Dead and Buried: Where the Bodies Lie (Chasing Happy Book 1) Read online

  Dead and Buried

  Where the Bodies Lie

  Jenni M Rose

  Copyright © 2017 by Jenni M Rose

  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 written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Dead and Buried

  Where the Bodies Lie

  Pools of blood without bodies were hard to explain. Animal vs car? Human vs human? No way to know. He hated blood, the tangy smell made his stomach churn, hot and acidic.

  Butch Hardy stood, hands on hips, in the center of the bright crime scene lights and looked around. The local hellhole known as the Railroad District was the only place in the city he’d ever come across pools of blood. Every damn time that description came across the radio he knew he’d end up there. Worse than dilapidated, it looked closer to a bombed ghetto from the second world war. Hollowed out and burned down, its reputation so bad even the local motorcycle gang had their headquarters in a better part of town.

  Just last year he’d found the corpse of little girl locked in a freezer about a block from where he stood now. Led there by a kid he’d found cowered in the corner of a whorehouse surrounded by heroin and dirty needles.

  He’d set aside being a cop that day, changed beyond anything he could explain, though he tried. He’d picked that girl up off the floor and taken her home to his wife, begged her to consider fostering the kid. It had taken him a long while to explain why it was so important she stay with them. He still wasn’t sure his wife got the why of it, but she’d said yes nonetheless.

  It helped, he reminded himself, to know there were things other than horror and death to come out of the Railroad District.

  “Detective?”

  Butch knew that voice. The youngest of all the crime scene techs, Magdalene Bowers stood all of five feet zero and was waving him down with a handful of plastic evidence bags.

  “You get something?” He asked, hand outstretched.

  “Sure,” she explained vaguely, the cold December air making her breaths puff with steam. “Fibers. Hair. Pretty sure I’ve got stomach contents mixed in there,” she shrugged.

  It was better than nothing.

  “Want me to walk you through the evidence samples?” Her sweet smile was as fake as her blonde hair.

  He ignored her sarcasm, a jab at his squeamishness no doubt, and asked a question of his own. “When was the last pool of blood call? Three weeks?”

  “About,” she agreed. “Few blocks over. That one was human. Female,” she said.

  He didn’t need the reminder. Open cases like that haunted him, day in and day out, as they sat on his desk, taunting him.

  “Three this year so far,” he mused.

  “Three last year,” she chimed in. “Two the year before that. Maybe we’re waiting on one more.”

  She’d done her homework. He liked that. Crime scene techs were usually in and out without much fuss. Maggie was a breed all her own and he’d learned quickly that she formed her own theories on scenes and wasn’t afraid to share them. Since the city slashed the department budget and his partners were all part timers, he’d take any help he could get.

  “Safe to assume this one will be human and female too,” he concluded. So far, they all had been.

  “Mathematically, the odds are…”

  Butch zoned out as she began rambling off some numbers that meant absolutely nothing to him.

  Two years ago, the appearance of the blood pools had left them all stumped. No reports of missing women within a fifty-mile radius matching the timeline, no suspicious activity was every reported. It was as if the pools just appeared there on their own. Same side of town, different blocks. Never any bodies.

  And while eviscerating someone in the middle of a street seemed like it would be a conspicuous act, Butch knew it wasn’t. Not down there. Occupied by hookers and vagrants, pimps and dealers, they all kept to themselves when the blue lights lit up the street. No one would snitch on anyone else. There were no neighborhoods to canvas, no one to ask if they’d seen anything. People lived in boarded up houses, long condemned by the housing department or on the streets.

  When the same thing happened last year, they’d called in the FBI but with no bodies ever found, there wasn’t much to go on. They’d come in thinking they’d get witnesses, flex their fed muscles and have people crawling out of the woodwork begging to talk to them.

  They didn’t find a single soul that knew anything about anything pertaining to the case. No one concerned about a missing friend, no one that heard a scream in the night.

  Trying to figure out what happened to these women would take a miracle.

  Or someone that could talk to the dead.

  “Hey kid,” Melinda whispered, quickly checking the door behind her. The last thing she needed was the kid’s mother to come in. “Kid. Wake up.”

  Moving slowly, the girl rubbed her eyes and rolled over, her back to Melinda.

  “You said you’d help me,” Melinda complained as she sat straddled on the windowsill, half in and half out of the house. “You gotta wake up.”

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” the girl grumbled, her back still facing the window. “Butch says you can’t come in.”

  “Yo daddy ain’t here,” Melinda reminded her. “Besides, he don’t know shit about me and why I need to be here.”

  “You’re not supposed to say shit.” The girl finally sat up in bed and looked at Melinda with reproach.

  “Your Ma says shit all the time. You just said shit,” Melinda pointed out. “Livin’ up in this fancy house makin’ you think you all booshie and shit. You ain’t.”

  When the kid just looked confused Melinda waved her off and flipped her weave over her shoulder.

