Rainey Nights Read online

  Other R.E. Bradshaw titles:

  OUT ON THE SOUND

  (Adventures of Decky and Charlie, # 1)

  SWEET CAROLINA GIRLS

  THE GIRL BACK HOME

  RAINEY DAYS

  (Rainey Bell Series, #1)

  WAKING UP GRAY

  RAINEY NIGHTS

  R. E. Bradshaw

  © 2011 by R. E. Bradshaw. All Rights Reserved.

  R. E. Bradshaw Books/August 2011

  ISBN 13: 978-0-98357-202-2

  www.rebradshawbooks.com

  Rebecca Elizabeth Bradshaw on Facebook

  For information contact [email protected]

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author and publisher.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and events portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual persons living or dead or events are entirely unintentional.

  From the Author

  I am writing this on the one year anniversary of uploading my first novel. I was finally pushed into this dream by the people around me who were tired of being guinea pigs and said, “Publish!” So, I did and what an amazing ride it has been. I owe a huge thank you to many people, but most important are the readers. Thank you for giving me a shot at a dream. Your constant encouragement keeps me at the keyboard.

  Lynne, Dawn, Linda, Henriette, Terry – you ladies simply rock!

  Kaycee, you are a savior. I am lucky to have such a patient editor.

  Gayl, what can I say? You were a blessing sent from above. Thank you for everything.

  My four legged editorial team, I thank you for hours of company and for listening to me read. More treats are coming. Yes, the chicken jerky kind. (The real Freddie Krueger, the model for Rainey’s bobbed-tail black cat, lives at my house and is a constant source of entertainment and consternation.)

  Mom and Dad, thanks for being there. Like the Sugarland song says, “Remember me in ribbons and curls, I still love you more than anything in the world, Love, your baby girl.”

  Jon, you’re the best son ever. Kendra, you are the best daughter-in-law ever.

  Deb, as always – you are my inspiration. Thanks for the gallons of coffee, bringing me food when I was too wrapped up in the story to remember to eat, sleeping alone for nights on end while I wrote into the wee hours of the morning, and not minding when I slept away the next day. Thank you for all the little things that mean so much. You are the reason I believe in love at first sight.

  About the book…

  RAINEY NIGHTS is the second novel in the Rainey Bell Thriller series. This a stand alone book, but if you want more background on former FBI Behavioral Analyst Rainey Bell, read RAINEY DAYS to see how the series began.

  In RAINEY NIGHTS, the reader is given a glimpse into Special Agent Rainey Bell’s former life, where she is unaffected by the tragedies that later derailed her career and changed her future, (detailed in RAINEY DAYS.) This glimpse into her past gives perspective to the challenges Rainey faces, starting a new life with Katie Meyers. This is not a coming out story, it is a coming to terms story. At the beginning of any relationship, there are adjustments and compromises to be made. In Rainey’s case, her past shapes her decisions and often complicates the situation. It may end up getting them both killed.

  Above all, RAINEY NIGHTS is a thriller. It is not a romance, although Rainey and Katie’s relationship provides the backdrop for the story. This book is not for the squeamish or weak of heart. Fair warning: RAINEY NIGHTS contains violence of a sexual nature. For those of you that choose to proceed, do so with the doors and windows locked and the lights on all over the house. As one reviewer said, “Don’t assume you know how this story is going to end.”

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part II

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part III

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  PART I

  “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”

  ~Sigmund Freud

  Chapter one

  Saturday, May 5th, four years ago.

  Botetourt County, Virginia

  Tears mingled with the cold water dripping from her body. The drops fell to the ground, streamed down the hill, and slid off the embankment just a few miles south of Iron Gate, Virginia. The James River headwaters swirled by, carrying the tears away on a meandering journey across the Commonwealth to the Chesapeake Bay, where they would slip into the Atlantic and out to sea. In the deep-green valley created by the Blue Ridge Mountains on the east and the Appalachian Mountains on the west, a mother began to worry. The two ancient mountain ranges nearly touched in Botetourt County, separated only by the little town of Buchanan and the James River. This lush land was an ideal place to be born and, as it turned out, a very lonely place to die.

  Crystal Lynn Granger, like the James River, was born in these majestic highlands. She grew to be a dark haired beauty with big brown, soulful eyes. A long legged, gifted athlete, Crystal was a two-sport star, playing basketball and tennis. She was also very popular among her peers, voted Class President all four years of high school. She would graduate Valedictorian of her class in a month and head off to college in the fall. Crystal Lynn was destined to follow the James River out of the valley and on to greater things.

