Dead Wrong Read online

  Dead Wrong

  A Samantha Church Mystery

  By

  Betta Ferrendelli

  For my sister, Shari

  In her sweet memory

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  The Last Chapter

  Copyright

  Connect with the author

  Prologue

  Blood does not flow from the dead.

  He picks up the scalpel, holding it the way a surgeon would, his right index finger just above the blade, his knuckle bent slightly.

  The heft of the knife permeates the latex gloves he wears, even though he’s wearing several pairs, as he always does for this procedure. That way he won’t have to feel the coldness of the knife’s base as the blade slices through the skin. He actually prefers the latex gloves to the several pairs of Kevlar gloves he keeps in the trunk of his car. The Kevlars are too clunky and the knife always feels awkward in his hand whenever he wears them.

  Oddly, he feels relieved to know the dead stop bleeding some four or five hours after the last breath slips from their body. Everything stops. Motion stops. The heart, the mind and the thoughts it contained come to a standstill. That’s the only thing that makes it easier for him to cut into the flesh.

  Blood does not flow from the dead.

  He deliberately left the Kevlar gloves in the trunk of the car tonight, because he knew the boss would not be coming. She always insisted they wear the cut-resistant gloves when handling scalpels, but he seldom listens to what she has to say.

  In one ear and out the other, he always likes to think.

  He looks at her when she is babbling. He nods and makes all the appropriate noises, as he pretends to listen. But he just watches her mouth move, thinking she looks like one of those puppets with the fixed stare and the mouth that latches at the corners. It drops open, then closed, then open, then closed, the tongue wagging as it speaks.

  That old witch.

  Always nagging, always bitching about something, the way he and the others do things with the bodies, it’s never good enough.

  I’d like to get her up on this cold, hard slab, and slice a few things. I’d show her I’m wearing the Kevlars, just like she wants, before cutting that goddamn tongue out.

  He takes a short, shallow breath, exhaling through his nose, and his surgical mask puffs out slightly, so he removes it, letting it fall to the floor. He reaches for the large, kettledrum-shaped overhead light and pulls it closer to her body. He stares at her face, now ghostly white in the harsh light.

  Then the old witch invades his thinking. A face to stop a clock, the proverbial saying goes. And he is unable to help the chuckle that escapes from his mouth.

  He stares at the dead woman. Even in the unforgiving light, she possesses an uncommon beauty. Her eyes are closed, but he knows them to have been a deep, piercing blue. He had looked at her so many times, and in return, received her warm gaze, innocent and trusting. She was like that just a few hours earlier tonight, safe in her condominium just a few hours earlier, when she opened her door to let him inside.

  A swirl of her long, brown hair rests over the top of her shoulder, curled slightly inward on her chest, the way it might fall naturally if she were just sleeping. But she’s not sleeping. She’s dead.

  He straightens himself, pulling the scalpel away from her slender body, and rolls his head from side to side, hearing the bones in his neck pop, pop, pop. Then, he takes a small step away from the gurney, his arms still positioned, ready to cut.

  It is the quiet, the nothingness here in the Care Center that bothers him. This is where the dead are brought before their final journey to the grave. Suddenly he wants to hear something, anything—even the tick, tick, tick of the clock hanging on the wall in front of him. Its large white face stares at him and he glances quickly at its black hands, frozen in place at just after twenty-two hundred hours, military time.

  He remembers the Christmas song that was playing during the drive to her condominium. He was bringing her gifts so she would not have suspected anything. Not from him and not on Christmas Eve. “Oh, what fun it is to ride…”

  He’s always hated Christmas music, especially that stupid song, but even “Jingle Bells” would be a welcome sound now. He wants to hear something in this embalming room besides the complete stillness, the kind of quiet only the dead can make.

  He closes his eyes and remembers the last moments of her life. She fought him until the end. He remembers how strong she was, pushing back against him, struggling to get free, her face a grimace of determination, as he shoved her hard against the living room wall. She looked at him, the trusting and innocence in her eyes replaced by fear and trembling. She gasped, wide-eyed as he wrapped his hands firmly around her neck. She tried to pull his hands away from her, but his grip remained firm and, as he squeezed, he could feel the strength leaving her body. Only moments passed before she slumped into him, her arms falling limply to her sides. He released his grip, surprised at how quickly life flowed out of her body. She slid slowly down the wall to the floor, her leg twisted in an unnatural way behind her back.

  He wanted to leave her there, but he knew he couldn’t. It would take too long for someone to find her this way. It was supposed to look like a suicide, so he knew what he had to do. Soon, there would be a commotion with emergency vehicles and law enforcement milling around. When the police were finished, the ambulance would take her body to the Care Center, where he would be waiting.

  Now he holds the scalpel in the air before him, ready to cut into her skin.

  Ah, the skin, he thinks. Perhaps not only the most visible organ of the human body, but also the most remarkable. A miracle garment, really. No other organ in the body is as soft and pliable, nor as strong, waterproof, and self-repairing as the skin.

