He shrugged, setting the pious declaration down on his coffee table.
She noticed he couldn’t discard it fast enough, but he chose a spot on the table that to someone else might seem unintentional—out of range of potential spills and away from all other articles. He even moved a glass out of the way that had no more than a swallow left in it.
“Dunno,” he said. “Maybe. Could be just a Bible-thumper leaving his calling card. Was there a similar slip on anyone else’s vehicle?”
“There were a few cars in the garage, but I didn’t see it until I was already in my car and I wasn’t about to get out to check.” She wondered if she should tell him about Brad, but decided not to. Brad had to have walked out after her, because she’d spied him talking to Frank moments before she’d left the office. The note was already on her car.
He stared at the note on the table.
“Good girl,” he said, and finally focused his stark blue gaze on her. The tension from his body permeated the room.
Caroline felt nervous merely standing near him.
“There’s something else . . .”
He tensed, the muscles in his biceps flexing.
“I ran into Patterson in the market yesterday.”
His brow furrowed. “Did you talk to him?”
“Briefly. He asked me, in his words, ‘nicely’ to stop harassing him.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“Not really.”
He moved toward her, the look in his eyes anguished.
Caroline sucked in a breath, startled by the advance.
“Caroline, promise me from now on you’ll go home when the rest of the world goes home . . . you don’t need to prove anything to your mother.” He reached out to touch her face. “Promise me,” he pleaded.
Her hand automatically moved toward his, intending to pull it away. “Jack . . .”
“I warned you to come here at your own risk,” he reminded her, his eyes swirling with emotion.
Caroline didn’t pull away.
She didn’t want to.
She held her breath as he cupped her chin and leaned into the caress.
That was all it took.
Ten years of yawning, unsatisfied hunger was unleashed with a simple touch. Jack took her into his arms, his hands sweeping over her body, his mouth lowering to hers. He kissed her, and Caroline dropped her purse on the floor and threw her arms around him, her body responding in a way it hadn’t ever responded to anyone, ever. She groaned, kissing him back, pressing into the firm contours of his body, craving the warmth of his skin against her bare flesh.
The next thing she knew, his hands were lifting up her skirt and she let him. He reached between her legs, beneath her panties, found her wet and growled deep in his throat.
Tiny orgasmic spasms wracked Caroline’s body with that simple touch and the next thing she knew, her clothes were on the floor . . . and so were she and Jack.
Chapter Twenty-Three
J
ack wasn’t sure what got into him—something primitive and possessive.
They fucked once on the living room carpet, like animals. The sight of her naked was a little like taking a starving man straight out of the desert, ribs sunken with hunger, and standing him before a table overflowing with all the sustenance he could possibly want.
Afterward, he brought her into the bedroom to love her with his heart, making love to every inch of her body the way he had imagined doing for ten long years.
He spread her legs, found the precious button he loved and feasted on the rich nectar of her body, drinking it in when she came on his tongue. He traced the outlines of her breasts, remembering the contour with his lips, the valley between and the pert nipples that pebbled against the warmth of his tongue.
Every time he had ever been with Kelly—anyone for that matter—he had been thinking of Caroline. Every time he satisfied his body, he wished the communion were with Caroline. He didn’t want to make love to anyone else—ever.
Only Caroline.
Jack came three times through the night, but he was pretty sure Caroline did at least twice as often. Like fireworks in July, each culmination of her desire came in rapid succession, one after another, making her toes curl and filling his heart with warmth.
They made love, gently, one last time and when they were done, she purred happily and he rolled to her side, thrusting his hands into her hair, caressing her cheek with his thumb. “I love you,” he whispered. “I have always loved you.”
She remained silent. But that was all right by him. He’d let her go slowly, knowing she needed to do this on her own terms. If he pushed her, she’d shut down and he didn’t want to take any more backward steps. As Neanderthal as it might sound, she was his, always would be—proof of that was in the way she’d responded to him—but he could afford to wait until she realized it all on her own. They had waited ten years already.
She peered up at the clock and Jack’s arm snaked around her waist, reading her mind, locking her into his embrace.
It was two twenty-two
A.M.
“I should go home,” she said, smiling.
“But you’re staying right where you are,” he told her with certainty. “Unless I’m coming with you, you are not leaving my house at this hour of the night—even if I have to tie your ass to my bed.”
She giggled, and gave him a sultry look that heated his blood all over again. He didn’t think he had anything left in him. “Yeah? And what will you do to me then?”
Jack hardened fully at the question and repositioned himself on his knees, lifting a brow as he peered down at her suggestively.
