Under Suspicion, With Child

She nodded, a swell of relief rushing over her. “Then I’ll be on my way.”

A large, calloused hand clamped onto her arm. “I’m taking you there.” Andrei’s chin set in a hard line.

The hairs on the back of her neck bristled. For the past ten years, she’d been independent of anyone telling her what to do. Even the two men in her life hadn’t interfered with her decisions. But with a body lying at the base of Raven’s Cliff, she didn’t want to make it a big deal.

With firm resolve, she peeled his hand off her arm. “No. You have much more important things to do. I’ll be fine on my own.” That said, she left, refusing to give him the opportunity to argue.

Having lost her sandals somewhere along the cliff, Jocelyne walked barefoot, her feet more tender than when she was a girl. The day was dreary, with clouds hanging low on the horizon and no sun to cast shadows or shed light into dark corners.

She hurried past the shops, hoping she didn’t bump into anyone else before she got home. All her old insecurities about being the village kook’s daughter surfaced to haunt her every step.

The Cliffside Inn stood near the town square, stately and welcoming after the horror of finding a woman’s dead body floating in the surf. Until she reached the inn, she’d felt fine. Numb, but fine. As soon as her feet touched the first step, her knees shook. By the time she opened the door, her entire body shook.

When all she wanted to do was go up to her room and collapse across her bed, she knew she couldn’t. Her baby needed nourishment. She had to get food in her stomach, even if eating was the last thing she wanted to do. This living being growing inside relied on her to care for him or her. This baby had not yet been introduced to this cold, callous world, where a woman wasn’t safe even in a small peaceful town like Raven’s Cliff.

Tears stung Jocelyne’s eyes. What a world to bring a child into. Had her curse followed her back to Raven’s Cliff?

When her first lover died seven years ago, she’d attributed it to bad luck that he’d been run over by a city bus. When the father of her unborn child fell on the subway tracks and was crushed by several tons of train, Jocelyne had thought long and hard. The common denominator was that they both loved her. Nothing else about their lives was the same. They had different occupations, different looks and different philosophies. But they’d dared to love her.

Despite her desire to put her mother’s Wicca beliefs behind her, Jocelyne couldn’t help but wonder if there was truth in the saying, Nothing is ever a coincidence. All actions, all events have a purpose.

With the death of Tyler Reed, her baby’s father, and newly pregnant, Jocelyne had struggled to hold it together. In the end, she was drawn back to where her troubles began. Maybe if she resolved her anger with her mother, the rest of her life would get better and the curse would lift. She hoped so for the sake of her unborn child.

The image of a girl dressed in white, lying at the bottom of the cliff, stabbed at her empty stomach, making it knot in pain. So far it looked as though her curse had followed her and extended beyond men who loved her. Was she destined to be followed by a black cloud of doom?

AFTER SPENDING THE DAY watching the state crime team comb the cliffs and the rocky shore below, Andrei was physically and emotionally exhausted. But he couldn’t stop until he found the murderer. He owed it to Sofia, his beautiful little sister who’d been the third victim of the Seaside Strangler.

Angela’s body had been recovered before noon and taken directly to the coroner where an autopsy was begun immediately. Mayor Wells had been there holding his breath when they pulled her from the surf, his face gray and lined with worry. Only when they turned her over and proved for certain she was Angela, did he draw in a shaky breath and run a hand through his thick, graying hair, standing it on end. He’d left shortly afterward, without a word to the captain, disappearing from the scene like a ghost.

Andrei knew what the medical examiner would say. Died of strangulation by a necklace of rare seashells. The same fate as his sister, her friend Cora and Rebecca Johnson.

Failure ate at his gut, stirring his anger. No clues had surfaced thus far to point the police force in the right direction. No fingerprints, no DNA samples from the attacker. Nothing. In a small community like Raven’s Cliff, it shouldn’t be so hard to find a killer.

But for the past several months, the perpetrator had eluded detection, slipped through their grasp and killed again.

