Carolina Rain (5 page)

“Hey Sophie. Good to see you, girl,” said Manny Williams, running his hand through his hair.

CHAPTER-6

New Hanover County Detective Ginny
Krantz
stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the ceiling of the Morgan mansion. What the hell was wrong with people? All she wanted was a nice, gentle, peaceful three weeks before s
he handed the Sheriff her badge and
her gun,
retrieved
what was left of her sanity, then rode into the sunset as a retired cop after thirty-five years of service to the fine people of North Carolina.

Was that too much to ask? She’d had it up to her arthritic neck with perverts, liars, men haters, women haters, rich bitches, poor pricks, and
especially
other cops who did what they did because someone “pissed them off.” Or worse, because they felt like they were smarter than the law
they’d sworn to uphold—
and tried to prove it.

Rubbing her face with sixty-
two-
year-old hands, she winced when her knuckles cracked. She moved back to the foyer where Lance Morgan had met his gory demise. Her eyes hesitated at his chest then worked past his abdomen and then down to his left leg
. T
his time, she couldn’t pull away. The combination of horror and fascination was compelling, in that morbid sort of way. She guessed that fascination was what separated detectives from blues who’d rather hand out speeding tickets and break up domestics than hang out with dead bodies. Today, she was all for being a blue
. . .
almost.

Murder wasn’t new to her but what lay spread
-
eagle on the floor was. When she and her partner, Ben Garcia, got the call, her thoughts ran every other place but to what she was
now
seeing,
remarkably
in this neighborhood of exactly
four
houses—the rich and famous kind.

Ginny felt her partner walk up beside her, followed by the head of their
CSU
, Dana Bostic.

“Are we good to go? I mean, you got what you need, Dana?” she asked without turning.

“Yes ma’am
,
I do. The team is done with this room and is working through the rest of the house. It may take all damn day but we’ll get it done, and done the right way.”

“That’s good to hear. Your f
olks always do a good job. Now, I need you to g
ive me your first impression."

Dana let out a breath, her dark eyes almost hidden by the deep scowl running over her pretty face, then answered in her soft, southern drawl. “I hate that question, Ginny, because it’s early. But it looks like everything is here. I mean the silver’s in the drawer, the paintings—the expensive ones—are still on the wall. And I know for a dadgum fact that there are two Warhol’s in the hallway. His wallet still has two thousand in cash
,
so it didn’t appear to be a robbery. We didn’t find any drug paraphernalia in the house
. . .
yet
,
anyway. I swear I don’t know how people use this much house. I’d go nuts trying to keep it clean.”

Ginny twirled her finger, encouraging Dana to keep going.

“Oh yeah. Anyway, there wasn’t any graffiti on the walls or anything else destroyed. We did find an empty plate in the kitchen, and we processed that but it could have been Morgan’s breakfast dish.”

“So that all means we can rule out thieves, drug dealers, and jealous
people and
destructive gangs?” asked Ben in that deep radio voice that
always
made everyone in the room turn in his direction.

“I’d say so, but I’m putting a little disclaimer on that until we finish processing,” said Dana, nodding.

“Anything else?” asked Ginny.

Dana pulled a clear evidence bag out of her CSI kit and handed it to Ginny. In the bag was a small medallion with a six-point plant or flower encircled in a ring. It appeared to be solid gold.

“Yep. One more weird-butt thing that will get your gears moving,” she said as she bent toward the body, pointing.

“See where this side of his mouth is stitched shut? We found the gold looped through the thread. The killer must have
placed
it there because
. . .
well, who else would have? And, looking at the coloring around the entry points, it was probably put there
postmortem
.
A
nd yep, I think
it
’
s
gold. My sister is a jeweler and
. . .
well
, did I ever show you this necklace that—”

Dana cut herself off
and
sighed. “Sorry. I do this when I’m nervous, and land sakes, I love jewelry.”
She shifted her feet and looked at the ceiling, tears forming but staying home. “I guess the real reason
I’m a little shaky
is that I’ve
never seen anything like this. I reviewed a few case stud
ies in NIBRS,
some like this
,
but like they say, pictures ain’t like being there. My
Lord
, this was a human being.”

Raising her eyebrows, Ginny took Dana’s last statement to heart. Sometimes working homicide, you blocked the fact that the vic
tims
were breathing not so long ago. Not only breathing, but laughing, entertaining hopes, and experiencing joys. She let the thought pass
, for now
. It wouldn’t help.

“So what the hell is that?” asked Ginny.

“I’m not sure, but we’ll see what we can do with it when I get back
to the lab
. Weird though. And that wasn’t the only weird thing. When you get close to the body, like you do, you’ll see some tiny grains of clear crystal around some of the wounds.”

“Yeah? So?”

“It’s salt. Must have driven him crazy with the burning and pai
n. My guess is that it was ante
mortem; otherwise, what was the point?”

Ben swore.

