Prologue
Chattanooga, Tennessee, October 2017
“Suspicious activity reported near the south end of Forest Lake Memorial.”
Officer Rachel Bennett knew the police dispatcher was going to ask her to check it out before the guy called out the number of her patrol car. Why? Because she was just lucky that way. Cursing under her breath, she flipped on her lights, spun her vehicle around, crossed over the median, and headed north on Highway 27.
Rachel forced herself to ignore the chatter on the radio, gritting her teeth as the shift sergeant instructed her fellow Chattanooga PD officers to set up a perimeter north of Lookout Mountain, miles away from where she was. There’d been a high-speed chase, a crash into a ditch, and lots of gunfire. It was literally the triple crown of fun for a cop on a slow Tuesday night in Tennessee. The chase had drawn half the law enforcement officers in the area, both city and county. And when the vehicle’s two armed occupants had escaped into the woods near the highway, that had drawn every other cop in this corner of the state. Hell, there were probably off-duty officers already rolling out of bed right that minute and yanking on their uniforms on the off chance they could get involved in the excitement.
And where was she heading while the rest of the police force ran through the woods looking for two armed felons? To a damn cemetery, most likely to chase off a prostitute and his or her trick looking to get freaky in a graveyard. Rachel had caught the suspicious activity call because it was her beat, but being forced to deal with sex-crazed perverts the night before Halloween while the other members of her department went after real criminals was frustrating as hell.
As Rachel crossed over the Tennessee River, the more built-up parts of Chattanooga quickly got left behind, replaced with stretches of dense woods, interspersed with quiet residential areas. A mile later, the woods disappeared almost entirely.
There was a thriving red-light district just before the bridge, but while that area had plenty of sidewalks for the guys and girls to display their wares, there weren’t many good locations to conduct their business. The nearby parking lots were generally well lit, which scared the johns to death. And the dark alleys behind the buildings were a refuge for the homeless and druggies, neither of which was good for a prostitute’s business. Nervous customers took longer to finish in that environment—if they could finish at all.
So, the working men and women of Chattanooga now had their clients drive them over the bridge to the suburbs, and for reasons that made sense to no one but them, the Forest Lake Cemetery had become their preferred location to get busy. Apparently, the privacy and soft grass made the time it took to get out there worthwhile. Rachel had no idea how the graveyard ambiance affected their bottom line though. She’d definitely never want to do it in a place like that.
Rachel turned into the cemetery, wishing for the hundredth time the place would install a gate that locked. The city had talked to the facility’s management about it, but they were resistant to the idea. They claimed it was because they didn’t want to keep people from being able to come in and out to visit their loved ones whenever they wanted. More likely it was because they didn’t want to spend money protecting a place when there wasn’t anything to steal.
She stopped the car a few yards inside the entrance, the beams of her headlights reflecting off the fog drifting silently across the graveyard. She flipped on her search light and swiveled it this way and that, but beyond confirming there was no one parked anywhere near the main building to her left, she didn’t see much of anything. Thanks to the fog, she couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. Just the silhouettes of headstones, large and small, along with a few family-sized crypts.
Nope, not creepy at all. Especially this close to Halloween.
She’d been in this damn graveyard a dozen times in the past month, so she was familiar with the mazelike network of narrow, curvy footpaths that weaved through the different parts of the tree-shrouded cemetery. The place had been fashioned that way on purpose, to give mourners a sense of privacy while they were there, but it also meant, if there was someone in the cemetery looking for action, it could take a while to find them.
She grabbed her car’s radio and thumbed the button. “This is unit 220. Any additional information from the reporting party about Forest Lake?”
“Negative, 220,” the dispatcher replied. “The reporting party said they heard a female screaming when they drove past the cemetery. No further contact since, though there was an earlier report of someone seeing a man in a clown costume walking near that same area.”
Rachel groaned. She frigging hated clowns with a gut-twisting passion. Then again, was there anyone on the planet who actually liked them?
“10-4,” she said into the radio.
She considered asking for backup but decided against it. Since the call had come into dispatch ten minutes ago, there was little chance whoever had screamed was still there.
Rachel drove around the cemetery, but with the ever-present fog and random patches of trees, she couldn’t see a damn thing. Worse, between the hum of the vehicle’s heater and the noise from the radio, it was impossible to hear anything either, even with the window down. Knowing she’d never find anything if she kept trying to do this search from her car, she turned around and headed back to the main building, figuring that would be the best place to park while she continued the search on foot.
Letting the dispatcher know she was getting out of the vehicle to look around, she shoved open the door. She shivered, trying to keep her teeth from chattering the moment the freezing fall wind hit her. Crap. It shouldn’t be this cold in Chattanooga already. The weather forecast had mentioned a possibility of snow tonight, and from the way her breath frosted in the air, she could believe it.
She turned down the volume on the mobile radio attached to her equipment belt, putting some distance between herself and the distracting sound of the patrol car’s hot engine ticking, straining her ears to pick up anything suspicious. She kept one hand on the weapon holstered on her hip as she moved away from the car and farther into the graveyard, letting her eyes and ears slowly adjust to the darkness and the night sounds around her as she swung her flashlight back and forth.
The moon was out tonight, but with the fog, it was like she was walking around in a bubble, cut off from everything around her. She couldn’t see or hear anything. There could be someone standing only a few yards away and she’d never know it. Crap, there could be a psycho in a clown costume behind the next tombstone for all she knew.
Rachel shivered as tingles ran up her back. She cursed silently. She refused to let her unreasonable fear of clowns freak her out.
She walked slowly along the paths that separated the various sections of the graveyard from each other, stopping occasionally to shine her flashlight into the woods that lined the east side of the cemetery. After ten minutes, she gave up any hope of finding a vehicle. After twenty, she was convinced the entire call had been a hoax. There was nobody out here.
She hadn’t gone more than a half dozen steps back toward her patrol car when a cracking sound from off to the right made her turn.
Any country girl who’d spent time in the woods knew that sound. Someone had stepped on a big stick, breaking it.
She immediately headed that way, aiming her flashlight in the direction of the noise, her other hand still resting on her weapon. She couldn’t see anyone, but her instincts were telling her someone was out there beyond the edge of the glowing beam, in the brambles near the base of one of the trees.
“Whoever is out there, this is Officer Bennett from the Chattanooga Police Department!” she shouted. “Stand up and move toward the sound of my voice or I’ll release my K9 and you will get bit.”
She didn’t expect whoever it was to do as she asked. That line about having a dog with her almost never worked, so she was shocked when she heard a desperate scream in the darkness and then a series of crashing sounds as a girl ran toward her, slamming through tree branches and undergrowth like her life depended on it.
Rachel immediately had her Sig Sauer out of its holster, ready to take down whoever was chasing the girl. The teen collapsed to her knees the moment she cleared the wood line, crying, shaking, and gasping for breath in the circle of Rachel’s flashlight.