Ten o’clock at night, and having sat at his desk for the past three hours, Andrei tapped a pencil to the file before him. The file he’d compiled and studied over the past couple months until he could recite every word, describe every picture. In it were the happy, unmarred faces of the women who’d died and the pictures taken after their bodies were discovered. A morbid before and after testimony to the killer’s impact.

After interviewing family, friends and acquaintances, Andrei had determined that none of the victims had enemies sufficiently angry with them. At least not enough to warrant killing them.

So far, the killer preyed on young women, yet none of the women had shown signs of rape. All of them had been dressed in white wedding gowns, strangled and thrown into the sea. What was the connection to the young women, the white wedding dresses and the sea? The whole situation reeked of sacrifices. Some sick ritual dreamed up by a demented mind.

A chill slithered down the back of Andrei’s neck.

Who would he target next?

His thoughts drifted to the woman he’d found by the cliffs. The image of Jocelyne Baker, pregnant, standing straight, facing the ocean, the wind whipping her dress against her thighs swam through his mind. God, he hated to think of finding her facedown in the water, her fiery-red hair floating around her pale face. Andrei clenched his fist, the pencil between his fingers snapping in two.

So far, the maniac had preyed on unmarried, young women, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t take a pregnant one. He needed to stop by the inn and stress the importance of personal safety to Ms. Baker. Not that she’d listen to him. But maybe for the sake of her unborn child she’d hear what he had to say. He glanced at his watch.

“Go home.” Captain Swanson stepped up to Andrei’s desk. “Get some rest. You look all done in.”

“I have to figure this out.” He slammed the broken pencil into the trash bin beside his desk.

“You’ve been on it for months. Hell, the entire force has been on it for months and we’ve found nothing.”

Andrei pounded the middle of the file with his fist. “Another girl died on our watch, damn it.”

“Take it easy, Lagios.” The captain laid a hand on Andrei’s shoulder. “You didn’t kill her. It’s not your fault.”

“It’s my fault I didn’t catch him before he struck again. It’s my fault I didn’t catch him before he took my sister and her friend.”

“We don’t have anything to go on. This guy isn’t leaving us a bone to gnaw on.”

“Then we have to interview every last person in this town, knock on every door, search every closet, basement and attic until we find something.”

“We can’t do that. People have rights.”

Andrei pushed to his feet so fast, his chair fell over backward. “What about Sofia’s rights? Or Angela’s or Cora’s? They had the right to live and he took that right away from them.”

“You know the law. We can’t search houses without probable cause and a search warrant.”

“To hell with search warrants. We have a killer to catch before he does it again.” Andrei’s lips pressed together and he breathed fast, exhaling through his nose. He wouldn’t let the bastard kill again—he couldn’t. “We have to be missing something. Some small trace of evidence that will lead us to the suspect.”

“This is his fourth victim, he has to slip up sometime.”

As the last statement left the captain’s mouth, the phone on Andrei’s desk rang. Could he dare to hope it was a sign?

Andrei lifted the phone. “Lagios.”

“Andrei, this is Gordon Fennell, I think I might have found something.”

“Are you done with the autopsy, already?” Andrei glanced up at Swanson. “Wait. I have the captain here. Let me put you on speakerphone.” He punched the button and laid the receiver on its rest. “Go ahead.”

“First of all, the victim has the same markings as the others. The same seashell necklace strung together on generic fishing line. She’s wearing a wedding dress that could have been bought in a resale shop anywhere in Maine.”

Tension built behind Andrei’s temples as the medical examiner listed what Andrei already knew. He resisted the urge to tell the man to cut to the chase.

“Everything points to the same attacker.”

“What is it you found?” the captain asked.

Andrei held his breath, hoping this would be the big break they were looking for.

“A trace of a chemical found in her bloodstream. I retested blood from the other three victims and found it in their blood as well.”

“What is it?”

“From what I could tell, it’s a chemical that comes from the henbane plant, not something you find around these parts on a regular basis. In some places it’s illegal to grow.”