The Chosen

Sanders’s shoulders tensed ever so slightly. “Lyrical dance. She’s a former contestant in the Miss Universe Pageant.”

“You mean she was,” Lindsay corrected.

“No, I mean she is. Ms. Cain is still alive.”

“What!”

“She didn’t die. Her sister found her before she bled to death.”

“My God! Do you know what this means?”

Sanders nodded, then walked away.

Lindsay’s heartbeat accelerated. Her pulse pounded loudly in her ears. After over three and a half years of searching for a manically clever killer, they had finally gotten a break. If the victim was still alive …

Lindsay closed her eyes and said a silent prayer for a woman she had never met, for a woman lying in a Kentucky hospital, missing both of her feet, the victim of a man to whom murder was some sort of sick game.

After closing her bedroom door and heading to the bathroom, Lindsay shucked off her oversized orange Vols T-shirt and slipped out of her white lace bikini panties.

When she had first moved from Chattanooga to Knox County to take a job with the Powell Private Security and Investigation Agency, she’d taken Griffin Powell up on his offer to stay at his sprawling twenty-room mansion situated on a hundred acres bordering Douglas Lake, near the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. She had intended to stay only until she’d found an apartment of her own, but what should have been a one-month stay had turned into three years and counting.

Lindsay turned on the shower, then gathered up a couple of towels and a washcloth. After placing the towels on the mat outside the ceramic-tiled shower unit, she stepped beneath the warm water and quickly lathered her short hair.

Some people assumed that because she not only worked closely with the big man himself but she was the only Powell agent who lived in Griff’s home, the two were lovers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Through their years together—each of them having their own agenda for being obsessed with the beauty queen murders— she and Griff had formed a bond of friendship. He had become more like a protective big brother than anything else.

Stepping out of the shower, Lindsay towel-dried her curly hair and hurried through her daily morning routine. She was a low-maintenance kind of woman. Short hair, short nails, a little blush on her cheeks, light lip gloss, and a whiff of fresh linen body spray. On her downtime, she dressed for comfort. On the job she preferred a casual look—slacks, shirt, and jacket, all in neutral shades. Her only jewelry, other than a sensible Fossil wristwatch, was a pair of diamond ear studs. A Christmas present from Griff.

After dressing hurriedly, Lindsay ran down the backstairs that led to the massive kitchen. Sanders stood behind the granite-topped bar, a glass coffeepot in his meaty hand. Griffin Powell, his unbuttoned overcoat hanging apart to reveal his rumpled white shirt and tuxedo, halted in the doorway leading into the kitchen from the mudroom, and wiped his snow-smeared dress shoes off on a sturdy floor mat.

Lindsay paused on the bottom step as her gaze zipped from Sanders to Griff. A silent understanding passed between her and her boss. They were both thinking the same thing— how will this affect Judd?

“Do you want me to call him?” she asked.

Griff shook his head. “I’ve already tried. Both his home phone and cell phone are no longer in service.”

Lindsay groaned. “I’m not surprised.”

“Neither am I.” Griff shook the snow from his short, platinum-blond hair, then removed his overcoat and tossed it over a nearby kitchen chair. “The last time I saw him, he was just one step away from being a mad hermit.”

“Will you try again to contact him or—?”

“Why don’t you drive down there this morning and see what you find,” Griff said. “If he’s even halfway sane, tell him what’s happened, stay with him and try to keep him in line as much as possible.”

The thought of seeing Judd again—how long had it been, six months?—rattled Lindsay’s nerves. When the Beauty Queen Killer struck three months ago, right before Thanksgiving, she had begged off working with Judd. And knowing their past history, Griff had allowed her one free pass. Apparently she wasn’t due another.

“And if I’d prefer not to work with Judd, not to see him …?”

Sanders cleared his throat. “Either of you want breakfast?”

“No,” they both said simultaneously.

Sanders placed the coffeepot back on the hot plate, then without saying a word, walked out of the kitchen.

“You can’t avoid him forever,” Griff said. “Your life has been Judd Walker-free for six months. You’ve been dating that hotshot young doctor, so I thought maybe you might have finally worked through your personal demons.”

“Getting rid of those personal demons is a work-in-progress.” Lindsay went over to the coffeemaker, lifted the pot from the hot plate, and poured coffee into the two mugs Sanders had placed on the counter.

