The Morning After, Page 3

  Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God!

  He had to keep moving!

  Deep in his boot, his ankle throbbed. Sweat covered his body. He was half blind. The crest of the ridge seemed hundreds of feet above him, the ravine abutting the trail a deep, dark abyss. How would he ever make it out of here? Why hadn’t he tried to follow that damned old logging road? If only Billy Dean would show up and help him and…

  Snap!

  Somewhere nearby a twig broke.

  He froze.

  His pulse throbbed in his ears.

  God help me.

  Fear sliced through his heart.

  Did he hear someone behind him? Footsteps on the blanket of dry leaves?

  Prescott spun.

  Again too fast.

  Agony ripped through his ankle and it buckled.

  Pebbles on the path skittered beneath his feet as he slipped toward the edge of the ravine. His arms waved frantically, but it was too late. He lost what frail footing he had. Screaming, he scrabbled wildly in the air, catching only a glimpse of a shadowy, tall man in the trees as he fell backward, pitching headfirst over the edge.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Come on, Nikki, give it up. Let’s go out for a few drinks.” Trina Boudine paused at the edge of Nikki Gillette’s cubicle, stretching her model-slim black frame over the edge that separated their desks. “You know what they say about all work and no play.”

  “I’ve heard. But I don’t know who ‘they’ are, and they probably weren’t concerned about paying the rent.” She glanced up at Trina. “And, just in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Johnny, and I’m not a boy.”

  “Details, details.” Trina’s dark eyes flashed as she smiled and showed off white teeth that were crooked enough to be interesting. She flipped a sleek wrist where half a dozen copper bracelets jangled. “What’re you working on that’s so damned intriguing? Last I heard you were doing a series on the budget cuts to the school district.” She clucked her tongue. “Mighty fascinatin’ stuff, that.”

  “Okay, okay, you’ve made your point.” Nikki rolled her chair away from her computer and hoped Trina didn’t catch any of the text she’d written as her story had nothing to do with money, budget cuts, or public outcry over lack of school funding. Instead, she was writing another crime piece, about a woman fished out of the river two days earlier. It wasn’t really her story. Norm Metzger had been given that assignment, but Nikki couldn’t help herself. Crime fascinated her. It always had and it had nothing, not one little thing to do with the fact that her father was Judge Ronald “Big Ron” Gillette. She frowned at the thought of her father, then glanced up at Trina. “Okay, so I’ll meet you. When and where?”

  “Sevenish for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at Bridges. Aimee and Dana will be there. We’re celebrating. Aimee’s divorce and Dana’s engagement. Kind of both ends of the romance spectrum.”

  “Sounds fun,” Nikki muttered sarcastically.

  “Well, you can see why we need a few more people. I’m hoping maybe Ned, Carl and Joanna can join us—you know, make it a party. Aimee is having some trouble getting enthusiastic about Dana’s engagement, but Dana wants to celebrate.”

  “Even though she was married twice before?”

  “You know what they say—”

  “Third time’s a charm, yeah, yeah. You’re just full of pearls of wisdom today, aren’t you?”

  “Always.” Trina’s phone rang and she rolled her eyes as Nikki’s computer screen flipped crazily.

  “This damned thing,” Nikki growled. “I thought Kevin was going to fix it.” Kevin Deeter was the editor’s nephew, a part-time student and full-time electronic whiz whose sole job at the Sentinel was to keep all the electronics working. A loner who told weird jokes, he kept mostly to himself. Which was a blessing. She frantically punched the escape key, then rebooted and the computer came back to life.

  “Kevin was by earlier.”

  “Did he do anything to the computer?”

  “Sorry. I was busy. Didn’t notice.”

  “Great,” Nikki mumbled testily. She didn’t really like Kevin, but tolerated him for his computer skills. It certainly wasn’t for his sense of humor. “I swear, he messes up more than he fixes. Damn.”

  Trina gave a quick shake of her head, a warning that Nikki caught. From the corner of her eye Nikki spied Kevin lurking by the coatrack, earphones plugged into his cassette recorder. He probably hadn’t heard her and even if he did, he needed to know that he was supposed to fix things, not make them worse. And what was with the earphones? If Tom Fink caught anyone else tuned into headphones while on the job, that employee would be out on his ass.

