All the Pretty Girls

“J.T. Ellison’s debut novel rocks.

Darkly compelling and thoroughly chilling, with rich

characterisation and a well-layered plot, All the Pretty

Girls is everything a great crime thriller should be.”

—Allison Brennann,

New York Times best selling author of Fear No Evil

“Taylor Jackson is a fresh portrayal of a cop with a serial

killer to catch. Creepy thrills from start to finish.”

—James O. Born, author of Burn Zone

“An impressive debut that is rich not just in suspense but

in the details. It’s all gritty, grisly and a great read.”

—M.J. Rose, international bestselling author of

The Reincarnationist

“All the Pretty Girls is a spellbinding suspense novel and

Tennessee has a new dark poet. J.T. Ellison’s fast-paced,

clever plotting yields a page-turner par excellence.

A turbocharged thrill ride of a debut.”

Julia Spencer-Fleming, Edgar Award finalist

and author of All Mortal Flesh

“Ellison hits the ground running with an electrifying

debut. All the Pretty Girls is a masterful thriller, shockingly

authentic and unputdownable. Fans of Sandford,

Cornwell and Reichs will relish every page.”

—J.A. Konrath, author of Dirty Martini

All The Pretty Girls

J.T. Ellison

www.mirabooks.co.uk

J.T. ELLISON is a thriller writer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her short stories have appeared in Demolition magazine, Flashing in the Gutters, Mouth Full of Bullets and Spinetingler magazine. All the Pretty Girls is her first novel in the Taylor Jackson series. She is a weekly columnist at Murderati.com and is a founding member of Killer Year. Visit JTEllison.com for more information.

Upcoming novels in the

Taylor Jackson series

14

JUDAS KISS

For Randy and my parents. Love you more.

Acknowledgements

The process of writing All the Pretty Girls was without a doubt a group effort. There are many people who graciously gave their time and expertise to help me get the details straight. I would like to send my deepest thanks to the following:

My extraordinary editor, Linda McFall of MIRA Books, and all of the MIRA team, especially Margaret Marbury and Dianne Moggy. A very special thank-you to Tara Kelly for designing the perfect cover.

My incredible agent Scott Miller, of Trident Media Group, for taking a chance on a unknown, and Holly Henderson Root, for all her help and editorial advice.

Detective David Achord of the Metro Nashville Homicide Department was an invaluable resource for the law enforcement details in the book. Not only did he allow me to ride along with him, he read, edited, gave ideas and information, encouraged me to keep on track and was always there for a question, chat or dinner. In the process, he’s become a great friend and I am very thankful to have him on my side.

Officer Carl Stocks of the Metro Nashville Police Department took me on a midnight-shift ride-along that changed my life. He showed me that the horrors we write and read about are very real and I have great respect for his abilities and dedication to getting it right.

The Metro Nashville Homicide Department gave me complete support and continues to handle even the most mundane questions. Detective Mike Mann helped me understand the mind-set a homicide detective must have to keep sane and shared in ghost stories. Dr Michael Tabor, the Forensic Dentist for the state of Tennessee, was a font of detail and information and my respect and awe for his efforts following the September 11 attacks is everlasting. Kris Rinearson of Forensic Medical and the Medical Examiner’s Officer for Tennessee provided long-standing insights.

Nashville is a wonderful city to write about. Though I try my best to keep things accurate, poetic licence is sometimes needed. All mistakes, exaggerations, opinions and interpretations are mine alone.

The support and encouragement of friends and family were vital for both motivation and sanity. Many thanks to the Bodacious Music City Wordsmiths – Janet, Mary, Rai, Cecelia, Peggy, my Dutch uncle Del Tinsley and my wonderful critique partner, J.B. Thompson. This story couldn’t have been told without your input! Joan Huston caught all the little errors and a couple of big ones. Linda Whaley is there for me always.

John Sandford inspired me to write and Stuart Woods gave me the rules. John Connolly taught me about faith, grace and pitch-prefect prose. Lee Childs, my ITW mentor, is just one big class act and M.J. Rose is always ready with a quip or a shoulder. Fellow authors Tasha Alexander, Brett Battles, Jason Pinter, Rob Gregory-Browne, Toni Causey, Kristy Kiernan and all the Killer Year folks have created a support net that is indispensable. My fellow Murderati bloggers keep me honest.

All my buddies at the Bellevue Post Office, who constantly cheer me on and treat every package with care.

My amazing parents, who constantly remind me that I can do whatever I set my mind to, and my brothers, who’ve always stood behind me. Jade the cat listened attentively whenever I needed a sounding board and amazed me with her ability to park her butt on each page of the manuscript as it printed.

Finally, to Randy. Your love, fortitude, patience, indulgence, sacrifice and faith in me keep me going. You are the keeper of my soul.

Chapter One

“No. Please don’t.” She whispered the words, a divine prayer. “No. Please don’t.” There they were again, bubbles forming at her lips, the words slipping out as if greased from her tongue.