  He forces himself to stop thinking. He has wasted enough time replaying the last moments of her life in his mind. The others will be at the Care Center soon, expecting him to be finished. Waste too much time and the old witch will be brutal on him.

  He places his hand lightly on top of her abdomen, with his fingers held at roughly a forty-five-degree angle and presses down. He carefully puts his scalpel less than an inch from the tips of his fingers. One smooth, soundless slice is all that’s needed. He could never really cut a straight line with his scalpel, no matter how sharp it was or how he had it positioned.

  But then he isn’t a doctor. He is just doing what he is told.

  One

  Samantha Church sat up in bed. She looked in the direction she thought she heard the sound.

  She listened a moment more, but heard nothing. When Sam rested her head on the pillow again, the buzzing sound returned. Though her brain was fuzzy with sleep and her body thick with pain that the sudden movement brought to her left shoulder, she was certain what it was. She reached for her cell phone on the nightstand, her heart beating fast, the way it does when the telep
hone rings at unexpected times of the night. She fumbled with clumsy hands trying to find the green call answer button. She groaned, as pain seemed to encompass every nerve in her body, slowing her response. The cell phone’s bright blue light illuminated the darkness, but her movements were sluggish from sleep and pain, and she missed the call.

  “Damn it!” Sam said and quickly made note of the time. The phone showed 2:45 a.m. That meant it was 1:45 a.m. in the Pacific Northwest. Sam said a quick, silent prayer April was safely asleep in her twin bed at her grandmother’s house.

  “Dear God, I hope everything’s all right,” Sam said into the darkness, squinting to see whose call she had missed.

  Relief flooded through her when she noticed the area code did not start with 206, which would have belonged to April’s grandmother, Esther Church. Her ex-mother in-law was the only person she knew in the Pacific Northwest who would have called her at that early hour and the only person in the Pacific Northwest that, as soon as Sam was able to regain full custody of April, she hoped never to see again.

  Her cell phone began to ring again and Sam jumped as it vibrated in her hand. She quickly noted the area code was 303, so the call was coming from somewhere in the Denver area.

  “Hello! This is Sam Church. Who’s calling?”

  “I really need to talk to you,” the caller said without preamble.

  “Who’s calling?” Sam said again.

  “You don’t know me, but I read your stories all the time in the Grandview Perspective and I need to talk to you,” the caller returned. “You just wrote a story that I need to talk to you about.”

  “Which one?” Sam said into the phone. “I’ve written lots of stories.”

  “In last week’s paper you wrote about Hilltop Gardens Mortuary possibly being sued.”

  Sam nodded. “The Marine veteran’s family who wanted to sue because the funeral home didn’t properly store his body?”

  “Yes, that’s the one,” the caller confirmed.

  Sam had written in her article that the family of the deceased veteran wanted to sue the mortuary because they claimed the staff had forgotten their son’s body and that it was left unattended in a garage for nearly two months while arrangements were being made for burial at Fort Logan National Cemetery. Sam wrote the family was seeking millions in damages from Hilltop and its parent company, Daniels Dignity LLC.

  “Is it accurate?” Sam asked. A common question reporters ask when someone calls to talk (or usually complain) about a story they have read in the newspaper.

  “Yes, it is accurate, but there’s more. You need to follow up on it. The article didn’t include some other very important information.”

  “Such as?” Sam asked.

  “Let’s just say his wasn’t the only body left unattended in that garage.”

  “There were others?” Sam said, not bothering to hold back her surprise.

  “There were,” the caller said. “A lot more.”

  Sam took the phone away from her ear and studied it a moment. The caller sounded like a scared young woman. “How’d you get my number?”

  “Your sister gave it to me.”

  “My sister’s gone.”

  “I know.”

  The phone fell silent. Sam couldn’t help wondering if Robin Marino, a once promising assistant district attorney with the Truman County DA’s Office, had been part of yet another clandestine investigation that she hadn’t mentioned to her. Robin’s life was cut short on Christmas Eve when she tumbled from her apartment balcony in an attempted suicide. Only it wasn’t a suicide. That’s what police wanted Sam to believe, but she didn’t buy it. Sam’s sister was murdered because of what she knew, of what she had discovered in a covert investigation of the Grandview Police Department. Sam had made sure, however, that Robin did not die in vain. She had brought her sister’s killers to justice.

  “Sam? Are you still there?”

  Sam forced herself back to the present. She cleared her throat. “Yes, I’m sorry. I’m here. Did my sister know about this?”

  “No. Not before I mentioned my suspicions to her, anyway. She wouldn’t have had any reason to know.”

  “Then how come she gave you my number?”

  “Because I asked her,” the caller said directly. “When she wanted to know why, I told her. I told her what I thought was happening and that I wanted to call you ’cause I’ve seen your bylines in the paper and I thought maybe you could help. Robin agreed and said she would help, if she could.”

  “Robin never said anything to me,” Sam said.

  “That was the morning of Christmas Eve. Robin and I just happened to be at the same place and I asked her then because I didn’t know when I’d ever get the chance again to ask her.”

