Say You're Sorry (Morgan Dane Book 1) Page 7

  Morgan walked past the keys. She played the beam of her flashlight over the ground and saw something pink on a mossy tree root closer to the lake. She walked closer. A cell phone. She stooped to pick it up. There was something dark spattered on it.

  The wind shifted, and a sense of vulnerability swept over Morgan. Shivering, she glanced around at the dark woods. Branches and their shadows swayed in the dark.

  She called back to the clearing. “Lance?”

  The hairs on the back of her neck twitched. Had Tessa gone this way? Morgan could see her accidentally dropping either her keys or her phone, but both? She glanced back down at the dark red dots on the phone case.

  Blood?

  And Morgan knew.

  Tessa hadn’t been walking away. She’d been running.

  Morgan followed an imaginary arrow that connected the two objects. Underbrush plucked at her jeans as she scanned the ground but saw nothing but dirt, moss, and dead leaves. Continuing in the same direction, a game trail led toward the lake.

  “Morgan, where are you?” Lance called from the clearing. “Did you find something?”

  A twig snapped as he approached. She jumped but didn’t answer. Every cell in her body was screaming that something was wrong.

  Very wrong.

  “I’m here.” She waited until she heard Lance behind her, then followed the trail toward the lake. Cattails rose from the weeds as she neared the water. The ground turned marshy and sucked at her feet. Directly ahead, her flashlight paused on some broken cattails.

  Was that blue cloth?

  “We should wait for the police,” Lance said behind her.

  “I see something.” She moved two steps closer, her need to know warring with her sense of dread. Apprehension prickled at her spine as she moved closer, her feet dragging in the mud as if they knew she wasn’t going to like what she saw.

  Morgan took another step forward. The cloth was blue. Denim blue. The sleeve of a jacket much like the one she was wearing. The beam of her light caught a length of long, dark hair. Her stomach went cold.

  Tessa?

  The cattails had nearly closed over her.

  “I found her!” She rushed forward. Six feet from the girl, she froze. Morgan moved the light over the girl’s body. Blood on her torso had dried to a dark red. Lance’s arm swept out to block her path.

  “Don’t go any closer,” he said. “You’ll contaminate the scene.”

  “But what if she’s . . .” Even as she said it, Morgan knew Tessa wasn’t alive. There was simply too much blood.

  “She’s not.” Lance’s voice softened.

  The flashlight shook in Morgan’s hand. She leaned forward to see Tessa’s face. Tremors spread through Morgan’s body, yet she couldn’t take her eyes off the trembling light and what it illuminated.

  She went cold from the inside out, as if her heart was pumping slush through her veins.

  Lance turned to face her and planted himself between her and Tessa. “Look at me, Morgan.”

  But even as she stared at the center of his chest, her mind projected its own image. Tessa, dropping her keys, trying to get into her car, seeing her flat tires, running through the woods.

  Something—or someone—chasing her.

  Catching her near the lake.

  “Morgan.” Lance’s hands settled on her biceps. His fingers squeezed gently. “Come on. Look. At. Me.”

  But her muscles had frozen. Lance gave her a gentle shake. She blinked and looked up. In the moonlight, his lean face was all sharp angles and shadows, with an underlying paleness that suggested he wasn’t as calm as he wanted to be. She felt the assessing scrape of his gaze across her face.

  When he spoke, his voice was hoarse with pain rather than full of conviction. “It’s going to be OK.”

  But she knew it wouldn’t, couldn’t be all right.

  She looked past him, her eyes pulled back to the sight of Tessa, her body slashed to fleshy ribbons and covered in dried blood. Her face was gray and her once warm brown eyes stared at the night sky.

  Across her forehead, rusty red letters spelled a single word.

  SORRY.

  Chapter Six

  “Back up.” Lance steered Morgan away from the body.

  Part of him wanted to take a closer look. Another part wanted to run like hell. From the brief glimpse he’d gotten of the body, it was a particularly nasty scene.

  Not that it mattered. He had no business getting near that body. He wasn’t a cop anymore, and the SFPD was en route.

