All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [3]
The young reporter from Channel Two was breathless, eyes flushed with excitement. There were no more options. The governor had denied the last stay two hours earlier. Tonight, at long last, Richard Curtis would pay the ultimate price for his crime.
As she watched, her eyes flicked to the wall clock, industrial numbers glowing on a white face: 11:59 p.m. An eerie silence overcame the crowd. It was time.
Taylor took a deep breath as the minute hand swept with a click into the 12:00 position. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the hand snapped to 12:01 a.m. That was it, then. The drugs would have been administered. Richard Curtis would have a peaceful sleep, his heart’s last beat recorded into the annals of history. It was too gentle a death, in Taylor’s opinion. He should have been drawn and quartered, his entrails pulled from his body and burned on his stomach. That, perhaps, would give some justice. Not this carefully choreographed combination of drugs, slipping him serenely into the Grim Reaper’s arms. There, the announcement was made. Curtis was pronounced at 12:06 a.m., July 5. Dead and gone.
Taylor turned the television off. Perhaps now she would get the call to arms. Waiting patiently, she laid her head down on her desk and thought of a sunny child named Martha, the victim of a brutal kidnapping, rape and murder when she was only seven years old. It was Taylor’s first case as a homicide detective. They’d found Martha within twenty-four hours of her disappearance, broken and battered in a sandy lot in North Nashville. Richard Curtis was captured several hours later. Martha’s doll was on the bench seat of his truck. Her tears were lifted from the door handle. A long strand of her honey-blond hair was affixed to Curtis’s boot. It was a slam-dunk case, Taylor’s first taste of success, her first opportunity to prove herself. She had acquitted herself well. Now Curtis was dead as a result of all her hard work. She felt complete.
Taylor had stood vigil for seven years, awaiting this moment. In her mind, Martha was frozen in time, a seven-year-old little girl who would never grow up. She would be fourteen now. Justice had finally been served.
As if in deference to the death of one of their own, Nashville’s criminals were silent on this night, finding better things to do than shoot one another for Taylor’s benefit. She drifted between sleep and wakefulness, thinking about her life, and was relieved when the phone finally rang at 1:00 a.m.
A deep, gruff voice greeted her. “Meet me?” he asked.
“Give me an hour,” she said, looking at her watch. She hung up and smiled for the first time all night.
Three
“I sure am glad we don’t live in California.”
Detectives Pete Fitzgerald, Lincoln Ross and Marcus Wade were killing time. Nashville’s criminal element seemed to be taking a vacation. They hadn’t had a murder to investigate in nearly two weeks. The city had been strangely quiet. Even the Fourth of July holiday had procured no deaths for their investigative skills. No one was scheduled for court, and their open cases were either resolved or held up by the crime lab. They had hit dead time.
The three men were crammed in their boss’s office, watching TV. A perfectly acceptable pastime, especially since the department had inked a deal with the cable company. Ostensibly, the televisions were to be tuned to twenty-four-hour news networks, but the channels invariably got changed. Usually to accommodate the guilty habit of daytime soaps to which many of the detectives were addicted.
Today though, a car chase through the mean streets of Los Angeles had captured the three detectives’ attention. Exciting, splashy. A kidnapping, a semiautomatic weapon at the ready, even