Picture Me Dead. Heather Graham
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him…the officer who had arrived on the scene. The police car. The two drivers. Their cars. The traffic slowing, veering…nearly hitting the median.
The median. The opposing traffic…
The figure across the expanse of lanes.
She sketched, shading in until, even in black and white and shades of gray, the scene was eerily real. And everything detailed except…the figure. The vague figure across the many lanes. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember any details…
It was all as she had remembered it, how the camera in her mind’s eye had frozen the image.
Everything so specific—except for the dark figure who seemed to be watching…looking…
For what?
Assurance that the man—the poor, pathetic man, near-naked and bloodied—was, indeed, dead?
A chill suddenly swept over her.
A breeze…
More than a breeze. Something that made her slightly…uneasy.
She turned quickly, then felt foolish. Even so, she walked over to the doors, then closed and locked them. She looked at the thin drapes, frowning, thinking that the sun would come rushing in the next morning.
The next morning. It was morning, and that sun would be coming soon.
Pulling the light draperies back, she saw the set of lightproof draperies, pulled them, then checked the lock once again and went to lie down on the couch.
She closed her eyes, but the image of the body on the highway still haunted her.
Swearing, she pounded her pillow. Counting sheep had always seemed like such a ridiculous thing to do….
And yet she was desperate.
She counted horses instead.
Strange dream. There was fog and sunlight. She was walking toward him in the dream. Sometimes they were on a beach, and sometimes she was moving toward him in the cabin of the Gwendolyn. Hair spilling down her back, flesh…yeah, naked flesh, all of it being touched by the sun and by the shadow.
Nancy…
He’d dreamed often that she’d been there, with him, trying to tell him something. Except that it hadn’t been like this. Before, they’d just been talking. Discussing the case. The frustrations, the dead ends. But she’d known something. Reckless, restless, unhappy in her married life, she was determined to throw her heart into her work.
They were good partners.
Not good enough. There had been something more, something she had suspected, something she had thought of doing to break the wall they were up against.
Then he dreamed of her face as it had looked, on the autopsy table, after they had found her. And that would always strike such a chord of horror in his heart and mind that he awakened.
Not tonight, though. Tonight that image didn’t appear.
He couldn’t see her clearly. Her hair wasn’t dark; it was red in the light.
It wasn’t Nancy. Just someone like her. Who moved something like her…
It was Nick’s girl. Walking with a slow, confident, easy rhythm. She reached him. The dream progressed. Memory faded, the now took hold. She was different, very much alive, real, vibrant. She was…reaching him. Touching him. She was…
He awoke abruptly, in a cold sweat. The alarm was ringing.
Fuck.
No. Not the alarm, the phone. Hell, what time was it? The middle of the night. And still, bleary, wretched, he was glad of the sound. It had drawn him from the depths of the most bizarre wet dream…about Nick’s kid. He needed to stay the hell away from her. Far away.
Shouldn’t be hard, not after the way they had just reacquainted themselves.
The phone…
Still ringing, like a hammer pounding inside his head.
He picked up the phone. Listened. And his knuckles went white against the receiver.
CHAPTER 3
“There’s not a lot left of the face,” Martin Moore said, nodding to the uniformed officer who allowed him and Jake through the crime tape to the off-road location where the body had been discovered.
“I think the recent rains washed her down here. She was probably buried in a shallow grave farther in from the road.”
It was the crack of dawn, Saturday morning.
He wished he hadn’t switched to Scotch the night before.
And he wished he had one then. Marty’s call had been way beyond bizarre.
So much for the long weekend off. But since the case had never been officially closed, he had been called in. Marty had been in vice, the narcotics squad, five years ago, when the first murders had occurred, but he had worked with Jake for a long time now and knew the past history of what were still referred to as the Bordon murders—as well as anyone. He also lived in the area, so he’d reached the scene first.
Police floodlights helped illuminate the area, which was still dark. Inky dark. Much of this part of the county had been developed out of land that was really part of the Everglades. The dirt was rich here and the foliage thick. Lights were few and far between. Before dawn, the darkness could be a strange ebony, as if the Glades had reclaimed what was really part of a no man’s land.
Jake paused a few feet from the corpse, taking his first look at the body that had been discovered that morning by a jogger. A foolish jogger, he thought, running at a time when the night still held sway in an area where the obsidian shadows and undergrowth could hide many a sin.
The jogger, he noted, was still on the scene. She was a middle-aged woman with a pretty, too-skinny face, a sweatband around her forehead, and the typical shorts, T-shirt and sneakers found among those who chose the quiet paths out in the farm district for their morning rituals. She was badly shaken by her discovery. He could hear her sobbing softly, speaking to the officers, who had supplied her with a blanket and hot coffee.
“My God, I was just running and then…there she was. I saw her…and it was so dark, I didn’t even realize at first. And so I doubled back. And I was so frightened I could barely punch the numbers into my cell phone. Thank God for cell phones! I know now that I’ll never go out jogging when it isn’t full light again. I don’t care if I have to learn to run around my own living room, I’ll never, never come out like that again. It’s so terrifying. But then, of course…she was just left on the road, right? She might not have been killed there, right?”
Jake could hear one of the uniformed officers telling her that they had no facts right then, but that she didn’t need to worry, one of the officers would get her back home.
Lady, you shouldn’t go out jogging along this path alone before the sun is up in any way, shape or form, Jake thought. They were in what most people in the county considered to be the country. Far south in Miami-Dade, an area where the old encroached on the new, where waterways connected to the deep river of grass that was Everglades. There was good land out here. Some people kept large tracts with beautiful homes, and some had acreage where they grew strawberries, tomatoes and other produce.
Good earth for growing intermingled with sawgrass, deep dark muck and tangled trees.
Much of the land, such as this immediate area, was county owned. It was often heavily wooded, and where there weren’t actually trees, the foliage was thick and dense.
A good place to dispose of human remains, a place where nature could inflict tremendous damage on a corpse and render many of the clues it might have given up hard to discern, even destroy them. Over the years, a number of criminals had tried to dispose of bodies and evidence on land much like this. And, God knew, many of them