5 Bodies to Die For Read online

  At a rap on the door, she turned to see Jack stick his head inside. “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” She turned back to her task of removing underwear from her dresser drawer.

  “Going somewhere?” Jack asked.

  She folded a pair of red lace panties and set them on top of the pile of clothes. “Peter invited me to stay with him for a while, and I accepted.”

  Jack picked up the red panties between thumb and finger to study them. “You’re moving in with Ashford?”

  “No,” she corrected, still folding underwear. “I’m staying with Peter until things settle down around here.”

  “Until I catch The Charmed Killer?”

  She nodded and instinctively wrapped her hand over the charm bracelet she wore. The charms were supposedly prophetic, but so far, they’d only proved to be disconcerting. After all, a killer was on the loose using the trinkets as his signature.

  Jack pursed his mouth. “I think it’s a good idea.”

  She gave a little laugh. “I thought you might since you said I should marry Peter.”

  “That’s not why I think it’s a good idea.” He brought the panties to his face.

  Carlotta snatched them away. “Then why?”

  He shrugged, unfazed. “Because I’m sure that palace of his is a fortress. You’ll be safe there. Which means I can investigate The Charmed Killer without worrying about your pretty ass being in harm’s way. I’m sure Ashford will keep you busy with polo matches and dinners at the country club.”

  “Does this mean I won’t be seeing you?”

  “You’ll miss me, huh?” Then he was suddenly serious. “Carlotta, I’m liaising with the GBI and your name keeps popping up in the investigation. We’re going to have to get you cleared, although this new development with Lane is a big step forward.”

  “You think Michael is The Charmed Killer?”

  “We’ll have to double-check the time line, but right now, he’s the best suspect we have.”

  “But Shawna Whitt was murdered before he escaped from the hospital.”

  “We don’t know exactly when Lane escaped, and we still don’t know if the Whitt woman was murdered. Since she was cremated, we may never know.”

  “But the charm in her mouth—”

  “Could’ve been placed there postmortem. Maybe Lane broke into her place and scared her so badly she had a heart attack, then he placed the charm in her mouth. Or maybe he heard about the death and the charm after he escaped from the hospital and decided to adopt it as his signature. Who knows how a crazy man thinks?” Jack wet his lips. “All I know is that thinking about Lane being here in this house when you were asleep makes me a little insane.”

  “But he didn’t kill me, Jack. He had the chance, and he didn’t kill me.”

  “Maybe he tried. We still don’t have a line on who planted that bomb under your car. You said yourself that the Monte Carlo was only here, at Coop’s, and at the mall. Michael was here and he’s certainly familiar with the mall parking lot.”

  She bit her lip. “Michael isn’t the type to plant a car bomb. He isn’t technical, or gadgety.”

  “You can buy ready-made explosives if you know where to go.”

  She sighed. “Michael is the one person we know wanted me dead, so maybe he did plant the bomb. But it just seems like a lot of trouble to go to when he had the opportunity to off me in my own bed.”

  “Can’t argue there,” Jack said, then averted his gaze. She could tell he had his doubts about Michael being their man. He pulled a small notebook from an inside jacket pocket. “When do you think Lane got in the house?”

  “I’m thinking Friday, after you removed the motion detectors. And I believe he left sometime Sunday or yesterday.”

  “How do you know?”

  She didn’t want to tell him about the money that Wesley had won in a card game. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing her brother was supposed to be doing while on probation.

  “Come on, you said on the phone something about Lane having ten thousand reasons to leave?”

  She closed her eyes briefly. “Wesley had ten thousand dollars hidden in his room and realized this morning it was missing.”

  Jack frowned. “Go on.”

  “Wes last saw the money Sunday morning, so Michael must have taken it sometime Sunday or yesterday.”

  “So Lane might’ve been gone before you and I came back here Sunday?”

  When Jack had spent the night. She nodded, knowing the information would ease his conscience—and his ego.

  “Have you noticed anything else missing?”