With filled mugs in hand, she walked across the room and offered one to Griff. He accepted the mug, took a sip of the hot brew and locked his gaze to hers.

“Judd has been one of my best friends for a long time,” Griff said. “If I thought we could save him, I’d move heaven and earth to do it. But Lindsay, honey, you can’t save a man who doesn’t want to be saved. He may be too far gone now. He lives for nothing but revenge. Not justice. Not salvation. Not peace. Just revenge.”

“Then why send me down there to help him, if he can’t be helped?”

“Even if neither of us can save Judd, we’re the only two people left who give a damn about him. No matter what, we need to see this thing through to the end with him. It’s what we both have to do.” He hesitated for a millisecond, then added, “And it’s the only way you’ll ever be completely free.”

Emotion welled up inside Lindsay, feelings she had tried so very hard to keep deeply buried, after she had realized she couldn’t vanquish them altogether. “What if he wants to go to Kentucky and see Gale Ann Cain?”

“I’m flying up to Williamstown later this morning,” Griff said. “I’ll keep you posted on Ms. Cain’s condition. And if Judd is acting like himself enough actually to give a shit about Ms. Cain, then don’t try to stop him from coming to see her. As a matter of fact, drive him straight to the hospital yourself.”

Chapter 2

Last night’s snow had turned into a cold, relentless rain. The windshield wipers on Lindsay’s two-year-old Trailblazer LT swished back and forth at high speed, barely able to keep one step ahead of the heavy downpour. She was at the halfway point between Griff’s home in Knox County and the old hunting lodge in Marion County that had belonged to the Walker family for several generations. She had headed out at nine-thirty this morning, shortly after dropping Griff off at the private airstrip where he kept his personal jet. Actually, it was the company’s jet—Powell Private Security and Investigation Agency—but since Griff was the sole owner, it was a moot point. In good weather, she could easily make the trip in a little over two hours, but with visibility practically nil, she’d be lucky to arrive at her destination in three hours.

Griff had known she didn’t want to see Judd again, yet he’d sent her off on this assignment anyway. She could have questioned him about his decision or even refused, but she’d known Griff long enough to realize he never did anything without a reason.

And that reason would be? she questioned herself.

Maybe it was because Griff knew that if this new Beauty Queen Killer case didn’t snap Judd back to life, from out of that no-man’s-land where he existed, then nothing ever would. Now, with a victim who had actually survived, this was the first real break they’d gotten in tracking down Jennifer Mobley Walker’s killer. If Gale Ann Cain could identify her attacker…

If … if … i f…

What if she couldn’t identify the madman who had chopped off both her feet? What if she never came out of the coma? What if she died? Was it fair to build up Judd’s hopes, to make him believe they actually had a shot at finding out who had killed his wife?

As the windshield wipers’ mesmerizing song hummed in rhythm to the drumming raindrops, and the miles along Highway 28 zipped by, Lindsay’s thoughts wandered backward to a day she would never forget—her first case as a brand new homicide detective for the Chattanooga Police Department. She had been partnered with Lt. Dan Blake, a veteran cop who had been her dad’s partner ten years earlier, before her father had been shot down by an escaping felon. Dan had taken her under his wing, guided her through her rise in the CPD, from rookie to detective, and had become like a second father to her.

They had arrived at the house shortly after midnight and took over from the uniformed officers—Marshall and Landers— who’d been first on the scene.

“The call came in from Ms. Walker’s boss, the owner of Archer/Hert Realty. It seems Mr. Walker became concerned when his wife was late coming home and he couldn’t reach her on her cell phone, so he called her boss. Mr. Archer was also unable to contact Ms. Walker on her cell, so he drove out to the house she’d been showing and found—” Officer Landers swallowed hard. “I’ve never seen anything like it and I hope I never—”

“That bad, huh,” Dan said as he passed by Landers and entered the sprawling seventies ranch house. Lindsay followed, pausing in the foyer when Dan stopped to take a look around. Officer Marshall stood in the foyer talking quietly to a small, gray-haired man who looked as if he’d been crying.

The minute Officer Marshall heard the door open, he turned to face Dan. “Lieutenant, this is Mr. Archer. He’s the one who found Mrs. Walker’s body.” The officer nodded the direction. “In there, in the kitchen.”