  “Girl, I been tellin’ you, yo Ma always said you was a good girl. She say, Melinda, baby, if you in trouble you go see Happy. I’m in trouble, girl.” She looked down at the nails on her right hand, pleased her manicure was still fly as hell. “But I ain’t got all the time in the world, you know. I got places to be. So, Imma need you to get yo ass up outta bed, get yo cute lil' self dressed and come with me now.” She looked over her shoulder and down to the ground. “You can probably make it.”

  “I can’t go out. It’s the middle of the night. I’m only seven,” Happy pointed out.

  “That don’t matter. You the only one can help. Ain’t no one else can even see me,” she scoffed, put out by the entire thing. “And you see this shit?” She waved to the spot her left arm used to be. “Missin’ a dang arm. I just had my nails did, girl. You see this manicure? Paid me some good money for these tips here and now I only got half. I ain’t spendin’ my ghostly days lookin’ at some half ass manicure shit.”

  “When my friend Lainey died she saw her Gramma and got to go to heaven, I think,” Happy offered for at least the tenth time. “Maybe you should try that.”

  “You think I didn’t try that Ghost Whisperer shit already. Ain’t nobody waitin’ for me on no other side. It’s me, myself and I. And you, kid.”

  “And them,” Happy pointed to the women standing silently in the corner of the room. One of them looked terrified, like she still wasn’t sure what happened to her or what was going on. She was new. The other one was the most terrifying thing Happy had ever seen.

  “Pfft,” Melinda rolled her eyes. “That bitch never say a damn thing. Just stand there all creepy and shit, freakin me the hell o
ut. The other one’s new. Just popped in a while ago. She still in shock.”

  “Happy?”

  Melinda tried to cross her arms but only had one. Instead, she looked at the bedroom door in annoyance.

  “Why this bitch always come in here in the middle of the damn night? Don’t she know you sleepin’?”

  There was a tap on the door before it opened a few inches.

  “You okay in here, Happy?” When she saw the little girl sitting up in bed she swung the door open and stepped in. “Everything okay? Did you have a bad dream?”

  Happy looked to Melinda who looked affronted. “Bad dream? Girl, I’m the nicest damn ghost you eva seen. I’m like Caspa.”

  “No, I’m fine,” Happy told her foster mom Erin, who was now sitting on her bed. She swallowed and leaned back as the scary woman from the corner stepped forward. Closer she came until her spirit loomed over Erin, casting a shadow only Happy could see.

  “Are you sure? You need a drink or something?”

  Happy looked at the ghosts in her room. They would not be leaving her alone tonight.

  She’d only been living with this set of foster parents for six months and she did her best to be independent so they’d keep her for a while. She liked it here. They let her eat whenever she wanted and no one wanted to watch her take a bath. She had her own bed and they’d even bought her a bike. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about the ghosts in her room and be weird. It was bad enough they knew exactly where she came from, how dirty she was on the inside. They let her stay with them anyway and she would do what she could to keep it that way.

  She looked down at Erin’s pregnant belly, round and hard. “Can I listen to the baby?”

  Erin let out a small laugh that sounded funny. “Hopefully, he’s sleeping, but uh, sure. I guess.”

  Happy adjusted herself so she was lying with her head in Erin’s lap, little arms wrapped around the woman’s middle. She took Erin’s hand and placed it over one of her ears, the other pressed tightly to the spot the baby liked to kick. If she squeezed her eyes tight enough and focused on the baby, they’d go away.

  I was worth a try.

  Happy kept looking at the empty space across from her at breakfast and it made Erin Hardy jumpy. Her husband Butch had brought the girl home last year and they’d fought for months to become her foster parents. Despite that, having Happy in their life and home was not how Erin envisioned building her family.

  She rubbed her stomach, unconsciously protecting the life she’d worked so hard to create. Years of trying to conceive had been fruitless. It wasn’t until they’d been approved to be foster parents that she’d finally gotten pregnant with their own child. The cosmic joke of a lifetime, her sole reason for going through with fostering Happy was that she may never have the opportunity to bear her own child. Fostering to adopt may have been her only chance. So, she’d agreed and then the world played this hilarious joke on her.

  Butch had told her the story repeatedly. How Happy had seen the ghost of a child and led him straight to her remains. He even claimed he saw the spirit himself.

  Personally, she thought the job was getting to him. Someday soon it would be time to hang up the badge and move out of the city, put this part of their lives behind them. She hadn’t told Butch yet, wasn’t sure how she would, but she was hoping when that time came Happy wouldn’t be with them. The last thing she wanted in her picture-perfect family was a child that claimed to see ghosts.

  She was a sweet enough kid; Erin would never argue that. She was quiet, kept her room clean and was genuinely kind. She loved the baby growing inside of Erin, talked about him all the time and always wanted to be near him. But she was strange too, talking to herself day and night, talking about the dead as if they were right there next to her. According to Butch, they were, but she didn’t buy it.

  Erin sighed. When the time came, she’d be the bad guy. She’d be the one pushing to let Happy go and Butch would fight her every step of the way.

  She watched as the little girl’s lips pursed and she shook her head as if she was having a silent conversation with the empty chair.

  “Everything okay?” She asked, brows raised.

