Down and Dirty Read online

  I’d heard people say that driving through Bloody Mary was like looking at a snap shot of good old-fashioned Americana. A Norman Rockwell painting that was good at disguising the darker sides of life—the domestic violence that increased during the winter months or the meth labs that popped up from time to time back in the forested areas. Sometimes ignorance was bliss.

  I did always enjoy driving down Queen Mary though. Something about it filled me with nostalgia—memories of sitting in the back of my parents’ station wagon and driving down the same street on the way to church or school—and it was nice to pretend that for the time it took to drive the length of the street that everything was perfect.

  It also made me grateful that I lived far outside of town, because I couldn’t imagine being so close to neighbors that they were familiar with what time your coffee kicked in and the subsequent bathroom trip.

  There wasn’t a fast way to get from our house to anywhere in Bloody Mary, and at eight o’clock on a weekday morning with school and work traffic, things were crawling at a snail’s pace. It would be another half hour at least before we made it to the scene.

  “You know the Marcello House?” Jack asked.

  “Is that the big estate out past the state park on 218? The one that looks like a mini White House but draped in wedding cake icing?”

  “That’s the one,” he said. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Would you look at that?”

  I recognized the blue Cadillac and shook my head in disbelief. Mrs. Meador was at least a hundred years old and shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel of a car. Every morning like clockwork, she and three other ladies, whose combined age was almost as old as Bloody Mary, met for coffee. They sat at the window table so they could look out onto the street and gossip about the people in town. Mrs. Meador had once told Jack that when you reached a certain age laws were more guidelines than something that had to be obeyed.

  It didn’t do any good to write her citations because she never paid them. And putting a warrant out for her arrest would only be a pain in the ass when Jack had to run for reelection for sheriff. It wouldn’t look good to lock up a little old lady behind bars and have her family—which was a good portion of the people in town—coming to visit every Sunday after church.

  Jack got on the phone and scrolled through his contacts. “Kristi, this is Jack. Mrs. Meador is parked on the median again where Queen Mary and the Towne Square intersect. Tell her she needs to move it or it’ll be towed.”

  Kristi Chen was the newest of Jack’s officers, but she wasn’t by any means a rookie. She’d come from Atlanta PD about a month ago after she’d had to wade through the carnage of the Greenwood Elementary School shooting. She’d tried turning in her badge, but her chief had recognized a good cop when he saw her and convinced her to get some distance and take another job. Chen had been fine with taking a pay cut and a slower pace of life in exchange for peace of mind. Though I’m not sure living through an experience like that would ever bring peace of mind.

  Kristi must have said something amusing because Jack snorted out a laugh and said, “Better you than me,” and then he hung up.

  We waved at a few of the parents in the school line and several store owners who were opening up for the morning. Once we turned onto 218, Jack pressed the pedal to the floor and we flew down the highway.

  “Anyway, I was saying before I got distracted, the Marcello House was bought several years back by the Connelli family. The house is almost a hundred and fifty years old, and they got it for a steal because it had been left vacant more than forty years and needed a lot of renovation. But they bought as is and moved in immediately with the walls crumbling around their ears from what I understand. We’re checking into the reasons behind that.”

  “It’s a beautiful house. At Christmas the papers always advertise it as part of the historical tour.”

  “They did a couple of million dollars worth of renovations, and it took two years to complete.”

  “I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than deal with all of that construction for two years.”

  I’d grown up in a three-story Victorian at the opposite end of the same street where Jack and I now lived. It had been a white elephant of a house and every time I turned around something else was wrong with it. It had also been a convenient location for my parents to secretly transport bodies by boat because the Potomac butted up to the back of the property. Needless to say, it was on the market. I’d thought briefly about burning it to the ground just to cleanse the memories, but Jack convinced me the jail time would be an inconvenience.

  I’d gotten used to Jack’s driving over the years, so I didn’t flinch when a tractor pulled out into the road from one of the fields. Jack swerved into the oncoming traffic lane to pass him and then jerked the car back in front of the tractor to cut him off. Nothing pissed Jack off more than when someone deliberately pulled out in front of him and then slowed to a crawl.

  My pulse hardly sped up at all and my pants were still dry. “I take it the family who bought the house are the ones who will shortly be occupying my morgue space?”

  “That’s what it looks like, but you’ll need to verify. There was a house fire last night. And because of the age of the house it went up like a matchbox. The fire department responded just after midnight, but the whole thing was so far gone there was no hope of going in to look for survivors.

  “They put out the fire and then had to wait until first light to start going through the premises. KGFD discovered two bodies on the search, which officially made it a crime scene until we can determine the cause of death. FD called us, and Detective Lewis responded to the call since he was on shift. It took a little time to track down a judge to get a warrant to enter the premises, but he’s got it and is on the scene now.”

  “Warrant?”

  “We still have to get a warrant to investigate the property. It’s a private residence. And all fire related deaths are treated as homicides until cause of death and the origin of the fire is determined.”

  “I knew that about the fire related deaths, but didn’t realize you needed a warrant when there was nothing left of the house and no survivors. The law…it’s a quandary. Who’d have thunk it?”

