Vigilante Justice, page 1
“I think someone wants me and my daughter dead,” Everleigh said.
Declan’s jaw dropped in disbelief. He wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “Excuse me?”
She handed him the note. Declan read it, then looked at her in confusion. It was threatening. “This is the first I’ve heard about a person seeking justice against a serial killer by going after his family members.”
“So you don’t think it’s some sick joke?”
“It’s possible,” he responded. “Have you told anyone about your father?”
“No. It’s not something I’d discuss—I’m actually disgusted by the idea of that killer having fathered me.”
Declan was surprised how calm Everleigh appeared to be, although he suspected deep down that she was shaken.
“Detective, I came to see if you can help me find out who sent this letter to me,” she said. “Someone wants me dead because of a man I’ve never met...”
Jacquelin Thomas is an award-winning, bestselling author with more than fifty-five books in print. When not writing, she is busy catching up on her reading, attending sporting events and spoiling her grandchildren. Jacquelin and her family live in North Carolina.
Books by Jacquelin Thomas
Love Inspired Cold Case
Evidence Uncovered
Cold Case Deceit
Harlequin Heartwarming
A Family for the Firefighter
Her Hometown Hero
Her Marine Hero
His Partnership Proposal
Twins for the Holidays
Visit the Author Profile page
at Harlequin.com for more titles.
VIGILANTE JUSTICE
JACQUELIN THOMAS
The fathers shall not be put to death
for the children, neither shall the children be
put to death for the fathers: every man
shall be put to death for his own sin.
—Deuteronomy 24:16
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM THE MARINE’S DEADLY REUNION BY LORETTA EIDSON
PROLOGUE
Legs planted wide and nostrils flaring, he stood on a hill, watching as a family gathered to lay their loved one to rest below him. His gaze was intense and unblinking. Sounds of people sobbing floated up to where he stood. He didn’t know the deceased or any of the mourners. He didn’t even care about them.
In this moment, it felt strange being here in Atlanta—he’d never wanted to come back to this place that was filled with nothing but bad memories.
“You okay?”
He had been too lost in thought to hear his brother’s approach.
Pointing at the aging headstone, he said, “She’s been dead thirty-two years today. I was six and you were only four.”
“I know. I thought it was supposed to g-get easier with time. At least that’s what people s-say.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say... They lied.” A vein in his neck pulsed. “I can still remember that night. Begging her to let us stay home with her. She forced us to go with Dad. Said it was his weekend. Then coming home and finding her body...” She’d been bloodied and beaten. They’d been too young to know that she’d been raped, too.
“There wasn’t anything we could’ve done. I b-barely remember wh-what happened. I only know what you told me.” His brother spoke slowly to lessen his stutter, which grew worse when he was upset or anxious.
He gestured wildly in his anger. “Maybe not, but we could’ve tried to do something. You don’t remember because I protected you from as much of it as I could.” He had been tormented by guilt all these years, living each day with a dreadful sense of failure. It wasn’t enough for the police to have found the man responsible for her death.
He recalled the day James Ray Powell was apprehended—three months after his mother’s murder. It was all over the television. As they escorted the serial killer out to a waiting police car, he was laughing.
That’s what I remember most. The laughing.
He drew in a few slow breaths to steady himself.
But the rage remained—it was a kind of cold fury that refused to leave. He’d never be rid of it until he dispensed the justice Powell deserved.
“Are we doing the right thing?” his brother asked.
“He took our mother away from us. We takin’ his family from him. Tell me now if you’re having second thoughts.”
“N-naw...”
“Ya sure?”
“I’m good. Let’s just get this d-done so I can focus on some other stuff. I’ve been thinking about my future. Got some plans in the works.”
“Like what?”
Shrugging, his brother said, “I’m not ready to t-talk about it.”
“Okay, whatever...” he said. “I found Ezra Stone. He don’t live too far from here.” He eyed his brother. “You with me on this, right?”
“Yeah. How m-many times I—I gotta reassure you. All we got is us.”
They descended the hill, their steps muffled by the brown carpet of grass as they walked towards the faded yellow lines of the empty parking lot.
“Ride with me. I’ll bring you back to your car.”
They got into the car, started the engine and drove off.
They rode in silence for a while, the only sound coming from the radio playing hip hop music.
“You ever find out what happened to Pops?”
“Naw... It’s pretty obvious that he abandoned us a long time ago.”
“That ain’t right,” his brother said. “Something happened to him. His body just ain’t been found.”
