Carolina Rain (11 page)

“I’m fine. Thank you for asking. Just enjoying the rain.”

“Okay. I wanted to make sure ya wasn’t locked out of your vehicle or something. You’re too good looking to have
anything like that happen to y’all
.”

Lily fought to hide the smile that was having its way. She leaned against the car. “How very thoughtful. They say that chivalry is dead, but I guess not.”

“My mama taught me right. So does that mean you’ll have a drink with me?” he asked
,
his grin hopeful.

Without answering, she put her bag over her shoulder, moved slowly to the passenger
-
side door of the red sports car, and climbed in. Her smile had to be brilliant
. .
.
and it was.
She could practically see her suitor getting hard.

“I don’t drink. Do you live close
by
?”

CHAPTER-15

Ginny Krantz parked her police SUV and got out, reached for the handle to open the garage, but
paused
. It had rained a few hours
before, and
now the moon sparkled overhead like a huge silver dollar framed with a billion stars. Add the resonance of waves lapping to white sandy shores
and the scent of spring azaleas
two blocks away and
. . .
well,
as always,
it almost took her breath away. She’d
experienced spring nights
a thousand times since she and her husband had moved here from Lansing, Michigan
some
forty years ago. It was beautiful, yes, but that wasn’t all. This scene, this ambiance
,
never ceased to stir in her the feeling that there was something more out there, up there, wherever. If God really existed, he had a condo in Kure Beach, North Carolina because there was no more glorious place on the planet.

She took in the scene a few more minutes, then turned the knob and shuffled into the garage heading to the house through the side door. The smell of stale gas mingled with dead grass was in sharp contrast to the fresh ocean scents she experienced mere steps away. Kind of like life. You could stand in the roses one minute and knee deep in shit the next.

Shaking her head, she entered the house wondering if her old man would ever do what he said he would and clean the damned garage. She was learning that his retirement also meant procrastination but
,
really, she was okay with it—he’d hurried his whole life.

Sighing, she
put her keys, cell phone, gun, and badge on the teakwood table and reached for the kink in her shoulder. This getting-old thing wasn’t the storybook version she’d always heard about
; the one
of boundless wisdom, energy, and free time. More like late nights and early mornings of pain shooting from the bottom of her feet to the top of her head, taking turns on a
different body part every few hours. Throw in this
pain in the ass job
, and it just couldn’t get any better, could it?

Ginny walked into the family room. “Old man? You still up?” she asked quietly.

The fifty-inch plasma was still on but he wasn’t in his favorite
easy
chair. He must have gone to bed, leaving the TV on again. They’d just talked about how expensive that was and how he
needed
to stop doing it. The “talk” had evolved into an argument, as usual these days, and ended when he slammed the door and headed into Wilmington. She crossed her arms and rubbed her hand over
her
left
arm
. They would both have to get whatever cob was up their respective cracks removed and exposed so they could solve th
ose
dilemma
s
. Retiring with a pissy spouse wasn’t going to be fun for either of them. But they would get it together; they always had. That’s what made marriage last—working things out.

The
antique grandfather clock her dad had given her
read
one
seventeen
a.m
.
She
shook her head
, again
. This Morgan case was taking far more time than it should
and
they still had almost nothing to go on in spite of the pressure the Morgan family was exerting on New Hanover County’s finest. That made the captain moody and demanding
, w
hich meant long days and nights like this one. Funny thing about crimes in the twisted-murder arena: money didn’t create clues or puke out suspects, no matter how many dollars one had. And
,
given Lance’s proclivity for whoring around, the suspects who might conceivably want him planted six-feet-under could be in the fifties.
There was a picture of the man o
n Wikipedia beside the term “love them and leave them.”

Exiting the family room, Ginny went to the kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator, and popped open a cold beer. She sat at one of the padded barstools and contemplated further. Multiple suspects were only part of the problem. Forensics wasn’t doing so well either. There
should have been more biological material to work with at the scene. Whoever killed Lance had spent some serious time on the body, maybe
they’d
even had sex but
,
for some odd reason, there wasn’t any secretion evidence of that
—
just
her
educated guess. There were no skin epithelia, hair, or follicle, or skin under the fingernails, no saliva—at least they had found none to date
—
apart from
the victim's. Weird as hell
. . .
and never mind the damn snake. She’d never seen Ben pull his gun so fast. With one shot, he’d blown the black and red reptile to kingdom come. She was a big animal lover
,
only
she hated anything that slithered. Those belly jocks could all go straight to hell in her opinion. But the question still remained: why was it there?

She took another long draw from the can. They’d already gone over
Lance’s
cell phone record and came up empty. There were several calls to one pay
-
as
-
you
-
go, and a couple more to known numbers, but nothing had panned out yet. They went to his usual haunts and talked to some of his former girlfriends and got squat. They did have one lead from one of the security cameras at Big Louie’s, his favorite bar. It showed him leaving with a blond who walked very slowly, but it could have been one of a hundred women. No one seemed to recognize her, not even the bouncers.