“It’s the most god-awful thing I’ve ever seen.” Archer’s voice quivered with emotion. “How could anyone have done something so terrible to Jennifer?”

“Take Mr. Archer outside and let him get some fresh air,” Dan said. “And let me know the minute the CSI boys arrive.” He turned to Lindsay. “Are you ready for this?”

She nodded.

“If you get sick, don’t worry about it,” he told her. “It’s happened to all of us at least once.”

“I’ll be okay.” She felt quite confident that she could handle whatever they found. After all, she had watched several autopsies and hadn’t experienced more than momentary nausea, hadn’t she? And she had viewed pictures of countless corpses in various stages of decomposition and hadn’t even flinched.

Dan slipped on his disposable gloves and headed through the house, inspecting one room at a time. Without a moment’s hesitation, Lindsay mimicked his actions. When Dan stopped abruptly in the kitchen doorway, Lindsay almost skidded into his back. She managed to sidestep him and wound up to his right, which enabled her to glance around him and into the kitchen.

Barely restraining a shocked gasp, Lindsay stared in disbelief at the slender young woman sitting on the floor, her head bowed, as if praying, her mane of long, dark hair cascading over her shoulders. Thin nylon rope crisscrossed her ankles, binding her feet together. Her arms, pulled up above her head, were bound with the same type of rope and were attached to two open cabinet doors.

“Sweet Jesus,” Dan said.

The woman’s hands, severed at the wrists, lay on either side of her hips, only a few inches from her thighs. Two large pools of rich, drying blood permeated the kitchen, emitting a distinct metallic scent and creating ebony-red stains where the victim’s life’s blood had drained from her body.

“The son of a bitch chopped off her hands.” Dan glared at the discarded meat cleaver lying at the dead woman’s feet.

Lindsay didn’t know what to say, had no idea how to respond to her partner’s comments. She wasn’t sure Dan expected her to reply.

As she surveyed the dead woman from head to toe, Lindsay noted one small item that seemed totally out of place in the gory scene. “There’s a flower in her lap.”

“A red rose,” Dan said. “Probably our killer’s calling card.”

Lindsay made a mental check of red rose connotations she’d heard during her lifetime. The one that came to mind first was that a red rose means I love you. Nope, that couldn’t be it, could it? Then the lyrics to an old song hummed through her head. It was called “Red roses for a blue lady” she seemed to remember.

“Let’s just back out of here and wait for our CSI team. If we’re lucky our guy left more than a red rose behind.” Dan closed his eyes, grunted and shook his head in disgust. “Why do some of them have to resort to slicing-and-dicing their victims?”

She was certain that comment had been rhetorical, so she kept quiet and took several steps backward, giving Dan room to turn around. But before Dan could close the kitchen door, a ruckus of some sort broke out from the foyer. The sound of Officer Landers’s voice rang out loud and clear.

“Sir, you can’t go back there,” Landers said.

“The hell I can’t,” the agitated baritone replied.

Feet stomping. Grunts. Curses. A thud.

“Mr. Walker, come back here,” Landers cried. “Stop now!”

Judd Walker, former Chattanooga District Attorney and presently a successful lawyer who was expected to run for office in the next gubernatorial race, came storming toward Dan and Lindsay.

“Where is she?” Judd demanded.

“Mr. Walker …” Dan approached the victim’s husband.

Lindsay eased backward, placing herself in front of the closed kitchen door.

Judd glared at Lindsay. “Get out of my way. I want to see my wife.”

“No, sir, you don’t want to see her.” Dan reached out to grab Judd’s arm, but Judd shook off Dan’s tentative grasp and moved past him.

With Dan behind him and Lindsay in front of him, Judd paused for a split second and glowered at Lindsay. “Don’t try to stop me. I’ve never hit a woman—”

“Then don’t start now.” Dan grabbed Judd from behind.

Judd whirled around and shucked off Dan’s grasp. He drew back his closed fist and punched Dan in the stomach before either Dan or Lindsay realized the man’s intentions. Groaning, Dan doubled over in pain.

Lindsay took a deep, bracing breath, and the minute Judd turned, she sent a swift right hook into his jaw, momentarily stunning him. Staggering slightly, obviously startled by her unexpected attack, Judd quickly focused on his single objective. While Dan managed to recover enough to draw his pistol from his shoulder holster, Judd shoved Lindsay aside, an easy feat for him since she was half his size. At that precise moment, Lindsay decided she needed to master some type of martial art.

