Dirty Little Secrets (Romantic Mystery) Book 1 in the J.J. Graves Series (28 page)

I was broken. And I had no idea how to fix myself.

I took another deep breath and slowly straightened my spine, wiping the inside of the windshield with the back of my sleeve to clear away the steam. I put the car in drive and checked my mirror for any traffic before I pulled back onto the road. It was habit. There would never be any traffic on these back roads at this time of night.

Bloody Mary, Virginia was like a throwback to another century. It was one of the four towns belonging to King George County and it was just shy of 3,000 of the most contrary people I’d ever met. My mother had always said it was because there was nothing to do in town except drink or procreate. My mother, come to find out, had been a consummate liar, but I was pretty sure she was right about that one thing.

It was a postcard of a town—towering trees and clapboard houses with American flags flying from the porches. The main roads were bricked and the sidewalks were cracked. It was a town that boasted family values and the American Dream. The shops closed before dark and everything was shut down on Sundays. People got up early and worked hard, and they went home to their families and home-cooked meals.

King George wasn’t a rich county, for the most part. There were pockets where the wealthy lived, of course, because the scenery lent itself well to the monstrous homes those with money tended to own. But most people in King George County were solid, blue-collar working class. It was a good place to raise a family and settle down to a comfortable life.

Maybe that was the reason driving back home made me feel out of place. A family and a comfortable life didn’t seem to be in the cards for me. I was fourth generation mortician. First generation law-abiding citizen. And I was all that was left of the Graves’ family legacy. By all accounts, I should have been buried next to my parents in the Bloody Mary Cemetery. But for some inexplicable reason, I was still breathing. The blood was still pumping through my body and causing my heart to pound erratically in my chest. I had no idea why God had chosen to spare me. It was just another thing to feel guilty for, wondering if He’d made the right decision.

My headlights slashed across the old playground equipment on the opposite side of the country road—rusted seesaws and metal slides that would blister the backs of some poor kids’ legs in the heat of the summer. There were patches of dirt where grass should have been and scarred picnic tables strategically placed under the towering oaks. It was a park well tended but in an area that couldn’t afford anything better.

The crunch of gravel beneath my tires seemed unusually loud over the whirr of the car heater, and my head turned automatically in surprise when a gust of wind had the seesaw moving up and down on its own, giving a ride to what I imagined to be the ghosts of two invisible children. My skin chilled and my flesh pebbled as I got the sense I wasn’t alone.

But it wasn’t ghosts I had to worry about. It was flesh and blood. Human. At least what was left of him. His skin was pale in the glare of my headlights, and now that I’d seen him I wondered how I ever could have missed him.

“Oh, shit.”

I made a hard left with the wheel and drove onto the playground, so the bright yellow of my headlights gave center stage to the man chained to the tree. His naked body was mangled and so bloody I couldn’t pinpoint the mortal wound. Heavy chains wrapped around his chest—I got the impression they were there to hold him up instead of restraining him. His dark hair hung down and his hands were limp at his sides, though from the looks of his misshapen fingers they would have been useless anyway. 

I felt the initial rush of fear even as my training kicked in.

In a former life that seemed like an eternity ago, I’d been a medical doctor doing rounds in the ER at Augusta General. After my parents had died amidst lies and scandal, I’d had no choice but to pack up and move back to Bloody Mary and take over the family mortuary business. Mostly because it was damned hard to do rounds while the FBI was trying to question me about my parents’ illegal activities. It didn’t put patients at ease when they found out my parents had been using their funeral home to hide and transport smuggled goods. Sins of the fathers, and all that. Go figure.

Once I’d moved back home and taken over the business (or what was left of it), I’d somehow gotten roped into acting as coroner for the whole county. Fortunately, we didn’t get a lot of suspicious deaths in this part of the country unless you counted the serial killer who’d murdered three people last winter. Almost four.

I took a long look around the area and shoved my cell phone in my pocket before flinging the door of the Suburban open and stepping to the ground. The piercing cold of a March wind slapped at my face and sliced through my long wool coat, past the threadbare lining and straight to my bones. I didn’t bother with gloves. I stuck my hand inside my coat pocket and pulled out the small Beretta that had become like an appendage since my incident. 

The wind blew the door of the Suburban shut almost before I could get out, and I looked around slowly, trying to see beyond the thick copse of trees and past the shadows that resembled grotesque pictures of my darkest nightmares.

Guilt was a vicious and cruel emotion. In the past I would have rushed straight to the victim, searching for that one last hope that he might have a chance for survival. But I learned the hard way that survival is something you have to fight for, and sometimes you have to be selfish when it comes down to your life or a stranger’s.

I breathed out slowly and put the Beretta back in my pocket, focusing my full attention on the man. If I’d had my wits about me sooner, I would have realized at first glance that hope for his survival had run out a long time ago.

Whoever had done this to the man had made a mess out of him. It looked like his hands and feet had both been broken, as well as his knees. There were small wounds all over his body, but most of the blood loss came from the area of his genitals. Someone had decided to castrate the victim and remove all signs of his manhood. Blood loss and shock would have been enough to kill him.

I fought back the urge to start an examination. I didn’t have my kit or any gloves, and technically I wasn’t coroner since I’d taken leave after my own brush with death.

But something stirred inside me that I hadn’t felt over the last three months. A spark of life. Of purpose. Lying in a hospital bed gave a person too much time to think—to question how much worth one really had. And I wanted this case. I wanted to keep my mind and my hands busy so I wouldn’t think of other things.

