Page 123 of The Night Before (Savannah 1)

“I’m Atropos. One of the three fates. Not that you would understand, you cretin, but I wanted you to know. And I’ve been watching you, seen what you’ve done . . . oh, yes.”

Sugar felt cold fear. She knew. Oh, God, she knew about Sugar’s lover. Sugar didn’t doubt for a second that this was the person who had made the terrifying calls. This was the person who’d been stalking her.

“You’ve wanted to be a Montgomery for so long and now you can. Do you know where you are? Can you guess?”

What kind of sick game was this?

“Oak Hill. You’ve always wanted to see inside, haven’t you? Well, here you are, and now you can stay. Atropos moved slowly out of the shadows. She walked to a table and picked up a jar. “No more guessing games.” As she walked closer, Sugar, terrified, saw that she was wearing gloves. “This is honey, and it’s just the start, to make sure the rest sticks.”

The rest? The rest of what? Sugar was trying to buck away, terrified. Whatever this sick bitch had in mind, it would be awful. She’d already killed Cricket, that was for sure and now . . . and now . . . She didn’t feel the sticky stuff being poured over her body, between her legs, over her breasts, on her lips, in her hair. Her attempts at trying to shrink away were fruitless and her mind was wandering. This couldn’t be happening. This was nuts. A horrid dream.

“Sugar. Such a sweet name. And it has so many possibilities.”

Go to hell!

Then she heard a ripping sound and saw Atropos standing over her with a huge sack. She began to pour, and white powder, sugar, came rolling out, covering Sugar’s body. “Such a sweet name,” Atropos said, then hummed along with the music that played over and over and over, that song . . .

Little miss innocence.

Sugar wanted to cry. To scream. To rail against this horrid, sick woman, but she could only watch.

Pour some sugar on me.

One bag wasn’t enough. Atropos ripped open another, and the pouring continued, over the bed, over Cricket, over Sugar. She was saying something about insects and soft tissues, and Sugar being a whore, but she couldn’t hear it over the roar of the sweet crystals falling over her body, in her hair, on her hands and finally, over her face. She gasped and sputtered, disbelieving. No, no, no!

Please stop.

Please, someone help me.

Thirty-One

The problem was, Reed couldn’t be two places at once. With Montoya and Morrisette, he stopped by Caitlyn Bandeaux’s house, found her not home and delegated the search to a couple of detectives he worked with. He trusted Landon and Metzger to do a thorough job and figured he could run down to St. Simons and be back within a few hours if he pushed the speed limit. He might miss Caitlyn’s return, but he’d deal with her later. Once they knew what she’d hidden away. He was hoping for a murder weapon, but he’d take any bit of evidence that would link her to the crime.

The trip to St. Simons took over an hour, but they didn’t have to stay long.

Viewing Rebecca Wade’s body wasn’t easy; nor, Reed thought, had it been necessary. He could have asked for pictures, though there was something compelling about actually seeing the victim rather than flipping through pictures, not that they wouldn’t have been bad enough. They’d seen the remains and he’d wanted to heave, as he imagined had both Morrisette and Montoya, but they’d all managed to get through the ordeal without throwing up and had learned an interesting piece of information from the deputy in charge.

“. . . The dentist we got the records from knew her pretty well. She’d gone to him for years and he was pretty upset to think that she might have been killed, let me tell you.” Deputy Kroft, a fleshy man pushing the last loop of his belt buckle as he edged ever closer to retirement, nodded to himself as they walked out of the morgue to the intense sun of Georgia in June. Water was visible, sunlight skating off the surface, nearly blinding in its intensity. “And the kicker is that he said she was married. Didn’t you say you didn’t know if there were any next of kin?” Kroft asked, taking off his hat to smooth his hair, then squaring it onto his thinning patch of gray.

Reed nodded. “We don’t have much information on her.”

“Well, she’d grown up in Michigan, small town outside of Ann Arbor. The dentist, Paxton, his name is, Timothy Paxton, he knew her as a kid, knew the family, remembered her getting married to another student at the university. The folks passed on a few years back, but Paxton was sure she was married to a guy named Hunter or Hunt or Huntington or something like that. Never had any kids that he knew of, but he never heard much about a divorce, neither.”

“Adam Hunt?” Reed asked, exchanging a look with Morrisette.

“That sounds like it. Yep. Could be.”

There was no ‘could be’ about it. Reed was sure of it. Crap. How had they missed that? He took the information, and filling Montoya in, they drove north toward Savannah. Morrisette took the job of calling the dentist and verbally pushing her way past a receptionist who didn’t want to put her through, some idiot who thought an impression for a new crown was more important than an ongoing murder investigation. Eventually she got through. She plugged one ear and listened as Reed drove ten miles faster than the speed limit.

She hung up and said, “Looks like Deputy Kroft’s information is on the money. The dentist was an old family friend, choked up about Rebecca.”

“What did he have to say about Hunt?”

“Not much more than we learned from Kroft. Rebecca met him in college where they were both psych majors, lived with him a while, ma

rried him after she’d graduated and then lost touch with Dr. Paxton. Her folks are dead, and apparently so was the marriage.”

“Hunt has a lot of explaining to do. Did anyone ever talk to him?” They were driving through the swampy flatlands, the highway cutting close to the coast.

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