Page 8 of Good Girls Don't Cry

“That’s very noble.” Raven whistled through his teeth. “Now he has found Norrell. They seem like a perfect fit for each other.”

Emily remembered her mother, a day or so before she died, insisting that she encourage her dad to move on with his life. It should come like a slap in the face to think that anyone could ever take her mother’s place—they couldn’t, of course, and she knew that now. Norrell was more like a really good friend and it had taken her father a long time to get the courage to ask her out. She’d seen Norrell with her little sister, Anna, and the way she encouraged her to remember their mom. She turned to look at Raven. “We all believed they’d be perfect together but my father is old-school and took forever to take the first step. He had some stupid notion that he was too old for her. There is only seven years difference between them and they were best friends long before they got involved.”

“I’m kind of old-school too.” Raven flashed her a smile. “I don’t see anything wrong with respecting women and their families. I’m more of a slow and easy kind of guy, rather than jump in boots and all.”

Laughing, Emily looked at him. “You sound too good to be true, but then I believed Dave was hiding behind a mask for a long time, but he’s the real deal. It must be military brat syndrome. I don’t need to ask if you were raised in a military family. It’s kinda obvious.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned. “I followed in my dad’s footsteps as well.”

Emily’s smile froze on her lips as they turned the next bend to see a couple of hikers, pale and wide-eyed, sitting on a boulder beside the dirt road. They pointed to the trees on the opposite side of the road. She looked past them to the tree adorned with body parts. The victim was a young woman. The head faced the road. Her long dark hair flowed in the breeze, making her appear almost alive. All around her, body parts hung from the branches of a pine tree. Emily swallowed the bile rushing up the back of her throat. She hadn’t prepared herself for a sight as barbaric as this. The killer had wanted them found and placed them so they were visible from the road. She squinted her eyes and made out a message cut deep into the flesh of the torso: not mine.

“Oh, that’s not good.” Raven drove under the cover of trees alongside the mountain and pulled the vehicle to a halt. He turned to her. “Stay sharp. We don’t know who’s out here. Call your dad and update him. I’ll go and speak to the witnesses. They need to be anywhere but here. I’ll get their story and then cut them loose. Jenna can follow up later.”

Grabbing her phone, Emily sighed with relief when Jenna answered her phone. Her dad would be in the river with Kane and Carter recovering bodies. “I’m on scene. It’s a homicide. Do you recall the serial killer who cut up his bodies and displayed them in the forest. It was during winter?”

“Vividly.” Jenna blew out a long sigh. “It can’t possibly be him. So we have a copycat.”

Emily stared at the body parts shifting macabrely in the breeze. “Yeah, and this one is leaving us notes.”

Nine

Shaken by Emily’s call, Jenna sat on a rock beside the fast-flowing river and replaced the phone in her pocket. She kept her back to a clump of trees, always concerned someone might creep up on her. She had two dogs close by and Norrell, Webber, and Blackhawk a few yards away. Her position was well away from the edge. She’d learned her lesson after falling in the river and being washed miles downstream. Kane, Carter, and Wolfe had tied ropes around their waists and then anchored themselves to trees before diving to recover the bodies. Although she’d seen Kane dive before, seeing the three men vanish under the rapids frightened her. She’d been stuck in those rapids and understood the danger from the incredible force of the water.

It seemed to take forever before Kane surfaced with one of the bodies. He informed her that four of the five boys had been hogtied, one shot in the chest, and all the girls were missing. Without being asked, Blackhawk left at once to hunt down the girls’ trail. She chewed on her bottom lip as Kane dived again and her heart ached as, one by one, they hauled pale lifeless corpses from the icy depths to the riverbank. Norrell went to each one and bent down, brushing the hair from their faces and closing their eyes. A lump formed in Jenna’s throat as Webber took photographs and her eyes stung with unshed tears. The boys, all dressed in tuxedos, were so young. What a waste.

Trying to take control of her emotions, she stared at the river, trying to grasp the implications of what had happened. These murders were another class of brutality. Five dead boys, the driver, and now five missing girls. As the reality that another serial killer had arrived in Black Rock Falls hit her like a tsunami, she rocked back and forth, running everything through her mind. First this and now a young woman found dismembered and hung in a tree. Could she be one of the missing girls? If so, did this killer kidnap the girls so he had a batch of potential victims to choose from? The copycat murderer had left a message on his victim—why? What did it mean? Jenna shook her head trying to look at the crimes from every angle. If these two crimes were connected what game was he playing?

