Passions of the Dead (A Detective Jackson Mystery/Thriller) Read online

  Novels by L.J. Sellers

  Detective Jackson Series

  Secrets to Die For

  Thrilled to Death

  Passions of the Dead

  Dying for Justice

  Liars, Cheaters & Thieves

  Standalone Thrillers

  The Sex Club

  The Baby Thief

  The Arranger

  The Suicide Effect

  Nonfiction

  Write First, Clean Later:

  Blogs, Essays, & Writing Advice

  PASSIONS OF THE DEAD

  Copyright © 2010 by L.J. Sellers

  All rights reserved. Except for text references by reviewers, the reproduction of this work in any form is forbidden without permission from the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-9795182-7-0

  Published in the United States of America

  Spellbinder Press

  Eugene, OR 97402

  ljsellers.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, locations, or events is coincidental or fictionalized.

  Cover art by Gwen Thomsen Rhoads, http://www.gwenrhoads.com/

  Digital Editions by booknook.biz

  Contents

  Novels by L.J. Sellers

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Monday, June 1, 8:15 a.m.

  “Final decisions about layoffs will be announced Friday.” Sergeant Lammers panned the room, stopping to make eye contact with Jackson. He and fifteen other detectives were crammed into an overheated conference closet. They shifted in their seats and tried not to glance at each other.

  “Two detectives will be cut, one from vice and one from violent crimes.” Lammers’ voice was deadpan, and for the first time in his twenty-year career, Jackson worried he might lose his job. He’d been written up and suspended recently, and now he had a health issue the department might consider a liability. What would he do if he lost his job? He was still a month away from his twenty-year pension.

  The door flew open and a desk officer rushed in. “Excuse me, Sergeant, but there’s been a mass homicide. Four people dead in a house at 1252 Randall Street. No reports of the assailant. A relative found the bodies and called it in.”

  A mass of men in dark jackets jumped to their feet, and the air hummed with adrenaline. Lammers shouted over the din. “I want Jackson, Schakowski, McCray, Quince, and Evans at the scene. Everyone else is on standby for assignments as needed.” Lammers strode toward the desk officer. “Get the mobile crime unit out there. I’ll call the DA and the ME.”

  Jackson hustled toward the door, thinking for the moment he still had a job.

  As he raced over Ferry Street Bridge with the rushing water of the Willamette River below, Jackson worried about what was happening to his hometown. For most of his life, Eugene, Oregon had been a safe midsized college town—a tree-loving, friendly place to grow up in, with the mountains and the ocean only an hour’s drive away. A perfect place to raise his child. Now Eugene was a small city with a growing crime rate, a meth scourge, high unemployment, and a dying downtown—and no money to fix anything. They’d never had a mass homicide though. He’d worked several murder–suicides in which a man had shot his wife or girlfriend then himself, but never a crime scene with four people killed. What if some of the victims were children?

  The home was in the Coburg Road area, in one of the older neighborhoods where the real estate had less square footage but bigger yards. A modest house that needed paint but otherwise looked cared for. The front lawn had been recently mowed and someone had planted petunias along the walkway—signs of an unusually warm month of May. A red F-150 pickup and an old green Subaru sat side-by-side in the driveway. The Subaru sported a bumper sticker bragging about a Student of the Month and another that said I Love Al Gore.

  Two patrol units sat out front in the curve of the long cul-de-sac. One of the officers was on the sidewalk next to a weeping woman with a cell phone to her ear. An older couple huddled together at the edge of their adjoining yard, and across the street a woman in sweatpants stood on her front step, watching the activity. Another blue Impala screeched to a stop behind him.

  Jackson climbed out of his car, wishing he’d taken some naproxen before leaving headquarters. The pain his ten-inch abdominal scar still produced surprised him. His kidneys, which had been compromised by the fibrosis, also bothered him if he moved too fast. As he approached the people on the sidewalk, the uniform officer said, “This is Rita Altman. Her sister is one of the victims inside. She came by this morning to pick her up and found them.”

  The woman, late thirties and heavyset with hair to her waist, glanced at Jackson, then continued weeping into the phone as she described her ordeal to a listener.

  “Don’t let her leave. I need to talk with her in a minute,” Jackson said and hurried past. He needed to get inside the home and see the scene before it was swamped with people doing their jobs. Behind him, the scream of an ambulance raced up Harlow Road. Why the siren? Jackson wondered. They wouldn’t need its paramedic services, just its cargo space to transport bodies.

  Ed McCray, an older detective fond of brown corduroy, joined him on the sidewalk. They looked at each other without speaking, then started for the house. Jackson visually searched the driveway as they walked past the cars. He had a small hope of finding something the killer might have dropped.

  At the threshold, Jackson grabbed paper booties and latex gloves out of his shoulder bag. McCray did the same. Jackson suspected today he would need nearly everything the bag held: flashlight, crime scene tape, an assortment of pre-labeled paper bags and clear plastic bags, a box of latex gloves, tweezers, and three cameras: film, digital, and video.

