Southern Cross Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Jen Blood

  ISBN: 978-0-9851447-7-7

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Design by Travis Pennington

  www.probookcovers.com

  For more information on the Erin Solomon series, visit

  www.erinsolomon.com

  For Ruth and Mariah

  Who taught me to celebrate my independent spirit, embrace my creative side,

  and, above all, never forget the healing power of a good belly laugh.

  Every girl should be blessed with the gift of such sassy, classy, wonderfully weird aunts.

  SOUTHERN CROSS

  An Erin Solomon Mystery

  By Jen Blood

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Part I: JUSTICE FIRST

  Chapter One

  DIGGS

  Chapter Two

  DANNY

  Chapter Three

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Four

  DIGGS

  Chapter Five

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Six

  DIGGS

  Chapter Seven

  DANNY

  Chapter Eight

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Nine

  DIGGS

  Chapter Ten

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Eleven

  DIGGS

  Chapter Twelve

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Thirteen

  DIGGS

  Chapter Fourteen

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Fifteen

  DANNY

  Part II: THE COUNTDOWN

  Chapter Sixteen

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Seventeen

  DIGGS

  Chapter Eighteen

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Nineteen

  DANNY

  Chapter Twenty

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DIGGS

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  DIGGS

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  DIGGS

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  SOLOMON

  Part III THE IDES OF MARCH

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  DIGGS

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  SOLOMON

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  DIGGS

  Chapter Thirty

  SOLOMON

  00:30:29

  DANNY

  00:28:16

  DIGGS

  00:25:40

  DANNY

  00:15:22

  DIGGS

  00:10:02

  SOLOMON

  00:05:59

  DANNY

  00:03:29

  DIGGS

  00:02:16

  DANNY

  00:00:20

  DIGGS

  00:00:04

  SOLOMON

  March 16

  12:05 a.m.

  DIGGS

  12:15 a.m.

  SOLOMON

  12:25 a.m.

  DANNY

  12:30 a.m.

  DIGGS

  1:15 a.m.

  SOLOMON

  1:30 a.m.

  DIGGS

  Chapter Thirty-One

  SOLOMON

  Epilogue

  Other Erin Solomon Mysteries

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  “Repent,” a voice whispered in the darkness.

  Wyatt Durham was on his hands and knees. Pebbles from the dusty ground dug into his palms. He lowered his head like a bull just hit with a cattle prod, trying to get his wits back. Someone stood beside him, a heavy hand between his shoulder blades to keep him down. Wyatt tried to speak, but his voice didn’t work.

  Nothing worked.

  “Repent,” the voice said again, lower this time.

  There was dried blood under Wyatt’s fingernails. The smell of something sweet and cloying in the air, like a jar of wet pennies: more blood.

  “The goat,” he whispered. He’d come for the goat. Mae was home waiting for him. The kids were gone for the night. Put the poor thing down and come on home, darlin’, she’d said to him before he left.

  The man beside him knelt, his mouth close to Wyatt’s ear. “One more chance, Doc. The end’s already nigh. Make your peace.”

  Wyatt closed his eyes, his body getting heavier. His elbows buckled. A hand came at him from behind, pushing him gently to the ground, tender as Mae on those sweet nights when they lay together. It was all familiar—nearly forgotten but still there, somewhere at the back of his mind, from days gone by and a life best left behind.

  Repent.

  Part I

  JUSTICE FIRST

  Chapter One

  DIGGS

  Every summer from twelve on up, I abandoned the ocean breezes and cool nights of coastal Maine for the wet swelter of western Kentucky, where the Durham family provided refuge from my stormy Maine home. When I was fifteen, Wyatt Durham and I were playing baseball one overcooked July day when I said something he saw as over the line about his little sister. He didn’t waste his breath explaining his views on the subject, though. Instead, he belted me in the stomach with a Louisville Slugger. It brought me to my knees, tears in my eyes, and for two days afterward every lungful of air burned going down.

  That’s the closest I can come to an analogy for what I felt when Wyatt’s wife Mae called me twenty-five years later, and told me my oldest friend was dead.

  I landed in Louisville at eight a.m. on a Tuesday in March, after sixteen hours traveling by boat, bike, bus, and plane to get there. Mae had tracked me down in the middle of a two-month trek in Costa Rica, where I was doing an in-depth piece on the surf scene at Guiones. I still wasn’t sure how she’d found me since I’d left no forwarding address and told no one where I was headed, but I had a feeling Erin Solomon had something to do with it.

  I’ve known Solomon since I mentored her at a Maine rag called The Downeast Daily Tribune when she was fifteen. Despite the fact that I was in my mid-twenties at the time, we struck up a close and possibly ill-advised friendship. In the seventeen years since, that friendship has morphed into something far more difficult to define. If anyone could find me, it was Solomon.

  Mae would neither confirm nor deny; she just asked me to come to Kentucky.

