Montreal. Each required a report.
A partially skeletonized corpse was discovered under a pile of tires at a dump in Gastonia. Female, white, twenty-seven to thirty-two years of age, five-foot-two to five-foot-five in height. Extensive dental work. Healed fractures of the nose, right maxilla, and jaw. Sharp instrument trauma on the anterior ribs and sternum. Defense wounds on the hands. Probable homicide.
A boater on Lake Norman had snagged a portion of an upper arm. Adult, probably white, probably male. Height five-foot-six to six feet.
A skull was found on the banks of Sugar Creek. Older adult, female, black, no teeth. Not recent. Probably a disturbed cemetery burial.
As I worked, my mind kept drifting back to the previous spring in Guatemala. I’d picture a stance. A face. A scar, sexy as hell. I’d feel a ripple of excitement, followed by a prick of anxiety. Was this upcoming beach trip such a good idea? I had to force myself to focus on the reports.
At one-fifteen I shut down the computer and dragged myself upstairs.
It wasn’t until I was showered and lying in bed that I had time to consider Geneva Banks’s statement.
“It wasn’t Darryl’s baby.”
“What!” Slidell, Banks, and I had replied as one.
Geneva remumbled her shocker.
Whose?
No idea. Tamela had confided that the child she was carrying had not been fathered by Darryl Tyree. That was all Geneva knew.
Or would say.
A thousand questions jockeyed for position.
Did Geneva’s information clear Tyree? Or did it render him even more suspect? Knowing the child was not his, had Tyree murdered it? Had he forced Tamela to kill her own baby?
Did Geneva have a valid point? Could the infant have been born dead? Had there been a genetic defect? An umbilical cord problem? Had Tamela, heartbroken, merely chosen the most expedient way and cremated the lifeless body in the woodstove? It was possible. Where had the baby been delivered?
I felt Birdie land on the bed, explore possibilities, then curl behind my knees.
My mind circled back to the upcoming beach junket. Could it lead anywhere? Did I want that? Was I looking for something meaningful, or merely hoping for rock-and-roll sex? God knows, I was horny enough. Was I capable of committing to another relationship? Could I trust again? Pete’s betrayal had been so painful, the breakup of our marriage so agonizing, I wasn’t sure.
Back to Tamela. Where was she? Had Tyree harmed her? Had they gone to ground together? Had Tamela run off with someone else?
As I drifted off, I had one final, disquieting thought.
Finding answers concerning Tamela was up to Skinny Slidell.
When I awoke, scarlet sun was slashing through the leaves of the magnolia outside my window. Birdie was gone.
I checked the clock. Six forty-three.
“No way,” I mumbled, drawing knees to chest and burrowing deeper beneath the quilt.
A weight hit my back. I ignored it.
A tongue like a scouring brush scraped my cheek.
“Not now, Birdie.”
Seconds later I felt a tug on my hair.
“Bird!”
A reprieve, then the tugging began again.
“Stop!”
More tugging.
I shot up and pointed a finger at his nose.
“Don’t chew my hair!”
My cat regarded me with round, yellow eyes.
“All right.”
Sighing dramatically, I threw back the covers and pulled on my summer uniform of shorts and a T.
I knew giving in was providing positive reinforcement, but I couldn’t take it. It was the one trick that worked, and the little bugger knew it.
I cleaned up the guacamole Birdie had recycled onto the kitchen floor, ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts, then grazed through the
There’d been a pileup on I-77 following a late-night concert at Paramount’s Carowinds theme park. Two dead, four critical. A man had been shotgunned in a front yard on Wilkinson Boulevard. A local humanitarian had been charged with cruelty to animals for crushing six kittens to death in his trash compactor. The city council was still wrangling over sites for a new sports arena.
