Where was that precious little girl? A strawberry-blond head appeared from around the edge of the king-sized sleigh bed. It took a moment to register-Hayden, with red hair? She was a towhead, so blond it was almost white, no, that wasn’t right.
“Hayden, oh, dear sweet Jesus, you’re covered in blood. Come here. How did you get out of your crib?” She gathered the little girl in her arms. Hayden was frozen, immobile, unable or unwilling to move for the longest moment, then she wrapped her arms around her aunt’s shoulders with an empty embrace of inevitability. Pieces of the toddler’s hair, stiff and hard with blood, poked into her neck. Michelle felt a piece of her core shift.
“Ma’am? Ma’am, what is your location?”
The operator’s voice forced her to look away from Corinne’s broken form. She raised herself, holding tight to Hayden. Get her out of here. She can’t see this anymore.
“Yes, I’m here. It’s 4589 Jocelyn Hollow Court. My sister…” They were on the stairs now, moving down, and Michelle could see the whispers of blood trailing up and down the carpet.
The operator was still trying to sort through the details. “Hayden is your sister?”
“Hayden is her daughter. Oh, God.”
As Michelle reached the bottom of the stairs, the child shifted on her shoulder, reaching a hand behind her, looking up toward the second floor.
“Mama hurt,” she said in a voice that made her sound like a broken-down forty-year-old, not a coy, eighteen-month-old sprite. Mama hurt. She doesn’t anymore, darlin’.
They were out the front door and on the porch now, Michelle drawing in huge gulps of air, Hayden crying silently into her shoulder, a hand still pointing back toward the house.
“Who is dead, ma’am?” the operator asked, more kindly now.
“My sister, Corinne Wolff. Oh, Corinne. She’s…she’s cold.”
Michelle couldn’t hold it in anymore. She heard the operator say they were sending the police. She walked down those damnable bricks and set Hayden in the front seat of the Volvo.
Then she turned and lost her battle with the nausea, vomiting out her very soul at the base of the delicate budding dogwood.
Two
A morning off.
Instead of lounging in bed, luxuriating in the crisp sheets and getting irritated with the Tennessean, Metro Nashville homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson was squinting at the ceiling in her living room, a small flutter of panic moving through her chest.
“Baldwin?” she called, stepping closer to the fireplace. “Baldwin!”
“What?” A voice floated down the stairs, tinged with impatience.
“You need to see this. I think the ceiling is wet.”
The clatter of footsteps on the stairs assured Taylor that her fiance was making the trek from their bedroom on the second floor down to her, in the room directly below, posthaste. He appeared at her side, joined her in craning his head toward the living room ceiling. A dark gray stain was moving across the joint, treading a thin line of damp. As they stared, a small drop of water beaded up from the end of the discoloration. Neither of them moved as it grew, larger and larger, then broke off and fell with a muffled plop onto Baldwin’s shoulder.
They sprang into action, no words needed. Baldwin sprinted back upstairs toward the bathroom to turn off the water. Taylor went to the kitchen and came back with a spaghetti pot. She stood under the dribble, catching droplets of water as they rushed through the surface of the drywall and fell to earth.
God, what next?
Baldwin came back to the living room with a step-ladder. “This house is built on an Indian burial ground, Taylor. I swear it. I turned the water off. We can set the pot on this. It might help keep the carpet dry.” He positioned the ladder under the leak and took the container from Taylor, setting it on the top. A happy plink rewarded his efforts.
They shared an exasperated laugh. In the month they’d been home from their pseudo-honeymoon, everything that could go wrong with their relatively new house had. A fitting metaphor for their life. No matter what they planned, how they tried, they couldn’t seem to get onto the right page and make it official. Taylor was content to remain unmarried. Baldwin was starting to come around to her way of thinking.
“Who do you want me to call? The home warranty place?” He started for the kitchen.
“Yeah. The number is in the folder in the server. They’re going to have to send out a plumber now, we can’t wait.”
He opened the drawer and pulled out an overstuffed file folder. “Okay, I’ll make the call. But I’ve got to finish packing. My flight leaves at ten-thirty.”
Taylor gave the ceiling a last hard stare, then joined Baldwin.
“Here, give me that. I’ll call. You go on and finish packing. Besides, the plane leaves when you tell it to. Director.”
He shot her a look. “I’m not the Director. I’m the Acting Director while Garrett has this stupid surgery. That just means I get to push his pencils around his desk and pretend to look important for two weeks. Seriously, I’d rather stay here, fight with the plumber.”
Garrett Woods, director of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and Baldwin’s boss, had called the previous evening. He’d gone for his routine yearly physical and ended up hospitalized, scheduled for a triple bypass. He needed someone he trusted to hold down the fort. Baldwin was the obvious choice. Taylor hoped it wasn’t a play to get him to come back and run the BSU permanently. There’d been quite a shake-up while Taylor and Baldwin were in Italy, celebrating what should have been their honeymoon. The man who’d been leading the BSU, Stuart Evans, had been summarily fired after a personnel issue made headlines. The Bureau wasn’t a big fan of having their personal laundry aired in the media. Garrett Woods took the position again, leaving his number three in the bureau spot. He hadn’t been happy working at that level anyway, was thrilled to return to the BSU and make things right with his investigative divisions and behavioral analysis unit profilers.
“You need to go tend to Garrett’s cases. And make sure he listens to the doctors. I can’t believe he’s so sick.”
“Me neither. He seems so indestructible to me, always has. So you think you can handle this?”
She kissed him, then pulled back and raised an eyebrow. “Uh, yeah. It’s just a little leak.”
“Okay, then. I’m going to finish packing.” With a pat on her rear, he left the kitchen. She smiled after him. God, what a goof she’d become. Fools in love…
And their love nest was falling in around their ears. This would be the fourth time she’d had to call for service since they’d moved in two months ago. There had been contractors crawling all over the place for silly little issues-a broken fan blade on the heater, a squirrel who’d nested in the crawlspace and chewed through some electrical wiring, a faulty thermostat on the freezer. Now a leak in the master bath. They were making their bones with the warranty company. She got the plumber’s name and number, left them a message, then went upstairs, determined to make Acting Director Dr. John Baldwin regret that he was leaving for two weeks and prove her point. The Gulf- stream couldn’t exactly leave without him.
The phone rang as she hit the second stair. What now? She backtracked, went to the kitchen and saw the number on the caller ID.
“Hi, Fitz,” she answered.
Sergeant Peter Fitzgerald, her second in command, greeted her brusquely. “I know it’s your day off, but you need to come in. We’ve got a murder that’s going to have fleas.”
“Who?”
“Some sweet little mother out in Hillwood. I’m hearing words like Laci and Peterson.”
Taylor shuffled her fingers through a notepad that sat next to the phone, ready for an urgent message. No, thank you. I’m not in the mood for a murder. I think I’ll pass. But she couldn’t. She was the homicide lieutenant, and if her team needed her, that meant she would show.
“Fine. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be on the road.”