  I came.

  There was no one waiting for me when I landed—I’d already told Mae I’d rent a car, so she didn’t have something else to worry about while she prepared to bury the man she’d loved since grade school. Still in board shorts and sandals, I watched the natives while I waited for baggage claim to regurgitate my duffel.

  A gray-haired man in Dockers and a sweater vest embraced a pretty, fair-skinned woman a head shorter and maybe a decade younger than him. They kissed, his hand at the soft slope of her neck as he pulled her closer. It wasn’t like some teenage tonsil-hockey kiss, with too much tongue and that self-conscious need the very young have to prove their virility as publicly as possible. It was more intimate than that; more electrified. The man’s arm settled naturally around her shoulders when they parted. Their heads were tipped close as they walked away, hip to hip, and I could hear her laughter and see the light in his eyes as they left the airport.

  I retrieved my duffel. Despite three mar
riages, one of them to the very same little sister I’d taken a baseball bat to the gut for as a teenager, there was only one person I could imagine greeting me in the airport like that.

  Not for the first time—or even the hundredth—I thought of Solomon. And not for the first time—or the hundredth—I pushed that thought out of my head.

  As I made for the door, I felt the now-familiar weight of someone’s eyes on my back. I turned and scanned the crowd. A slow crawl of fear ran up my spine when a thin man with a receding hairline and angular features caught my eye and then ducked into the crowd before I could get a clear picture of him. He wore a black trench coat and carried an expensive leather briefcase. For a full thirty seconds of blind panic, I watched his progress in the crowd. The latest incoming flight was broadcast over the PA system; the man paused, listening. He turned once more, giving me an unobstructed view of his face.

  I didn’t recognize him.

  The slow crawl of fear faded, but it hardly disappeared.

  Six months before, a nameless ghoul threatened me at gunpoint while Solomon sat tied twenty feet away, both of us helpless to do a damned thing. That moment changed something fundamental about the way I carried myself. Since then, I’d spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder.

  True, the traveler with the trench coat and the briefcase wasn’t that nameless ghoul. That didn’t change what I knew to be true, though: he was out there somewhere. And he was watching us.

  From baggage claim, I went straight to the rental place to pick up the car I’d reserved, still trying to re-acclimate to civilization. A spit-shined, fresh-faced kid of no more than twenty greeted me at the counter. His hair was cut short. His tie was perfectly centered. I hadn’t bathed in two days, hadn’t shaved for considerably longer, and it turned out that my forty-year-old bones didn’t recover from wipeouts nearly as well as they had a decade ago.

  My shiny young friend didn’t look fazed, though.

  “I reserved a rental,” I said. “The name’s Daniel Diggins.” I pulled out my wallet to retrieve the confirmation code I’d scrawled on a napkin.

  The kid blinked at me, his smile faltering. “Uh—I’m sorry, sir…”

  I frowned and pushed the napkin toward him. “They’ve already charged my card—I’ve got the confirmation number right there. I don’t care what you give me. It doesn’t have to be what I reserved.”

  “Well, no, sir—we have cars. But you already picked up yours.”

  I stared at him, eyebrows raised. “Then why am I here?”

  “Not you,” he amended. “But your girlf—” He stopped, sensing that I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “She said you were meeting at the airport,” he insisted. “Red hair? Little thing… real pretty?” He sighed in relief, pointing toward the door. “There.”

  I turned around. Erin Solomon herself pushed the door open and crossed the threshold. Her hair was cropped shorter than I’d seen it since she was in high school, her fair skin a shade paler than I remembered thanks to the long Maine winter. She wore boot-cut jeans and a striped jersey, oversized sunglasses pushed back on her head. All the air left the room.

  “Hey, ace,” she said after a moment. “Need a lift?”

  <><><>

  “No,” I said the moment we were outside.

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?” she asked. “I just thought you could use some moral support.”

  “Nope. I’m fine, thanks.” The rental—my rental, a white Ford Focus—was idling in front of the rental office. Solomon’s second-in-command, Einstein, had his fuzzy white head out the window, his whole body wagging.

  “Look, I know we haven’t talked in awhile—”

  “Six months, actually,” I said. “We haven’t talked in six months, except for one panicked phone call in the middle of the night in September, when you’d had a bad dream and needed to hear my voice. You can’t just show up like this—”

  “I wasn’t trying to piss you off,” she said, more quietly than I’d expected. “You’re right: I have no right to be here. I was trying to help. If I’d just lost someone important, you’d be there. You always have been. I was just trying to do the same.”

  I didn’t say anything. She shrugged, looking awkward and miserable. “I’ll go if you really don’t want me here.”

  I should have told her to do exactly that—as much for her sake as mine. It wasn’t like she didn’t deserve it. But the fact was, the idea of returning to my old Kentucky home and all the Kentucky folk I’d left behind—including an ex-wife who, last time I checked, hated my guts—in order to bury my childhood friend was only slightly more appealing than being run down by a freight train. Twice.