  Under his hands, Morgan’s body shook, and her teeth chattered. Worry for her quickly wiped out any concern for himself. This wasn’t his first death scene, but as a former assistant prosecutor, Morgan’s experience with homicides would be one step removed. Viewing photos was not the same as seeing the body in situ.

  He guided her toward his Jeep. He opened the hatchback and took out a warm jacket. He helped her into it. The sleeves covered her hands, and the hem fell to her thighs.

  Before he could think, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest. She fit against him perfectly. As wrong as the scene behind him was, having Morgan in his arms was right, and he took as much comfort from the embrace as he gave.

  Morgan stirred, talking to his chest. “What happened to her?”

  Reluctantly, he stepped back and zipped the jacket to her chin. “It is way too early for theories. We’d be guessing. Let’s wait for facts.” He appealed to the lawyer in her.

  “You’re right.” But her blue eyes were dark pools, and her face had gone paler than the moon.

  Eyes drifting toward the trees, Morgan took a huge gulp of air. “Could he still be out there?”

  “I doubt it.” But he kept scanning the surrounding trees just in case. He’d only gotten a brief look at the corpse, but the blood smeared on her skin had appeared dark and dry. “I suspect she’s been dead more than a few hours.”

  Fifteen minutes later, approaching strobe lights swirled in the dark. A patrol vehicle parked next to the Jeep, and Carl got out, his face grim. They didn’t bother with greetings. Lance showed Carl the body.

  “Shit.” Carl turned back toward his cruiser.

  By the time the first gray of pre-dawn brightened the scene, two more patrol cars, the medical examiner, and a forensic team had arrived. The team hung back, waiting for the ME to do his thing. Kit in hand, the ME trudged across the clearing. His white coveralls looked ghostly in the gray light. Despite the number of personnel, the clearing was eerily quiet. Normally, bad jokes would bounce around a death scene. Gallows humor was a favorite coping mechanism, but not when the victim was a kid.

  A dark blue unmarked police car parked at the end of the row. Two figures got out.

  Detectives Brody McNamara and Stella Dane hurried down the tract.

  Stella rushed to her sister. “Are you all right?”

  Morgan’s stiff nod wasn’t convincing, but she’d pulled herself together.

  While the forensic team suited up in their PPEs, Brody and Stella followed the ME into the cattails. The horizon shifted from gray to pink as Morgan and Lance waited. Ten minutes passed before Brody and Stella emerged from the reeds.

  “You must be exhausted. We’ll take your statements, and then you can go.” Brody motioned for Morgan to follow him. He guided her ten feet away.

  Stella turned to Lance. “Tell me what happened.”

  Lance related the events of the evening, from Morgan’s phone call to finding the body. Stella took notes, then returned her notepad to her pocket. “You’ll look after my sister?”

  “Of course.” He nodded.

  But Morgan’s spine was straight and her chin high as she finished giving her statement to Brody and then returned to Lance’s side.

  They walked back to the Jeep. He started the engine, turned on the heat, and drove back toward the Dane house. Morgan was silent on the drive to her neighborhood. She pinched her cheeks, smoothed her hair, and climbed out of the Jeep.

/>   A grim-faced Art opened the door before they reached it. He shot Lance a questioning look.

  Lance shook his head. “Not now.”

  With a long police career behind him, Art understood. He nodded.

  They left their muddy shoes by the door. High-pitched chatter drew them to the kitchen. Lance followed Morgan into the room. The sight of the three kids eating breakfast was a welcome dose of positive energy.

  Her three little girls sat at the table. Ava was digging into a syrup-soaked pancake. Mia slathered butter on a short stack. Tiny Sophie, who seemed to survive on three Cheerios a day, hadn’t touched her plate. Morgan’s wild child wore purple leggings, a neon green T-shirt, and socks in two different shades of blue. Her hair looked like it had been styled with a leaf blower. Instead of eating, she smeared a glue stick on a piece of paper and shook a small container of silver glitter over it. Glitter was Sophie’s crack.

