The Killing Times (An FBI Romance Thriller (book 1)) (5 page)

Probably no
t!

Elizabeth
wasn’t proud of the mistakes she’d succumbed to, how could he be?

Pulling herself back to the present,
Elizabeth touched the box reverently. Inside were the pictures, laptop, and all his personal effects. Thankfully, she didn’t have to pack it herself. Tony had done it for her, and for that she was grateful. In fact, when she returned, it had all been handled. Elizabeth didn’t even have to carry the boxes up the stairs to dusty storage.

For that
alone, she owed Tony.

The day of the funeral had been difficult
. Elizabeth had to make the long trip back north, to place him beside her mom. There had been hell to pay with his ex-wife, but that didn’t matter. Her step-mother’s wishes were inconsequential. In her mind, he would want to be with his first wife, and love of his life. As executor of his will, she made the final call.

To give him peace in the afterlife, Elizabeth would willingly carry any anger directed towards her.

When she arrived home after the reading of the will, they all struggled to lay the past to rest. There was more drama from her step-mother, and wounds she wasn’t sure would ever heal.

Charlie’s l
ife insurance paid for the funeral, for the interment, and then it took care of any other debt. Some of the remaining money went to her half-brother, and he had used it to buy his own pub and eatery.

She couldn’t fault him that.
He was after all Charlie’s son, and her flesh and blood. Maybe it was their age difference that forced them to never feel cohesive. There was always this understated jealousy and a fight for their father’s attention.

T
hen the divorce happened.

Her brother was put in the middle against her father’s wishes and desires. Divorce was messy
to begin with, but none more so than this one. It wasn’t pretty, but in spirit of his love for his son, her father had given his ex-wife more than was expected or deserved. Charlie built them a house on the outskirts of the property, making sure his son was able to see him any time he wished.

The
‘
sins
’ of the father were not held against the son at all.

Once a
gain forcing herself to the present, Elizabeth opened the box, pulling out the photos. The first one was of her and her brother, George, and then one of her by herself. It warmed her that at one time she was smiling, proud, and full of life in the pictures. Next she removed the laptop, blowing the dust from the top. There was this urgency to turn it on, but that soon turned to dismay when it was dead. Damn, the battery was drained. Hurriedly, she dug through the carton, pulling out the power cord and something else with it.

The object
fell with a light thud into her lap. Picking it up, she cradled it in her hand. Touching it reverently with her fingers, Elizabeth remembered exactly why she wanted it packed away. The badge was still shiny and still attached to the FBI ID with her smiling picture. Funny how the past always seemed to come back and bite you when you least expected it.

With no thought, she dropped it back into the box, not ready to even go there emotionally. Right now
, she had to dig into her father’s last few hours of life, and that was going to be tough enough.

Pushing the box b
ack into the shadows, she stood and planned her evening. While the laptop charged, Elizabeth would get a shower, make some coffee, and then start the journey into the last few days of her father’s life.

Elizabeth had just sat down
to the computer, and turned it on, when there was a knock at the door. It wasn’t unusual to get a visitor, but at this time of night it was rarely a good thing. She went to answer and frowned as she looked out the peep hole. It was the medical examiner, and he didn’t make house calls.

Well
he did, but you generally ended up in a bag and on a slab if he came to your house.

Elizabeth
was far from the slab or at least she hoped so.

“Doc, what’s wrong?
” she inquired, as she opened the door for the older man.

Doctor Trudeaux walked in, patting her on the shoulder. He had a genuine fondness for the sheriff
. Charlie had been his best friend for years. He loved the LaRue family, and that’s why he stopped in on his own.

There were inconsistencies that she needed to hear
about.

“I finished the autopsies.”

Elizabeth poured him some coffee, handing him a mug and sat across from him on the sofa. “You came all the way out here to tell me this?” She could feel a wave of uneasiness wash over her. Doc didn’t make social calls after an autopsy either.

“They both drowned.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I figured, since they were found in the lake, bloated and a snack for the fish. I know I didn’t attend medical school, but I did have forensics at Quantico. A dead body in a lake usually means drowning.”

He sipped his coffee,
taking in the woman before him. She had changed a great deal since returning to Salem. Elizabeth LaRue used to be so filled with peace and calm. Now there was a tension in her, and even sarcasm that wasn’t there before. Thinking back, he couldn’t remember the last time she looked relaxed. A cold hard edge had been created by whatever happened in the FBI. This woman was being chased and haunted in her daily life and it made his heart ache.

It was evident
by her face that she was a changed woman, and not for the good. “I put it in the report,” he said, pulling out the papers from his old leather briefcase. “I wanted to deliver it to you directly and not through the office.”

Elizabeth took the papers
and scanned them. When she arrived at the singular line, she glanced up at him. “Is it a suspicious death, or do we have two girls out playing in the water who didn’t make it back to shore?”

“
I’m calling it suspicious.”

She
began to read the reports, stopping at the section he was now pointing out for her. “Fluid was found in the lungs, so they both did drown? That could be accidental.”

“I put a rush on the
fluid; it’s been a slow lab week. They analyzed it, and it came back that it was chlorinated water.”

She closed the file and sat back. The wheels began spinning in her head. Lake water couldn’t test as chlorinated water.

