Murder in the Smokies - By Paula Graves Page 0,1
awaken, pull the weapon and have him in her crosshairs.
He never used a gun himself if he could avoid it. It seemed too easy. Too impersonal. Snipers shot at targets from hundreds of yards away, their only connection with the soon-to-be-dead a brief, magnified view through a sniper’s scope. Where was the value in such a death?
He liked to feel the heat of his victims as they struggled to hang on to their fleeting lives. Smell the iron tang of blood and hear the sounds of life leaving a body. It was intimate. The most intimate, thrilling thing he’d ever done in his whole life. Nothing else came close.
He wondered if she’d left another window open....
Ivy Hawkins woke with a start, sitting up straight in her chair. A piece of paper clung to her cheek before dropping back to the desk atop the others lying inside the open manila folder. Her gaze went automatically to the window as if she expected to see someone there.
She rubbed her tired eyes, trying to hold on to the fleeting remnants of the nightmare that had awakened her. For a moment, she had a memory of looking through her own window at herself and feeling...what?
Anticipation, she realized, feeling queasy. But when she tried to remember more about the dream, it eluded her grasp, slippery and ephemeral, leaving behind only the sour taste of fear.
She pushed to her feet and crossed to the window, sliding her hand across the latch to make sure it was in place. Her heart skipped a beat as she realized it was unlocked.
How had she left a window unlocked?
He knows it’s unlocked.
Chill bumps rising on her arms and back, she quickly snapped the latch into place. And because if one window could be unlocked, so could others, she grabbed her Smith & Wesson M&P357 and went around the small farmhouse, room by room, to check the rest of the locks, as well.
Everything else was secure. She holstered the pistol and went back to the study, where she’d left her files.
Crime scene photos lay scattered across the open file, as if in death the three murder victims would share the secrets of their last moments in life. But they were mute, the bloodless marks on their carefully cleaned bodies serving as their final statements.
“You don’t even know if they’re connected.” The impatient tone of her supervisor, Captain Rayburn, rang in her head.
He refused to admit there was a link between the deaths at all, despite the obvious evidence. Ivy suspected the captain resisted the idea because he didn’t want to invite outside agencies into Bitterwood to observe the department in any way.
She had a few theories why that might be so, none of them good.
On paper, the victims were different enough to confuse matters—a quiet, single woman in her early thirties, a young widow with a drinking problem and a college coed home alone while her parents were visiting friends in nearby Maryville. But it was what the victims shared in common that convinced Ivy of a link.
Home alone. Living on secluded roads that saw little traffic after seven in the evening. All three murders taking place at night, between ten and midnight. And all three victims stabbed to death by a killer who had left no actionable evidence behind—because he didn’t kill them in their homes. Apparently, he took them elsewhere for the kills, washed them clean of all blood and evidence and returned them to their beds to be found by concerned neighbors and loved ones.
Ivy slumped in her chair and closed the folder, a glance at her watch reminding her that she’d stayed up well past two in the morning yet again. If she went to bed right now, she’d get maybe two hours of sleep before her alarm clock rang and she’d have to start all over again. Ten days straight. That’s how long it had been since she’d had a full night’s sleep.
The phone on the desk rang, shattering the silence and rattling her nerves. The caller ID read “Bitterwood P.D.”
She grabbed the receiver. “Hawkins.”
The voice on the other line was Detective Antoine Parsons, the whipcord-lean veteran who’d been working the murders with her. What he said sent another chill skittering through her.
“We have another one.”
* * *
SUTTON CALHOUN EDGED his way around the small cluster of neighbors gathered outside the farmhouse on Blalock Road, trying not to draw attention from the police officers busy at work taping off the scene and keeping people from going