  Gianna stood at the stove ladling batter onto a hot griddle.

  As soon as Morgan entered the kitchen, the girls ran to her in a chorus of “Mommy!”

  “Good morning, my sweets.” She enveloped them in a giant hug, and the smile on her face warmed to genuine. She eased into a chair. The children surrounded her, and their chatter escalated. Lance’s head spun, but Morgan seemed to be able to listen to three conversations at once. Her face relaxed as the kids told her about their morning. How much could they have done already?

  “Hi, Lance.” Ava climbed back into her chair. Mia zoomed over to give him a quick hug before returning to her breakfast.

  Sophie crossed the kitchen, stopping in front of him and staring up, her big blue eyes seeing right through him. Seriously, the kid was a walking polygraph. “Mommy looks sad.”

  Clearly, Sophie blamed him.

  “Yes,” Lance said warily.

  “Will she be happy again soon?” Subtext: what are you going to do about it?

  “I hope so.”

  “Me too.” Her nod was far too solemn for a three-year-old.

  “I should go,” he said. The weariness in his bones came from more than one night of no sleep. It grew from the violent and senseless death of a bright young woman.

  Morgan walked him to the door. “Thank you for everything last night.”

  “You’re welcome.” He stopped over the threshold. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “I will.”

  Lance drove back to his small house in town, parked in the driveway, and went into his two-bedroom ranch. After the chaos of Morgan’s house, the emptiness of his own hit him hard. Who would have thought he’d miss the incessant chatter of three small kids? Not him.

  He entered the bedroom, stripped, and stepped into the shower. The blast of cold water cleared his head. Five minutes later, dried and dressed, he stared at his bed. Considering the replay of this morning’s crime scene, he would pass on sleep just yet. In the dining room, he sat down at his piano but couldn’t muster the desire to play. Nor did he want to sit in his cold, empty space and stare at the walls.

  Even though it was Saturday, he needed the distraction of work.

  Grabbing his keys, he left. The office was only six blocks away. Lance’s morning commute took less than three minutes.

  Sharp was at his desk when Lance arrived at the office. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks.” Lance went into the kitchen at the back of the space. “Do you have any coffee in here?”

  “Do you really want to tax your adrenal glands?” Sharp asked in a no you don’t voice.

  “Yes.” A dull ache throbbed at the base of Lance’s skull.

  Sharp broke out the blender and leafy greens. “Seriously, tell me what happened last night.”

  “As if you haven’t heard.” Lance dropped into a chair at the small wooden table.

  “I know that eighteen-year-old Tessa Palmer was found dead near the local party spot at Scarlet Lake.” Sharp shoved sweet potato greens, his latest obsession, and frozen chunks of fruit into the blender. “I know you and Morgan Dane found her, and that it was a particularly nasty killing.”

  Lance blew out a stream of air. “That sums it up.”

  But he detailed the events of the night anyway. When he was finished, Sharp pulsed the blender until its contents were a revolting shade of green. He poured the concoction into a glass. “Antioxidants are good for stress.”

  Knowing the shake would taste better than it looked, Lance drank it. “Do we have any cases to work on?”

  “Of course.”

  Lance followed Sharp into the office.

  Setting his mug on the desk, Sharp selected a file from a stack. “Here. Sixteen-year-old Jamie Lewis has been missing for two months. The SFPD has no leads. Her mother is desperate. This isn’t the first time she’s run away, but it’s the first time the police haven’t been able to find her.”

  Lance took the file and opened it. An eight-by-ten, full-color glossy of a young girl stared up at him. It was a school photo, but Jamie wasn’t smiling. Her mouth was twisted in an insolent scowl. But it was her eyes that startled him. They were dark with challenge and anger that belied her age.

  “I’ve seen convicted felons with warmer expressions,” Lance said.

  “Definitely,” Sharp continued. “Jamie has ADD and oppositional defiant disorder. She’s been on a broad range of pharmaceuticals since she was eight. By the time she was twelve, she was refusing to take her medication. Instead she self-medicated with alcohol and pot. Two years ago, her psychologist added bipolar disorder to her diagnosis. Her parents are divorced and blame each other. There’s plenty of friction with the stepparents. The mother is local. Jamie’s dad moved to California and remarried.”