  “I’m going to tell him to leave my equipment alone unless I’m here,” Nikki vowed.

  “Sure you are.” Trina’s phone jangled for the third time. “Duty calls.” Sliding her desk chair into the booth, she answered, “Savannah Sentinel, Human Interest. This is Trina.”

  Nikki rolled her chair closer to her computer monitor. She’d been surfing the Internet, getting as much information as was available on the Jane Doe who had been found tethered to heavy barbells at the bottom of the river. Scuba divers had found her remains and the police had been called in. Detective Pierce Reed was in charge of the investigation. As usual, he had “no comment” about the case and no amount of calling on her part had even gotten her connected to the reclusive investigator.

  She clicked on a picture of Reed. He looked as if he might have done time as the Marlboro man. Tall and rangy, with a craggy but handsome face and eyes that didn’t miss much. She’d discovered that he was single and had told herself it was necessary to know as much as she could about him, including his marital status.

  She’d also found out that he had worked for the Savannah Police Department once before, over twelve years ago and only for a short while, before he’d moved to the West Coast and joined the San Francisco Police Department where he’d eventually become an investigator.

  From there on his past was a little murky, but from what she could piece together she figured that Reed had landed himself in some kind of hot water. Major trouble. A woman had been killed while he’d had her apartment under surveillance. From what Nikki could discern, Reed had seen the murder, hadn’t been able to save the woman’s life, nor ever capture the killer. Reed had been reprimanded, though not stripped of his badge. Nonetheless, he’d resigned and shortly thereafter, he’d returned to Savannah.

  The rest, as they say, was history. Capped in the form of the Montgomery murders.

  While the strains of some easy listening music filtered through the speakers set high overhead in this warehouse-turned-office building, she tapped a pencil on her desk and scowled at the image of Pierce Reed, a photograph taken thirteen years earlier when he’d still been a fresh-faced cop in Savannah. In his late twenties, but still serious, he nearly glared into the camera. She wondered what drove the man. Why uproot himself and move to California, only to return here over a decade later? Why not marry? Why no children?

  She’d love to do a story on Reed and was working on an angle to sell to her editor. Something along the lines of the man behind the myth, a personal look into one of Savannah’s finest…

  Her phone jangled and she cut off speculation about the elusive detective.

  “Savannah Sentinel,” she said automatically, her attention focused on the caller. “Nikki Gillette.”

  “Hi, Nikki, this is Dr. Francis with the Savannah School Board. You called earlier?”

  “Yes, I did,” Nikki said quickly as she visualized the woman—tall, imposing, never a hair out of place, an African-American woman who had made good and at forty-two held a major position of authority in her hometown. “Thanks for calling. I’d like to interview you on the recent budget cuts,” Nikki said and clicked over to her notes on the computer while holding the receiver between her shoulder and ear. “There’re rumors that some of the smaller neighborhood elementary schools are going to be closed.”

  “Temporari
ly. And we prefer to call it merging. Taking two or three schools and blending them together for everyone’s benefit. We maximize our talent that way, the students are exposed to a lot of different teachers with innovative ideas, their educational experience is broadened.”

  “Even if they’re bused out of their neighborhoods, mainly the poorer neighborhoods, and shuttled across town?”

  “So that they ultimately benefit,” Dr. Francis cut in with her smooth, dulcet voice. A native Savannahian, her accent was subtle and refined. She’d been a poor girl who had worked her way through the school system here, who had found scholarships, grants and work study programs to propel her through undergraduate school and a doctoral program while her single mother held down two menial jobs and raised a total of six kids. Dr. Francis was the epitome of the American dream, a philanthropist, never married, with no children, but a woman with foresight who actually seemed to care about all of the kids in Savannah. So why did Nikki have the feeling that she’d somehow sold out? Dr. Francis rambled on and on about serving the needs of the students and the community and Nikki took notes, reminding herself not to be so cynical. Maybe the woman really believed the garbage she was peddling. And maybe it’s not garbage. Just because they’re closing down a school you attended years ago, doesn’t make it necessarily bad.

