Her Sister's Murder
Auteur
Tara Taylor Quinn
Lezers
17,4K
Hoofdstukken
21
Solving a cold case… And avenging her sister's murder. Morgan Davis lost a piece of herself when her twin, Maddie, was killed — and the former FBI agent will stop at nothing to find out who was responsible. So when prime suspect Blade Carmichael is found entangled in another mysterious death, the Sierra's Web PI springs into action. Even if it means working with her first love, Blade, to finally unearth the truth. Have Blade's murderous impulses been unleashed again seventeen long years later…or is he the only one who can protect Morgan from a lethal past exploding into their present?
Chapter 1
Gravel crunched above him in the darkness. Freezing in place, all senses on alert, Blade Carmichael went into defend-and-protect mode. Listening. His eyes were the only things moving as he took in the rim of the eight-foot-deep half-acre hole in which he stood.
Being trapped in a pit, inspecting footers, wasn’t something he’d choose to do without daylight, or without others around. But with darkness falling, and his company expanding so quickly, he hadn’t been able to get to every site with the sun still shining down on him and with his crew still present.
The sound came again, weight on gravel. It wasn’t the rolling sound of a vehicle. Didn’t have the normal rhythm of footsteps, either. Was something being pushed by someone on foot? Or dragged?
Whatever was up there, it didn’t belong. He’d locked the temporary gate behind him, as he always did when he drove on-site. The plowed and flattened land was clearly marked with keep-out and no-trespassing signs.
There had been a series of weird things happening lately. He’d been pretty sure someone was following him but had no proof—just a blue sedan. Sometimes it was parked down the street from his house with no one inside that he could see. And then he’d seen it outside a restaurant where he’d been eating. Across from his office, twice. And once when he’d been driving, a few lanes over and a couple of vehicles back.
But then, he tended to err on the paranoid side of watching his back. Spending seventeen years wrongly accused did that to a guy.
He hadn’t noticed the car as he’d driven to the site, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been there somewhere.
His truck was up top in full view.
Someone knew he was down in the pit.
No one was authorized to be on any of his sites after dark. No one. Ever. A rule that, if broken, cost an employee their job. Or garnered a call to police and a trespassing charge.
Turning off the light strapped to his head, he backed up slowly to the footers he’d come down to inspect, careful to keep his own boot crunch at a minimum. Once there, he leaned back, pressing himself into the dirt wall of the pit. Jeans and his button-down shirt and tie didn’t offer much protection. All alone and thinking he was just going to be doing a few quick measurements, he’d left his hard hat on the front seat of the truck.
He hadn’t felt real fear for his life in a long time, not since he’d mastered both target shooting and martial arts. His heart pounded, and he didn’t welcome the sensation of snakes slithering in his gut. He reached slowly for the Glock 9 mm holstered to his belt, legally allowed in Michigan if it was visible, and by his concealed-carry permit if it wasn’t. He’d never used the pistol, other than to shoot targets.
He’d never killed anything.
But the world thought he had. Even though he’d never been formally charged, and had a completely clean record.
More gravel turning. Crunching. Getting closer. Was someone coming to get revenge? The paranoia that he’d been fighting fairly successfully in recent years suddenly surfaced with a vengeance. There was nothing on the lot to steal.
Nothing there at all but dirt, some rebar cemented into footer framing and him.
The sound was definitely scraping. Or dragging.
Dirt?
Was someone moving a large mass of dirt?
To bury him in his own pit?
Horror clawed at him. After so many years full of dread, were the death threats he’d received finally becoming reality?
No, he had to get a hold of himself. He was a grown man running a successful business in a town where his past wasn’t an issue.
The investigation had been thorough seventeen years before and as soon as he’d been released from custody, he’d immediately, and legally, dropped the McFadden from his name. Leaving Blade Carmichael McFadden behind, he’d hoped.
The only evidence against him had been circumstantial—strengthened by the fact that there were no other viable suspects. But even though the DA had decided not to press charges, public opinion had been swayed against him.
But not in Rocky Springs. Not in the small Michigan town where he’d made a good name for himself.
Was someone from the past on his lot? Had they come to make him pay? Knowing he had nowhere to run? To hide?
Struggling against the unhealthy thoughts, he tried to focus on the sounds above him.
The scraping sounds were coming closer. He was a standing duck.
What if someone local had heard about his past?
The only way out, the stepladder he’d brought down with him, was all the way on the other side of the pit.
And climbing up would do nothing except make him an easy target.
No matter what was going on, someone was on his lot, illegally, in the dark.
Gun in his hand, safety off, he listened and watched the rim, waiting for the first sign of whoever was up there to show itself. His only chance was to stay alert and get a shot off first.
A feat he should be able to accomplish. He’d been on high alert since he was seventeen years old.