I needed to call into the station and report the scene, but even the thought had my breath hitching and sweat streaking down my spine in cold rivulets. I wasn’t sure I was ready to face them all. My friends. My acquaintances. My enemies. Being back in town would almost be as big news as the body. But mostly I wasn’t ready to face Jack.

There wasn’t a choice. The universe had decided it wasn’t through with me yet, even though I’d started to wonder. I’d have to face everyone sooner or later, so I pulled the phone from my pocket and dialed before I could second-guess myself.

“Dispatch,” a woman answered.

“This is Doctor Graves. I’ve got a body.”

Here’s an excerpt of CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. A new romantic suspense by Liliana Hart.

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Chapter One

The
slap, slap, slap
of his shoes hitting the pavement echoed in the fog that crept over the sleeping city.

He was slicked with sweat and his lungs burned with each laboring breath, but still he ran faster, punishing his body, punishing himself, as he fought the urge to look over his shoulder. It never seemed to matter how fast he ran, because his past continued to haunt him.

Shane Quincy knew all about ghosts and personal demons. He knew about the terror of the innocent and their screams that still filled his head. He knew about heartbreak and sorrow because it plagued him with every breath he took. And most of all, he knew about fear—fear that clawed its way up from the pit of his belly and left a bitter taste in his mouth—and horrors so devastating they could break even the toughest FBI Hostage and Rescue Sniper.

And he had been the toughest. The best the FBI had ever had to offer.

He slowed his steps as a heavy drizzle blanketed the deserted New Orleans street and hunched over, propping his hands on his knees as he gasped for breath and tried to ease the aching in his chest. He knew from experience that the ache would never go away, but he tried just the same.

For two years his routine hadn’t changed. The nightmares would come, waking him in a cold sweat with the taste of bile rising in the back of his throat. The covers would be damp and twisted beneath his restless body and his senses would be primed. But the echoes of the screams were only in his imagination, so he’d slip on his sweatpants and a t-shirt, leave his empty apartment, careful not to disturb the dark-haired woman he shared the third floor with, and he’d run for miles through The Big Easy. Fast and hard, as if he were running for his life. And in some ways he was.

The drizzle turned into a downpour and Shane laughed bitterly as he raised his face to the sky. He began running again, this time at a slower tempo, and turned left off of First Street onto Prytania, where the historic mansion that housed six different apartment units was located. He never would have been able to afford the place when he was working for the FBI, but he’d found out very quickly after he’d turned in his resignation that private security paid a hell of a lot more than working for the government.

His skin was chilled and his dark hair, which was in desperate need of a trim, dripped into his eyes as he typed in the security code for the wrought iron gate that protected him and the other residents. Only four of the six units were currently occupied, the effects of Katrina and Rita still making people wary of putting down roots. There was a young couple on the first floor, both of them attorneys at a large firm, a tenured professor at Loyola on the second floor, and the woman who’d moved in a couple of months ago across the hall from him.

Shane wasn’t afraid to admit that the new neighbor had given him a restless night or two after she’d first moved in. Apparently a peaches and cream complexion, raven hair and pale blue eyes were enough to jump-start his libido after a long hiatus. He hadn’t wanted a woman in two years.

Not since Maggie had died.

But he wanted his new neighbor, and because of the fierce need that had caught him unawares, he did his damnedest to stay out of her way. He didn’t know anything about her and it didn’t look like things would ever be any different since she’d never gone out of her way to say more than a lukewarm hello. The same could be said about all the neighbors, which in his opinion made it the perfect place to live.

Along the outside of the building, freshly painted, white wooden stair cases led to each level of the house and split in different directions to each apartment door. Shane was almost to the third floor before he smelled the smoke. The rain and the wind had dampened the scent so it was barely recognizable, but it was there. He was sure of it.

He raced the rest of the way to the third floor and saw the licks of flame taunting him from the windows. The sight was hypnotic, the reds and oranges of the fire as it danced a path of destruction. The front door and one of the windows was open, feeding the inferno with much needed oxygen so it spread quickly through the rooms, up the thick drapes and onto the ceiling. Black smoke billowed out the open window and door, and he cursed himself for leaving his cell phone on his nightstand. He heard the fire alarms shrieking and hoped the other tenants made it out safely.

He didn’t pay attention to the splintered wood on the open door as he charged into the smoke and biting flames to see if his neighbor was still inside. His adrenaline was pumping and he didn’t miss the irony of the situation, that a failure such as himself would be put in the role of hero once again. He hadn’t been able to save anyone in a long time. He could barely save himself.

The apartment was a mirror image of his own, and he ran with familiarity down the long hallway to the bedrooms at the back. Paint blistered on the walls. Black smoke blurred his vision and clogged his lungs, so he ducked down on his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way to the bedroom. The fire wasn’t contained to one area but seemed to be everywhere at once, racing toward some unseen finish line where the prize was utter destruction. The blaze was scorching hot and windows shattered as the pressure built hotter and higher inside the fiery walls.

Shane heard the coughs and the pants that sounded more animal than human as he crawled over the threshold into the master bedroom. The air was slightly clearer, but it wouldn’t be for long. He stood up quickly and used his shirt to wipe his burning eyes before taking stock of the situation. What he saw built a fury in his gut that he hadn’t felt in a long time.