“Imagine that, no concrete leads,” she muttered.

Police work was always so glamorized on the boob tube
,
but in reality
,
you had to get lucky while working your ass off. She reached back with her left hand and touched her backside. God knew hers could use a little working off.

The only thing they had going for them was the medallion stuck in Lance’s mouth. The meaning wasn't exactly clear, but it could
be
the symbol for a cult of sun worshippers, a marijuana leaf, or Aphrodite. Her vote was for the MJ leaf. If it belonged to one of the others, they might have a serious problem. It was made with relatively expensive aluminum alloy, was
gold-plated, and had to be special ordered. The problem was that it could be purchased from about twenty places on the Internet. It would take
patience
to run down those records and it could have been sold to any
one of a thousand people in the area, or elsewhere, over an indefinite amount of time.

Draining the beer, Ginny slid off her slacks and tossed them in the laundry room as she headed for the bedroom. The fan was thumping methodically as usual
and
there was something else
. A
smell, her husband’s s
cent
. The man was a freaking gas machine.

Ginny finished undressing, climbed into bed without turning on the light, and reached over to kiss him good night. His chilled arm caused her hand to jerk away. She jumped out of bed. She tripped over something on the floor, ca
tching
her balance as a sharp pain ran up her right shoulder. She ignored it and fumbled for the light switch, panic acting as her guide.

The ceiling light flooded the room
. S
he stared at
the scene on her bed and froze.
Even a grisl
y veteran of hundreds of murder investigations like her
can be shocked. Carl lay on the comforter, his arms crossed on his chest just above where the hilt of the corkscrew protruded. The streaked, dried blood covered his nude body from head to foot, barely covering the same spider-web pattern she’d seen decorating Lance Morgan
, including the faint salt lines
.

As Ginny screamed, the glint of
the
medallion caught her
eye. She
screamed again as she dropped to her knees, fighting the nausea and
lightheadedness. A
flash
later, she lost her late dinner on the dark
blue carpet. Breathing hard, she struggled to her feet, glanced at the bed
again
, heaved again, and then rushed to her phone on
the table
. She suddenly grew dizzy, lost her balance and landed o
n her knees a second time. Then
she dropped the phone just long enough to free a wail borne of pure disbelief
and agony
. Finally she took control, at least enough to dial 9-1-1.

As she waited
for an answer
, tears streaming,
Ginny Krantz
was struck with the irony of her early thought.
She’d been right.
Kure Beach
had a real problem.

CHAPTER-16

Sit
t
ing on the edge of the bed, Manny raised his knee toward his chest, felt a tiny twinge of pain, then continued to tie his black
cross trainer
before plopping his foot back
on
the floor. The small echo ricocheting from the sound made him smile. He stared at the other shoe, tied it, and repeated the process he’d managed with the first. That sound caused the grin to grow wider still. Two shoes on the floor meant two feet on the ground
. T
hat meant he was walking out of Lansing Memorial Hospital—today.
They would insist
on throwing him in one of those ancient wheelchairs that had been around since the Civil War and
,
for a change, he wouldn’t argue. Anything to get his fanny out of here and back into the real world.

Running his hand through his hair, he reflected on what he had been able to do while lying in the bed. Josh had brought in some case files, including
one for the mysterious cyanide woma
n who claimed he
’d
done something to her, then killed herself.
Chloe would have kicked his ass had she known
. He’d asked for them anyway. E
ven with all of the visitors, he found time to read
—and think.

The
cyanide woma
n’s
file was remarkable thin. No match for her fingerprints,
no DNA match,
n
o ID. Nothing. They had pictures of the scene in the hospital and one of the security cameras saw her walk through the door in full uniform. She must have stolen it, yet no
uniforms
were reported missing by the staff. Josh said they were still digging, so he’d wait. He had no choice. Still, when someone says you did something to them and they wanted to kill you, it
prompted
questions that needed answers.

And what of
Garity’s file
? Josh wanted
Manny’s review and first impressions
on his murder
.
He’d gone over Garity’s file a dozen times, staring at his attacker’s death
in photos and reports,
comparing
them
to the man’s life from his FBI personnel file.

Manny stared at the floor. He wanted to hate him, to take satisfaction that Garity was dead, and that he’d gotten what he deserved. But, oddly, he hadn’t gone there
. . .
much.
His profession had taught him about human nature
. H
e was convinced that people did
abnormal
things out of what they perceived as normal.
I
n the end, d
id that make them so much different than the rest of the human race?
Didn’t we all want
what
we wanted? Weren’t we all slave
s
to our motives?
His real concern was with just that: Garity's motives.