Murder in the Smokies - By Paula Graves Page 0,26
marble seemed to glow with light. “Yeah,” he answered, closing his fist over the marble. “I think I will.”
* * *
ALL OF THE WINDOWS and doors were safely locked. Ivy wasn’t sure why she’d made such a big deal of double-checking them. She’d just had a strong feeling she should. To be sure.
As she slid between the sheets again and reached for the switch to turn off the light, her gaze fell on the folder lying on her bedside table. It was closed, which surprised her for some reason.
She dropped her hand from the light switch and picked up the folder. Balancing it on her knees, she opened it and looked at the photos and notes inside. April Billings’s photo was on the top of the stack. Not the crime scene photo but a recent posed photo of the pretty young college student provided by the family. “I want you to remember her as a person, not just a body,” April’s mother had told Ivy when she handed over her daughter’s photo. It had been the day she’d talked the captain into letting her join forces with Antoine Parsons on the murders.
There had been three homicides by that time—the two earlier cases Antoine had been investigating and the newer one Ivy had taken the lead on. She was convinced the three cases were related, and Antoine had agreed. Only the captain thought differently, and he’d been reluctant to combine the investigations.
She’d expressed curiosity to Antoine about the captain’s recalcitrance, but Antoine had told her it was all about turf. The captain didn’t want the TBI or the feds nosing around the Bitterwood Police Department, asking inconvenient questions about how they did things in the sticks.
“You think there’s corruption going on?” Ivy had asked.
“I don’t know, and I’ve learned not to ask any questions,” Antoine had answered flatly. “I just do my job and make sure the cases I work don’t get corrupted by office politics. I suggest you do the same.”
She moved on past April Billings’s files and found the next victim. Amelia Sanderson. Age thirty. Mousy brown hair worn in a messy short bob. In the crime scene photos, she was lying faceup in bed, half-open eyes staring, sightless, at some infinite point beyond the camera’s range. A pair of wire-rim glasses lay on the bedside table. No blood on them, no fingerprints but Amelia’s found when the crime scene unit dusted them. Like April Billings, she’d been killed elsewhere and returned, nearly bloodless, to her bed.
Ivy flipped past the photo and read over the short bio Antoine had compiled. She was a bookkeeper, working for a trucking company in Maryville. Davenport Trucking.
She paused, an image flitting through her mind. A word scrawled on the inside cover of the manila folder.
Davenport.
She flipped back to the front cover and looked for the handwritten note, but the folder was bare. Checking the back as well, she found it also empty.
But the image was so vivid in her mind now. Those nine letters, written in sprawling ink across the folder.
By the killer.
Her hand trembling, she closed her eyes, searching the image that seemed imprinted on her mind. Saw the hand moving down to the open folder, watched the pen strokes form on the manila and realized, with a little shiver, that while the hand was large and male, the handwriting was her own.
Her subconscious sending her a message?
She moved forward to the third victim, Coral Vines. Coral’s murder had been Ivy’s case, and if she hadn’t been following Antoine’s investigation of the other two murders out of sheer curiosity, she might not have made the connection between those deaths and that of Coral Vines. Of the four women killed, Coral lived in a seedier part of town, her lifestyle one that might lend itself to random homicide more easily than being a college student on summer break or a retired high school librarian with no enemies outside of a few disgruntled former students with big late fines.
Coral Vines, twenty-eight and widowed, drank too much, according to friends and family alike. The death of her husband in Afghanistan a few years earlier had sent her over a ledge, it seemed, and she eased her pain with whiskey and classic Southern rock played at ear-bursting decibels on a bad drinking night. Whatever job she’d once had she’d lost and was living on welfare and the kindness of friends.
But she’d worked at some point, Ivy thought, flipping back through the bio. She vaguely remembered someone