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“Don’t think I haven’t considered it, but it’s the old adage of tryin’ to get blood out of a damned turnip.”
Reed glanced up at her and grinned. “You might not get anything but the squeezing might be fun.”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“You brought it up,” he reminded her as he extr
acted a single sheet of white paper from the envelope.
“Don’t remind me. My luck with men.” She sighed through her nose. “If I were smart I’d become a nun.”
“Oh, yeah, that would work,” Reed mocked. He unfolded the single page. There was nothing on the paper save one line written in the same neat block letters that had been used in the envelope’s address.
THE CLOCK IS TICKING AND
THERE ISN’T MUCH TIME
“What the hell is this?” Reed muttered.
Morrisette was on her feet in an instant. She rounded the desk and studied the simple note.
“A prank?”
“Maybe,” he muttered.
“A warning?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. You think maybe a bomb?” She frowned. “I don’t like the mention of ticking.” She studied the block lettering, then looked at the envelope. “Mailed directly to you.” Her eyes narrowed on the postmark. “From here in Savannah. And the return address is downtown on Abercorn . . . Jesus, just around the corner.”
“Colonial Cemetery,” Reed said.
“The cemetery. Who would send a letter from there?”
“Another crackpot. This letter’s a crank,” he said, frowning. “Someone who read about the Montgomery case and wants to jerk my chain.” Since last summer when he’d been on the trail of a killer who had a vendetta against the Montgomery family, Reed had gotten a lot of press. Too much of the kind of publicity he abhorred. Credited with cracking the case, Pierce Reed was suddenly looked upon as a hero and sought after as an expert by other departments, by reporters who were still reliving the case, even by the attorney general in Atlanta. His reputation had been exaggerated and his personal life picked and prodded ever since capturing Atropos, a woman determined to decimate one of Savannah’s wealthiest and most infamous families. In the past six months, he’d been quoted, photographed, and interviewed more times than he wanted to think about. He’d never liked the limelight, had always been an intensely private man. He had a few demons of his own, secrets he’d rather keep hidden, but hell, who didn’t. Reed would have preferred to go on about his job without the inconvenience of fame. He hated all the attention, especially from those reporters who seemed fascinated with his past, who had taken it upon themselves to find out every little piece of information about him and to tell the world what made detective Pierce Reed tick. As if they had any idea. He picked up the letter and envelope with a handkerchief, then found a plastic bag in his desk drawer. Carefully he slipped envelope and note into the bag. “I think it’s nothing but you never know. Better keep it in case it ends up being evidence.”
“Evidence of what? That there’s another looney on the loose?”
“There’s always another looney on the loose. I’ll keep it just in case and then send out an APB over the local system and through NCIC, just in case any other department in the country has gotten anything like it.” He turned to his computer, accessed the National Crime Information Center run by the FBI. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said to Morrisette. “In the meantime I think I’ll take a break and walk over to the cemetery.”
“You think you’ll find something?”
“Nah. Not really. But you never know.” He stuffed his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. “As I said, it’s probably just a crank. Someone getting his jollies by making a vague threat against the department.”
“Not the department. This particular crazy has zeroed in on you.” Sylvie was adjusting her shoulder holster. “I’m coming with you.”
He didn’t argue. It would have been useless. Sylvie was the kind of cop who followed her instincts and bent the rules; the kind of hardheaded woman who couldn’t be talked out of a decision once she’d made it. He slid the note into a file drawer, then headed out a side door to the parking lot where a cold wind slapped him in the face. The usually mild weather had a bite to it, a damp chill that reminded him of his years in San Francisco. He’d lived on the West Coast over a decade, having moved there from Savannah over a dozen years ago.
They walked outside through a side door and the December wind slapped Reed hard on the face. The weather, usually warm in December had a definite bite to it, the product of a cold snap that was roaring down the east coast and threatening crops as far south as Florida. Morrisette, fighting the stiff breeze, managed to light a cigarette as they walked the few blocks past Columbia Square. Colonial Cemetery, Savannah’s oldest, was the final resting place to over seven hundred victims of the nineteenth-century yellow fever epidemic and was the site of far too many duels in centuries past. General Sherman used this plot of land in the middle of Savannah as a campground during the Civil War, or, as many of the locals referred to it, the War of Northern Aggression. Shade trees, now barren of leaves, seemed to shiver in the wind and dry leaves skated down the pathways that cut through the ancient gravestones and historic markers where so many people believed demons resided.
It was all bunk as far as Reed was concerned. And this morning, this burial place seemed as much a park as graveyard even though dark, thick-bellied clouds scudded overhead.
Only a few pedestrians wandered through the tombstones and nothing about them looked suspicious, they seemed nothing out of the ordinary. An elderly couple held gloved hands as they read the markers, three teenagers who probably should have been in school smoked and clustered together as they whispered among themselves and a middle-aged woman bundled in ski cap, parka, and wool gloves was walking a scrap of a dog wearing a natty little sweater and pulling on its leash as it tried to sniff every old tombstone. No one seemed to be lurking and watching, no graves appeared disturbed, no cars with tinted windows rolled slowly past.
“Don’t we have better things to do?” Sylvie asked, struggling to keep her cigarette lit. She drew hard on the filter tip.
“You’d think.” Still Reed scanned the dried grass and weathered grave markers. He thought of the cases that he was working on. One was domestic violence, pure and simple. A wife of twenty years finally had decided enough was enough and before suffering another black eye or cracked rib had shot her husband point-blank while he slept. Her attorney was crying self-defense and it was up to Reed to prove otherwise—which wasn’t that hard, but didn’t make him feel good. Another case involved a murder-suicide pact between lovers, in this case a couple of gay boys, one seventeen, the other almost twenty. The triggerman, the younger of the two, was still hanging onto life in the hospital. If and when he got off the ventilator and came to, he’d find himself looking at a murder charge. The third recent homicide case wasn’t as defined. A body pulled out of the Savannah River two days before. No ID and not much left of her. Just another Jane Doe. No one seemed to be looking for her, no missing persons report was on file for a black woman whom, the ME thought, was around thirty years old, had type O positive blood, extensive dental work, and had borne at least one child.