This meant that those girls didn't die there. At least she now had a direction to follow and this put the bodies in the homicide column.  

“I’m worried, Lyzee,”

She was too, but didn’t admit it. “So, we have two girls who drowned in chlorinated water, and then they were placed in the lake posthumously.”

“
There was no sexual assault or defensive wounds on either girl.”

The sheriff
began processing all the details in her mind. “Do we have a time of death?”

Doc deposited his empty coffee mug on her table and continued, “It was only a few hours prior
. The water distorted the precise TOD, but I will venture to say between midnight and one in the morning.”

Elizabeth crossed her legs, and pondered how this fit in with what her father was investigating, “Dad had some suspicious murders
before he died, and now I have a double murder dropped into my lap.”

He nodded and added, “Or we have an accidental death, and someone dumped the bodies to make sure they didn’t get in t
rouble. Tox screen is still out, but I put a rush on it. For now this is going down in the books as suspicious, until you have some time to deem otherwise.”

“I’m not buying anything less than ho
micide, Doc. I can see swimming and an accidental drowning; someone panics and dumps one body, but two? That’s not accidental, that’s intentional. Two women drown at the same time and go into the lake at the same time? That’s a dumping ground for evidence and nothing more.”

It was time to talk about the past.

“When my father was found at his desk, I was told he was investigating a trio of deaths.”

Doc laced his fingers behind his head of white hair. He remembered them all. Death left impressions on you, even when the victim changed. “Your father ha
d spoken to me earlier that day at the morgue. He came in needing information on all three women. There was Tara Scott, Melissa Martin, and Melody Howe. The first two were victims of an arson fire. COD was burning alive in the dwelling. They had smoke in their lungs and didn't make it out. The last victim appeared to have committed suicide in the park. She left no note and was found hanging from a tree.”

Elizabeth scribbled their names on the front of the file folder, holding the autopsies of the two new
victims. “What did he want from you?”

Doc closed his eyes, as if going back in time to the last day he saw his friend alive. “He wanted to talk about the town, and the possibility there was a serial killer among us.”

“And?” she braced for his answer, pretty sure she already knew what drove her father. It was the same that would have kicked up her gut instinct.

“I told him that to me it seemed that there was a very good possibility that we definitely had something to worry about. Salem has been notoriously quiet for decades. I have lived here my whole life, and now in the matter of a few days
we had three bodies.”

Nodding her head, she
tapped her fingers on the file. “And now I have two.”

“You have the same look on your
face that he had on his that day.”

Elizabeth smiled at the compariso
n, it was a huge compliment. “I’m going to review those three files, and check into them tomorrow. I’m feeling less and less convinced that these deaths are all just random killings by five individuals,” she paused, “I don’t believe in coincidences either. I’m starting to believe we have one killer, and that means Salem has big trouble brewing.”

“Like father, like daughter.”

Elizabeth laughed. Wasn’t that the truth?

Sitting at the big mahogany desk, Elizabeth stared at the laptop. It was now or never. She had to get some guts and just dive right into the task. As she pushed the power button, it whirled to life and started up. Slowly, the screen came on and the box to enter the password popped up.

“Well, crap,”
Elizabeth muttered as she began entering all the possible passwords that came to mind. When she was out of ideas, she blankly stared at the screen. Elizabeth might need to just accept that she wasn’t a computer whiz and this might be out of her scope of ability.

Then it hit her
!

On the wallpaper was a thirty year old picture. The three smiling faces touched her, especially since the woman had been dead for almost twenty six years. A ghost of a smile touched her lips, as she knew the password her father had chosen. Elizabeth entered her mother’s name, and immediately the screen dissolved. Soon the files loaded and began to appear on the desktop.

Eureka!

As Elizabeth navigated her father’s files, she couldn’t help but smile. It was blatantly clear where she got her compulsive tendencies from, and it was her old man.

As she
clicked on each icon, she scanned and read all the information. Elizabeth wasn’t sure what she was searching for, but she knew it had to be in there somewhere.

There was a shortcut to his email, and
Elizabeth tried to access it, watching it open slowly and again asking for a login password. The email was his private account, and had been the one she used to message him, and tell him what was going on in her life. The last time she emailed him, was days after she was shot. The message sat in his inbox, calling to her. She opened it, taking note of the day and time. It was the day of her partner’s funeral and the same morning she had gotten the call. 

Reading over it, she recalled how vague she had been in the message
to him. The last thing she wanted was to make him worry. Had she known this was to be her last correspondence, she would have said so much more.

     
“Dad, I’m coming home. I love you.”

The message was to the point, and spoke nothing of the pain she was living in that moment. Little did she know that more
hurt was on the horizon.

Reading it again,
it sucked her back to that moment in time, forcing her relive it all over. Wiping her eyes, she knew that all this was necessary and had to be done. Elizabeth forced herself to search the sent emails. There was nothing there she hadn’t seen before. As she continued, Elizabeth searched the spam folder and the drafts file.

It was there she got lucky.

Inside the drafts was her father’s last correspondence with the world, and it was addressed to her. She swallowed and clicked on the message. As it loaded, she braced herself as she saw the date and time. It was the day he died. In fact, it was roughly the time he’d passed away too. She knew because she had asked Doc a million times, and studied the numbers like an obsessed mad woman. It was her father; she simply couldn’t let it go.