  Nikki clicked her pen and listened, agreed to meet with Dr. Francis later in the week and hung up thinking that the story wasn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material, not even Nikki’s particular cup of tea, but it might have merit and was certainly newsworthy in its own way. No, it wouldn’t spark a byline in a bigger newspaper, wouldn’t propel Nikki Gillette to a job at the New York Times, or Chicago Tribune, or San Francisco Herald, but it would help pay the bills for the month and maybe she’d learn something.

  Maybe.

  In the meantime she wouldn’t give up on the Jane Doe pulled from the river, nor would she put her story on Detective Pierce Reed on the back burner. Nope, there was something there, something newsworthy. She could feel it. She just had to find out what it was. To do that, she needed to interview Reed, somehow get close to him.

  Which was about as likely as cozying up to a porcupine. The man was bristly, grumpy and sometimes just damned rude. Which was probably why she couldn’t just drop her idea about a piece on him. He was a challenge. And Nikki Gillette had never backed down from one. Never. Not the daughter of the Honorable Ron Gillette.

  Somehow, some way, Nikki would ferret out everything there was to know about Detective Pierce Reed. Maybe she’d come up dry, with nothing of interest. Maybe Reed was about as interesting as a dirty gym sock. She smiled. No way. In her gut, she sensed there was a story around the elusive cop. She’d just have to uncover it, no matter how many layers deep Reed had covered it.

  The life-flight chopper took off in a noisy whir of rotors as it lifted from the floor of the ravine. In a rush of winter air, it scaled the forested cliffs before disappearing over a hill. On the trail halfway up the cliff face, Detective Davis McFee turned his gaze on the young boy shivering before him. The kid was scared as hell, that much was certain, but other than the older boy might not survive, McFee didn’t know much.

  McFee’s partner, Bud Ellis, took over. “Let’s go over this again, Billy Dean. You were out hunting and something spooked your friend.”

  “My cousin—er, second cousin.”

  “Prescott Jones?”

  “Yeah. Me ’n him hang out a lot.”

  “It’s not huntin’ season.”

  “Yeah.” The pimple-faced kid had enough smarts to look down at the ground and dig his toe into the soft earth.

  Jones’s story was that he and his cousin had been tracking a deer, following the wounded buck down into the ravine, stumbled upon what looked like a grave and something had spooked the Jones kid. Scared spitless, he’d scrambled up the hill along with Billy Dean’s dog, and by the time Billy Dean had climbed to this section of the trail, he’d discovered that his cousin had fallen down a steep precipice on the switchback.

  In the fall, Jones had cracked his skull, broken three ribs and splintered his right forearm. He’d also scratched the hell out of his face and shattered his glasses. The EMT in the chopper wasn’t sure, but the kid could also have a punctured spleen or some other internal injury, no doubt a concussion. McFee wasn’t certain the older boy hadn’t been pushed down. Maybe the two boys got into a fight, maybe they were just squirreling around, but somehow Prescott Jones had ended up fifty feet below and beat to crap.

  Ellis prompted, “So you was chasin’ him up the hill?”

  “No, sir. I was followin’ him and old Red, wherever the hell that mutt is. Anyway, when I got ta here, I seen him down there.” He pointed down the steep hillside, into the woods below. “I couldn’t get to him so I kept runnin’ to the truck. His pa’s got a cell phone in there and had to drive a mile for reception but then I called you all right quick. That’s what happened. I swear.” The kid’s teeth were chattering from the cold or fear or both.

  “And you found a grave down at the bottom of the holler?” Ellis asked.

  “Yes, sir.” Billy Dean nodded so furiously that a lock of his dirty blond hair flopped up and down between his eyebrows.