  “People that pay attention?” Jack asked, arching a brow. “Which is apparently not you. Or Mrs. Meador.”

  Considering up until a couple of months ago I was buying my birth control pills out of the back of Leroy Brown’s trunk, I decided it was probably best not to continue this line of conversation. A girl has to watch her pennies where she can.

  Most of Highway 218 was two-lanes of hills and curves through forested areas. Most of the left side of the street belonged to Caledon State Park, but just past that the land opened up to private residences.

  The houses were few and far between and sat far back from the road, including the Marcello House. Or what had once been the Marcello House. Jack turned his unit into a long driveway, the black wrought iron gates propped open to allow easy entry and exit for all the first responder vehicles going in and out.

  Despite the fact that we were coming onto the scene rather late, there was still a contingency of fire trucks, ambulances, and cop cars.

  Jack hadn’t been kidding about what the fire had done to the house. What had once been two stories of antebellum estate—white columns, wraparound porches, and an exterior staircase leading to the massive front doors that had been a work of art—was nothing more than blackened rubble.

  The brick chimneys that had been at each end of the house still stood, but the center of the house had been gutted, the upper stories collapsing onto the lower. Large holes where walls had once been yawned into a cavern of darkness, still smoking with the remnants of the fire.

  You didn’t realize how many materials were used to build a house until you saw it as rubble—wood, glass, insulation, bricks, ceramic tiles, toilets, and hearths—littered through the remains of the house with no rhyme or reason, but placed at the monster’s whim.

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nbsp; I let out a breath and started preparing myself mentally for the scene. It was easy in our line of work to lose our humanity. To become hardened to the atrocities we saw on a day to day basis. But the only way to survive those atrocities was to not think of the bodies as anything other than the job. To not imagine them with expressive faces or going about their day to day lives.

  “I hate it when it’s kids.”

  Jack looked at me with his brows raised in question, worry in his gaze. I hardly ever talked about the parts of the job that bothered me. I buried it. Just like he did. It was like an unspoken code of honor between those who worked scenes like this. You made jokes or played it off as inconsequential. But you never talked about it. About how the images stayed in your mind forever and haunted your dreams, catching you off guard at random moments throughout the day and bringing you to your knees with the horrors of it all.

  “Sorry,” I said, before he could ask if I was all right. “I think marriage is making me soft. Let’s get this done. I’ve got an appointment I can’t miss at three.”

  He squeezed my hand once and we got out of the car. I pulled on my dark blue coveralls and zipped them up. Jack had his own gear and was already suited up by the time I finished pulling on my boots. I pulled my hair back into a stubby ponytail, and then dug in my bag for a pair of gloves.

  I’d started wearing the engagement ring Jack had gotten me on a chain around my neck because of instances like this. I was terrified I was going to lose the ring taking it on and off at scenes. It had been in Jack’s family for a long time, and I didn’t want to be the Lawson bride who lost part of the family fortune by dropping it inside a chest cavity or losing it at a crime scene.

  I saw Detective Lewis heading in our direction from the corner of my eye and groaned at the sight of the man who accompanied him.

  “Oh, damn. I guess it was too much to hope that anyone but him would be here.”

  “He’s the fire chief. Who were you expecting?”

  Larry Edwards had been the fire chief for King George County for as long as I could remember. He was a couple of inches taller than my own five foot eight and in good shape for a man who had to be approaching sixty. His hair was solid silver and he wore it in the same crew cut he’d had since his days in the military. I was pretty sure I’d never seen Chief Edwards in anything other than the uniform of black pants and white shirt with the fire department emblem on the sleeve.

  Larry and my dad had been rivals growing up in Bloody Mary, and it had extended into adulthood. So when my mom and dad were suspected of driving over a cliff in a murder/suicide, you could say that Chief Edwards wasn’t exactly broken up by the news. And when the FBI had started sniffing around shortly after to investigate the smuggling ring that had been running through Graves Funeral Home, Edwards had been downright gleeful.

  The malice he had toward my parents extended to me as well. Not because I’d done anything to earn it. At least not to my knowledge. I guess I was just lucky. Sins of the father and all that nonsense.

  “Well, I’d prefer someone who didn’t look at me like they were wishing I’d drop dead at their feet.”

  “Look on the bright side, babe. At least Floyd Parker isn’t here.”

  I groaned and shot Jack a dirty look. If I made a list of past mistakes, Floyd Parker would be item number one. Don’t get me wrong. Floyd was a good looking guy. He had a Clark Kent kind of vibe going for him. And he was smart. So one would think he’d be right up my alley as far as passable man traits go.

  The problem with Floyd—one of many—was that he was basically a douchebag. He would have sold his own mother to the Devil if it meant getting the break on a story or furthering his career.

  He’d been a few years older than me in school, and we’d never run in the same circles, but I’d always heard gossip from the older girls that he was excellent in bed, and there was a very convincing poem written on one of the bathroom stalls at the stadium that proclaimed the same.

