LITMIR.BIZ

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me know if you think of anything else. Go to Ashford’s and lay low. We’re going to have a CSI team go over the entire town house in case Lane left something here that relates back to one of the murders. Take only what you need.”

      Panic blipped in her chest. If Michael had left something behind in their house, the Wrens would be even more closely intertwined with The Charmed Killer case. And she didn’t like the idea of the police going through her personal things.

      “And forget about the body-moving business for a while,” Jack added.

      “But Coop—”

      “Could stand to take a break himself.”

      She blinked, surprised to hear Jack’s concern for Dr. Cooper Craft, the former M.E. who had been relegated to moving bodies for the morgue and had hired Wesley to assist. It was how she’d been drawn into body moving herself, and how she’d been drawn to Coop, who had been acting strange lately. “So you do think something’s wrong with Coop.”

      “Nothing an AA meeting can’t fix. Don’t get caught up in Coop’s problems, darlin’, you’ve got enough of your own. And keep that stun baton handy.” He wiped his hand over his mouth, trying to smother a smile. “You got Ashford good, huh?”

      “You don’t have to take so much pleasure in his pain.”

      “You’re moving in with the man. Let me have a little fun at his expense.”

      “I’m not moving in with Peter…I’m staying at his house.”

      Jack stepped closer and lifted her chin. “In his bed?”

      Carlotta’s chest tightened. “What do you care, Jack?”

      He leaned his face close to hers. “Because getting you back home gives me that much more incentive to get The Charmed Killer off the streets.” He grabbed the red panties in her hands, and walked away, holding them high before shoving them into his jacket pocket with a grin. “I’ll hang on to these for motivation.”

      Carlotta shook her head as he disappeared through her door, confounded as always by the man’s push-pull on her heart. She had no doubt that Jack would get the maniac off the streets. Her live-in arrangement with Peter notwithstanding, she only hoped it was sooner rather than later.

      She glanced around her room with an eye toward what the police would find that might make her uncomfortable.

      Her teenage diaries.

      Carlotta moved toward the dresser. She’d found them when she’d unearthed the charm bracelet that her father had given her. She couldn’t remember the exact contents of the diaries, but since they’d encompassed her burgeoning relationship with Peter and the time immediately after her parents’ disappearance, she didn’t want strangers analyzing her personal drama for their own entertainment.

      She pulled out the diaries—one for each year of high school—and stowed them under clothes in her suitcase. When she started to close the dresser drawer, she suddenly noticed the corner of a file—her father’s client file that Wesley had stolen from Randolph’s attorney, Liz Fischer. She didn’t want it to wind up in the wrong hands. So she slipped in the file, then closed the bag and zipped it shut. Moving in with Peter was the right decision, Carlotta told herself. She desperately needed a change of venue.

      Carlotta picked up her cell phone to check for messages and frowned. Meanwhile, where was her brother and why wasn’t he returning her calls?

      2

      Wesley was valiantly trying not to throw up. He’d passed on a drive-through lunch in anticipation of the job that he’d spent hours working up his nerve for, and it was a good thing, too.

      The severed head at his feet looked like a prop for a haunted house. The edges of the neck skin were black with dried blood and curled, like a macabre ruffle. Red and white strings of sinew dangled out of the gaping hole that had once connected the head to a torso. The head’s eyes were partially open, and the skin was dark in places, hinting of a beating the man had received before he’d taken his last breath. The sparse, dark hair was a matted mess, caked with dirt and blood.

      Wesley stood holding pliers, giving himself a pep talk. Mouse had ordered him to remove the head’s teeth, which would make it harder for the cops to identify the head if it was found. This wasn’t what Wesley’d had in mind when he’d agreed to go undercover in The Carver’s loan-shark organization in exchange for having charges of attempted body snatching downgraded to a misdemeanor and additional hours added to his community service. By offering his services to Mouse to help him collect on overdue accounts, he’d hoped to kill two birds with one stone—fulfill the D.A.’s demands while clearing his own debt to The Carver. When he’d balked at performing the grotesque act, Mouse had told him he had Wesley’s jacket with the dead man’s blood on it. Wesley believed him. When he’d tried to recover his confiscated jacket from Mouse’s trunk, he’d found a severed finger inside.

      “Just do it,” Mouse yelled. He stood nearby eating a Big Mac and fries.

      They were on an abandoned construction site in east Atlanta where the city leaders’ overly optimistic projections of growth had led to lots of digging, followed by lots of reneging. The site was deserted, hemmed in by a few trees, but there were no people or houses within sight. Just baked dirt, tinged red with Georgia clay, as far as the eye could see.

      “Have you done this before?” Wesley asked his companion.

      “Oh, yeah. You get used to it.”

      Wesley gagged.

      “You’re thinking about it too much, little man. Fucking do it already.”

      Wesley took a deep breath and lowered the safety glasses over his eyes. Then he knelt on the ground, averted his gaze and felt for the man’s mouth. The dead flesh was cold and pulpy and the head reeked, like a rancid piece of meat. Wesley groped until he found the mouth, then pried open the stiff lips. He glanced down and grew light-headed at the sight of his hands in the mouth of the disembodied head.

      “Start with the front ones,” Mouse advised, chewing on his burger. “They snap off like dried corn.”

      Wes swallowed hard and positioned the pliers with a shaking hand around one of the big square front teeth. The stretching and pulling had made the man’s eyelids pop open, revealing his cloudy irises. Wesley squeezed the pliers, but when he pulled up, the head slid against the ground and spun out of his grasp, rolling like a melon.

      Mouse belly laughed, obviously enjoying the show.

      Wesley wrestled the head back in position, then put it between his knees to hold it still. Panicky and sickened, he repositioned the pliers and pulled as hard as he could. Something pinged against his safety glasses, and when he looked down, half of the tooth was gone. Bile backed up in his throat, but before he could change his mind, he broke off the other half of the tooth and dropped it in the Micky D’s disposable cup that Mouse had conveniently provided.

      “See, that wasn’t so hard,” Mouse urged him on.

      One by one, Wes rid the head of its teeth. Some of them broke off, and some of them came out root and all. There was no blood, thank God, but plenty of flying gum tissue to muck up the safety glasses. Mr. Dead Man had spent a lot of money on his choppers, because he had caps, and two in the back were gold.

      “I’ll take those,” Mouse said, extending a handkerchief for Wesley to drop them into.

      “What will you do with them?”

      “Sell them.”

      “Who the heck buys gold teeth?”

      “Well, most of our sources have dried up because it’s gotten too risky, but now those companies that buy gold through the mail make it real easy. They send me a postage-paid envelope, I drop in the gold teeth, and a couple of weeks later, I get a check, easy-peasy.”

      Wesley’s eyes bulged. “They don’t wonder where you

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