Page 6 of Forever Dark
Nothing about this was chaotic.
This had been arranged.
Whoever killed her had taken time.Had posed her with care.Folded her hands.Bowed her head.Sat her upright like a sinner brought to church for judgment.
Connor kept his gun up and swept the loft with the flashlight in case the murderer was hiding somewhere.No movement.No sign of anyone hiding in the corners.
The wall behind the woman held more writing in the same dark substance as downstairs.
He barely recognized it for what it was this time because the body held his attention so completely.
The sight turned his stomach.
Not because of the blood.Not only that.
Because of what it meant for the place he loved.A place he had always found peaceful.
Because it meant somebody in Harlan County had done something methodical and cruel in the middle of the night, then took the time to make the scene look the way they wanted it.
A local woman, Connor thought.Mid-thirties, maybe.The face was partly shadowed by her bowed head, but there was something familiar there.A face he ought to know.Grocery store familiar.Church picnic familiar.Like he’d passed her somewhere in daylight and never imagined seeing her like this.
His beam moved once more across the corners of the loft.
Nothing.
He wanted to step closer.Needed to know whether there was a pulse even though his brain told him there wasn’t.Needed to see if anything in the room named the victim.Needed to understand what the writing said, why the candles had been arranged, why this place of all places had been chosen.
But the rest of him understood something else first.
Don’t touch it,he thought.Thescene mattered now.
One wrong step and he could ruin whatever chance there was of reading it properly later.
Connor lowered the gun a fraction but kept it ready.His pulse thudded in his throat.Somewhere down below, the body of the church stretched away in darkness, the pews nothing but black shapes.The whole building seemed to listen.
He looked at the woman again.
Nothing like this had ever happened under his watch.Not in Eagleton.Not anywhere in Harlan County while he had been sheriff.His world was dead livestock dumped on roadsides, fights that started with beer and old grudges, stolen tools, family trouble, meth tucked away in barns.
This was something else.A callous malevolence that had crept its way through the beating heart of the county, like a thief in the night.
A far cry from the sleepy rural county he spent his nights patrolling.
Connor stared at the body, at the folded hands, at the words on the wall he barely recognized, and knew one thing with complete certainty.
This might be beyond him.
He was going to need some help.
CHAPTER ONE
The conference room at the Washington field office had no windows and too much polished glass for her liking.It was meant to project seriousness.All it really did was make everybody sitting around the table look flatter and more tired than they were.
Selena Raven stood at the front of the room with a remote in one hand, her blond hair tied back and as pristinely managed as her black suit.A row of unhappy men in pressed shirts stared back at her across a table.
Nobody bothered pretending they were pleased.
That suited her fine.This was an uphill fight.The kind she liked.
