Prologue
Standing on a beach in northern California, Raven Burns wondered how killing a man could bring such peace. She bent and picked up a piece of dry wood and threw it as hard as she could toward the horizon now transformed into a ribbon of gold with the setting sun. The brown wood arced head over tail for a long time and a long way out. As she watched it travel she thought of Lamont Lovelle, the man who had driven her from her job as a homicide detective in Byrd’s Landing, Louisiana by framing her for several brutal murders that he committed.
He began by killing a wealthy socialite who hated Raven. After he was done, Lovelle left the calling card of Raven’s father, the notorious serial killer Floyd Burns. At the murder scene Raven found bright blue and fluorescent green glowing in the darkness beneath the bed. A peacock feather that said even though Floyd Burns was long gone, the daughter, Raven, was still here, the same daughter who had helped her serial killer father lure victims when she was a toddler, watched him kill again and again and was rewarded, Lovelle accused, with a job in law enforcement.
But Raven’s career choice was no reward.
What Lovelle couldn’t know was that the real so-called reward consisted of nightmares filled with screaming and blood and burning flesh, along with Floyd’s voice in her head. The job was Raven’s penance for the sins of her father, and frankly, what she thought of as her own sins for helping him. It was her one chance to make things right. Lovelle took that away from her. The very act of taking Lovelle out flooded her senses like a healing serum, made the rough edges of her mind smooth, the dark thoughts light. No wonder her father hadn’t been able to stop.
But there was a difference.
Her father killed for pleasure. Raven killed out of necessity. Lovelle maimed her partner, killed the mentor who took her in after Floyd went to prison, and shredded her career as a homicide detective to ribbons. Like her father, Lovelle had a taste for killing. He ran when Raven exposed him as a killer, had almost gotten away with it. She had no choice but to go after him, and once again put things right.
Lovelle’s death didn’t trouble her. No. It was the peace that came after, warning her to stay as far as she could from her hometown of Byrd’s Landing, Louisiana, the place whose soil grew killers like kudzu.
And then there was the voice of her long-dead father. After she hung up her detective badge, she hadn’t heard him narrating her life in her head. But his cackle had returned the minute Lovelle fell with the double-tap to the chest from her sniper’s rifle.
Can you stop after just one killing, Birdy Girl? Floyd asked her now. Maybe you should dive into the ocean and keep swimming on out ’til you can pay your ole man a visit. Could save some lives.
But there was no reason to swim out to sea until she couldn’t anymore. She did nothing wrong. She squished a maggot. She did the world a favor. Turning away from the darkening water, she found the ball cap she had been wearing before rising from her beach chair to watch the sunset. She put the cap over her wet hair and pulled it over her eyes. She sat down and stuck both feet deep into the cool sand. Just another tourist watching the sunset. As innocent as a brown baby rabbit, Floyd said in her head.
She stayed that way for a long time, thinking. She missed Byrd’s Landing. She missed the gumbo, the catfish, the bayou and, of course, her old partner, Billy Ray. She even missed the cruel humidity and the cloying smell of honeysuckle attacking her allergies. It was useless to resist. Byrd’s Landing would reach out and claim her as one of its own regardless of how many miles she put between them or how many demons she slew.
But she wouldn’t go back as a cop. She was done with the life. She would go as Jane Q. Citizen to prove that she had a right to peace just like everyone else. She would prove that she could be good, that she was, in fact, a country mile different from her killer father. Besides, Billy Ray was there, her friends, too, she thought as she drifted to sleep while seagulls skimmed the folding waves.
“My decision,” she mumbled, as if hearing the words out loud would make them believable.
* * *
“Raven!”
In the fading sunlight was a boy atop a set of rickety steps that acted as access from the resort to the beach down below. He was barefoot and bare-chested, waving at her over the railing.
“Be careful!” she shouted back up at him.
His little head disappeared and she soon saw him bumping down the steps while dragging a scooter behind him. He and that scooter were never apart. He would spend hours on the sidewalks curving through the resort’s lawns while his mother slept off whatever her drink of choice was the night before. What he planned to do with a scooter on the beach was beyond Raven, but she knew that the thing was more of a security blanket than anything.
He jumped from the last step and ran toward her, grunting with the effort of maneuvering the scooter over the sand. He stopped cold when he saw her face.
“What?” she said.
He edged closer. “For a minute you didn’t look like yourself.”
She cocked her head. “That’s funny,” she said. “I still feel like myself.”
“I can come back if you don’t feel like talking to anybody.”
She bent over so she could see the brown freckles that draped over his sunburned nose and cheeks. She tousled his thick, brown hair and gave him her most inviting smile.
“I always feel like talking when it’s talking to you. Where’s your mom?”
The smile forming on his face faltered.
“Sleeping.”
Raven stood up and put her hands behind her back. “I see.” She waited a few seconds before continuing, “You know what, Tommy? Your mama is missing out on a lot. I’ve had such a good time having you as my little buddy on my holiday.”