Shaking her head, Ginny wondered again, who t
hought
of this kind of shit. “Why?”

“Couldn’t say, other than the obvious. I’m just giving you the facts, ma’am
,” said Dana. “
Just the facts
. The rest is all you
.
”

“Okay. So what do you think
really
happened here?”

“Don’t know that either. I do know, for another fact, he loved his women
folk
,
so maybe that’s got something to do with it. I’ll have more science for you later
. L
et me go do that
. I’ll get you reports ASAP.
And, like I said,
the why is all about you.”

Then Dana was hustling out the front door.

Ginny felt Ben looking down at her from his six-three vantage point with that familiar, and somewhat curious, way partners do when neither has a
concrete
clue where to go
next
.

“We’re checking everything else, per procedure,
B
oss. Cameras, whereabouts the last twenty-four hours, computer, cell phones, all of that. We’re still questioning the maid who came in and found him. She says it was her day off but
she
got a text from Lance that he needed her for a while. That was about an hour before she got here and found him
,
”
said Ben.

“Good. Maybe we’ll get a print from the phone and a hit from IAFIS and that’ll make this a quick one.”

The doubt she tried to hide must have reflected in her voice because Ben gave her a double look. He thought it
too
. This just might get ugly and
might
be an
ything but
easy
.
Hell, she knew better.
Easy was for TV.

She bent closer; felt the catch in her back, ignored it, and kneeled to the victim’s left. Ben followed suit to her right.

The corkscrew was still buried in his chest, almost to the wooden hilt. Surprisingly, there wasn’t as much blood as she might have expected. Two thin spatter lines ran at a forty-five
degree angle toward his chin and his semi-closed mouth, and a small puddle covered his chest, but that was it.

Underneath the corkscrew
,
a thin incision branched out in six directions, leading to every extremity of his arms, legs, neck, and groin, stopping short of his crotch.
More salt dusted his groin and belly button.

Each one of the next incisions diverged outward in another six
tracks
making his skin look like some sick depiction of a spider web. If
this carving job was done ante
mortem, then Dana was right: the man would’ve been in unimaginable pain. There were two more inch-long incisions
—
one above each eyebrow
—
and a two-inch cut on each side of his face below the ear. All four seemed to be deeper cuts than the others. He was a mess, no doubt, but the symmetry was hard to ignore, whatever it meant.

“This had to take some time
,
so I don’t think it was
a
crime of passion,” Ginny said softly.

“I think that’s right. But if it isn’t, then what? And how does the sewn mouth figure into that? There could be a dozen motivations for killing this guy like this,” said Ben, his handsome face wearing a serious frown.

“And we have to find the right one. I read an article once by a profiler from Michigan, a Detective Williams. He said killers will change MOs, but motivations are limited. Find the motivation, then you have a chance of finding the killer,” said Ginny.

“Sounds
like a smart
man.”

“How do you know it was a man?”

Ben grinned. “Intuition.”

“Smartass.”

“Had a good teacher.”

“And don’t forget it. You know, other than the corkscrew in the chest, these other wounds weren’t enough to kill him. Just not deep enough to draw that kind of blood. But throw in the salt exposure and serious torture comes to mind.”

Glancing at the victim's wrists, then his ankles and feet, she clucked her tongue.

“And how did the perp keep someone built like this controlled? No ligature marks that I can see.”

“Probably drugged then?” asked Ben.

“I guess the toxicology report will tell us. It smells real fishy, though.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, just a feeling. I guess I’ve never had one like this so I don’t know what to think.”

“Yeah, but like Dana said, the why is on us—” Ben’s sentence caught in his throat and he jumped back.

Lance Morgan’s head had moved to the right, then back to the left as each cheek popped out in turn.

They watched in horror as his mouth gaped open, showing a darkened tongue, then the movement stopped. A moment later, it began again
. T
his time
,
his lips expanded
, releasing most of the black threads
. T
hen a small coral snake burst through
the opening
,
heading directly toward Detective Ginny Krantz.

CHAPTER-7

Reaching for the glass of red
c
abernet,
Lily
inhaled its rich ambience and sipped it appropriately. She was beside herself with raw emotion. Not the typical kind she supposed normal people felt, but on
e
of those first-time “feelings” that rocked every part of her depraved world.
S
he understood from her myriad of doctors that babies are f
looded with sensations at birth
and
that their management of tho
se
sensations
determines
their
emotional temperature for life. No one
was able to
figure out why she had so few
feelings
, almost none
,
in fact. She
didn’t know
why
,
nor cared.
No feelings of love, compassion, elation, even anger or hate.
Up
until a few hours ago, that is.

“Never again,” she whispered, and then laughed. A true
this is mine
laugh. She'd
faked
it for
years. After
all, she was far from the world of the intellectually challenged and had learned the ropes very quickly. She’d fooled them all,
excluding
two. But she chose not to dwell on
them
just now.