The Chosen

“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.”