Shadowed Paradise (29 page)

“
More than eighty thousand lots,” Brad
said, following Claire’s fascinated gaze. “Less than ten percent
have houses.”

“
It’s awesome,” Claire admitted. “And
spooky. It’s as if we hung a right and dropped off the
world.”

“
Great place to dump a
body.”

Claire shivered and did not reply.

In the wild grass along the edge of the road,
masses of yellow flowers were interspersed with the delicate red of
bleeding heart, backed by tall feathery fronds of pampas grass.
Beyond that, the Florida jungle—towering slash pines, cabbage
palms, live oak, scrub oak, willow and carrotwood, much of it
covered in dangling gray swirls of Spanish moss and massive
overhangs of wild grape and poison ivy. A seemingly impenetrable
wall of green. As Brad said, a great place to hide a body.

The pickup bucked and shuddered as Brad
turned onto one of the perfectly straight dead-end streets,
encountering resistance from the grass thrusting up through the
cracked pavement. They were almost at the end of the short street
when he braked to a stop. “Somewhere in there,” he said, nodding to
the right. After a glance at Claire’s feet to make sure she was
wearing her boots, he said, “Okay, let’s see what we can find.”

It didn’t take long. The yellow crime scene
tape was gone, but too many feet had tramped through the area for
an old Florida hand like Brad Blue not to locate the site, which
was less than thirty feet off the road. A disturbed mound of sandy
soil glared up at them from a surrounding bed of brown pine
needles. Gnarled roots thrust their way up, giving ample evidence
why the grave had been so shallow.

There was absolute silence, not a car on the
main road, not so much as the call of a bird. The hair rose on
Claire’s arms, the back of her neck prickled. Not waiting for Brad
to tell her not to tromp on the grave site, she turned her back and
moved away. Someday, perhaps a generation hence, someone would
build a home here, never knowing . . . Or would it always be as
haunted as it seemed today? Lingering in the folklore of Pine
Grove, land destined to be abandoned forever?

Wary of snakes and other insidious Florida
creatures, Claire walked only as far as the edge of a cluster of
pines whose thick mulch of brown pineneedles kept most of the
jungle back. She kicked at a wild mushroom, brushed her hand across
the soft green of a young pine scarcely three feet high, spotted an
air plant hanging temptingly low on a oak branch stretched above
the pineneedle carpet.

Teetering on her tiptoes, Claire stretched
her hand up and plucked the small gray-green plant off the branch
so she could take it home to Jamie. She’d tried to explain how air
plants grew without hurting their host tree, but the lesson would
be much stronger if Jamie could hold one in his hand.

She glanced back toward the grave site. Brad
was down on his knees, head bent, as if he actually believed there
was something left to see. Or was he simply soaking up the
atmosphere? The aura of evil. Claire shuddered. There was a
darkness here that had nothing to do with the trees that towered
over the grave site. A miasma of madness she couldn’t ignore. She
wanted to believe the body in the shallow grave was a case of
domestic violence or a drug bust gone wrong, but now . . . somehow
she didn’t think so. She could feel the evil. Not just violence,
but insanity.

Stupid!
She
couldn’t possibly know that. Not really.

As Claire started back toward Brad, her foot
struck something hidden beneath the carpet of pineneedles. She
almost didn’t look down. If it was a snake she didn’t want to
know.

Okay, she had to look.

A whoosh of relief escaped her lungs. Just a
branch. A small broken branch. She started forward again. Stopped.
Stepped carefully back and looked again. Her scalp prickled as she
took a longer look at what her boot had scuffed into view. Not a
single branch, but two small branches. Tied together in the shape
of a cross.

Claire knelt and studied the crude cross. No
sense getting excited over nothing. Gingerly, she moved the sticks
out from under the carpet of pineneedles. Definitely man-made,
definitely a cross. Part of the grave site? If so, what was it
doing twenty feet away, hidden by pineneedles and the overhang of
an elderberry bush?

The dog, of course. Playing his own version
of Fetch, growing bored, dropping the sticks where they gradually
became obscured by falling pineneedles.