Judd Walker thrust open the kitchen door.

“Please stop, Mr. Walker,” Lindsay called to him. “Don’t go in there. Don’t touch anything. You’ll compromise the crime scene.”

Dan tromped past Lindsay, halted just inside the kitchen, and aimed his Magnum at Judd Walker’s back.

“You’re not going to shoot him,” Lindsay said.

Shaking his head, Dan lowered his weapon. “God damn it. I should have been able to stop him, but he caught me off guard. I must be getting too old for this job.”

Lindsay barely heard a word Dan said and hardly noticed Officers Landers and Marshall, who had arrived seconds too late to assist them. She watched as Judd Walker dropped to his knees and pulled his wife into his arms. He didn’t cry, didn’t rant and rave. He held her tenderly, his trembling fingers caressing her pale cheek.

“We’ve got to get him out of there.” Dan motioned to Landers and Marshall.

As Dan and the officers cautiously entered the kitchen, it happened, stopping them dead in their tracks. Judd Walker let out an earsplitting scream, the sound so horrific that Lindsay heard it in her nightmares for years to come.

Swish, swish. Back and forth. The wipers smeared the freezing rain across the windshield of Lindsay’s metallic blue SUV. Damn, that cold rain had turned into a rain/ice mix. Just what she needed. The state and county work crews would keep the main roadways clear, but the Walker hunting lodge was off the beaten path, the last five miles on a gravel road. A four-wheel drive did great in snow, but was no better than any other vehicle on ice.

Did she hope the roads became impassable? Was she looking for any excuse to avoid seeing Judd again? Probably. No, not probably. Definitely. The last time she’d had to deal with him, she’d sworn never again. The man was an unfeeling bastard. Yes, he’d lost his wife, his beloved Jennifer. Yes, the former Miss Tennessee had been murdered— her hands whacked off—by a psycho monster. Yes, Judd had deserved sympathy, compassion, and understanding. And she had given him all three, in spades, as had Griff. Hell, everybody who’d ever known him—and countless others who had never met him personally—had felt the man’s pain. But it had been nearly four years since Jenny Walker’s death, and it was way past time for Judd to return to the land of the living.

Of course, he would never be the man he once was. How could he be? No one expected that to happen. But where at one time Lindsay had held out hope that Judd would go through the grieving process and shed his crazed vigilante persona, she now accepted the fact that his grief and rage had sucked all other human emotions out of him. If not for his thirst for revenge, Judd Walker wouldn’t exist.

As soon as Griffin’s plane landed at the small commercial airport in Williamstown, Kentucky, he called Sanders.

“Any word on Gale Ann Cain’s condition?”

“Nothing, other than she’s still alive,” Sanders said.

“Heard anything from Lindsay?”

“No, but we didn’t expect to this soon, did we?”

“Not really.”

“You’re concerned about her having to confront Mr. Walker again.”

Griff didn’t reply immediately, hating to admit that he actually was concerned about Lindsay. “She’ll be all right. She’s tough.”

“Yes, sir.”

Whenever Sanders became formal enough with Griff to say “sir” to him, he immediately understood that his assistant was showing his disapproval. “Judd needs her,” Griff said. “She’s the only one who has a prayer of reaching him on any level.”

Silence.

“It’s not as if she’s a lamb being led to the slaughter.”

“No, sir.”

Griff knew when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em, especially with Sanders. It was definitely time to fold ’em.

“If you hear from her—”

“I’ll contact you, sir.”

Damn it, Lindsay McAllister was tough. She was a former police officer who’d done a short stint as a Chattanooga PD detective. Her old man had been a cop, as had his father before him. She had grown up as a tomboy, or so she had told him, preferring to play baseball with the boys instead of Barbie dolls with the other girls. Small-boned, petite, and slender, Lindsay should have projected an image of dainty femininity. Instead, with her pale, curly blond hair cut short and very little makeup covering her freckled nose and cheeks, she came across as a no-nonsense, no frills woman. If anyone made the mistake of thinking she was fragile, all they had to do was cross her. Since he had first met her, she had acquired topnotch martial arts skills, had become an expert marksman, and hid the emotional side of her nature as well as any man.