  Medical school was a lonely existence. That’s my only excuse. I’d run into Floyd one night while I was picking up Chinese takeout and somehow ended up bringing him back to my place for the night. The Chinese food was delicious, but I’d been disappointed that the sex hadn’t lived up to the poem. In fact, it had been awful, but I considered the possibility it might just be me and the fact I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since I started med school.

  Floyd had been a general dick about the entire experience and had stopped up my toilet just for good measure before he snuck out the next morning. I pretty much put the whole thing out of my mind until a year and a half ago when my parents drove over that cliff. Floyd had been the first to suggest that it had been a murder/suicide, claiming that witnesses had seen them fighting.

  I already wanted to kneecap him just for clogging my toilet and being awful at sex, but messing with my family made me want to shove my embalming wand where the sun didn’t shine and turn it on full blast. Needless to say, I stayed out of his way unless I couldn’t avoid it. Things would be awkward for Jack around reelection time if he had to give me conjugal visits in jail.

  “Twenty bucks says he’ll be here before we leave the scene,” I said.

  “That’s a sucker’s bet. Fifty he’s here in the next ten minutes.”

  “You’re on. Will you spot me a fifty?”

  Jack laughed and squeezed the back of my neck, giving me all the support and courage I needed to deal with what I was about to face—the victims—not the assholes who crossed my path from time to time. I was used to that.

  I slung my bag across my torso and we went to meet Edwards and Lewis half way.

  “Sheriff,” Detective Lewis said, nodding at Jack. “Hey, Doc.” He gave me a knuckle bump and a slap on the arm.

  Lewis was a good guy. Like Chen, he’d moved from being a cop in the big city—in his case, Chicago—to a slower pace of life. I had no clue what Lewis’s story was or what had brought him here, and I knew enough about cops to not ask unless they volunteered the information.

  I grinned and looked Lewis over from head to toe. He was city slick and wore pressed slacks and a white dress shirt, his patterned blue tie knotted crisply at his throat. He’d at least had the presence of mind to put on boots, but they were expensive and made of suede, and already they were wet and blackened with soot.

  “Nice boots,” I said.

  “I’ve got an image to maintain, Doc. I’m hoping Chen will take notice of my keen sense of style and agree to go out with me one of these days.”

  “How many times have you asked her?” Jack asked.

  “Just four. But I’m starting to make some headway. She’s one of those women that never says yes on the first try.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Sometimes it amazed me that men were able to find a woman at all with the thoughts—or lack thereof—that went through their minds.

  “She’d probably take more notice if you started calling her by her first name instead of treating her like one of the guys. You shouldn’t treat a woman you want to impress like you do Martinez.”

  Martinez and Lewis worked as partners from time to time, and they were good friends off shift. But as with most cops, their conversations often had the maturity level of a twelve year old.

  “You think that’s what I’m doing wrong?” he asked, tugging at the knot of his tie to loosen it a bit.

  “One of many things,” Jack said. “The most prevalent being that you’re not that big bruiser of a boyfriend she has. That man would break you in two if he caught you sniffing around her.”

  Chief Edwards snorted out a laugh and shook his head. “Sorry to ruin your morning Sheriff, but I’m glad you came out.” He held out his hand and he and Jack went through the typical greeting ritual that had to transpire before any business could be conducted. Edwards ignored me completely.

  “Any problems getting the warrant?” Jack asked Lewis.

  “Other than pulling the judge off the golf course and ruining his game?”
Lewis asked. “Other than that, no issues. Martinez and I have been inside with the arson guy.”

  “Is arson suspected?” I asked.

  “Nothing obvious so far. Arson guy thinks he’s found the source, but he’s got to run some tests. Could be an electrical malfunction. We marked all the bodies for you nice and neat, which is why my three hundred dollar shoes are ruined.”

  “Just don’t send me the bill,” I said. “Serves you right.”

  “Boy, you’re a cop,” Edwards said. “No cop I know of wears three hundred dollar shoes. You on the take?”

  Lewis flushed red and squared off his stance to face Edwards directly. He looked like a bantam rooster ready to attack. Lewis had a reputation for his temper being quick on the trigger, which is why everyone went out of their way to rile him up. Cops were perverse like that.

  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. I was mostly just glad Edwards hadn’t been outright hostile the moment he’d seen me. I could deal with being ignored.

  Footsteps came from behind me and I moved closer to Jack to widen the circle a little. Detective Martinez stepped up and slapped Lewis on the shoulder with affection.

  “Nah, Lewis isn’t on the take. His mama sent him those boots for his birthday. He loves his mama.” Martinez made kissy face noises and Lewis elbowed him in the gut.

  Martinez was Lewis’s opposite in almost every way. Dark skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. He’d spent some time in the Army and had only been a cop for a couple of years—not long enough for the shiny idealism to have rubbed away—but long enough to develop a cocky attitude and camaraderie with the guys.

  I’d gotten used to cop humor over the years. Especially at a particularly difficult scene. The inappropriate jokes and comments were just par for the course. A way to cope. We’d all learned it was better to laugh, the only alternative was to start crying. And once you started crying there was the very real possibility that it would open a whole host of emotions that were better left buried.

  “You get a new arson investigator?” Jack asked Chief Edwards, getting things back on track.