Free Cold Touch by Leslie Parrish Page A

this case had started to mean
    something to Ty. And it meant a lot to his partner. Even the thinnest lead
    deserved every bit of respect they could give it. Which was why, together,
    they’d come back to the bul pen to pul up the report on the Wainwright
    kidnapping. After doing a little more poking around about Ms. Wainwright,
    Gabe had frowned, then headed back in to talk to their witness, asking Ty to
    finish reading over the case file without him.
    It al read pretty normal y . . . until it got pretty damn freaky.
    “Ki d told him to drown her,” Ty mumbled, his eyes drawn back to one
    portion of the victim’s statement.
    Any way of dying was bad, death being the main problem with it. But, in Ty’s
    opinion, some means of getting there seemed a lot worse than others. For
    him, drowning had always ranked as one of the worst ways to go. It was right
    up there with being tied down to a set of train tracks, watching a big old freight
    train barreling down on you. You’d know what was happening, but would have
    a hel of a time surviving without help.
    Though, to be fair, both were slightly less awful than being eaten by a shark
    —also too easy to be aware of and tough to escape.
    —also too easy to be aware of and tough to escape.
    But being drowned as opposed to accidental drowning—that was some
    heavy shit. To think about somebody holding you down in water, on purpose,
    until you stopped struggling—what would it take to survive that? And what kind
    of person would you become afterward?
    Honestly, part of him wanted to meet this Wainwright woman just to see if
    she had a whole Elvira, Mistress of the Dark thing going on. Because
    something like that would have to scar someone for life, put him or her on a
    first-name basis with the Grim Reaper.
    Then there was that graveyard business. Talk about a nightmare after a bad
    dream. It was like escaping from Michael Myers only to land in a nightmare
    with Freddy Krueger.
    When he’d first moved here, he’d walked around Laurel Grove as wel as
    some of the other old cemeteries. Like the city’s famed squares, they were
    part of Savannah’s unique charm, or so he’d heard. Though, honestly, he had
    to question the sanity of anybody who would cal a cemetery charming.
    To give credit where it was due, if there was one thing the South did wel ,
    other than sweet tea and NASCAR, it was death. They knew how to take a
    biological function and make it mysterious and eerie, each grave tel ing a
    story, every headstone seeped in history and ritual.
    Though not as big as the city’s more famous cemetery, Bonaventure, Laurel
    Grove was stil a sprawling site, shadowed with massive, moss-draped trees,
    al bent and gnarled like giant arthritic limbs. Gated family plots with rust-
    encrusted wrought-iron fences vied for space with maudlin mausoleums
    dripping with marble vines, cherubs and angels. Headstones that had once
    been black or white were now a mottled gray color, about the shade of two-
    day-dead skin. And for every twenty graves with bouquets of plastic flowers or
    smal American flags on them, there would be one with a chicken claw, a bit of
    eggplant or some strange brown powder. Voodoo .
    Amid the commonplace surnames were others that stood out, repeated
    again and again in testimony to the rich father-to-son tradition around here.
    Whole sections of the cemetery bore eternal witness to some of the city’s
    most respected families.
    Of course, stones in the older part of the north cemetery wouldn’t include
    the names of any black folks. Segregation had been alive and wel in
    Savannah, even when it came to burying, and Laurel Grove South was where
    they’d have stuck a Wal ace like him if he’d died a century ago or, hel ,
    probably fifty years ago.
    One walk-through had been enough for him. Ty had been raised in Florida
    and far preferred going to theme parks for entertainment rather than
    graveyards. He’d take a giant cartoon mouse over marble-carved,