  Raised by God-fearing country folks, Crystal was very active in the youth ministry at her church. Jesus played a big part in her life. It was to Him that she prayed, as she looked up into the deep black night at the stars twinkling through the treetops. The waning moonlight could not erase the surrounding darkness. Though Crystal could not see down the embankment, she knew the James River gurgled below her. Her sense of sight was useless, but her hearing was keen. What she heard made her pray even harder. She did not pray for herself. She prayed for the family she was about to leave behind. She prayed that God would help her devastated parents and friends, and see them through the grieving. Crystal closed her eyes and prayed her Lord would end her suffering soon.

  From behind, Crystal heard the snapping of twigs, as he moved closer. Some time ago, he had slipped into the blackness, leaving her tied to a tree. She wasn’t sure how long ago he left. Time had no meaning, now. Crystal knew he was coming back for her. He told her he would, right after he taped her hands into praying position, tied a rope around her neck, and fastened her to the tree on her knees. His final act was the duct tape on her forehead that held her head up, so she was forced to look at him, while he ranted and raved in front of her, and then he was gone.

  Crystal was glad to be left tied there. At least he wasn’t hitting her anymore. He beat her black and blue, before viciously raping and sodomizing her for the last two hours. The mo
re she fought him, the more he seemed to enjoy it. Finally, she submitted to stop the beating. After the sexual assault ended, he tied a rope around her neck, and threw her in the river. She repeatedly lost her footing on the slick river rocks and nearly drowned. Laughing, he pulled her up, only to let the rope go slack so she would fall again. She screamed when she had the breath, but no one could hear her over the rushing rapids this far away from the road. At least the freezing water had eased some of the pain in her brutalized body. Crystal was sure, however, that he was not done with her. She knew he was going to kill her. She knew who he was, or at least she thought she knew the blond haired young man with the kind blue eyes and handsome smile.

  Crystal found him waiting by her car when she finished work. Surprised and flattered that he came to see her, she felt her face blush with excitement. His invitation for a quick cup of coffee was thrilling. She understood when he told her not to tell anyone, because the other girls would be jealous, and she wouldn’t want that either. Crystal didn’t call home, because her strict parents would not let her go out with a boy they had not met. It was just coffee. “No harm, no foul,” she thought.

  He promised to have her back in time to make her curfew. He already had the coffee, prepared just as she liked it, waiting in his truck. He drove to a place where they could sit and watch the river. Crystal was not nervous or apprehensive about being alone with him, because of what he said he stood for. In fact, she felt safer with him than some of the boys her parents vetted. He was so handsome and charming, he seemed a dream come true, the perfect boy. When he leaned over and kissed her sweetly her heart fluttered, but as she returned his kiss, everything changed.

  The light from his small battery operated lantern illuminated the area in front of the tree again. Through eyes that were nothing but slits from the swelling, Crystal saw his feet first before he raised the lantern, bringing his full body into view. He was completely naked. During the earlier assault, she closed her eyes, but she knew he didn’t use part of his body to rape her. He had not removed his clothes. Now, she could see him standing before her with his penis in full view. She had only seen a nude man in a picture a friend showed her. She wasn’t sure, but something didn’t look right. He saw where she was looking and the look in his eyes sent lightning bolts of terror through her body. Shaking uncontrollably, Crystal searched for some place to take her mind, some place to find peace, so she wouldn’t be there, alone, with him. She wasn’t sure where the inspiration came from, but she began to sing softly. Through bloody, split lips the words came out in a whisper and they stopped him in his tracks.

  “Jesus loves me, this I know…”

  He froze only for a second and then a wicked smile crept across his face. The last thing she saw was that evil sneer and the flash of light reflected from the thin blade slicing through the air. She felt nothing, as her soul and body separated with the first swing of the sword, nor did she feel the second slash disembowel her. Crystal Lynn Granger’s blood flowed down the embankment and into the James River. Her soul followed the flow of the river out of Botetourt County for what she had always been told and knew in her heart was a better place.

  Chapter two

  Thursday, May 10, five days later.

  Southeast of Eagle Rock Gorge, the James River formed a small island. On the east embankment facing the island, the dark trail of dried blood was still visible five days after the murder. Bloody bare footprints ran up and down the hill, forming a macabre choreography along the crimson trail. Rainey’s eyes followed the stains to the rapidly moving water below and then back up to the naked, headless body attached to the tree. The hands were still duct taped together in prayer. Rainey pulled on the latex gloves she had been squeezing tightly in each fist, trying to distance herself from the pain and horror the victim experienced. She turned from the rotting smell of the corpse and took a deep cleansing breath, before she walked back up the hill to join the others by the tree.

  FBI Supervisory Special Agent, Danny McNally, his broad muscular shoulders in stark contrast to the wiry mountain men, towered over the two local detectives. His red wavy hair was wildly out of control. He had not tried to tame it since they ran out from under the helicopter blades, jumped into a waiting SUV, and rushed to the crime scene. Rainey’s experiences with helicopter blades and the thick mass on her head were not good ones. Before leaving this morning, she captured her unruly chestnut locks in a ponytail that stuck out the back of her FBI baseball cap.