“You can hang on to that dream, but the truth is that people out here don’t care ’bout nothin’ but they own lives. That’s why we gotta take care of stuff ourselves.”
When he glimpsed a police car a few vehicles behind them, he slowed down, cruising carefully down the street. He didn’t want to risk getting a speeding ticket or even drawing attention to themselves.
Ten minutes later, he pulled into a parking spot near the corner. “That’s the house right there.”
They watched a man walk out of the house toward an old Cadillac. He unlocked the door and leaned inside. He appeared to be searching for something.
“That’s him. Ezra Stone ain’t changed a bit. Just got older.”
“Old and gray,” his brother responded. “He used to have m-more weight on him. At least that’s how I remember him.”
As he watched their target, he felt hot fury surge upward, threatening to explode.
Soon...
The thought of what they had planned appeased him. Temporarily. But his rage would return.
“We’ll come back tonight,” he announced.
“I’ll be ready.”
“It’s time to make them all pay.”
ONE
James Ray Powell is a cold-blooded killer. He stole the lives of so many women, leaving their families devastated and heartbroken. It is only right that he feels what we feel—the loss of a child, a wife, a mother, a sister... I won’t stop until I erase every single member of that killer’s family. This includes you and your daughter.
Everleigh Sanderson Taylor stared at the letter in her trembling hand, reading it again, allowing the words to wrestle their way into her brain. A chill dashed down her spine at the mention of her little girl. Rae was only five years old—an innocent in all this. Six months ago, Everleigh’s world changed when her mother told her about the circumstances surrounding her conception. Deloris died a few days later on the first day of June.
Two weeks after her mother died, Everleigh received an offer from a small university in Charleston. She’d accepted the position as a professor of psychology, seizing the opportunity to build a new life for herself and Rae. A month after her mother’s funeral, Everleigh left Savannah, Georgia, to escape her past and start fresh on Angel Island, located off the coast of South Carolina. She was no stranger to grief. Just one year prior to losing her mother, Everleigh’s husband died, leaving her a widow at thirty. With both gone, the Hostess City of the South no longer felt like home.
Starting over in a new city brought hope, promise and no drama. She and her daughter were about to spend their first Christmas on the island. Everything had been going well, until today.
Her thirty-second birthday when she retrieved the letter from her mailbox.
She glanced down once more at the typewritten note in her hand, the words jumping out at her, the tone accusing and judgmental. It had been originally sent to her mother’s
Who would want to hurt her and her child?
Her mind jumped to Wyle Gaines, a smooth talker who’d befriended Deloris at the hospital where they worked. He’d spent a lot of time with Deloris, even taking her to doctor appointments, cooking and staying with her whenever Everleigh had to work. Perhaps her mother had confided in him, which would explain how he knew the truth.
Everleigh had never cared for the man, but was unable to convince her mother that Wyle couldn’t be trusted. When she’d put the house up for sale after her mother’s death, he’d made an offer to purchase it at a substantially lower price than what it was worth.
When Everleigh refused him, Wyle became angry. He even claimed that Deloris had promised the house to him shortly after she got sick. Her mother had never mentioned this to Everleigh and she didn’t believe a word of what Wyle said. She ended up blocking him and threatened to call the police if he continued showing up at her door or her mother’s home unannounced.
In the end, Everleigh rented out the house, choosing to keep the property. Was this his way of getting back at her for not letting him have her mother’s house?
Everleigh bit back the overwhelming streak of panic she felt, refusing to allow her fear to spin out of control until she had a reason to be fearful.
She picked up her coat and purse, and headed out the door. Everleigh was going to the police precinct in Charleston. Declan Blanchet, a fellow professor at the university, was also a criminal investigator. She didn’t know him well. Until now, they hadn’t had any real interaction on campus other than general faculty meetings. She’d heard from some of the other staff that he was a decorated police detective, having been in law enforcement for fifteen years.
Everleigh turned up the heat in her car. She wasn’t sure if the sudden chill was due to the wintry weather or the feeling of dread coursing through her veins.
She pulled into the parking lot of the Charleston police precinct. Everleigh sat in the car, debating whether she really wanted to see this through, to open this Pandora’s box.
Five minutes later, she strode with purpose through the doors, walking up to a large desk that was separated from the public by a glass partition. While waiting for someone to assist her, Everleigh could hear sirens blaring from outside the building, competing against the anonymous voice coming through an intercom system. Behind her, the doors opened and closed in rapid succession.
“How may I help you?” a young woman in uniform asked. Her hair was braided down and pulled back into a bun.
“I’d like to speak with Detective Declan Blanchet. I work with him at the university.”