  He braced himself, nodded at McCray, then pushed though the door. A sour metal smell soaked the air, overpowering even the odor of meat scraps in the garbage. The front door opened into a narrow hallway with vinyl flooring, bordered by a step down into a carpeted, crowded living room. With a sweeping glance, Jackson took it all in. Two well-worn couches huddled around a big TV, a cluttered desk in the corner with an older computer, a bookshelf with more sports trophies than books, and a wall covered with family photos.

  Then he saw the wide archway into the kitchen. And beyond it, the bodies.

  A patrol officer squatted near the bloody mess. He jumped at the sound of their footsteps. “This girl is alive,” the officer said in an excited rush. “After we cleared the house, I went back to the kitchen to stand guard. I was taking pictures and realized she was still breathing, so I called for an ambulance.”

  A survivor! Thank God. Someone would
be able to tell them what the hell had happened here. Jackson started toward the kitchen, then froze. He looked down at the floor and spotted bloody footprints leading away from the bodies toward the front door. Critical evidence and they were walking on it. He turned to McCray. “We need samples of the blood on these footprints right now.” Jackson wondered about another way into the house, maybe through the garage. He let the idea go. The paramedics would charge through the front door no matter what he requested. Their objective was different than his.

  Jackson took five quick photos of the footprints while McCray scraped and bagged some dried blood. They hurried over to the bodies. Jackson forced himself to shut out everything but the girl who was still breathing. She looked about seventeen and her head rested on the stomach of another woman. Based on their matching reddish-blond hair and freckles, he assumed the body underneath was her mother.

  Knowing the paramedics were a heartbeat away and would alter the crime scene when they carried the girl out, Jackson knelt and snapped another round of photos. He took one of her face, one of the congealed bloody gash cut through the belly of her blood-soaked shirt, and one close-up of each hand to document the defense wounds. For a moment, her eyes fluttered open, pale green and distant, then closed again. Jackson stepped back and took two pictures of her position, relative to the other bodies, before the paramedics rushed in.

  “Stop there,” he said. “You’re not wearing booties, and we’ve have to do this carefully. McCray and I will carry her to the gurney.”

  “No, we have to do this.” The taller paramedic rolled the gurney into the kitchen and pushed past. He shifted to the other side of the bodies and squatted near the young woman’s head and shoulders. The other medic in dark blue grabbed the girl under her knees, and they gently loaded her on the gurney. As they tended to her wound and gave her oxygen, Jackson hung back and let them work. The foot traffic patterns in the crime scene area had just been obliterated. As the paramedics rolled the girl out, Jackson said a little prayer, asking God to keep her alive.

  In the distance, cars raced up the street, followed by the rumble of the mobile crime unit’s diesel engine. The white, truck-style RV would serve as their base today while they processed the house and questioned the neighbors. Jackson looked over at the patrol officer. “Please stand by the door and don’t let anyone in yet, except the medical examiner and my team of detectives. We need a few minutes alone in here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jackson panned the room, finally taking in the whole scene. Adrenaline rushed through his veins, and he felt a little lightheaded. The kitchen, once a yellow and white invitation to domesticity, was now a scene so gruesome it almost looked staged. A teenage boy was face down near the door to the garage, his t-shirt soaked in blood. The forty-something woman, who looked like the girl they’d just carried out, lay near the center of the once-white vinyl. She was on her back in a pool of blackish-red blood. Jackson’s eyes were drawn to her right wrist, stuck in the congealed mess. Someone had hacked off her hand. Chipped pink polish topped the appendage, which lay nearby, and blood pooled around it, thickening. The offending kitchen knife lay on the floor two feet away. Jackson scrutinized the woman’s amiable face and wondered what she could have possibly done to inspire such violence. Blood had run down one side of her cheek from a trauma to her forehead.

  What had she been struck with? Jackson’s stomach curdled. He wished he had some mint gum to keep the sour-rust taste out of his nose and mouth.

  Near the sink McCray squatted next to a prone male body partially propped against the lower cabinets. Even from eight feet away, Jackson could see the father had also been bashed in the head. Yet his life had poured out through the stab wounds in his chest. Typically, in a scenario like this, Jackson would suspect the man of the house to be the perpetrator of a murder–suicide, but this poor guy had not gouged open his own chest.

  “Check his pulse, just to be sure,” he called to McCray. Jackson knelt down next to the boy and touched his arm. Even through gloves his flesh was cool.

  The chirp of a cell phone broke into the quiet. Jackson pivoted toward the sound. The beep came from the pocket of the dead man by the sink. Jackson and McCray looked at each other, uncertain of the correct response. “We’ll let it ring, then see who called,” Jackson said. “Maybe they’ll leave a message and tell us something important.”

