Free Wylde by Jan Irving Page A

lips, looking away as the deputies helped the coroner take down the body from the tree in her yard. “Alec, please, I just want to find my dog.”
Alec nodded, reaching out to squeeze Jade’s shoulder. “He’s company, I get that.”
     
“Yeah, company,” Jade said, swallowing thickly. “I’ll be in my kitchen when you’re ready.”
    K
ELL followed Daniel to his SUV, Alec beside him. “This killer butchered Morley.” He swallowed, a little sick. “Do you think he or she… ate him?”
    Daniel shrugged, looking grim. “I have no idea, but it does look like a butchered kill and given Morley was placed like a bulletin board in Jade’s garden, I think it’s a hunter who had an agenda. There’s only one predator I know of that is capable of that kind of deliberate action.”
    “Yeah, us .” Kell took a deep breath. “I guess this is better, knowing that it’s a hunter out there and we need to catch him.” So why were his guts twisting like cold snakes, warning him there was more going on here? He looked at Alec. “We need to find out if anyone had it in for Morley, any of his connections for his part-time business, anyone whose wife he might have slept with….”
“Kell….” Daniel hesitated. “Someone has been stealing food from people’s homes for years. You know it and I know it.” Kell rubbed the stiff back of his neck. “Yeah. So you’re saying the so-called ghost killed Morley?”
     
“I don’t know, but someone certainly wanted to make it look that way… which will probably make folks in town very spooked.”
    “Shit!” Kell could imagine. He hoped no one shot at his neighbor getting a newspaper or something. And whoever the ghost was, he or she had better stay hidden deep in the woods for a while… as long as they weren’t responsible for Morley—because if they were, Kell would come hunting.

J
ADE M ORETON ’ S kitchen had a dozen red roses seated in a jam
    jar. Kell could figure out who had sent her the flowers without reading the card, but it struck him as sad that the woman didn’t even own a flower vase. Maybe Alec would be good for her, if he could get close enough through the thorns that guarded the rose.
    He was briefly amused by the romantic turn of his own thoughts, but maybe he had a reason lately to be feeling that way, and it beat hell out of thinking about gory hanging bodies. Still, he had to get his mind back to the business at hand. “Jade,” Kell greeted the waitress, sitting down in the offered chair.
    “Chief,” she rasped. “I was thinking of getting very drunk. Want to join me?” She pulled a bottle of Johnnie Walker out of the cupboard.
“I’m on duty,” Kell sighed with some regret. “Guess you know what I’m here for.”
    She nodded.
“Nice flowers,” he said, seeking to put her at her ease. “Yeah, Alec, you know….”
    “I do.” Kell’s gaze sharpened. “I need to know what you remember from the night you and Thomas got lost in the forest.” He pulled out a notebook. “You headed up the trail for a swim in Noah Matthews’s pool, is that right?”
    “Yep. From my conversations with Noah, he seems a good guy, really crazy about his kid. He was gentlemanly enough to say it would be all right for me to use the pool sometimes and… I guess I’m comfortable about that since it’s not too fancy, you know. Plus, his pool has the power of purple working for it.” Jade’s eyes were briefly amused as she gave a shrug, and Kell remembered that, like him, she was a foster kid, raised by a divorced mother here in town; it figured Noah’s parenting would impress her. “I don’t remember much. That kid Thomas thought he heard a sound, he fired his Dad’s gun at something and then he shoved me… next thing I had a hell of a headache.”
Kell eyed her bruise. “You really should have taken work off.”
    “Don’t kid a kidder. You would have done the same as me,” Jade observed, reaching for a fresh cigarette. “And I’m determined