“Your name?”
“Dr. Everleigh Taylor.”
“Please have a seat over there, Dr. Taylor,” the officer directed. “I’ll let him know that you’re here.”
“Thank you,” Everleigh said.
She sat down, her back straight. Her body was filled with tension.
Relax.
Everleigh went through a series of relaxation techniques while waiting to meet with Declan.
After all, the letter could turn out to be Wyle’s idea of a cruel joke. He’d vowed to make her life miserable after she refused to sell him her mother’s house. She reminded herself that until she knew the threat was real, there wasn’t anything to worry about.
Her body however, revolted at the thought that he could be so cruel.
* * *
Forty-year-old Declan Blanchet’s dark eyebrows rose to attention when he learned the woman requesting to speak with him was none other than Dr. Everleigh Taylor. She was the new professor in the psychology department. She was also extremely attractive and reserved, keeping mostly to herself whenever she was on campus. They’d said hello a few times, but hadn’t interacted much otherwise.
He couldn’t imagine why she’d come all the way to the precinct in Charleston to see him. He knew that she lived on Angel Island, two blocks from another colleague, Robin Rutledge, and the island had its own police department.
Declan walked past a couple of officers chatting over the sound of a microwave beeping in the break room.
“What’s up, Blanchet?” one of them asked.
“Same thing, different day,” he responded with a chuckle.
Declan peered through the locked door before walking out. Everleigh was dressed in a pair of gray designer jeans and a black turtleneck beneath a black wool coat. On her feet were a pair of leather loafers. He liked a woman who knew how to dress to accentuate her curves. Her hair was styled in the usual neat bun at her nape. Her skin was the color of smooth chocolate and free of makeup. Normally, she wore black-framed glasses, but not today.
He walked up and asked, “What can I do for you, Professor Taylor?”
“I think someone wants me and my daughter dead,” Everleigh stated, getting straight to the point.
His jaw dropped. I couldn’t have heard her correctly. “Excuse me?”
She handed him a piece of paper. “This letter was forwarded to me by the people renting my mother’s house in Savannah. I have an idea of who might have sent it, but I’m not sure.”
Declan’s eyebrows shot up as he read the note, and he looked at Everleigh in disbelief. He led her to a deserted office, weaving through cubicles until they came to one with its door shut tight.
Inside, Everleigh spoke, almost too quietly for him to hear. “I found out six months ago that James Ray Powell is my father,” she admitted.
He jolted. She didn’t have to explain who the notorious serial killer was.
“My mother was one of his victims. She escaped with her life, but I was the result of the attack. She never reported it, and she told me that no one outside of her parents knew what happened. I think she may have told this guy. He spent quite a bit of time with her during her final days.”
Declan swallowed his disbelief that someone as evil as Powell could’ve fathered a woman like Everleigh. The man had raped and murdered as many as thirty women...maybe more. James Ray Powell began terrorizing Atlanta, Carrollton and a few other surrounding cities in Georgia in the mid-eighties. He was finally apprehended June 1990, six months before she was born.
“Who was the letter addressed to?” he inquired.
“My mother,” she responded.
“It’s possible that the letter is most likely referring to the two of you—mother and daughter.”
“I had considered that,” Everleigh said. “But this guy knows my mom is gone. Besides, she isn’t related to Powell by blood—just me and Rae.”
“We should consider all options. If it’s not him, then I have to admit that I’m baffled,” Declan said. “This is the first case I’ve heard about of a person seeking justice against a serial killer by going after the family members.”
“So you don’t think it’s just some sick joke?” Everleigh asked.
“It’s possible,” he responded, though he had some reservations about the idea. “Have you told anyone about Powell?”
“No. It’s not something I’d discuss—I’m disgusted by the very idea of that killer having fathered me. But this man...his name is Wyle Gaines. He worked at the hospital with my mom. He went out of his way to befriend her, although I never trusted him... Anyway, after she died, Wyle kept asking for different things—saying that she promised he could have them, including her house. He knew I’d never just sign it over to him, so he offered to purchase it for half of what it was worth. Wyle got very upset with me when I wouldn’t sell to him.”
“Did you ever feel threatened when he was around?” Declan asked.
“Not really,” she responded. “Irritated mostly. But Wyle promised that he’d make life miserable for me.”
“Do you think your mother told him about Powell?”
“It’s entirely possible,” Everleigh stated. “I’d like to think she wouldn’t have told him anything, but my mother was under a lot of medication toward the end. She would say random things and she talked about Powell a lot in her final days.”
