A Deeper Grave. Debra Webb

Storyteller had tattooed those lines on her flesh. Her story. She could have had them removed but she needed to look at them every day. She never wanted to forget. Just thinking about the psychopath who had tortured and raped her for better than three damned weeks made the bones in her right leg ache. The Storyteller had left a trail of bodies, including her husband’s, across the southern United States over the past thirteen years. He was the reason her little boy was dead. The bastard might never have been caught except that having a victim survive to identify him had marred his record and he hadn’t been able to resist coming back to correct that anomaly. Bobbie had been that victim and she’d been waiting for his sorry ass to return. Images from those final moments in that dilapidated shack in the woods flashed one after the other through her head.

      She’d made sure he got what he deserved.

      Her choices were the reason she would never hold her baby again. She would never make love with her husband again. Her old partner would never call her “girlie” again. She stared at the long scars on the backs of her wrists. At first she had wanted to die, too.

      She exhaled a heavy breath, only then realizing how thick and damp the air in the room had grown. No looking back.

      She climbed into the shower and let the hot water sluice over her weary muscles. Tomorrow and the day after and the day after that she would do all in her power to be the best cop possible.

      The image of Nick Shade edged into her thoughts. Her hands stilled on her skin, body wash slipping away. She wondered where he was. If Weller wasn’t playing some sadistic game, Nick was in danger.

      Tomorrow she would try to reach him.

      She hurried through the rest of her shower and quickly dried off. On second thought, why wait until tomorrow? Why not call him now? If the number he’d used previously was still in service, they could talk tonight. Now.

      Wrapping the towel around her body, she grabbed the .22 and left the steamy bathroom, headed for her bedroom. D-Boy trotted after her. Her cell was already vibrating loudly in the quiet room. She reached the bedside table and grabbed it up. Devine’s name flashed on the screen. She couldn’t pull the charging cord loose and hold on to her towel, so she bent forward to answer, pinning the towel with her forearm. She placed the .22 next to the knife once more.

      “What’s up?” Her pulse thumped a little harder with anticipation. There could be a break in the case or another murder. Anticipation fired through her. Maybe Fern Parker had been found.

      “I didn’t wake you, did I? Damn. I just realized how late it is.”

      “No, no. I was in the shower.” Bobbie dropped onto the side of the bed. “What’s going on?”

      “I’ve spent the past six hours going back through what we have. I’ve called every name on Fern’s contact list again and then called every person suggested by anyone on that list. For the last two hours I’ve focused on the parents. Despite all that work I’m left with nothing more than a couple of new names. I want to go over them with you. Do you mind? My mind is racing with possibilities on this damned case. I don’t think I’m going to sleep again until it’s over.”

      “Sure.” Bobbie pushed the wet hair back from her face. She was always ready to talk about the case. This was the first homicide she and Devine had caught as partners. “Let’s hear ’em.”

      “Wait, how did your appointment go?”

      Bobbie cringed. She’d told her partner she had a doctor’s appointment. “Good,” she lied. “I have to wait for some of the test results, but I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

      “Nothing like having the doc give you a clean bill of health.”

      Thankfully he moved on to the names he wanted to discuss. Bobbie felt guilty for lying to her partner but sometimes it was necessary. As soon as she and Devine had finished she would call Nick.

      She owed him more than she could possibly hope to repay.

       Four

      New Orleans

      11:30 p.m.

      Nick Shade waited in the darkness for another full minute. The shotgun house he’d been watching for the past two weeks was dark. The woman who called the place home was always in before dawn. Like a vampire, she didn’t make public appearances during daylight hours.

      He had been tracking the Executive Executioner for two months. Finding her had been a little trickier than he’d estimated. The Big Easy was the forty-year-old former schoolteacher’s preferred hunting ground. She’d left victims all the way from Houston to Tallahassee, but New Orleans apparently held some significance for her. It wasn’t her hometown though. Adele Pratt was from Jackson, Mississippi. She had been a daddy’s girl all the way up to the day he’d dropped dead in his office. Her father had been a low-level ad man at a major firm where he worked ridiculously long hours in an attempt to keep the boss happy. Adele had been murdering ruthless businessmen like her dead daddy’s boss for nearly a decade.

      Nick reached above his head and stretched his back. He’d been waiting and watching for hours, day in and day out. It was almost time. His prey was on the verge of taking her next victim.

      Adele Pratt didn’t know it yet but she was finished.

      For the first thirty years of her life she’d never shown the slightest reported penchant for violence, and then one of her students shot herself right in front of Adele. Something happened to her in that moment when a fifteen-year-old decided she couldn’t deal with her demanding and ironically high-level executive father for a moment longer. Adele’s family hadn’t heard from her since that day. They all thought she’d gone off somewhere and taken her life. But that wasn’t the case. Nick had found poor, sweet, reserved Adele. She had been busy giving all those demanding men like her father’s old boss and her former student’s father what she believed they deserved—a truly nasty death after hours of slow torture.

      She had lured in her latest prey and, if she followed her usual MO, tomorrow night she would make the kill. Oil tycoon Race Cashion had no idea what a lucky man he was. Adele, aka Alana Jones the Executive Executioner, was about to retire permanently.

      The day’s thick humidity had eased a little with the darkness, but the air was still far too suffocating for Nick’s liking. Halloween was approaching and the city had spent the entire month celebrating death in all its grim beauty. Nick stood and stretched again. The rocking chair he’d vacated eased back and forth once, then twice. The elderly man who lived in the house Nick used for a vantage point was sleeping off his nightly drunk. He generally started around five and by ten or so he was down for the count. Nick had to give him credit, he had good taste. The bourbon he inhaled night after night was some of the best the average man could buy and likely exhausted the biggest portion of his retirement check. Each night Nick tucked ten bucks into the coffee can over the stove. The old guy had cut a hole in the lid and used the can like a piggy bank where he kept his change. By the last week of the month the mound of quarters, nickels and dimes was probably all he had left. This month when he removed that lid he was going to have a nice surprise. It was the least Nick could do for the use of his back porch.

      He picked up his backpack and slipped across the narrow yard, using the overgrown shrubbery for cover. There were a few preparations he needed to make before Adele returned home. He approached her back door, listening for any sounds of trouble. Picking the ancient lock was too easy. People who renovated historic homes should never rely on the security of a century-old lock. He silenced the alarm and then reset the system with the code she’d written on a sticky note and stuck to the wall above the keypad. It wasn’t that Adele was too dumb or flighty to recognize the recklessness of leaving the code in plain sight. Not at all. The woman was highly intelligent. She simply wasn’t afraid.

      Maybe she really wanted someone to come in and end her misery.

      The house was quiet. Adele didn’t own any pets and she never had company. No friends, not even