  She shook her head, then glanced around her bedroom, comparing what she saw to the images a person’s subconscious picks up from of their surroundings every day. When her gaze landed on her bulletin board, she stopped and walked closer to study the random mementos she’d tacked onto the mesh surface—tickets stubs to shows, things she’d cut out of magazines, and photos, some of the items so old they were curled around the edges.

  “What?” Jack asked, coming to stand behind her.

  “Something is missing.” She stared at the empty spot, trying to remember what had once been there, then the answer slid into her mind. “A photo.”

  “A photo of who?”

  “Of me,” she murmured. “Michael had taken it during a holiday party at work. He gave it to me.”

  “Must’ve wanted a souvenir. Anything else missing?”

  She sighed. “Not that I can tell, but who knows.”

  Jack made a few notes, then closed the notebook. “Let me know if you think of anything else. Go to Ashford’s and lay low. We’re going to have a CSI team go over the entire town house in case Lane left something here that relates back to one of the murders. Take only what you need.”

  Panic blipped in her chest. If Michael had left something behind in their house, the Wrens would be even more closely intertwined with The Charmed Killer case. And she didn’t like the idea of the police going through her personal things.

  “And forget about the body-moving business for a while,” Jack added.

  “But Coop—”

  “Could stand to take a break himself.”

  She blinked, surprised to hear Jack’s concern for Dr. Cooper Craft, the former M.E. who had been relegated to moving bodies for the morgue and had hired Wesley to assist. It was how she’d been drawn into body moving herself, and how she’d been drawn to Coop, who had been acting strange lately. “So you do think something’s wrong with Coop.”

  “Nothing an AA meeting can’t fix. Don’t get caught up in Coop’s problems, darlin’, you’ve got enough of your own. And keep that stun baton handy.” He wiped his hand over his mouth, trying to smother a smile. “You got Ashford good, huh?”

  “You don’t have to take so much pleasure in his pain.”

  “You’re moving in with the man. Let me have a little fun at his expense.”

  “I’m not moving in with Peter…I’m staying at his house.”

  Jack stepped closer and lifted her chin. “In his bed?”

  Carlotta’s chest tightened. “What do you care, Jack?”

  He leaned his face close to hers. “Because getting you back home gives me that much more incentive to get The Charmed Killer off the streets.” He grabbed the red panties in her hands, and walked away, holding them high before shoving them into his jacket pocket with a grin. “I’ll hang on to these for motivation.”

  Carlotta shook her head as he disappeared through her door, confounded as always by the man’s push-pull on her heart. She had no doubt that Jack would get the maniac off the streets. Her live-in arrangement with Peter notwithstanding, she only hoped it was sooner rather than later.

  She glanced around her room with an eye toward what the police would find that might make her uncomfortable.

  Her teenage diaries.

  Carlotta moved toward the dresser. She’d found them when she’d unearthed the charm bracelet that her father had given her. She couldn’t remembe
r the exact contents of the diaries, but since they’d encompassed her burgeoning relationship with Peter and the time immediately after her parents’ disappearance, she didn’t want strangers analyzing her personal drama for their own entertainment.

  She pulled out the diaries—one for each year of high school—and stowed them under clothes in her suitcase. When she started to close the dresser drawer, she suddenly noticed the corner of a file—her father’s client file that Wesley had stolen from Randolph’s attorney, Liz Fischer. She didn’t want it to wind up in the wrong hands. So she slipped in the file, then closed the bag and zipped it shut. Moving in with Peter was the right decision, Carlotta told herself. She desperately needed a change of venue.

  Carlotta picked up her cell phone to check for messages and frowned. Meanwhile, where was her brother and why wasn’t he returning her calls?

  2

  Wesley was valiantly trying not to throw up. He’d passed on a drive-through lunch in anticipation of the job that he’d spent hours working up his nerve for, and it was a good thing, too.