  “Let’s take a look-see.” Ellis cast a glance at McFee and they followed the boy to the bottom of the trail where, on one side of the clearing was a gutted buck, his innards spilled onto the ground, and, nearby, just as the kid had sworn, was a mound of fresh earth, appearing for all it was worth like a grave. McFee didn’t like the looks of it. He pulled out his can of tobacco and stuffed a wad near his gum. What the hell was beneath the surface? Maybe another dead deer. Maybe nothing. Maybe trash…though usually trash was left strewn about without much care. This was a pit that was covered, but the earth hadn’t been camouflaged with leaves or sticks or foliage to hide it. Aside from the fact that the grave, if that’s what it was, was tucked deep into this ravine, whoever had buried something here had left it visible to anyone who passed.

  It was odd. Damned odd. “Let’s see what’s in there,” he said to Ellis.

  “Shouldn’t we call the sheriff? Maybe we need a crime scene unit.”

  “For what crime?” McFee asked. “Who knows what’s inside. We dig it up and find nothin’, then what? We’ve called everyone out here on a wild goose chase.”

  “Tell ya what. I’ll go up and get the shovel and make a call to the department.”

  “You do that. Billy Dean, here, will keep me company, won’t ya, boy?”

  The kid looked about to argue, but changed his mind. “Yessir.”

  “Good. Man, it’s cold down here.” McFee rubbed his arms and looked up at the sky. Gray clouds threatened rain. As Ellis hurried up the trail, McFee took out his knife and carefully moved some of the dirt to one side. The kid fidgeted and McFee guessed he knew more than what he was saying. “You ever been up here before?”

  “Yep.”

  “Ya have?”

  “Well, not right here, but around.”

  “You been in this holler?”

  “Once. A month or so ago.”

  “You see this grave then?”

  “No, sir, it weren’t here.”

  That much McFee believed. The earth was too fresh, like turned sod in a new field. Not quite the right color of the surrounding dirt, not trampled by animals or packed by rain. There had been a downpour two days ago. Torrential. Enough to flatten this mound. But it hadn’t. Because whatever was beneath the earth was fresh. McFee scraped again with his knife. He was square in the middle of the mound, centered so he wouldn’t miss whatever was below. But as he dug, making a small hole, his blade went deep, deeper than the shaft of his knife, deep enough that he had to lean over and place a knee on the dirt. Deeper and deeper while the kid shifted his weight from one foot to the other, ran the back of his hand under his runny nose and jangled the keys in one pocket.

  “Your dog the kind that runs off?”

  “What? No, sir. Old Red, h
e don’t go far.”

  “Where you reckon he is?”

  “Don’t know.” His eyebrows pulled together in a scowl and his lips turned in on themselves as if he were worried. He bit at his lower lip and sniffed. “Pa’ll skin me alive if somethin’ happened to him.”

  “No reason to borrow trouble,” McFee said. He felt certain they’d found enough as it was.

  Reed’s stomach growled. Acid burned up his esophagus. He glanced at his watch and realized he’d been going through paperwork, taking calls, answering E-mail and generally catching up ever since he and Morrisette had returned from the cemetery this morning. Breakfast had been coffee, lunch nonexistent and he’d been up since six A.M. It was now two forty-five. Time for a break. He rolled his neck around, trying to crack it and break up the tension in his shoulder muscles. How long had it been since he’d been to the gym and worked out. A week? Ten days? Hell, maybe longer. Tonight. No matter what came up, he’d throw on his sweats and trek over to the old athletic club where boxers sparred, weights clanged and the smell of musk and sweat wafted to the old rafters. It wasn’t a typical today type club with fancy computer-linked treadmills and stair-step machines that calculated heart rate, calories burned and distance traveled. Nope. This was old school. Weights, weights and more weights. If you wanted to run, you jogged. If you need an upper body workout, you tackled a big bag, throwing punches to get rid of your aggression, or for faster, quicker movements, you worked with a sparring bag.

  The real macho types could don gloves and mouthpieces and go at it in the ring while the other members of the gym looked on and placed a side wager or two. Not that it was legal, but then, what was? Reed and a few others in the department chose not to see the bets going down. He imagined drug deals were transacted on those cracked concrete floors, or behind a bank of battered lockers, but he hadn’t witnessed money exchanged for meth, coke or steroids. So far. He hoped he never did.