Celestia is Falling (A Croft & Croft Romance Adventure Book 1) Read online

  A place to heal.

  A place to be reborn.

  A place to forget.

  A place to hide.

  Now, it was forever tainted by the words uttered by her deputy in her office. There would be a struggle to remember the purity of before as death would now taint it forever.

  When they finally arrived and parked alongside the other patrol vehicles, Emma grabbed a pair of latex gloves and tossed a set to her deputy.

  “Put these on, Dwayne, and be very careful where you step. Make sure all the other men glove up before they touch a single thing.”

  Deputy Ridge stared at the sheriff in awe. In the time it took to arrive there, she’d undergone a complete metamorphosis. No longer was the easygoing, peaceful woman there in his presence. Somehow, she’d… hardened. It was etched on her face and in every movement she made. It was as if she had slipped into a different person, one with a tougher veneer and accustomed to what they were about to face. Gone was the sweet woman they all loved and appreciated. Death had made her different.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered, pulling on his gloves and struggling with them. The quick, easy motion was more proof she’d done this repeatedly. The sheriff was accustomed to it. It was like a routine for her--almost second nature. Before gloving up, he’d watched her secure her hair and unclip the holster at her hip. Dwayne noticed that she had tucked a spare pair of gloves in her back pocket, in case she needed them. He was in awe that Emma appeared almost mechanical and on autopilot.

  Who was this woman they called friend and boss? This was a whole side of her that he’d never expected to see.

  Ridge followed her as she moved towards the clearing and the mutilated victim who was waiting for her attention.

  “Sheriff, over here!” shouted Deputy Thomas, waving furiously. There was a sense of relief that he could pass this off to someone else. Standing guard over the dead was downright creepy.

  Emma made her way to the man and his location. It was hard to not notice that her deputy looked pale and an awful shade of green.

  “You going to be ok, Deputy Thomas?” she asked, handing him a pair of gloves.

  “I think so,” he replied, not buying it himself.

  She simply nodded, scanning the scene. “What did you touch?” The sheriff watched him with cold, empty cop eyes as she assessed the situation. It was the same look she’d given countless beat cops while she stood over the dead in Philly.

  “I didn’t touch a thing. I couldn’t. It’s too disgusting,” he finally admitted.

  Emma understood what he was feeling.

  “At first I thought it was some piece of animal, and then I got closer. It looks like a woman, but she’s…” There was a pause and what sounded like a gag, “but she’s carved up real BAD. Whoever did this to her laid her out.”

  It’s all he had to say to describe what was coming.

  The sympathy was there in her voice and Emma hated seeing her men suffer. “Just keep taking deep breaths. It’ll pass, Deputy,” she offered, reassuringly. “Stay here and wait for the rest of the others. Dwayne and I will go ahead and prep the scene for the doctor.” Emma glanced back over her shoulder at the man. “It’ll be okay.”

  Deep inside, she didn’t believe her own words. Emma may have appeared calm, but her own stomach rolled and her heart pounded a wild staccato in her chest.

  Forcing herself forward, she entered into the clearing. It was like the last year dissolved, and she was back in the alleys again. The smell was the first thing that hit her.

  It was the smell of death.

  Gone was the distinct odor of copper pennies from the blood. It tinged and mixed with something far worse. Before Emma even saw the woman, she knew. It was going to be horrific. The hint of bowl and blood intermingled in the air, giving her a clue as to what kind of death the woman had suffered. What would be coming was going to rock them all. Emma already knew--she’d lived it many times before.

  Violence and its companion Death sat in the field, waiting for someone to gaze down upon them, becoming horrified. The viciousness of the acts committed were lurking, ready to take them all by surprise.

  “I can smell it,” muttered Dwayne, sickly.

  “You smell death,” she said, her voice void of all emotion. “There’s going to be a lot of blood.”

  Emma wasn’t wrong. As they approached the body, there was a sickly hue to the ground surrounding what used to be a woman. The blood was soaking into everything that sat beneath and around her. It wasn’t until she walked over to the victim that she got the full effect of what had happened in the clearing. Surprisingly, she didn’t even flinch.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Ridge visibly shaken. He quickly turned in an effort to keep his breakfast down.

  Dwayne stared back at the cars while his boss crouched down next to the victim to study her body. How she could do it, he’d never know.

  At first, Emma simply scanned the form, taking it all in. No one had touched her, except the perpetrator of the crime. Now, it was her job to analyze what the killer was trying to convey. The corpse had once been curvy, like a woman. There was the distinctive shape of hips and breasts. But violence had tried to erase her gender.

  All her clothes were stripped, including her bra and shoes. The only thing the killer had decided to leave on her were the panties. At one time, Emma doubted they’d been that color red. The white lace looked to have soaked up its share of the dead woman’s blood.

  Yeah, this was definitely a mutilated body.

  Emma leaned over the victim, absorbing as many fine details as possible before she would be moved by the doctor. She stared down into the damaged face, fighting the need to feel sympathy and sorrow. Emma pushed it back down. Now wasn’t the time for those feelings. They’d offer the victim nothing. What was needed was resolution. They needed to find who did this and mourn for the woman later.