“
Brad?” Claire called. Softly, because
a loud noise would have been as sacrilegious as shouting in church.
Her tone was enough to bring him running.

Brad hunched over the two cross-shaped
sticks, the intensity of his concentration radiating from the set
of his shoulders. He placed his index fingers on each end of the
shorter crosspiece and carefully turned the object over. Picking up
a fistful of pineneedles, he gently brushed dirt from the rough
bark. With a toneless whistle through his teeth, he sat back on his
heels, uttering a cryptic, “We can scratch Ken Millard as a
suspect.”

“
Why?”

“
There’s carving on the wood, rough but
still legible.”

Claire dropped to her knees beside
Brad, staring at the marks. Crudely scratched into the bark were
three letters:
MOM
. “Dear
God, that’s sick,” Claire breathed. “I suppose,” she added,
struggling to stay cool and detached, “you mean that Ken would have
done a neater job of it.”

“
That’s it,” Brad nodded. “Old Ken
would have scraped off the bark and carved the letters in Old
English Script.”

“
Even if he’d just killed his mother?”
Claire challenged.

“
Right.”

“
It could still fit Vicky’s theory,
except a mother died instead of a wife,” she pointed out. “Loss of
a Social Security check puts a big dent in the monthly income. This
wasn’t necessarily murder, was it? Didn’t you say there was no sign
of trauma on the skeleton?”

“
Suffocation wouldn’t show,” Brad
countered shortly, “and that’s what our killer likes to do to his
women. First,” he added so softly Claire almost missed
it.

Goosebumps rose on her arms. Claire had to
struggle to maintain her role as sounding board. “All right, let’s
say she was done in by our serial killer. Isn’t it rather strange
he made a cross for this victim and not for the others?”

“
Not with someone as sick as this guy
is.” Once again Brad bent his head to the cross, examining the
still viable vine that bound the two sticks together. He shook his
head. “How in the
hell
did you
find this?”

“
I tripped over it.”

Brad swore. “The best crime scene team in
Calusa County went over this site with a fine tooth comb, and you
come wandering out here and trip over something they didn’t find. I
suppose you’re going to call it female intuition,” he added with
disgust.

“
Just dumb luck,” Claire responded
modestly. “But speaking of intuition, there’s something really
wrong about this place. There’s evil here, I can feel it. I don’t
think this is just someone’s private burial ground.”

“
Well, shee-it, Ms. Langdon,” Brad
drawled. “I thought it was Massachusetts that had all the
witches.”

“
Well, I’m sorry,” Claire snapped back,
“but if you macho types are too thick-skinned to feel it, too bad!
That’s why the phrase is ‘
women
’s intuition.’”

“
Okay, okay,” Brad grumbled. He handed
her the cross. “Put this back exactly where you found it and stand
guard while I get my camera and an evidence bag.”

Suddenly, she was alone with evil. Brad was
just a few short steps away, yet Claire’s heart was in her throat.
Fading light filtered down through the canopy of pines above,
illuming the crudely etched letters.

MOM
. Oh, God,
what was she doing here? What was she doing taking a job sitting a
model home in the middle of nowhere with a madman on the
loose.

MOM
. He’d
killed his mother. He’d made her a cross. He wasn’t going to like
Claire finding it. And he would know. Oh, yes, somehow he’d find
out. There were too many people interested in this case. Too many
mouths.

And when he found out? When he found out, he
might be very angry. Logic, reason were irrelevant. He was a
madman, and he was going to kill her.

“
Claire. Claire!”

Startled, Claire blinked at Brad who
was standing in front of her, the cross already safely stowed in
the plastic bag in his hand. “I can hardly say I’m sorry I brought
you,” he admitted as he took her firmly by the arm and steered her
toward the car, “but I
am
sorry you had to pick up the feel of this place. You look
like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“
In a way, I did,” Claire said as they
left the pines and walked out into the sunshine and a carpet of
wildflowers. “I had a horrible vision that the killer was going to
hold me personally responsible for disturbing his mother’s
grave.”

