the love he had once felt for her still existed. And he’d kept on denying it all these years.

I don’t love her. She means nothing to me. Less than nothing.

Then stop thinking about her, you dope.

He walked into the office, flipped on a light, and pulled out his swivel chair. After plopping down in the Office Depot special—on sale for $99.99—he glanced at the shelves above his computer desk. A row of photos spread across one shelf, school pictures of Hannah and M.J., various photos of him and his kids. And one photo of his family, taken two years before Molly died.

I loved you, Molly. You were the best thing that ever happened to me.

His gaze traveled over the books and magazines stored on the shelves and settled on his old yearbooks. He hadn’t looked through them in years. In fact, right after Lorie dumped him, he had tossed all four yearbooks in the trash. His mother had retrieved them and kept them for him.

Half standing, he reached up and yanked his senior yearbook off the shelf. As he settled back into his chair, he opened the book and flipped through it. Dust particles flicked off the pages and danced in the air, their images appearing in the iridescent light from the overhead fixture. He smelled a hint of mustiness.

And then he stopped flipping through the pages and opened the book at the sophomore photographs. A sixteen-year-old Lorie Hammonds smiled up at him, her dark eyes sultry even then. His body tightened with desire. It had been that way since the first time he’d noticed her. That much between them hadn’t changed. As desperately as he wanted to deny it, he had to admit that he still wanted Lorie.

They had been in lust long before they fell in love. From the get-go, sex between them had been explosive. She’d been a virgin. He hadn’t. Being a good-looking jock, he’d had his pick of easy lays from the time he was fifteen. But Lorie had been different. She had been his, only his, the girl he wanted to marry and make the mother of his children.

Mike slammed the yearbook closed and tossed it on the floor.

“Damn you, Lorie! Damn you to hell.”

Chapter 6

Derek parked his Vette in the driveway, got out, locked it, and stretched his long arms over his head. He had driven in from Memphis this morning, a good three-and-a-half-hour drive, and hadn’t made any stops as he’d crossed the entire state of Mississippi. The farther east he had traveled, the hillier the landscape, going from flatland through the Magnolia State to the tentacles of the Appalachian Mountains that spread into the northern and eastern sections of Alabama. After retrieving his suitcase from the trunk, he glanced around, taking in the beauty of the renovated Victorian house and the peaceful street lined with large, mature trees beginning to come to life in the early days of spring. Dunmore was an old town, seeped in Southern traditions that grounded it in the past. And yet when he had spent quite a bit of time here last year, he had seen glimpses of change, of people looking to the future.

When the Powell Agency had sent him there last summer, he had gotten to know Perdue’s older brother, Jack, a local deputy, rather well. He had liked Jack as instantly as he had disliked Jack’s sister. Odd thing about the vibes you picked up from people. He figured Jack for a combination of hardened soldier and good old boy, a man’s man as well as a ladies’ man. But Jack’s days of carousing were over. Less than a week ago, Derek had attended Jack and Cathy’s wedding. The following morning, he’d left his motel room and driven straight to the Nashville area, to his mother’s birthday celebration.

Now here he was back in Dunmore and doomed to work with Perdue on a new and rather intriguing case. He figured the best way to handle their precarious partnership was not to take the woman seriously. She was big-time uptight, at least around him. He had told her more than once that what she needed was to lighten up, and a good start would be to go out and get herself laid. She hadn’t taken his suggestion in the spirit in which it had been given, which was only with the best intentions, of course.

Chuckling to himself, Derek headed up the walk that led to the front porch. Bet Perdue couldn’t wait to see him.

When he rang the doorbell, he didn’t expect to see a tall, lanky teenage boy open the door and invite him in.

“Aunt Maleah’s on the phone,” Seth Cantrell told him. “She’s talking to somebody at the Powell Agency, getting some information about the case y’all are working on. She’ll be with you in a minute.”

Seth was Jack and Cathy’s son, although Jack and Seth had met for the first time last year. Jack, a former Army Ranger, had been MIA during the Gulf War back in the early nineties. A pregnant Cathy had married another man who had raised Seth as his own. When Jack had come home to Dunmore last year, he had not only discovered that his long-lost love was a widow, but that he was her sixteen-year-old son’s biological father.

As Seth led Derek out of the foyer and down the hall, he asked, “Have you had breakfast?”

“Nope, sure haven’t,” Derek replied.