Maybe getting to the ladder was the best bet. He could climb slowly. Crouch down. Get a look at his would-be assailant before they got to him.
Blade was already acting before he’d finished the thought. Moving softly, sliding quickly along the dirt floor, he kept himself crouched and balanced as he leaned into the wall of dirt his crew had dug.
The sound was closer. Almost directly above his head. He wasn’t going to get to the ladder in time. He stopped moving and pressed himself into the dirt with all of his strength. Gun in both hands, barrel pointing upward, he slid his head backward an inch, then two, attempting to see without being seen.
Throat dry, tight, he couldn’t swallow. But mixed in with the fear, surprising him, was a bit of relief. No more dreading that this day would come...
But it still might not have come. He had to stay calm. Focused. Deal with the moment, not the past.
He hadn’t killed that sixteen-year-old girl. But he hadn’t hung around to make sure she made it back to camp safely, either. Not that he’d invited her to the party, or even that she’d have left with him if he’d asked. She’d been having too much fun hanging out with the others. But he’d been a senior camp counselor. She’d only been a junior...he shouldn’t have left while there was still a junior there...
He shouldn’t have been there at all. None of them should have been.
The dirt against his back reverberated slightly. From weight on the ground directly above him. Had to be right at the rim of the pit. He couldn’t see a thing but dirt and sky. No moon. No stars. And no assailant visible to him.
But someone who knew he was in that pit was right above him. Illegally there.
Bracing for a load of dirt or a bullet that would bring searing pain, he kept his eye trained above, arms and hands set to use his pistol at the first sign of movement.
Tense, ready, he waited.
The one thing he had going for him, a man thought to have murdered a sixteen-year-old girl when he’d been just seventeen himself, was that he’d never, ever physically hurt anyone.
Before he had time for another thought, rocks and clods of fresh dirt started to tumble around him, hitting his head, his shoulders. Some were big enough to bruise him and obstruct his vision. He couldn’t see anyone up above. But he couldn’t just stand there and die. He’d learned long ago he had to bear his own load. Cocking back his pistol, he pointed the barrel to the sky, and pulled the trigger, not to kill, but to warn, to scare and then, if necessary, to defend.
Before the bullet had even reverberated through the air, a body landed on the dirt at his feet.
Former FBI agent turned private detective Morgan Davis had dread in her gut as she entered Rocky Springs just after sunrise. She’d gotten the call in the very wee morning hours and had been instantly up, showered, dressed in black pants, a white cropped blouse and black flats, and was out the door, making the two-hour drive from Detroit in record time.
Maddie, I’ve got him...
The internal words started before she realized their intent. No. She wasn’t going back there. Not to the time. Or the false hope.
She wasn’t a sixteen-year-old youth camp counselor anymore. She’d lost her youth the night she’d lost her identical twin sister. Murdered by someone she’d thought was one of her closest friends, the only guy she’d ever had a serious crush on. The only one who’d ever shown any interest in someone as straitlaced and serious as she was. The only guy who’d asked her to be exclusive with him.
Maddie had been the vivacious one. The honey that drew everyone to them. And kept their attention when they arrived. Morgan had the same perfectly aligned features, striking blue eyes, blond hair and slim, long-legged build, but she’d rarely been noticed. And, introvert that she was, she’d been perfectly content to sit in her sister’s shadow, watching out for the both of them, planning their futures.
Until that last summer at camp. Maddie hadn’t wanted to be there. They’d heard the school counselor talk about a need for counselors at the summer youth camp, alighting Morgan with interest. Interest she’d known her twin wouldn’t share, just as Maddie hadn’t been paying attention during assembly that morning. During the rest of the mandatory meeting, while her sister kept exchanging looks with a boy across the aisle, Morgan worked it all out. They’d spend their first summer apart. Maddie going to cheer camp and Morgan being a counselor at the youth camp they’d attended for years. It would be good for them...they could text every morning and every night...and have so much to tell each other at summer’s end.
As it had turned out, their overly strict, older parents had jumped on the guidance counselor’s call for help. The twins had started counselor training that very afternoon...
And that had been the end of life as they knew it.
Following the prompt from her dark blue SUV’s navigation system, Morgan turned and then turned again. She’d never been to Rocky Springs. The beach town hadn’t had any crimes calling for FBI presence when she’d been with the Bureau.
And Sierra’s Web, the nationally renowned firm of experts she’d joined the year before, hadn’t sent her there, either.
She wasn’t there on official business. Yet.
She was there because a non-FBI law enforcement acquaintance had fulfilled a promise.
Blade Carmichael’s name had shown up in a crime scene report that made it over the unofficial BOLO wire across the state. Word of mouth traveled fast when a guy showed up dead in a ditch at the feet of a suspected killer. Morgan’s acquaintance knew she’d want the information.