  And it really was good to see her.

  Solomon chewed her lip. I was caught suddenly by the memory of luminescent green eyes and the feel of her body pressed to mine over the course of forty-eight hours last summer, when we were running for our lives and sleeping in one another’s arms and the only thing that mattered was survival. And her.

  “You’re a pain in the ass,” I said.

  “I know that. Do you want me to leave?”

  I scratched my neck, digging in hard enough to feel it. Breathed deep. And took a step toward her. “Come here.”

  She hesitated, a shadow of something damned close to fear flickering in her eyes. When she reached me, I pushed a lock of hair from her forehead and pulled her into my arms. She held on tight, her head nestled just below my chin. After a few seconds, she pulled back, her eyes wet. I smiled.

  “Damn, Solomon… Are you crying?”

  She smacked me in the gut, brushing the tears away with the back of her hand as she tried to regain her composure. “No, smartass—you’re just so ripe it brought tears to my eyes. Don’t they have showers in Costa Rica?”

  It was cool and clear when we left the airport. The grass was green. The sky was blue. According to a local with whom I’d flown, it had been a mild winter and now, in March, spring had taken hold of Kentucky and showed no signs of letting go. I took the wheel of the rental without the aid of GPS or Rand-McNally and kept my foot heavy on the accelerator, rediscovering the Bluegrass State like the half-forgotten lyric of a once-favorite song.

  Once we hit I-64, I glanced at Solomon when she wasn’t paying attention, searching for signs that she’d fallen apart without me. There were none. There was, however, a thin scar running along the side of her right wrist, another remnant from our forty-eight hours of hell in August. She caught me looking and covered the scar with her left hand uncomfortably.

  “How’s the wrist?” I asked.

  “Better,” she said. “More or less. I just had another surgery about a month ago.”

  “And that makes…?”

  “Three.”

  Three surgeries. Six months since we’d seen each other last. Another memory flashed through my mind: Solomon ripping off the splint I’d made and pulling herself out of our cave prison to safety; shouting down to me as I bled on the ground below. I’m not leaving you.

  I sighed. It sounded wearier than it should have, considering I’d just gotten back from two months of hanging out on the beach. We fell back into silence.

  “So, what did Mae tell you?” she finally asked.

  I frowned. I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the information I’d gotten so far on that count. “It’s a little bizarre,” I said.

  “An understatement if ever I heard one,” she agreed. “Did she give you details?”

  “Wyatt disappeared on March second—a Saturday night,” I said, reciting the scant facts I’d been given. “His truck was still at the site of his last appointment, but there was no sign of him. He was found on the side of the highway late Wednesday night with an injection mark in his neck and no other sign of physical trauma, wearing a suit Mae had never seen before. And no shoes.”

  “That’s what I got, too,” she said. “So weird. And someone like Wyatt… I mean, who didn’t like the guy? He was a country vet. James Herriot in a c
owboy hat. Who murders James Herriot?”

  “Apparently, someone.”

  We fell silent again. I realized after a few minutes that I wasn’t the only one sneaking sideways glances. I caught her eventually and quirked an eyebrow.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You look good.”

  “The last time you saw me, we’d just spent two days running for our lives with a madman on our heels. It’s not hard to look good when that’s your yardstick.” I paused. “You sound surprised.”

  “No… not exactly.” I waited patiently, eyes on the road, while she sorted through what she wanted to say. “Actually, I wasn’t sure what I’d find when your plane landed,” she conceded.

  Between the ages of ten and eighteen, Solomon spent most of her free time cleaning up after her mother—who was a stellar surgeon by day, and the town drunk by night. Then she followed that up with a nice little stint looking after me in her twenties, before I got clean four years ago. Old habits die hard.

  “Ah,” I said. “So there’s the real reason you showed up today: still playing designated driver after all these years.”

  “You quit your day job, dumped your girlfriend, and took off for Costa Rica with a bunch of extras from The Endless Summer. Is it really so crazy for me to think you’d be doing lines off some beach bunny’s backside?”

  I laughed out loud. “Jesus, Solomon. It was a surf trip, not spring break. I was with a bunch of forty-year-old guys—hell, half of them had their wives and kids with them. Someday, I’m taking you on one of these trips. Your perception of the lifestyle is just bizarre.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. Translation: Solomon wasn’t free to think about surf trips with me anymore.

  “How’s Juarez?” I asked, taking the silence as sufficient segue. Juarez was Jack Juarez, God’s gift to the FBI. Tall and lean and vaguely Cuban. And nice, actually. The bastard.

  “He’s good,” she said.

  “He knows you’re here with me?”

  “It was his idea.” Of course it was. “I mean—not totally his idea,” she amended. “I mentioned it; he said I should come without him.”