  The severed head at his feet looked like a prop for a haunted house. The edges of the neck skin were black with dried blood and curled, like a macabre ruffle. Red and white strings of sinew dangled out of the gaping hole that had once connected the head to a torso. The head’s eyes were partially open, and the skin was dark in places, hinting of a beating the man had received before he’d taken his last breath. The sparse, dark hair was a matted mess, caked with dirt and blood.

  Wesley stood holding pliers, giving himself a pep talk. Mouse had ordered him to remove the head’s teeth, which would make it harder for the cops to identify the head if it was found. This wasn’t what Wesley’d had in mind when he’d agreed to go undercover in The Carver’s loan-shark organization in exchange for having charges of attempted body snatching downgraded to a misdemeanor and additional hours added to his community service. By offering his services to Mouse to help him collect on overdue accounts, he’d hoped to kill two birds with one stone—fulfill the D.A.’s demands while clearing his own debt to The Carver. When he’d balked at performing the grotesque act, Mouse had told him he had Wesley’s jacket with the dead man’s blood on it. Wesley believed him. When he’d tried to recover his confiscated jacket from Mouse’s trunk, he’d found a severed finger inside.

  “Just do it,” Mouse yelled. He stood nearby eating a Big Mac and fries.

  They were on an abandoned construction site in east Atlanta where the city leaders’ overly optimistic projections of growth had led to lots of digging, followed by lots of reneging. The site was deserted, hemmed in by a few trees, but there were no people or houses within sight. Just baked dirt, tinged red with Georgia clay, as far as the eye could see.

  “Have you done this before?” Wesley asked his companion.

  “Oh, yeah. You get used to it.”

  Wesley gagged.

  “You’re thinking about it too much, little man. Fucking do it already.”

  Wesley took a deep breath and lowered the safety glasses over his eyes. Then he knelt on the ground, averted his gaze and felt for the man’s mouth. The dead flesh was cold and pulpy and the head reeked, like a rancid piece of meat. Wesley groped until he found the mouth, then pried open the stiff lips. He glanced down and grew light-headed at the sight of his hands in the mouth of the disembodied head.

  “Start with the front ones,” Mouse advised, chewing on his burger. “They snap off like dried corn.”

  Wes swallowed hard and positioned the pliers with a shaking hand around one of the big square front teeth. The stretching and pulling had made the man’s eyelids pop open, revealing his cloudy irises. Wesley squeezed the pliers, but when he pulled up, the head slid against the ground and spun out of his grasp, rolling like a melon.

  Mouse belly laughed, obviously enjoying the show.

  Wesley wrestled the head back in position, then put it between his knees to hold it still. Panicky and sickened, he repositioned the pliers and pulled as hard as he could. Something pinged against his safety glasses, and when he looked down, half of the tooth was gone. Bile backed up in his throat, but before he could change his mind, he broke off the other half of the tooth and dropped it in the Micky D’s disposable cup that Mouse had conveniently provided.

  “See, that wasn’t so hard,” Mouse urged him on.

  One by one, Wes rid the head of its teeth. Some of them broke off, and some of them came out root and all. There was no blood, thank God, but plenty of flying gum tissue to muck up the safety glasses. Mr. Dead Man had spent a lot of money on his choppers, because he had caps, and two in the back were gold.

  “I’ll take those,” Mouse said, extending a handkerchief for Wesley to drop them into.

  “What will you do with them?”

  “Sell them.”

  “Who the heck buys gold teeth?”

  “Well, most of our sources have dried up because it’s gotten too risky, but now those companies that buy gold through the mail make it real easy. They send me a postage-paid envelope, I drop in the gold teeth, and a couple of weeks later, I get a check, easy-peasy.”

  Wesley’s eyes bulged. “They don’t wonder where you got an envelope full of gold teeth?”

  He shrugged. “They don’t care. Ain’t America grand?”