She shivered and pulled her jacket tighter around her. Beside her, Duke sat with his head resting on her thigh. Sitting a little way away, Zorro, Carter’s Doberman, sat like a statue, his gaze fixed on the water, but he was alert. Carter had given his dog orders to guard her, and every so often, his proud head turned toward her, as if checking. She turned and scanned the forest. The dense pine trees spread out for hundreds of miles. The killer might have four or five girls hidden somewhere out there. They’d be terrified and wearing nothing more than thin prom dresses, all potentially suffering from hypothermia. Horrified, she stared into the distance. How could she possibly find them, before he killed them all?

Jenna turned at the sound of voices. Rio and Rowley headed toward her through the forest. She looked up as they approached. “It’s good to see you. Raven has gone with Emily to look at a potential crime scene close to the Glacial Heights Ski Resort, and Webber needs help getting the murder victims into body bags once Norrell has done a preliminary examination. We found only the missing boys in the limo and now Blackhawk is hunting down tracks of the girls in the forest.”

“Murder victims?” Rio’s brow creased as he peered past her at the bodies laid out on the grass. “Have they been shot?”

A pang of deep remorse gripped Jenna as she nodded. “One of them at least. The others were found hogtied and left inside the limo to drown.”

“Have mercy.” Rowley ran a hand down his face and his eyes filled with sadness. “Do you believe that the murder at the ski resort has anything to do with this?”

Jenna handed them gloves and masks she’d taken from Wolfe’s forensics kit. “Emily is on scene now and I’m waiting for a report, but she said the victim is definitely female. I don’t like her up there alone with Raven. We don’t know who is hanging around watching us. The only reason I agreed to her going was the fact that Raven has Ben with him and that dog would smell a stranger a mile away.”

“Then you’ll need Wolfe’s team up there as soon as possible.” Rio indicated to Rowley. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Splashing in the water caught Jenna’s attention just as Kane and Carter broke the surface with a body of a young man between them. The young man was strong and muscular. His pale handsome face and staring eyes brought a lump to Jenna’s throat. She stood as Kane and Carter fought against the fast-flowing river. The swirling currents made it difficult for them to maneuver the body to the bank. As they were wearing wet suits, diving tanks, and flippers, lifting the body across the rocks and up onto the bank was almost impossible. Rio and Rowley ran to the edge to take over and hauled the body onto the grass. There was no time to talk or give her team encouragement. Kane flicked her a glance and then turned and dived back into the swirling current as Wolfe broke the surface with the final victim. As they struggled with another victim, she stood and stumbled over the uneven surface toward the river’s edge.

“Don’t come any closer, Jenna.” Carter dropped onto a boulder to remove his flippers. “The rocks down here are slippery. Just wait, we’ll move them onto the grass.” He stood and walked to the water’s edge and assisted Kane and Wolfe with the last body.

Wanting to see the extent of the victims’ injuries, Jenna moved slowly to Norrell’s side. In her time as sheriff she’d seen so many horrific murders, but the sight of these young men lined up wearing their finest clothes tore at her heart. She couldn’t imagine the heartache of losing a child like this. Their deaths were senseless. The serial killers she’d dealt with over her career always had a crazy reason or a fantasy to fulfill. She couldn’t imagine anyone creating a fantasy of drowning young men in the river. The killer had used them to get to the girls. To him, they were nothing more than collateral damage. He needed them out of the way and drowning them was quick and easy. Driving the limo into the river made it hard to find and gave him time to move the girls to a safe location.

“I’d say the last four are death by drowning.” Norrell straightened from bending over the final victim. She turned to Webber. “Bag them up, we need to get them to the morgue as soon as possible, but the chances of finding any evidence on them is practically zero.”

The drivers removed their wet suits, dried off, and dressed. None of them said anything and all had a faraway expression. Jenna looked from one to the other. She needed to keep up morale. “I have coffee in the Thermoses for when you’re ready, and then we need to head to the next crime scene. Emily confirmed it’s a female victim.”

She went back to the pile of their belongings and Kane came to her side, pulling his T-shirt over his head. She handed him a cup of coffee. “This is bad, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I sure as heck won’t get the sight of those boys floating inside that limo from my head for a long time.” Kane sipped the coffee and then handed back the cup before pulling on a sweater and jacket. His lips had turned blue. “It was dark down there and seeing them floating under the roof of the limo hogtied like that was nasty.” He took the coffee from her and rubbed his hair vigorously on a damp towel.

“That coffee sure smells good.” Carter came to her side, his blond shaggy hair dripping down his suede jacket. “It was like the Arctic in that river. The only good thing is that it would’ve preserved evidence.” He sighed. “The limo is under a rock shelf way down at the bottom. It will never see the light of day again.”

Jenna poured a cup, added the fixings, and handed it to him. As Wolfe joined them, she updated them on the Glacial Heights Ski Resort murder. “I figure it’s a copycat of one of our old cases, but why the message? Who is it to? The killer obviously murdered the girl, so why carve ‘not mine’ into her torso?”

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