There was one condom left in the drawer.
Her wide-eyed expression when she realized how fully she affected him brought a wicked smile to his lips. “Let’s find out,” he suggested with a roguish grin.
As an invitation, she tossed off the covers, gloriously naked, offering him her wrists to bind.
He didn’t need further encouragement.
Make a left-hand turn instead of a right . . . and later you hear you missed a three-car pile-up. But you listened . . . and you’re safe at home, pouring a glass of wine and flipping through news channels . . . feeling superior because . . .
you knew
.
Instincts.
Everyone had them. Most people ignored them. Even in absolute innocence, a child knows when to be wary—they feel it down in their little pile of twisting guts—an “uh oh” feeling that sends them wailing after Mommy’s skirts.
The Hutto girl knew better.
She’d followed him anyway, wanting to see the turtle nest he promised to show her.
At some point, most people stopped listening to that inner voice.
Then one day, you’re thirty-five, you’ve got kids at home and gray hair peeking through a dye job, and you’re alone in a parking garage when a guy approaches asking for directions.
Maybe you think he’s cute, despite the scruffy, three-day beard and the hand buried in his hoodie . . . or maybe the color of his skin makes you feel guilty because your first instinct—your most primitive instinct—is to roll up the window and drive away.
Or maybe you’re just stupid.
That’s what predators like Donald Pee Wee Gaskins counted on: stupid people. Gaskins grew so bold he even purchased an old hearse, telling folks at a local bar he needed it to haul victims to his private cemetery.
No one believed him.
They thought the short little man with the gimp leg was perfectly harmless.
If they couldn’t find an idiot like Gaskins until he slipped up and tried to off a man for fifteen hundred bucks, they would never catch
him
.
You’re too smart.
Prove it.
In total, Caroline got maybe three hours of sleep.
If she stopped to think about what she had done, she might be mortified, but she’d sworn off thinking this morning as a matter of self-preservation.
As soon as the sun crept in under the window shades, she got up and hurried to dress, gathering her belongings. She checked her cell phone. Sixteen missed calls and five texts—all from Savannah and Augusta. She felt instantly contrite for not having let them know where she was. If either of her sisters had done the same thing to her, she would kill them. But it had been a long time since she’d felt obligated to check in with anyone—or, for that matter, since she’d hooked up with a guy—so she just didn’t think—but she should have, considering the climate of fear in Charleston.
Then again, this wasn’t just any guy, and deep down, she knew it wasn’t a hookup. That both terrified her and thrilled her at once.
She woke Jack to say good-bye.
“It’s Saturday,” he complained groggily, grasping her by the hand and tugging her down so he could kiss her. One hand grabbed her buttocks, pulling her close.
“I have to go,” Caroline protested with a smile. “Augie and Sav are probably angry at me as it is for not calling.”
“As well they should be,” he offered, but released her. He lay there completely naked, looking unrepentant and very fit.
“So do we . . .” She gestured between them awkwardly. “Should I . . . call . . . maybe later?”
It seemed not much could derail his good mood, Caroline decided as his grin widened. “Later. Five minutes from now. Anytime works for me,” he assured, laying a hand over his very defined left pec and scratching his chest absently. That hand—those fingers—had been places she had never imagined.
Caroline’s brows collided. She wasn’t comfortable with expectations, but the lackadaisical answer somehow displeased her. “Right. Okay, I’ll call you later.”
“Be careful,” he demanded. “Wear your seatbelt and be sure to look both ways before you cross the street.”
Caroline laughed, despite her unease. “You’re still a dork,” she declared.
“And you’re still fucking beautiful in the morning!” he said emphatically.
Caroline’s face split into a grin over his flattery. “Bye,” she said, and as she turned to leave, she found her own smile broadened.
Chapter Twenty-Four
T
he instant Caroline walked out the door, Jack got up and hurried to the kitchen. He grabbed a plastic bag and a pair of spaghetti tongs—the only clean utensil he could find—and walked bare-assed into the living room, carefully picking up the slip from the coffee table with the tongs and placing it inside the bag, zipping it tightly.
In his gut, he felt it was a message.
So their guy was a bit of a thrill seeker, after all. That was both good and bad, because while he was communicating, Jack realized he was also ramping up for another grisly show.
At this point, he couldn’t do a damned thing about Caroline’s or his fingerprints on the paper, but he didn’t want to take any chances with the first possible piece of evidence in the case—even though so far their guy had left them zero evidence and Jack was pretty certain he wouldn’t send a message like this without taking similar precautions. Later, he would have the lab take a look at it—but first, he planned to make a few inquiries.
