As Darkness Fell. Joanna Wayne

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      “We bagged some items. A couple of cigarette butts, an old sock, some chewed gum, a beer bottle, that kind of stuff.”

      “Send them to the crime lab in Atlanta. See if we can get a DNA reading from any of them.”

      “You got it. Anything else you need before I head out?”

      Sam glanced at the clock. Five after five. Knockoff hour for the day shift. Time was when a cop on a murder case wouldn’t have bothered to look at a clock. But those were guys from the old school. Today’s cops had lives. They worked their shifts and that was it. They were probably better off for it. But then, so were the criminals.

      “Guess that’s it,” Sam said. “Got a big night planned?”

      “A hot date with a cute little redhead who works for Dr. Wolford. What about you?”

      “I might cut out early and get some sleep.”

      They both knew he wouldn’t. Sam would stop in at the Grille for the daily special, if he bothered to eat at all. After that he’d be back here at the precinct, going over the sketchy evidence.

      Sam dropped the notes on the table as Matt left, then walked to the window and stared at the rain. It wasn’t falling as hard as it had been when he and Caroline had been caught in it, but it was steady.

      Caroline Kimberly. She should have no meaning to him at all except as she related to the murder case. Only now, standing here staring at the rain and thinking about how she looked soaked to the skin, he knew she affected him in ways he couldn’t begin to define.

      Not simple, like plain old-fashioned lust, though there was no denying he’d felt a tightening in his groin when she’d opened the door this afternoon.

      But it had been even worse driving her home from the park, and she’d looked a little like a drenched, stringy-haired waif at that point.

      Frustrated by the needs pushing at him from all directions, he crossed the room, opened his desk and pulled out the framed picture of Peg. He used to keep it on top of his desk, but he got tired of answering questions about who she was. So he kept it here for special times, when he needed to remember what life was supposed to be like. What it would have been like now if he hadn’t made that one fatal mistake and let a killer sneak into their lives.

      The kind of mistake Sally Martin must have made. Had she trusted a stranger? Prentice was the kind of town where that could easily happen. An hour southwest of Atlanta, but a world away from big-city problems. More churches than bars. Clean streets. Landscaped lawns. Citizens who still held to the old Southern ways and treasured their past as if it were a gem to be polished and put on display.

      Had the killer merely left the interstate and driven the twelve miles along the state highway, winding up in Prentice with the urge to kill tearing at his soul? Or was it someone Sally knew and trusted? A betrayed lover?

      But if there had been a lover, the Martin family had never heard of him. Their story was that Sally had flunked out of Auburn University last semester and had come home to get her act together before returning to school. Now she was dead.

      Sam had no reason not to believe the parents. Their grief seemed heartbreakingly genuine. Besides, Sam’s gut feeling was that the killer had picked Sally randomly or from some search criteria only he understood. He’d stripped her naked, but there were no signs of sexual assault.

      Still, Sam was fairly sure the perp was male. The MO wasn’t that of a woman. The knife, the nudity, even the marks on the breasts all indicated that the killer was a guy, either one strong enough to overcome the victim or charming enough to have convinced her to go with him willingly.

      And unless Sam had this all wrong, the guy wasn’t through with Prentice yet. Nor was he through with Caroline. Sam had no evidence to support that or even to prove that the note left on the reporter’s window was from the killer. It was all instinct. The stock and trade of any homicide detective worth his paycheck.

      His mind went back to Caroline Kimberly. He’d done some checking on her this afternoon. She was new at reporting. New to Prentice, as well. Could she be…?

      No. No way was she in this with the killer. And he doubted seriously she’d faked that note just to draw more attention to her reporting. Still, it never hurt to check out all the angles.

      After all, his instincts weren’t infallible. Peg’s death was proof of that. He walked back to the desk and made a note to himself to call Sylvia in records tomorrow and have her run a more thorough check on Caroline Kimberly.

      BY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON Caroline had run out of things to write about Sally Martin’s murder, but the town had not run out of their avid fascination for details. She didn’t know if it was due more to their fear or their curiosity for the morbid, but the Prentice Times was selling twice as many papers as usual.

      John was pleased with her work, but he kept pushing her for more articles. He wanted interviews with Sally’s neighbors, her family, the people she worked with, even her high-school friends. It was almost to the point where anyone who’d ever passed Sally Martin on the street could get his or her name and opinions in print.

      “I’m making a Starbucks run,” Dottie said, walking through the office with pen and notebook in hand. “Who wants what?”

      Dottie was their teenage assistant who came in two afternoons a week to earn extra credit for her journalism class. Caroline used her to proof copy occasionally, but mostly she filed or ran errands for John. And went for coffee for those who wanted something other than the thick black goop John brewed.

      “A caramel latte,” Caroline said.

      “Nonfat milk, medium?”

      “You got it. I’m a creature of habit.”

      “In the old days reporters all lived on straight black coffee,” John said.

      “Yeah, yeah, we know,” one of the grunt reporters said. “And walked a mile in the snow barefoot to get a good story.”

      That brought a rumble of laughter. Caroline went back to her typing. She was trying to stretch five good sentences from one of Sally’s friends from Auburn into half a column. She didn’t know about the old days, but being a reporter these days was tough enough.

      Ron Baker stopped by her desk, which he made a habit of doing a couple of times a day when she was in the office. She usually didn’t mind. He was even newer at the paper than she was and didn’t quite fit into the camaraderie routine yet.

      Fitting in was always harder for the nonreporters, but Ron was nice. Pushing fifty, a little shy, but a hard worker. His main job was seeing that the newspapers got to the carriers and the dispensers every morning, but he was a kind of jack-of-all-trades and John took advantage of all his skills. Today he was putting up some new shelves in the supply room.

      Ron looked over her shoulder. “You must get tired of writing about that murder every day.”

      “I wouldn’t, if there were something new to say.”

      “No new leads, huh?”

      “If there are, the cops are keeping the news to themselves.”

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