  The killer needed to be caught.

  “Is that a woman?” asked Dwayne, still unable to look back at the scene.

  “It was.” Those two words spoke volumes.

  The sheriff shifted her focus back to the victim. The dead woman’s hands were covered in blood and the residue had dried on her fingers and nails. Emma normally wouldn’t have touched the body until the ME arrived to examine and clear it, but this was Celestia. They didn’t exactly have protocols set in place for vicious homicide. It really wouldn’t matter, so she pushed on with the investigation.

  Picking up the woman’s hand, Emma inspected it closely. Just what she suspected--the woman had fought for her life. Her forearms were cut and covered with blood. The stab wounds to her upper torso were telling of the rage the killer had been filled with during the crime. Shockingly, gone was all her hair. It was hacked from her head and tossed aside to the ground. There had been a struggle, and her face was beat beyond recognition. This woman didn’t go to death easily. She fought hard.

  Emma’s outrage and fear began pushing to the surface, and she was forced to shove it deeper just to get through the crime scene. Now wasn’t the time for a breakdown.

  “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” stated Deputy Ridge, glancing back over at the woman.

  “I’ve seen worse,” she muttered in response.

  How she wished she could say that this was the vilest tragedy that she had seen done to a human being. The overwhelming sickness of the situation caught in her throat.

  Then Emma saw it.

  Beneath the chopped up hair, there was a sheet of paper. Emma retrieved it, being careful to not leave blood on it from her gloves.

  “Dwayne, get me a plastic bag for the clothes and this note,” she ordered, glancing over at her deputy. The look on his face was of horror, that he was needed closer to the remains.

  “Okay,” he muttered, moving towards her. Within seconds, he’d gone from a sea green hue to the pallor of a corpse himself.

  She was about to lose him any second. Emma knew this was the first time he’d been this close to
human ravaged by murder. There was such innocence in the men she worked with, and she longed for a touch of it at this moment. Part of her wished she could get sick over all this.

  He started gagging.

  “Over there!” she demanded, pointing to the furthest part of the crime scene. The last thing Emma needed was him retching all over the evidence.

  Dwayne dropped the bag, racing away from the dead woman. He hit the ground knees first, purging everything in his gut.

  There was nothing but sympathy for her deputy. Emma understood what he was feeling, but the years of wading through scene after scene just like this had dulled her emotions. There was no naiveté left for Emma in the real world.

  Life was cold and death wasn’t always pretty.

  Delicately, she slid the note into the clear plastic, staring down at the words.

  The game has begun and the challenge is coming. Be prepared for the next one.

  The Hunter

  “Sheriff, what does it say?” inquired Dwayne, as he finally made his way back over to her. Now he was feeling a little better. If he didn’t look at the body and focused solely on his boss, he’d get through it.

  Emma glanced up at the man. Her mind was whirling at what she’d read. Part of her wanted to pretend it wasn’t true. Not only did they have a murder, but now, it had escalated with a few words.

  “It says we have a serial killer on our hands.”

  “Oh God!” he replied in horror.

  Emma’s eyes flickered back over to the dead woman. “I have a feeling that things are going to get ugly real fast.”

  The sound of approaching cars caught her attention.

  Deputy Thomas yelled from his sentry point. “Doctor Brooks is here!”

  Emma stood and began the walk back to the approaching physician. He was going to have one hell of a job ahead of him, and she hoped he was ready for it. The little voice in Emma kept screaming repeatedly, warning her of what was coming.

  Everything had changed.

  Her old enemy was back on her trail and taunting her.

  Death had found her once again.

  ~ Chapter Two ~

  Monday Late Afternoon

  Later that day, Emma sat behind her desk, stewing over all the information that she had on the homicide. After returning to the office, she’d sequestered herself in her room, closing out the others. Inside, she told herself she was studying the file and details, but she knew the truth.

  She was hiding.

  The sheriff’s entire department was rocked by the day’s events. There was a tense, uneasiness flowing through the station, and it was making her, and everyone else nervous and on edge.

  Emma tried to calm them all down, informing them that the killer would be apprehended and quickly. For an hour, she was offering reassurance to her men and staff that there was nothing to worry about.

  They were all lies--ones that she didn’t even believe herself.

  As if her day couldn’t get worse, she was currently dealing with the mayor’s office, and the apparent outrage that had occurred when she had the gall to call in the FBI without letting Ron Tate make the decision.

  “What do you mean you contacted the FBI?” bellowed the mayor into the phone. “Don’t you see the panic this is going to cause? We don’t know if there’ll be more killing. Aren’t you jumping the gun a little here?”

  “Mayor, if we have a serial killer here, when would be the time to call the FBI? After we have a morgue full of dead women or at the beginning, so we can stop the killer before we lose control of the situation? I needed the expertise and technology of the FBI.”

  He continued raging on, and she simply listened to him in his infinite stupidity.

  “This was done in haste!”