The Ashley was a thirty-mile blackwater river fed by the Was-samassaw and Great Cypress swamps. Sister to the Cooper, the waterway was as mercurial as the tides that governed it. Like twin, black moccasins, the rivers’ murky depths slithered toward the sea, spitting their daily flotsam into the Charleston Harbor, where the tides fluctuated like backwash into a cup.
On the other side of Folly, the Stono River cut its way through more swampy terrain—land that was deceptively beautiful and uncorrupted even after centuries—except for a few scabs left upon the land by fleeing humanity—the ruins, the earthworks and the bulwarks.
You could literally throw a stone at one such scab from Brittlebank Park, a quiet little public green nestled on the Ashley River. Across the street from the park sat the police station, making it an ideal location for a family outing, complete with a playground and dock for incoming boats.
Certainly, no one working inside the two-story brick building would have any concerns over working on a Saturday. Inside, Kelly Banks sat poring over her computer screen.
She had begun the missing persons exercise as a means to earn Jack’s pardon, but found it fascinating. First, she spoke to John Sever, the detective in charge of the Missing Persons Unit, to get a little insight. Luckily, she found him working on a few derelict reports. At any given time, there seemed to be a stack on his desk—growing more than receding—and instead of playing ball with his son at home, he sat at the office tagging and filing the missing and the dead.
Missing persons files were retained indefinitely, until the individual was located or the record canceled. The number was always high, Sever told her—up six times since the eighties—the increased number primarily due to the simple fact that law enforcement took the reports more seriously. But while the number of missing reported nationally in any given year could reach seven hundred thousand and more, the active missing persons report was a fraction of that. At the end of 2010, for example, NCIC’s active report contained roughly eighty-five thousand, and only a fraction of those were related to abductions or kidnappings.
Once Kelly was ready, she borrowed an empty desk in the criminal identification unit. There were several databases available, including NCIC and NamUs, a relatively new public repository for missing persons sometimes used by medical examiners’ and coroners’ offices. The last list was public, which might give her access to cases that, for whatever reason, had not been properly reported. She started with NCIC, made her notes, printed copies of the list and then moved to the NamUs database, which revealed a total of two hundred and twenty-four cases for South Carolina—one hundred and forty still open . . . dating as far back as 1972.
That didn’t make her head spin, but it didn’t tell her anything either, so she narrowed the search to currently missing adults only, which reduced the numbers to a one-page printable list, but when she pulled up a map, the concentration revealed nothing. The virtual pinpoints were all over the state. Clicking on the dots revealed people of all ages and types—a twenty-seven-year-old white female from Gaston, a fifty-year-old black female missing from Greenville, an eighty-six-year-old white male from Greer.
She saved that search and tried another approach, removing missing persons who were older than sixty-five and cross-referenced that list with NCIC’s list of EMDs—persons of any age missing under proven mental disability and senility. She removed those from her list.
If she discovered anything significant, they would have to get someone else to do a more professional analysis. There was no way anyone was going to accept her search officially, but then again, she was only doing this to help Jack.
The list narrowed to maybe twenty for the entire state—but the concentration again revealed nothing. So she ran the report, not by the area in which they resided when they were reported missing, but the location they were last known alive.
Her map shifted slightly, but not enough for her to make any correlation. The numbers were just too low to reveal anything. There were still lots of representational dots all over the state, but a pattern seemed to be emerging near the coastal areas, and particularly in places known for high drowning rates.
It seemed crazy, but despite enormous signs posted anywhere there were dangerous currents, the number of drownings each year never declined. It was almost as though it were a challenge some people just couldn’t pass up; the bodies recovered were usually those of healthy young men—often military guys who thought they were in exceptional physical shape and who believed somehow the laws of nature didn’t pertain to them. During spring and summer months, it was not uncommon to hear Coast Guard choppers circling above.
Following that logic, she filtered out males between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five and cross-referenced that list with NCIC’s list of EMVs—persons missing after a catastrophe. A thin jagged line of virtual pinpoints stared back at her from the computer screen.
She clicked through the pins surrounding Charleston, revealing mostly women—girls—from the ages of sixteen to thirty-seven. One of them happened to be Jennifer Williams from Murrells Inlet. There were a few young girls—including six-year-old Amanda Hutto—a handful of males, and a four-year-old boy, missing since 1989 . . . Robert Samuel Aldridge III. She knew the name—who didn’t?