According to the report that had been read to her so early that morning, Carmichael had been in a new-build basement dig. The body had landed at his feet from up above. He’d heard footsteps. One set. And then nothing. The form had been unmoving, lying with a leg bent underneath it and both arms splayed out. He’d immediately dialed 911, then ran to a ladder and climbed to the rim of the pit. He saw no blood, no sign of anything, except for a strip of dirt that looked like some kind of heavy box or blanket had been dragged across it, cutting a path on the newly cleared land.
He’d made a quick perusal of the site and headed back down to the body.
Male, based on the dark pants, he’d told the operator on the line, and light-colored dress shirt. Short hair, mostly dark. Gray tinges, perhaps from the moon’s reflection? The guy was face down. Carmichael couldn’t get a feel for age.
He had checked for a pulse and said something about flesh not yet cold to the touch of his fingers.
The lack of pulse was evident, though. He’d been touching a dead man. No bleeding profusely from a killer’s bullet. Not bleeding visibly at all, and not pooling from beneath him, either.
The suspect—she couldn’t not think of Blade that way—hadn’t been arrested when law enforcement arrived. There hadn’t been sufficient evidence against him to warrant doing so. But Morgan knew better. Blade Carmichael was someone whose alias—Blade Carmichael McFadden—might not show up in official police records. But it was definitely at the top of the suspect list in her personal memory.
He’d grown up in another beach town—South Haven. Another town she’d never visited. One he’d vacated abruptly when it had become known that he was a murderer and his father’s business had tanked. The family, just him and his parents, had moved to Grand Rapids, and then, upon his high school graduation, to Florida. He’d returned to his home state to attend the University of Michigan, graduated with a degree in business management and settled in the burgeoning, if still small, beach town of Rocky Springs.
Why he’d gone to all the trouble to change his name and then return to his home state, she didn’t know. Except that, even as a teenager, he’d loved the state. The Great Lakes. The vast outdoors. The seasons. Those were the kinds of conversations he’d had with Morgan years ago.
While Maddie had talked constantly about getting out and seeing the world, wanting to move to California or New York, Morgan had loved Michigan, too. The natural beauty of forests and streams, bound by the Great Lakes and a lot of wide-open country.
It felt right to think about something good as she prepared to enter hell.
Her phone rang. Slowing, she saw Jas’s ID on her dash screen, pulled to the shoulder and picked up.
“Hey,” she greeted her ex–FBI team member and close friend. Because she knew if she didn’t pick up, Jasmine would go into full agent mode.
“I heard about the murder, Morg. Tell me you aren’t headed to Rocky Springs.”
Glancing at the Carmichael Construction sign on a stick stuck in the ground just ahead, she figured, since she’d reached her destination, she wasn’t headed anywhere. “I’m not.”
“You’re there already, aren’t you?”
She wasn’t going to lie. Silence was the only other option.
“It’s not good for you.” FBI Special Agent Jasmine Flaherty knew, more than most, that Morgan was somewhat obsessed with getting her sister’s killer behind bars. Legally. Rightfully. Forever and ever, world without end.
It was partially why she’d left the Bureau.
“The dead man is Shane Wilmington. He was another counselor that summer. One who had been at the party, too.” An unsanctioned gathering, just down the beach from camp property, reached through a hole in a very old and never very strong wire fence.
She idled at the curb as she explained herself. She trusted her friend with her life—and needed Jas to know she could trust Morgan, too. She wasn’t just there because the name had unofficially popped up in a new murder investigation. But when the dead body had turned out to be someone else from that night...
What investigator worth her salt wouldn’t at least get herself to town and see what she could find out?
“Be careful.”
“I will.” Morgan’s words were confirmation of how she lived every minute of every day.
“And call me. The second you know anything. And when you’re headed home.”
With a grim face, she agreed to do so and hung up. When she got to the gate, she showed her Sierra’s Web private detective credentials to a uniformed guard, and pulled forward onto the lot legally occupied by the man who’d killed her sister.
She wanted to be all brave and strong. Unflappable. She wanted to be the woman who’d earned her reputation as one of the best agents the Michigan Bureau had ever seen. Instead, when she took in the newly plowed ground—the vehicles, some with bubbles, some not, the crime scene tape around a big hole in the ground with a crane hovering just off to the right of it—she started to shake.
Heart pounding, she took a deep breath. Pushed away her need to cry.
The crane was there to remove the body, she knew. The rest of the folks—forensics, crime scene investigators, detectives and officers, she determined by vests and vehicle markings—might wonder why a private detective was on scene.
If the guy guarding the lot had actually read her badge, recognized it and told anyone who she was, she’d tell them why she was there. Unofficially. Because they might have a serial killer on their hands. One who committed murder seventeen years apart.
As it was, no one seemed to notice as, her Glock at her hip and creds in her back pocket, she made her way toward the scene of the murder.