  Rainey and Danny were here to try to make sense of a series of brutal murders along US 220, from the Blue Ridge Mountains down through the Piedmont area of North Carolina. They left the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, on the campus of the FBI Academy, just after seven a.m. Using the twenty minutes of flying time to go over the files prepared by the Behavioral Analysis Unit, of which they were both members, Danny and Rainey were now analyzing the most recent crime scene. The BAU2, as it was known, was tasked with understanding evil the average person could never fathom. Her unit concentrated on violent criminal acts like serial murders, mass murders, spree killers, unusual murders of all types, along with sexual assaults and kidnappings targeting adults. The nine murders tied to this particular unknown subject or UNSUB certainly met the criteria of violent and unusual.

  Danny turned to Rainey, as she approached, and made the introductions. “Detectives Blaine and Martin, this is SSA Rainey Bell.”

  Rainey ignored the hands extended toward her. She held up her gloved hands to show the officers she didn’t want to contaminate them. She simply nodded and acknowledged each with, “Detective.”

  Danny began to fill her in on what he found out from the locals. “Blaine here says the body was discovered just before dawn by those two scared boys over there. They were huntin’ a new spot to do some fly-fishing, found a path, followed it, and stumbled on her. They’re going to have to wash out those waders when they get home. No sign of the head, but they’re pretty sure this is the Granger girl that went missing last Saturday.”

  Rainey walked over and studied the body without touching it. “What makes them so sure it’s her?”

  Blaine answered, “That ‘WWJD’ tattooed on her ankle is exactly like the picture her folks gave us. They weren’t too happy she had a tattoo, but it helped us identify her. We’ll know positively when we get the hands un-taped and compare prints. We hope the scavengers left the thumbs under the tape untouched. The M.E. thinks the tape may have preserved the skin well enough to rehydrate. She was printed at one of those safe kids things at the mall, so we have a comparison set. If we can’t get a print, then we’ll have to wait for DNA, but I’m pretty sure it’s her.”

  At that moment, a small white haired man in blue coveralls came toward them. He made eye contact with Rainey. A huge grin enveloped his face, curling the ends of his white mustache upward. “Agent Bell, how nice to see you again. Sorry it’s under these circumstances, but then we always seem to meet over a dead body.”

  “Dr. Patrick, I’m glad to see you. I was hoping it would be you on this one,” Rainey said, and then added, “Her hands… they are the same. Can we see if she’s holding anything before you bag her?”

  “Let me get something down so we can lay her over and then we’ll see what the tape could be hiding,” Dr. Patrick said, as he and his assistant moved a plastic sheet into position beside the body.

  Rainey squatted in front of the putrid, blackening remains. Rainey wasn’t “used to” the smell, but she had learned to block it out and breathe properly. Still, she had to fight the gag reflex trying to overtake her. Detective Martin moved closer.

  He spoke behind a handkerchief, held over his nose and mouth. “Did he beat the others this badly?”

  “It’s hard to tell what’s bruising and what’s lividity. The animals and insects didn’t do us any favors,” Rainey answered, dispassionately.

  She had to be detached. How else could she deal with the torturous images she saw almost daily? She spent
the last seven years researching serial killers, rapists, sadists and the like, by reading about them in reams of reports, interviewing them in prison, cataloguing their behavior, and going out into the field to help catch the new ones. It took time to develop the expertise needed to become one of the eight members of Rainey’s team. In conjunction with their extensive field experience and accrued wisdom, she and her coworkers had studied an extremely large volume of cases. An average law enforcement officer would pursue maybe one serial killer in a lifetime. Rainey’s team averaged twelve serial investigations a year.

  Criminal behavioral analysis developed based on the idea, a person’s behavior directly resulted from that person’s thought processes. The repetitions of behavior in his or her crimes became recognizable. By comparing types of criminal behaviors and the people who committed those offenses, it was possible to classify the type of person who would most likely commit a crime with similar characteristics. In other words, Rainey Bell spent her days and most nights submerged in human depravity. Today would be no different.

  Rainey stood up and moved back as Dr. Patrick approached. He removed a cross, suspended on a gold chain, from what remained of the neck. He placed it in an evidence bag and handed it to Rainey. She studied the cross while the doctor and his assistant cut the ropes fastening the victim to the tree, careful to leave the knots intact. Slowly, they lowered the body onto the plastic sheeting. Once all the bindings had been bagged and tagged, the doctor moved to the hands. He cut the tape with a scalpel only enough to see inside. Prying the hands open slightly, he reached in with tweezers and removed a small piece of folded paper. He placed the paper, stained with body fluids from decomposition, in another evidence bag and handed it to Rainey. She looked at the paper, unable to see what was written on it, but she knew from the way it was folded what it would say.