Staring at the kid’s last published photo, she tried to make out a resemblance to Caroline. She could barely see it. The boy was too young and the photo too blurry. Maybe he looked more like his dad? She wondered what it must have been like for the Aldridges to lose a child so young. She didn’t know much about the circumstances, except that Caroline’s dad had briefly been in the news, accusing his estranged wife of substance addiction and avoiding all blame for his son’s drowning death. Kelly remembered her parents talking about it. Afterward, her mother had refused to let her go to the beach with her aunt, citing the missing Aldridge kid as her favorite cautionary tale. It became an urban legend, like Jaws . . . or the little four-year-old girl in Florida who was snatched by a gator out of her own backyard.
She sat there, trying to find empathy for Caroline and even as a small kernel of emotion appeared, she tamped it down, telling herself she didn’t need to feel sorry for the girl who had everything, including Jack.
As she studied the mass of dots on the screen, she was aware that behind her, some of the men in the unit were chattering with a newcomer. Distracted, she turned to see who had come in.
Josh Childres flashed her a warm smile, his unnaturally blue eyes brightening at the sight of her. They had worked together for a while before he’d gone to work for the county solicitor’s office and if she hadn’t been so nuts about Jack, she might have actually gone for Josh. He was an ambitious up-and-comer, with a charming personality and smooth tongue that somehow managed to win you over despite the overkill of sugar behind his words. Now, it seemed ridiculous to have dated two men who were intricately connected to Caroline Aldridge. So that was ruined for her, too.
“Hi, beautiful,” Josh said, winking.
Kelly blushed. “Hi you.”
“Whatcha doing locked up here on a Saturday morning?”
The heat in her cheeks intensified, aware that the attention of the room turned in her direction. “Checking the missing persons database.” There was a question in his eyes, and though she didn’t really want anyone to know exactly what she was doing, she couldn’t seem to not answer it. “Trying to help Jack.”
“I see,” he said. “Well, whatever you’re doing for him, I don’t want to know about it.” He turned to go. “Get yourself some sunshine, sunshine. It’s a lovely day!” To the guys he tossed out a final, “Don’t work too hard.”
“Hey, Josh.”
He turned to face her. “Do you have a sec?”
His brows twitched. “Sure.”
She waved him over, not wanting to ask out loud. Although he wasn’t related by blood, he was bound to have feelings about Sam Aldridge’s disappearance and she didn’t want an audience.
He knelt at her side. “What’s up, sugar?”
She whispered, “You’re such a flirt! I just wanted to ask about Sam Aldridge . . . he’s still in the database.”
The brilliant smile vanished from his face and his expression sobered. He peered down at his shiny Versace shoes, leaning on the chair suddenly for support. “That’s because they never found his body.”
“I guess I was just surprised for some reason. Everyone seemed so sure he drowned.”
He glanced up at the computer screen. “Those your results?”
Kelly glanced at the screen, too. “Yeah, there are only a handful of unexplained disappearances in the area . . . until ninety-six. Then we have a few. I was thinking about removing everything before then, but I wanted to see what you thought. I mean, the last thing I want to be accused of is leaving Sam Aldridge out because he’s Caroline’s brother. If it’s relevant, I’ll leave it. Can you tell me what you know about his disappearance?”
Josh ran a hand over his jaw. “I don’t know. I was pretty young. He disappeared in eighty-nine so I was—what—seven? That was some rough shit,” he admitted.
“Well . . . what do you think?”
“I think you’re safe removing it if you want to. They were pretty sure Sammy drowned. He set out in a little inflatable raft and that’s the last anyone saw of him.”
“Okay, well, thanks anyway.”
He shrugged. “My advice to you: let Jack worry about it. That’s his job. And I’d better get to the evidence unit and do mine or I’m not going to have one to get back to.” He stood and patted Kelly’s shoulder. “Good luck with that list.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Catch y’all later,” he said to the guys.
They responded in unison, waving him off.
“You working on a missing persons list for Jack?” one of the detectives asked.
Kelly winced. “Yeah.” At all costs, she wanted to avoid a conversation about this so she didn’t turn around to address him. She knew the last thing Jack would want was for the entire department to know she was trying to help him, especially after Condon had warned him to focus on the single victim and solve the crime without scaring the hell out of people.
“Find anything interesting?”
“Not really.”
Kelly studiously ignored him, staring at the map a moment longer, and then she hit the print key, concluding that, at this point, it might all be relevant. She wanted to get out of this office and away from prying eyes and rude eavesdroppers. As Josh suggested, she would let Jack decide. Pulling all her documents together, she found a yellow envelope and wrote Jack’s name on the back, then sealed the envelope and took it with her.