The smile disappeared from his face. A shine of tears appeared in his blue eyes. “You leaving?”
“Yep.”
“Oh.”
She sensed he had more to say. She waited.
“Well,” he said. “Will you? I mean, can you…?”
She wagged an index finger at him before he could finish, feeling only slightly guilty. “Now, now. Remember what we talked about.”
“Vacation friends.” He dropped the scooter and hung his head. He picked up a piece of driftwood lying on the sand. Just as Raven had done before, he threw it out to sea as far as he could. He wouldn’t look at her.
“We only talk together when we’re on vacation together, remember? No use trying to keep in touch when the vacation is over. You know why, right?”
“Because life will get in the way and we’ll lose touch and we’ll be sad eventually so it’s best if we don’t even try,” he said.
“Exactly. If I come back and you happen to be here next year, we’ll be buddies again. But not anywhere else.”
“Are you coming back?”
“That depends,” she said. “Are you coming back?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “We used to come every year when my dad was alive, but now that he’s dead, I don’t know if my mom is going to keep coming back here.” He picked up another stick and started to draw patterns in the sand.
“Well, I don’t know if I’m coming back, either.”
“And friends don’t lie to each other,” he said.
“Nope, they don’t lie.”
He shaded his eyes and looked out to sea. “A whale,” he said.
“I think those may be more like dolphins, buddy.”
Three dolphins jumped cleanly from the water before twirling in the air and splashing back into the sea.
“Are you sad that you’re leaving?” he asked.
“Sad that I won’t see you anymore.”
He rewarded her with the smile that she knew she could pull out of him. Tom Arthur craved attention and wanted to be liked. That’s why she chose him. She had found the one person in the entire resort who would keep her secrets.
They watched the dolphins play for a while. And then she said, “Do you have something for me?”
“I wish I had my binoculars.”
“Tom?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, as if just remembering.
He dropped the stick and stuck his hand deep down into the left pocket of his cargo shorts. The pointed tip of his tongue licked the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on getting the thing out of his pocket. He put it in her waiting palm, a look of pride on his face. She examined it for a moment or two, brushed sand from its screen, and peeled a Sour Patch gummy worm from its back case. Before she could say anything, he plucked the gummy worm from her fingers and popped it into his mouth.
“Tom,” she scolded as a grin appeared on his face. And then, “Did you play with it?”
“Yeah, but only games. No calls, just like you said.”
“Did it ring?”
“A couple of times but I didn’t answer it. I let all the calls go to voicemail.”
She waited for a moment, and said, “That’s fine. That’s real fine.”
He squinted at the sparkling water before tilting his head at an odd angle. With one eye open and the other closed, he pointed his index finger and cocked thumb at the dolphins playing in the water.
“Did you keep track of where you took it like I asked you?” Raven said.
“Uh-huh,” he said, and then, “Pow. Pow,” punctuating each word with the recoil of his imaginary gun.
His actions unsettled Raven. If it were anybody else, she would say he knew what she had done. But that was impossible. Tom Arthur was barely nine.
“And where did you go when you had it?”
“To the pool,” he said, now with his hands up to his eyes as if he were looking through the set of binoculars he had wished for earlier. “And then hiking with my mom down to the butterfly garden. She was sick, though. Couldn’t keep up.”
“Anywhere else?”
“To the restaurant with the pirate lady in front.”
“And you wrote it all down, right?”
“Uh-huh.” He reached down deep into his other pocket and came up with a piece of unlined paper. It was damp, the pencil marks smudged, the words misspelled as only a nine-year-old could misspell. He had written the day of the week she had been gone, the time of day, and where he had taken the phone during that time.
“Did anybody help you with this?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I did it all by myself. I’m pretty smart, you know.”
She ran her fingers through his thick hair, smoothing it off his face.
“That’s why I’m glad you’re my friend. You are very smart, indeed.”
“Did I do good?”
“You did real good,” she agreed. “Real fine.”
“Well, thank you for letting me play with it.”
“You’re welcome. Now there’s just one more thing.”
“What?”
“It’s our secret, remember.”
“Yes, our secret,” he said emphatically.
She put the cell phone in the pocket of her loose jeans and turned back toward the water. She clasped her hands behind her back and contemplated the expanse of sea laid out before her. She didn’t notice that Tom mimicked her stance.
Yes, she thought. Her father, the serial killer who had sown terror from California to Louisiana, was dead. And the man who carried on Floyd’s reign of terror – he was gone as well. She had made sure Lamont Lovelle would never walk this earth again. Even the ghost of Floyd had melted away back to hell where it belonged, only able to intrude from its depth with an occasional sentence or two. She was sure of it. She was completely and solely Raven Burns now. Not a cop trying to atone for her father’s sins. The possibilities were endless. For the first time in her life she had the chance to chart her own path.