Jackie Lyons investigates a father's mysterious death, in the second installment of her ghostly mystery series
When photographer and former Memphis police detective Jackie Lyons finds Sam Loftin's lifeless body in the same location where his daughter died five years earlier, there's no reason to think he didn't kill himself, too. No reason, except Jackie has just seen Sam's ghost act out the last violent moments of his life.
In investigating his murder, Jackie is drawn into a tumultuous battle between wealthy and powerful suburbanites and a charismatic preacher trying to serve the poor and homeless. But a deeper mystery lurks beneath the petty rivalries and jealousies of a gated community, one that stretches back into the distant past and reaches out to snare the youngest of this generation. A secret so dark, it can only be protected by "The Covenant."
Release date:
January 12, 2016
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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I WAS PARKED IN FRONT OF THE liquor store at the corner of Poplar and Highland, about to stick a fat envelope in a mailbox in the hope that my photos of the dead and their uniformed attendants might earn me a fat government check. I wrapped every corner of the package in three layers of tape to keep the postal inspectors from steaming it open. I hoped to score some real money from the pedigreed jokers who decided what was and wasn’t art, the kind of money that could make a real difference in the train wreck of my life, not the nickel-and-dime stuff I usually got from the police and the insurance companies for my photographs of accident victims and overdoses.
Since I had nothing else to depend on, hope seemed a good plan, but I might as well have spent the postage on a lottery ticket. Who was I, after all? Just some aging nobody with a car with no air-conditioning and a broken taillight, too dry to summon enough spit to lick her stamps. I had a disk drive full of photos of the faces of the dead, and a few who had left their faces on the road, and all that work had got me exactly nowhere, living in a by-the-hour motel on the outskirts of Memphis. If you could even call it living, chasing ambulance sirens, waiting for the phone call that would be the difference between ramen noodles or nothing to eat at all. I’d been off the smack for over a year now and I was still waiting for my life to turn around.
I opened the mailbox and dropped my package inside. When I returned to my car, I found a woman crawling into the passenger window. I shouted and she backed out waving a steak knife that she had probably lifted from a restaurant back when she had enough money to steal from restaurants.
“Gimme,” she shouted. She might have been my age, probably a lot younger—the meth had aged her like a broken time machine. She looked like she needed a hit in the worst way. She was about to shake apart. I noticed a couple of kids, two girls, peeking out from behind a van parked in the gas station parking lot on the corner.
“Are those your kids?” I asked. That threw her for a second. She wasn’t used to robbing people at knifepoint. She probably never did anything worse than lifting purses out of grocery carts and open car windows at the convenience store. She glanced back at her kids, then at the closed liquor store, then at the traffic passing not twenty feet away. It was like she only at that moment realized she was trying to rob somebody in broad daylight on a Sunday morning.
“Gimme your purse, bitch!”
I could have taken the knife away from her and dented the rusting hood of my car with her face, but that was the last thing she needed and the last thing I wanted. By this point, she was just looking for a good enough reason to run away. So I gave her one.
“I ain’t got a purse,” I said as I reached behind my back. “But I got a gun.”
She took my advice and lit out, shouting for her babies to run. I got in my car and closed the open glove compartment. It was empty anyway.
As I pulled out onto Highland, my phone started to ring. The name that popped up on the display seemed familiar, though I couldn’t remember why. I almost didn’t answer it, but I needed a job more than I needed not to answer a wrong number.
“Jackie?” Her voice sounded familiar, too. “Jackie Lyons?”
“Yeah,” I said blankly.
“I was afraid your number had changed, it’s been so long since we talked,” she said. “How have you been?”
“Fine.” I still didn’t know who she was.
She seemed to sense it. “You probably don’t remember me. This is Jenny. Jenny Loftin.”
I said, “Yeah,” again, because her name meant almost nothing to me. I knew a Jenny once, for less than an hour, and I never learned her last name.
“You found my cell phone and returned it to me,” she said. “I was Ashley’s friend.”
“I forgot I gave you my number.” It was the only thing I could think to say to her at the moment. Ashley St. Michael was a photographer, and I had bought her camera from her husband, James. They were both dead now, murdered by the same man four years apart. I had met Jenny when I found her cell phone, unaware that she and Ashley had been friends long before I met either of them.
“I saw you on the news,” she said. “It must have been awful, what you went through.”
“It was pretty bad.” She didn’t need to hear my sea stories, so I didn’t go into detail, but the same lunatic who killed Ashley and James had very nearly greased me over some pictures I took of him without his permission. I managed to punch his ticket first, but not before he put me in the hospital and all over the local news for a week or two.
“But you’re OK now?” she asked.
“I’m doing OK.” The physical wounds had healed, but in my nightmares I wasn’t nearly so tough as I liked to pretend.
“I think about you sometimes, but I just never had a reason to call before.”
I don’t know why she was apologizing. I hadn’t thought of her at all. I had forgotten her completely.
“Are you still a photographer?” I allowed that I was still in the business and tried not to let her hear the hope in my voice.
“The pastor of our church needs somebody to take some pictures. I was wondering if you could meet him here at my house this afternoon, if you’re not too busy.”
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