  Happy’s eyes flipped up to her and then back to the chair, then down to her bowl of cereal. “Yes, ma’am,” she whispered.

  “You don’t have to call me ma’am,” Erin reminded her for the hundredth time.

  Happy put her spoon on the table and looked at her, their eyes meeting, sending a shiver down Erin’s spine. The girl had the strangest eyes, clear Caribbean blue but for the bottom of the left one that was a deep coal black. It was easy to flinch away from her gaze, innocent yet somehow powerful.

  “Will you send me back before you have the baby or after?”

  Startled, Erin was at a loss for words.

  “No one is sending you back, Happy.”

  The child just watched her, waiting.

  After a minute, Erin said, “Why don’t you go brush your teeth and I’ll walk you to school.”

  When Happy left, Erin felt a relief so great she sagged as if a weight had been lifted. The girl was sweet but Erin knew she couldn’t live like this forever and she certainly wasn’t going to bring a baby into the house while Happy was there either.

  “You all worried and this bitch don’t even like you?” Melinda squawked, arm waving as she walked beside Happy. “She thinks you crazy, girl. She got them judgy eyes, don’t she? Like she so much better than y’all.”

  All through breakfast Melinda sat across from Happy, trying to convince her to help. Help do what, Happy didn’t know yet. What she did know was that Melinda was right. Erin didn’t like her. Every time Erin watched her the air became thick with tension and without knowing how, Happy would hear Erin’s thoughts in her mind.

  “I can’t have her near the baby,” she’d thought as she smiled at Happy over the brim of her coffee mug.

  The ache inside her chest was familiar but Happy hadn’t thought she’d feel it at Butch’s house. He’d said it would feel like a home. She wasn’t sure what a home felt like so maybe it was supposed to hurt sometimes.

  Happy looked at Melinda, strutting next to them as they walked to school, her mini skirt torn and bloody, her chest nearly hollowed out with stab wounds.

  “Why you looking’ at me like that? I can’t do nothin’ about this shit. Just pretend you don’t see it, baby.” Melinda looked behind her. “Definitely don’t look at those crazy fools behind us.”

  Happy looked anyway. The other women followed, one floating over the ground, her feet dragging behind her leaving a jagged trail of blood. Matted, long black hair covered her face, her body so mangled Happy wasn’t sure what her injuries were. Could have been the same stab wounds as Melinda. Could have been something else. The other woman was younger and blonde. She kept one arm wrapped tightly around her middle, eyes darting from side to side.

  Both were missing an arm.

  When they turned the corner into the school-yard Erin stopped.

  “Have a good day,” she said, her smile not reaching her eyes.

  Happy couldn’t look away from the mangled women practically breathing over Erin’s shoulder. She turned around and walked slowly up the walkway, sneaking glances as she watched Erin disappear around the corner.

  “C’mon. She gone,” Melinda whispered as if someone else might hear her. “And I need ya real bad, baby girl. Just this one thing and I swear, Imma go haunt my sister Jolene.”

  If she didn’t help these women now they’d never leave her alone. If the spirits already found her in her bedroom, well, the bedroom at Butch and Erin’s, they’d find her anywhere.

  “Will it take long, do you think? Erin will come back to pick me up.”

  Melinda’s eyes lit up. “Naw, baby girl, I’ll have ya back right quick.”

  The ringing phone on his desk startled Butch out of a power nap. He was waiting on lab results from the latest pool of blood to come back. Once that came in, he’d be
able to compare it to several databases and hope for a hit.

  “Hardy,” he answered.

  “It’s Erin,” she sounded harried. “Is Happy with you?”

  His brow furrowed. “Happy’s supposed to be at school.”

  “I just got a call from the school. She’s not there. I didn’t know if she came to see you.”

  “Didn’t you walk her there?” He growled knowing Erin didn’t like Happy. She put on a good show but he wasn’t stupid and his detective’s skepticism ran deep.

  “I did,” she insisted. “I walked her up the walkway. The bell hadn’t rung yet, we were early. They said she never even went in.”

  “Well, where would she have gone?” He asked, knowing she wouldn’t have an answer.

  “I don’t know,” she confirmed his thought. “I told you, I thought she might have come down to see you at the station. She was up in the middle of the night talking to herself again and she was acting strange this morning. I thought she might have missed you or needed to talk and skipped out to come down there.”

  “Seven-year olds don’t skip school Erin, they get abducted.”

  “She didn’t get abducted,” Erin argued, sounding sure. “She probably just ran off. Can’t we go look around where she used to live?”

  “She lived in a crack-den. Somehow, I doubt she went back there looking for some old friends.”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said, sounding angry.

  “I’m going to put an APB out. I’ll call you back.”

  There was no doubt, Happy being in their lives had put a strain on their relationship. For years, they’d struggled to have a baby of their own. When he’d come across Happy last year, when he’d seen how special she was and how badly she needed a safe place to call home, he’d felt compelled. Beyond words, beyond reason and well beyond the point his relationship with Erin could handle, he’d advocated for Happy to stay with them. Heedless of Erin’s need to bear her own child he’d forced Happy into their home.