Page 9 of The Morning After (Savannah 2)

“What? No, sir. Old Red, h

e don’t go far.”

“Where you reckon he is?”

“Don’t know.” His eyebrows pulled together in a scowl and his lips turned in on themselves as if he were worried. He bit at his lower lip and sniffed. “Pa’ll skin me alive if somethin’ happened to him.”

“No reason to borrow trouble,” McFee said. He felt certain they’d found enough as it was.

Reed’s stomach growled. Acid burned up his esophagus. He glanced at his watch and realized he’d been going through paperwork, taking calls, answering E-mail and generally catching up ever since he and Morrisette had returned from the cemetery this morning. Breakfast had been coffee, lunch nonexistent and he’d been up since six A.M. It was now two forty-five. Time for a break. He rolled his neck around, trying to crack it and break up the tension in his shoulder muscles. How long had it been since he’d been to the gym and worked out. A week? Ten days? Hell, maybe longer. Tonight. No matter what came up, he’d throw on his sweats and trek over to the old athletic club where boxers sparred, weights clanged and the smell of musk and sweat wafted to the old rafters. It wasn’t a typical today type club with fancy computer-linked treadmills and stair-step machines that calculated heart rate, calories burned and distance traveled. Nope. This was old school. Weights, weights and more weights. If you wanted to run, you jogged. If you need an upper body workout, you tackled a big bag, throwing punches to get rid of your aggression, or for faster, quicker movements, you worked with a sparring bag.

The real macho types could don gloves and mouthpieces and go at it in the ring while the other members of the gym looked on and placed a side wager or two. Not that it was legal, but then, what was? Reed and a few others in the department chose not to see the bets going down. He imagined drug deals were transacted on those cracked concrete floors, or behind a bank of battered lockers, but he hadn’t witnessed money exchanged for meth, coke or steroids. So far. He hoped he never did.

Stretching in his chair, he considered the note he’d received this morning. The letter was probably mailed from another nutcase getting his rocks off by trying to rattle the department and get a little fame for himself. The envelope had been mailed to him as he was an easy target, the most high profile detective in the department compliments of the Montgomery case a few months ago.

Which galled him.

He reached into his top drawer, found a bottle of antacid and popped two with a swig of leftover coffee just as the phone rang for what had to have been the hundredth time today. He swung the receiver to his ear. “Detective Reed.”

“Sheriff Baldwin, Lumpkin County.”

Reed straightened. Not a usual call. Lumpkin County was over three hundred miles north. But familiar to him. Too familiar. “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

“I think ya need to come up here straightaway.”

“Me?” Reed asked, his stomach knotting the way it always did when he sensed something wasn’t right.

“I think it would be best.”

“Why’s that?”

“Two boys were out huntin’ with their dog, up near Blood Mountain. One boy, Billy Dean Delacroix, he got lucky and wounded a buck. The kids took off after him and followed his trail into a ravine. Found the buck dead at the edge of a clearing. And that’s not all. They think they stumbled onto some kind of grave cuz of the fresh turned earth and their old hound was going ape-shit. One kid, Billy Dean’s cousin, Prescott Jones, got spooked and ran, said there was the devil there or somethin’ and hightailed it the way they came in. Billy Dean was pissed, thought his cousin was imaginin’ things, but a few minutes later, he gets to feeling jumpy and takes off after Prescott. Just as Billy Dean’s comin’ over a rise, he hears a scream that scares the liver out of him. He rounds a corner and sees the Jones boy doin’ a header off the cliff. Now, it’s fifty feet down and there’s no way to reach him, so Billy Dean, he runs to his daddy’s pickup and calls for help on the cell phone—which doesn’t work so hot up in the mountains. He has to drive a ways before the call actually connects.”

“Jesus.” Reed was doodling, writing down the kids’s names on a pad, hoping the sheriff would get to the point.

“The way we figure it, the two kids were out there where they shouldn’t be, probably high on somethin’, and they either had an accident or one kid pushed the other.” He hesitated, sounded as if he were drawing hard on a cigarette. Reed waited. Still didn’t know why the sheriff had called him.

“Trouble was, it was just as the boy said. A grave was down in the holler, fancy coffin and all.”

“Coffin?”

“Yep, someone went to the trouble of buryin’ the bodies in a rosewood box.”

“Bodies? As in more than one?”

“Ye–ep. Two, as a matter of fact. One fresh, one not so…The reason I’m callin’ you is that we think you might know one of the victims.”

“Me? Why?” Every muscle in Reed’s body tensed. He quit doodling.

“We found your name in the coffin.”

“What? My name?” Was the man insane? His name on the inside of the coffin? What did that mean? “In the coffin?”

“That’s right. A note addressed to you. Along with a small microphone.”

“Sheriff, hold on a minute. There was a note for me and a microphone inside a coffin that held two bodies up in the woods three hundred miles from Savannah?”

“You got it. A hole was bored into the box and the mike placed in a corner, near the vic’s head, the note was placed at the foot, tucked into the lining.”

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