  The chirp stopped after six rings, and Jackson retrieved the phone with gloved hands. He flipped open the cheap Motorola and the screen said: Missed call. Check messages? Jackson pressed Yes and put the phone to his ear. “Jared, it’s Noni. Have you seen Roy?” The caller sounded worried and a maybe a little pissed off. “He didn’t come home last night. If you know where he is, please call me.”

  Jackson chose option four, Save message. While he clicked through, looking for the name or number of the last call, McCray asked, “Who was it?”

  “Someone named Noni, looking for Roy. She says Roy didn’t come home last night.” Jackson found the data he wanted. “The call is labeled Roy Engall in the directory. Probably a married couple. I also would like to know why Roy didn’t come home last night.”

  “Holy mother of god.” Lara Evans stood in the archway, mouth open, her heart-shaped face registering horror. She was the youngest detective in the unit, and at the moment, the most unprepared for this assignment.

  Michael Quince, a step behind, opened his mouth, closed it, then finally said, “What the hell?” Jackson had never heard Quince curse before. Behind his movie-star looks, Quince was a quiet respectful man. No one in the unit had ever seen anything like this.

  “We saw the ambulance go tearing out of here,” Evans said. “Is someone alive?”

  “The daughter still had a pulse, but barely. We have three dead I know of.” Jackson needed more time to visually process the scene before the house filled with detectives, technicians, and prosecutors. “Time is critical. The perpetrator is likely on the run. We need to canvass the neighborhood and find out if anybody saw a vehicle. Evans, start by talking to the sister outside. Get the names of everyone who lived here. Then both of you talk to the neighbors. From the looks of the congealing blood, I think they were killed last night.”

  Evans said, “I’m on it.”

  Quince nodded, and the detectives turned and headed out.

  McCray rose from his position near the dead man. “I think this victim was hit in the head with that baseball bat, then stabbed after he was down.” He rubbed his wrinkled face as if to wash the scene out of his eyes. “Thirty years as a cop, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Me neither.” Jackson turned to the wooden bat leaning against a lower cabinet near the refrigerator. It had surprisingly little blood on it compared to the rest of the kitchen. “Will you check all the victims for ID?” Jackson reached in his bag for his video camera. He didn’t use it often, but for this scene it could prove critical.

  It was a relief to put a lens between himself and the carnage. The distorted view allowed his brain to start working more objectively. He filmed the kitchen slowly, recording the positions of the bodies, then moved to the baseball bat.

  He hit pause, backed up to the archway, then zoomed in on the teenage boy. From what little he could see of his face, Jackson guessed his age at fifteen or so. Five-seven and about a hundred and forty pounds. The boy had sandy brown hair and eyes, but his skin had the same coloring as the females. Blue baggy basketball shorts, white t-shirt, and white basketball shoes—a typical teenage boy. Only this young man’s life had been cut short by a large knife in the back. Jackson wanted to roll him over and fully see the victim’s face, but the medical examiner would not appreciate it.

  He panned the camera over to the woman. She looked about five-five and muscular, like someone who exercised but still couldn’t lose the last fifteen pounds. Her white t-shirt with colored beading had been stained even before the blood spurting from her severed hand sprayed the bottom half. With her reddish-blond hai
r and pink sunburn, she reminded Jackson of his sister-in-law Jan, who often looked after his daughter when he worked difficult cases.

  Jackson forced himself to focus. From the position of the woman’s body, he guessed she’d taken a blow to her head first, then was knocked to the ground and slashed. The pathologist would likely report she had died of blood loss.

  “Jared Walker, age thirty-seven.” McCray read from the driver’s license in his hand. “His wallet was in his back pocket and there’s still seven dollars in it.”

  Jackson made an involuntary noise in his throat. Jared Walker hadn’t been killed for quick cash. He swung the video camera over to the cabinets and aimed it at the body on the floor. Jared Walker was about Jackson’s size, six-feet tall and two-hundred-plus pounds. That was the only resemblance. Walker’s blond hair curled at the back of his neck, his face was long and thin, and his Adam’s apple bulged in an almost-freakish way. Faded jeans and a navy blue t-shirt topped bare feet. The slashed and blood-soaked shirt had once said “Hawaii.” Jackson recognized the white floral pattern above the letters. Based on the house and the vehicles in the driveway, Jackson guessed Jared had never been to the islands and had picked up the shirt at a garage sale.

  While Jackson filmed the bloody bat, McCray rummaged through a purse on the kitchen counter. “Carla Walker,” McCray announced, “age thirty-six.”

  Time seemed to have nearly stopped. They’d been in the house for ten minutes, yet it felt like an hour. Jackson heard footsteps and paused the camera as the medical examiner entered the kitchen.

  “Isn’t this some crazy shit?” Rich Gunderson, dressed in his usual black, was in his fifties and had seen more dead bodies than anyone ever should.

  “It looks like a lot of rage,” Jackson said, stepping to the side, uncertain of where Gunderson would start.