  “Where was that?” Sam asked.

  “I can’t say right now.”

  The phone crackled a moment in silence.

  “She never had a chance to tell you, Sam,” the caller said.

  “Were you at her funeral?” Sam asked, cradling her cell phone with both hands, ignoring the throbbing pain that continued to pulsate from her shoulder after the car accident.

  “Yes, I saw you walk in. You look so much like Robin.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Sam said and couldn’t help her amusement at being compared to her sister, a willowy brunette with a near-perfect figure. A woman who could easily turn heads and attract attention wherever she went. Not Sam, of course. An overweight, out-of-shape alcoholic in the rudimentary stages of recovery, whose body felt as soft as a sofa.

  “Are you calling me now to tell me what you had told Robin?”

  “Yes. It’s getting out of hand,” the caller said. “But I don’t want to tell you anything over the phone.”

  “How long have you known about this?”

  There was a pause and Sam could tell the young woman was doing some quick calculations in her mind. “About seven or eight months,” she said finally.

  “September,” Sam said.

  “Yes,” the caller said. “At first I tried to tell myself I was imaging things. That I was new and didn’t really understand the business. But…”

  The caller’s voice trailed off. “But you knew you weren’t imagining things,” Sam said.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Then talk to me,” Sam said, her voice now a sympathetic mix of calm and understanding. “I have your number on my cell phone. I can call you in the morn—”

  “No, that won’t work,” the caller said. “Besides, this isn’t my cell. You won’t be able to reach me at this number.”

  “Why not? Where are you calling from?”

  “A pay phone. I don’t want anyone to trace my number.”

  “A pay phone?” Sam said. “Where’d you find one of those?”

  “I’m standing outside a 7-Eleven.”

  “Then call me tomorrow. I’ll be in the office all day.”

  “Okay,” the caller said and hung up.

  Sam stared down at her cell phone as she ended the call. She took a long, deep breath, then slowly exhaled. The furnace kicked on and warmth quickly began to erase the coldness in the bedroom. It was early spring now and although most days passed with sun and bright blue skies, the nights were still crisp, stubborn with winter. Sam set her cell phone on the bed and lightly patted the space beside her, looking at Morrison, lying contently at the foot of the bed, staring at her with lazy, half-open eyes. “Here, kitty,” Sam called quietly.

  Morrison came over, curled up next to her and was fast asleep. The cat had been Robin’s and she had adopted him soon after her sister passed away. Sam was allergic to cats and was still surprised at how much she liked Morrison. But Robin had loved that cat, naming him after her favorite singer, Van Morrison, and Sam couldn’t bear to part with him. She could say it was still a small piece of her sister that she had left. And she wanted to hold on to every piece she had.

  She stroked the length of Morrison’s long, soft fur, lost in thought. She settled
back into bed, hoping to fall back to sleep. Instead she just stared up into the darkness.

  “Robin, Robin,” Sam said, her voice disappearing into the darkness above. “What else am I going to learn about you?”

  Two

  Sam opened her eyes to the melody of her cell phone’s alarm.

  She reached over, silenced her phone and looked at the time, 6:15 a.m., though she already knew the hour. To her surprise, she had fallen back to sleep, despite the early morning call that had set her on edge. She closed her eyes again and, for a few minutes, all that moved in her bedroom was the rise and fall of her breathing.

  She turned over and saw she had disturbed Morrison’s sleep. The cat jumped easily from the bed and Sam watched as he stretched, then sauntered across the bedroom floor, his black tail high in the air, and out the door, which was slightly ajar. She directed her attention back to her cell phone and began to view the call log. She saw the calls from the number that came just before three this morning. Though the chances of someone answering the pay phone outside the 7-Eleven now seemed remote, Sam hit the call button anyway. Perhaps a customer going in for coffee at the convenience store would be walking by the pay phone and would answer it. She waited and listened and, after the tenth ring, disconnected the call. She decided she would try the number throughout the day, hopeful that someone would answer and at least tell her where the convenience store was located. She reached for a Reporter’s Notebook she kept on her nightstand and scribbled down the number from the pay phone. For now, it was the only thing she had to go on.

  Sam stayed in bed, resisting the urge to get up and get ready for work. She didn’t feel rested. Of course, that feeling of fatigue didn’t come from being awakened a few hours earlier by the mysterious call. Even the extra rest she had been forcing herself to get these past few weeks did not help. Not a day passed, when she did not feel exhausted and wasn’t in pain. It all began Christmas Eve, the night her sister was murdered and the downward spiral of events had continued since. She thought of the February night, less than a month ago, when she and her publisher Wilson Cole Jr. left the Grandview Perspective newspaper. She could still see them walking toward his Honda Accord, their heads bent low and toward each other, trying to avoid blasts of snow hitting their faces. Sam remembered how cold it was that evening and she remembered telling Wilson of her fears that someone was and had been watching them. Wilson dismissed her suspicions, telling her she was imagining things.