  “Again, what would you have liked me to do?” she asked. “We have a limited staff, no official Coroner, and the only lab is attached to the Photo Mart. Do you think they can magically extract DNA with their picture machines?” The words dripped with sarcasm, and Emma hoped he caught it.

  “This is going to make everyone panic. You should have conferred with me!” he demanded. “We aren’t the Philadelphia Police Department. You should have used your common sense and came to me first.”

  “Oh well, here’s a thought,” she snapped back into the phone. “How about at our next meeting we come up with protocol on what to do when we have a serial killer? Then we can have a productive get-together for a change. ”

  The phone went silent.

  “This is new for everyone here except me. I’m the logical one to make the decisions on killers, since I’ve dealt with plenty. Get your ass kissing lackey to send me a memo on the proper code of behavior for a killing spree.” She forced herself to take a few deep breaths.

  Emma could visualize in her head the vein throbbing on Ron Tate’s forehead. For all intents and purposes, Emma knew this was going to happen. When she got to the station and thought about it, she realized that something like this could go south very fast. They didn’t have the luxury of waiting to see if the killer was yanking their chains.

  There was no choice in her mind.

  Once Emma called the FBI field office and described the scene of the murder and the note, the man on the phone was quick to guarantee agents as soon as the next day.

  Something about that puzzled her. They generally didn’t send assistance that fast. Don’t get her wrong, it was a relief, but also puzzling why it happened quickly. She’d worked closely with FBI agents before in Philadelphia, but this seemed too…URGENT. That little niggling feeling sat in the back of her head all day, not helping the ache at the base of her skull.

  Emma’s focus was drawn back to the man blabbering at her on the phone. Why couldn’t he see that her sole intent was to get a profiler to check out the murder and give her some assistance? The man was making it a pissing match and losing sight of the true importance.

  Now it was about the victim and justice.

  Finally, she’d had enough. “Well, you know what, Mayor? I’ve found that when a serial killer pops up, it’s best to get the reinforcements in as soon as possible. Not when people running for re-election believe it’s in their best interest,” she snapped, rubbing her neck to work the kinks out. “Besides, the FBI seemed to want in, and who are we to stop them if they can guarantee our citizens’ safety?” Emma paused before emphasizing what she knew he would understand. “You know, our voting citizens.” Emma mentally drew a check in her column when he stopped the bitching.

  There was an audible hiss over the phone.

  “If that’s all, sir, I have to get ready for the FBI. They’ll be arriving tomorrow sometime, and I need to make a trip out to the house to discuss their daughter.”

  As she hung up the phone, Emma stared at the name and address that was sitting on her desk. Doctor Brooks had found the woman’s ID in her purse, and in combination with the abandoned car registered to her, they easily obtained her identity.

  Fortunately, Doctor Brooks volunteered to do the notify, since Megan Landry had once been one of his patients. Emma was sure that it had been a horrible experience and honestly, she was more than glad it wasn’t her job to handle it.

  When it came to knocking on a victim’s door, telling the family their loved one was never returning and why, it stole pieces of your soul every time. She had done that job more times than she cared to remember in Philadelphia. Each time, Emma lost a little bit more of her humanity to her enemy, death. To this day, she still carried each and every person with her.

  Shaking her head, she opted to suck it up and get it done. There were questions to ask, and that had to be completed before the FBI rolled into town and took over the investigation.

  Leaving the station, all Emma really wanted to do was go home. She needed to shower and some strong coffee to help her forget.

  Damn!

  Everything about this day was exactly why she ran and came to Celestia. This was what she never wanted to do again--the blood, the guts and the
families of the dead. It was a hellish trifecta that Emma could live without.

  Hopping into her Jeep, she drove out to the address and prayed she could face the family, convincing them she had it all under complete control.

  It was a total farce. If anything, Emma was spiraling helplessly into the fear and terror.

  What she needed now was a miracle to get her through all this. Deep down, Emma knew she wasn’t strong enough to face it alone. What she wouldn’t give to have someone to lean on and tell her it was all going to be all right.

  Yeah, good luck with that.

  * * *

  “Holy shit!” exclaimed Special Agent Curtis Briggs, as he was handed the paper with the contact information. “We have another one!”

  Senior Special Agent Greyson Croft glanced up, having already seen the paper that was handed to him twenty minutes ago. He scanned it, making certain that it was indeed related to his current case. “I think we picked back up on his trail,” he stated, hoping he was right. The killer they were hunting went cold a few months ago and until that call, he was continually frustrated by the nut job’s disappearing act.

  “You think it’s him?” Briggs asked. He was relatively new in the office and had been partnered up with Agent Croft for a reason. The man was damn good at his job and a field veteran.

  “I hope so. I want to catch this bastard and lock him away for a long time.”

  Briggs nodded. “When do we leave?”

  Croft leaned back in his chair and considered the question. “I want to head home in a bit, pack for a few nights, and get some sleep. I don’t know how long we’ll be there, but we’ll head to Celestia in the morning. There’s a Sheriff Starling who is going to be waiting for us.”

  He was getting revved up.