“
Claire, half the sheriff’s department
has tromped through these woods.”

“
I know it’s silly,” she admitted as
Brad boosted her into the truck, “but for a moment there it seemed
so real.”

“
That’s the trouble with brainy women,”
Brad muttered. “Jet-propelled imagination.”

Claire made a weak attempt at a laugh.

After Brad maneuvered the pickup into a
U-turn on the narrow overgrown road and headed back toward
civilization, the gloom seemed to lift with each mile they drove.
By the time they reached Golden Beach, Claire had almost convinced
herself her fears were groundless. She had helped. She had actually
found something of significance. Brad was pleased.

The sheriff was going to have a fit.

“
Witch, am I?” Claire teased later that
night, as she dangled the tip of a long blond lock of Brad’s hair a
half inch above his nose. Propped on her elbow, she was lying full
length along Brad’s side, one bare breast brushing enticingly,
erotically, against the blond mat of his chest.

“
Fully licensed, card-carrying
candidate for the stake . . . and I’m the guy who’s going to make
you burn.”

Before Claire could come up with a good
retort, their positions reversed. She found herself on her back
with a pair of brilliant blue eyes laughing down at her. Somehow
her arms, as bare as the rest of her, were pinned beneath the top
sheet.

With his hands flat on either side of her
head, Brad shook out his hair until a long strand fell precisely
above Claire’s nose. Then, like a bull about to charge, he began
swinging his head back and forth, taking his revenge in kind.
Claire giggled, squirmed, threw her head to one side. “Enough,
enough!” she choked, acknowledging the exquisite agony of the
torture.

“
So when are you going to make an
honest man of me?” Brad demanded, cupping her head back into place
and ruthlessly continuing his pendulum-like torture of her nose. He
ducked his head still lower, swishing half a head of blond hair in
her face. “When’s the wedding?” he demanded.

Claire dragged a hand out from under the
sheet and yanked at a tempting strand of gold-streaked blond. A
satisfyingly hard tug. With a roar that was half laughter Brad
rolled away, his head falling back against the pillow next to hers.
He stretched out a hand and trailed it lightly across her stomach
before resting it, palm up, against her abdomen. “Want to have
another try at baby-making?” he inquired huskily.

Claire squeezed her eyes shut—want, guilt,
need, and love at war with New England pragmatism. Refusing to play
Russian Roulette with her life, she’d gone back on the pill. But
not without a twinge of regret

Except for her nightly drive home, it was as
if they were already married. Learning each other. Sometimes tender
and loving, sometimes hot and fierce. Quarreling, laughing.
Spending long, lazy, glowing moments together between bouts of
passion that drove her to heights she had never even imagined.

And yet . . . she was still afraid. Afraid of
her own judgment. Afraid she was once again blind to reason,
caution, good sense. Who was this man, this admittedly dangerous
man, who wanted to father her children? Who wanted to live with her
for all the days of their lives?

So chicken out, girl. It’s
so much easier to make love than to think
. Claire
tugged on Brad’s hand. Slowly, it slid down over her belly, until
his fingers tangled in her short soft curls. The fingers stilled,
lying with tantalizing warmth along her most sensitive flesh,
Brad’s iron will very much in control. “When, Claire?” he demanded.
“How long do we have to play these games?”

With a wiggle of her hips Claire turned
toward him, dislodging his possessive touch. She trailed the tips
of her fingers down his chest, tracing each scar with loving
tenderness. So much easier to
feel
, to lose herself in love. Seize the moment,
forget tomorrow.

Chicken, chicken,
chicken
.

Claire’s fingers wandered lower,
bypassing his vibrant erection to butterfly his inner thighs. He
sucked in his breath. “Damn you, woman, you
are
a witch.” With excruciating slowness her hand
drifted toward his penis. Hard as iron. She squeezed and stroked,
rubbing her index finger around the swollen tip, smugly secure in
the knowledge she had put a period to all conversation.