  The molars and the wisdom teeth presented the greatest challenge, but by then, Wesley had gotten the hang of it and twisted them out like pulling stumps out of the ground. When he dropped the last tooth into the cup, he sat back on his heels and tore off the safety glasses. The head rolled a quarter turn, its mouth a snaggly hole. Wesley stumbled to his feet, walked to the nearest bush and threw up.

  Mouse chuckled, then picked up the cup of teeth and headed back to the Town Car. “When you’re finished, let’s go.”

  Wes wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “What about the head?”

  “Leave it. It’s supposed to be a hundred degrees today—the bugs and the birds will take care of it.”

  “What about the skull?”

  “Hell, if someone does find it, they’ll probably take it home and put it on their bookshelf.”

  Wesley walked back to the car to put the tools and gloves in a bucket in the trunk. He stopped for a moment and let the reality of what he’d done wash over him, then he slammed down the lid with revulsion.

  “Hey, take it easy,” Mouse called. “Get in.”

  Wes crawled into the front seat, hot and sweaty, the stink of rotting flesh in his nostrils.

  “Moist towelette?” Mouse asked, extending one of those little foil packets that barbecue joints pass out to customers.

  He took it and tore it open, then unfolded the disposable towel and held it against his face, breathing in the antiseptic smell. God, that was the worst thing he’d ever done. He had a feeling he’d be having nightmares about it for a while. He needed a hit of Oxy, bad. He reached for his backpack just as his phone rang from inside. Wes pulled it out and frowned. The screen said he had eight messages and the incoming call was from Carlotta—something was wrong.

  “I need to get this,” he said to Mouse, then flipped up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Wes, where are you? I’ve left you a half-dozen messages.”

  “Um, I’ve been working. Is something wrong, sis?”

  He listened with incredulity as she told him how she’d discovered that Michael Lane had been living in their parents’ bedroom. He shook his head, his mind racing at the implication—the psycho had been roaming around their house at all hours, doing chores? “That’s crazy. For how long?”

  “We think since Friday.”

  “Jesus Christ, why aren’t we dead?”

  “Good question. Michael obviously had ample opportunity to do whatever he wanted.”

  He hated hearing the fear in his sister’s voice. “They don’t know where Lane is?”

  “Not yet. But at least Jack knows he’s on the run again, so they have an APB out on him.”

  “I’m going to install
a security system in the town house,” he said. Guilt tightened his chest. He should’ve done it before now, considering all the trouble the pair had been in lately. He wasn’t doing a very good job of taking care of his sister after years of her taking care of him.

  “I think that’s a good idea. But meanwhile, Peter invited me to stay at his house until the dust settles.”

  He frowned. “You’re moving in with Peter?”

  “I’m staying at his house,” she corrected. “And Jack is having a CSI team go over the town house, so you should come, too. Peter has plenty of room.”

  He remembered the man’s huge home from when he and Coop had gone there to remove the body of Peter’s wife after she’d drowned in the pool. “Thanks, but I’ll probably crash with Chance.”

  “Okay,” she said, although he could feel her disapproval vibrating over the line. Carlotta didn’t like his buddy Chance Hollander—she thought Chance was a bad influence on him. Little did she know that he’d just performed oral surgery on a severed head while Chance was probably watching cartoons.

  “Wes, there’s something else. It looks like Michael stole your money before he left.”

  His stomach fell. “No…no…. no. Are you sure?”

  “I didn’t touch it, so if it’s gone, that only leaves Michael.”

  He leaned his head back and groaned.

  “I’m sorry, I know you had plans for that money. But in the scheme of things, we’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Yeah, I know. But still.”

  “So, how’s the courier job going?” she asked cheerfully.

  He glanced down at the cup of teeth in the console and his intestines cramped. “Fine and dandy.”

  “Good. I’ll have my cell phone with me, and here’s the number at Peter’s.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking down the information. “Later.”

  He disconnected the call and sighed.

  “Trouble at home?” Mouse asked.

  “You know it.” Now he really needed a hit of Oxy. Reaching into his backpack, he palmed a pill into his mouth and chewed.

  “What’s that?”