He liked Lindsay. Respected her. And in many ways had come to think of her more as a kid sister than an employee.

They had met almost four years ago, shortly after Jennifer Walker’s brutal murder. Lindsay had been partnered with Dan Blake, the lead detective on Jenny’s murder case; and he’d never seen anyone more determined to solve a crime than she had been. At first, he had chalked up her perseverance in finding Jenny’s killer to a rookie detective’s need to prove herself. But as the weeks and months went by, he realized that the case had become personal to Lindsay. Sometime between meeting Judd at the scene of his wife’s murder and becoming acquainted with him as a grieving widower obsessed with revenge, Lindsay had fallen in love with Judd Walker.

Griffin slid behind the wheel of the rental car, a two-year-old Lincoln. He’d never been to Williamstown, Kentucky, so he’d asked for directions to the hospital before he left the airport. He doubted that, in a town this size, even a direction-challenged person could get lost.

Three miles from the small airport, Griff took a left on Elmwood Street, which meant he should be less than five minutes from the hospital where Gale Ann Cain lay in a semi-coma, heavily drugged, and teetering between life and death. The former Miss Universe contestant was only one in a long line of former beauty queens who had been savagely attacked in the past four and a half years. By Griff’s—and the FBI’s—count, Ms. Cain was victim number twenty-nine. But neither he nor the FBI could be sure that all twenty-nine murders had been committed by the same person, and therefore weren’t positive that the murders were all connected. Nor could they be certain that there hadn’t been other victims.

Griff’s gut instincts told him all twenty-nine had a definite connection.

The victims had not been confined to one city, county, or state, making their killer nomadic, a guy who traveled around in search of the perfect target. But these women had not been chosen at random. Not by a long shot. The common denominator in these crimes was the fact that each woman had been a winner in some kind of beauty pageant—local, statewide, national, or international. Not one victim had been older than thirty-five. And each had still been beautiful.

Jennifer Mobley Walker had possessed a flashy kind of beauty: Big brown eyes, lustrous dark hair, full lips, large breasts, and long legs that went on forever. And she had been blessed with a bubbly, enthusiastic personality that drew people to her. To know Jenny was to love Jenny.

No one had been more surprised than Griff when his old friend, Judd Walker, a confirmed bachelor, had fallen head over heels for the former Miss Tennessee and married her less than a year after their first date. Women throughout the state had mourned the loss of such a desirable catch. Rich, handsome, and charming.

That had been then—five years ago.

The three-story hospital came into view as Griff neared the turnoff on to Pickler Avenue. If Gale Ann Cain lived long enough to ID her attacker, they would have a chance of catching this guy and stopping him before he killed again. Griff wasn’t sure that arresting the man and bringing him to justice could save Judd’s soul, but it was sure and certain that nothing else would. During the nearly four years he had worked on this case, he had done his utmost to stay detached, as much as it was possible when a friend was involved. But both he, Sanders, and especially Lindsay had become borderline-obsessed with seeing justice done.

After parking the rental car in the crowded visitors’ lot, Griff slipped on his leather gloves, tightened the silk scarf around his neck, and buttoned up his water-repellent overcoat. The harsh February wind bombarded him, chilling his face, and putting a giddyup in his step.

At the information desk in the lobby area, he acquired instructions on reaching the ICU unit.

As he stepped off the elevator, he unbuttoned his tan overcoat and unwrapped the scarf from his neck. He hated the sounds, smells, and sights in a hospital. Medicinal scents blended with the aroma of cleaning products and the stench of human sickness and death. Passing by patients’ rooms, he tried not to glance inside the open doors, tried to avoid viewing the weak, infirm, ill men and women. His avoidance came not from empathy, but from a lack of it, and Griff hated the phlegmatic elements in his nature that were so alien to his former self. A by-product of surviving at all costs, he surmised.

When he entered the intensive care waiting room, a twelve-by-fourteen-foot, windowless cubbyhole filled with a small group of bleary-eyed, rumpled men and women, he removed his leather gloves and stuffed them into his overcoat pocket. A few of the people in the room appeared to have slept on the two brown vinyl sofas and in the mismatched collection of uncomfortable-looking vinyl chairs. An assortment of small pillows and blankets of various sizes and colors lay scattered about haphazardly on the furniture and the floor.