  “She looks like a seriously troubled kid.”

  “She is.” Sharp sighed. “SFPD has found no signs of her in town. They’re convinced she ran far away. The parents don’t deny it, but they want her found anyway.”

  Lance flipped through the file. Sharp had interviewed her mother in person, the father over the phone. He’d also gone through Jamie’s bedroom. She wasn’t a girly girl. She liked classic rock and comics. She could draw, and some of her sketches were disturbing. “If she got out of town, there isn’t much the local cops can do except enter her in the database with the million other missing kids.”

  If she was picked up by police in another location, they would run her through the National Crime Information Center. The NCIC would list her as a runaway, and she’d be returned to her parents.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I have Jamie’s social media account information. She hasn’t been online since she went missing, but kids post everything online. Go back through her posts for the last few months before she took off. See if you can find anything that might give us some insight. Friends that her parents weren’t aware of. Places she always wanted to go. Online connections that could be suspicious.”

  Lance cracked his knuckles over the keyboard. “I’m on it.”

  Pulling his keys from his pocket, Sharp nodded toward his own office. Through the open door, Lance could see the black leather couch against the wall. “Try to get a nap.”

  “I might get bored enough.”

  “Have you stopped to see your mom today?” Sharp asked.

  “Not yet.” After finding the body, Lance wasn’t up to dealing with his mother yet. “Maybe after that nap.”

  Sharp paused. “Want me to check in on her for you?”

  As if merely checking in on his mom was all that a visit entailed. Sharp was one of the few people who Lance’s anxiety-ridden mom allowed into her home. If it hadn’t been for Sharp, no one would have seen her or taken her to her group therapy sessions while Lance was in the hospital last fall.

  “No. I’ll do it, but thanks for the offer.”

  “Call me if you change your mind. Do me a favor, and make sure the water bowl on the back porch is full,” Sharp said on his way out.

  Lance went onto the back porch. He caught the quick flash
of a skinny white-and-tan body as the stray disappeared under the steps. He carried the water bowl into the kitchen, filled it, and returned it to the porch. The pup looked thin and the food bowl was empty, so he added some kibble. He could see the shine of the dog’s eyes as it watched him. “You could do worse than Sharp. He acts all gruff, but he’d basically be your slave if you let him.”

  The dog didn’t believe him.

  Lance returned to his office, played a classic rock station through the wireless speaker, and settled in with his laptop. He flipped through the file to the parent information—anything to keep the image of a dead teenager out of his head.

  Three hours of computer research later, exhaustion hit Lance like a brick over the head. Jamie’s social media accounts revealed nothing, but then, it was likely that her parents monitored her online activity, considering her psychiatric history. The kid was probably smart enough to know her accounts were being watched.

  Lance considered making a coffee-and-donut run. If he fell asleep, he’d be seeing Tessa Palmer’s body in his dreams. He was halfway to the door when the stiff ache in his thigh turned him around. He went back to the kitchen and drank a protein shake, then stretched out on the couch.

  He couldn’t let a few nightmares—or anything else—get in the way of his recovery.

  But the bloody image that haunted his sleep didn’t belong to Tessa. It was Morgan’s. Even in his sleep he knew that she was the one who had the power to hurt him.

  Chapter Seven

  It was Wednesday afternoon. Lance leaned on the outside of his Jeep and waited for Jamie Lewis’s best friend. Seventeen-year-old high school dropout Tony Allessi worked at the bowling alley. Neither the police nor Jamie’s parents had been able to get any information out of the kid, but Lance wasn’t an authority figure. Somebody had to know where Jamie had gone. With teenagers, friends were the best possibility.

  Tony was easy to spot crossing the parking lot. On top of a lanky, six-three frame, his four-inch blue-and-red Mohawk didn’t exactly blend into a crowd. He looked like a parrot.

  Lance pushed off the door of his Jeep. “Hey, Tony!”