Even in death, Jessica Ann Porter was unfailingly polite. She wasn’t struggling, wasn’t crying, just pleading with those luminescent chocolate eyes, as eager to please as a puppy. He tried to shake off the thought. He’d had a puppy once. It had licked his hand and gleefully scampered about his feet, begging to be played with. It wasn’t his fault that the thing’s bones were so fragile, that the roughhousing meant for a boy and his dog forced a sliver of rib into the little creature’s heart. The light shone, then faded in the puppy’s eyes as it died in the grass in his backyard. That same light in Jessica’s eyes, her life leaching slowly from their cinnamon depths, died at this very moment.

He noted the signs of death dispassionately. Blue lips, cyanotic. The hemorrhaging in the sclera of the eyes, pinpoint pricks of crimson. The body seemed to cool immediately, though he knew it would take some time for the heat to fully dissipate. The vivacious yet shy eighteen-year-old was now nothing more than a piece of meat, soon to be consigned back to the earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Blowfly to maggot. The life cycle complete once again.

He shook off the reverie. It was time to get to work. Glancing around, he spied his tool kit. He didn’t remember kicking it over, perhaps his memory was failing him. Had the girl actually struggled? He didn’t think so, but confusion sets in at the most important moments. He would have to consider that later, when he could give it his undivided thought. Only the radiant glow of her eyes at the moment of expiration remained for him now. He palmed the handsaw and lifted her limp hand.

No, please don’t. Three little words, innocuous in their definitions. No great allegories, no ethical dilemmas. No, please don’t. The words echoed through his brain as he sawed, their rhythm spurring his own. No, please don’t. No, please don’t. Back and forth, back and forth.

No, please don’t. Hear these words, and dream of hell.

Chapter Two

Nashville was holding its collective breath on this warm summer night. After four stays of execution, the death watch had started again. Homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson watched as the order was announced that the governor would not be issuing another stay, then snapped off the television and walked to the window of her tiny office in the Criminal Justice Center. The Nashville skyline spread before her in all its glory, continuously lit by blazing flashes of color. The high-end pyrotechnic delights were one of the largest displays in the nation. It was the Fourth of July. The quintessential American holiday. Hordes of people gathered in Riverfront Park to hear the Nashville Symphony Orchestra perform in concert with the brilliant flares of light. Things were drawing to a close now. Taylor could hear the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, a Russian theme to celebrate America’s independence. She jumped slightly with every cannon blast, perfectly coinciding with launched rockets.

The cheers depressed her. The whole holiday depressed her. As a child, she’d been wild for the fireworks, for the cotton-candy fun of youth and mindless celebration. As she grew older, she mourned that lost child, trying desperately to reach far within herself to recapture that innocence. She failed.

The sky was dark now. She could see the throngs of people heading back to whatever parking spots they had found, children skipping between tired parents, fluorescent bracelets and glow sticks arcing through the night. They would spirit these innocents home to bed with joy, soothed by the knowledge that they had satisfied their little ones, at least for the moment. Taylor wouldn’t be that lucky. Any minute now, she’d be answering the phone, getting the call. Chance told her somewhere in her city a shooter was escaping into the night. Fireworks were perfect cover for gunfire. That’s what she told herself, but there was another reason she’d stayed in her office this holiday night. Protecting her city was a mental ruse. She was waiting.

A memory rose, unbidden, unwanted. Trite in its way, yet the truth of the statement hit her to the core. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Or became a woman. Her days of purity were behind her now.

Taking one last glance at the quickening night, she closed the blinds and sat heavily in her chair. Sighed. Ran her fingers through her long blond hair. Wondered why she was hanging out in the Homicide office when she could be enjoying the revelry. Why she was still committed to the job. Laid her head on her desk and waited for the phone to ring. Got back up and flipped the switch to the television.

The crowds were a pulsing mass at the Riverbend Maximum Security Prison. Police had cordoned off sections of the yard of the prison, one for the pro–death penalty activists, another comprised the usual peaceful subjects, a third penned in reporters. ACLU banners screamed injustice, the people holding them shouting obscenities at their fellow groupies. All the trappings necessary for an execution. No one was put to death without an attendant crowd, each jostling to have their opinion heard.

The young reporter from Channel Two was breathless, eyes flushed with excitement. There were no more options. The governor had denied the last stay two hours earlier. Tonight, at long last, Richard Curtis would pay the ultimate price for his crime.

As she watched, her eyes flicked to the wall clock, industrial numbers glowing on a white face: 11:59 p.m. An eerie silence overcame the crowd. It was time.

Taylor took a deep breath as the minute hand swept with a click into the 12:00 position. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the hand snapped to 12:01 a.m. That was it, then. The drugs would have been administered. Richard Curtis would have a peaceful sleep, his heart’s last beat recorded into the annals of history. It was too gentle a death, in Taylor’s opinion. He should have been drawn and quartered, his entrails pulled from his body and burned on his stomach. That, perhaps, would give some justice. Not this carefully choreographed combination of drugs, slipping him serenely into the Grim Reaper’s arms. There, the announcement was made. Curtis was pronounced at 12:06 a.m., July 5. Dead and gone.

Taylor turned the television off. Perhaps now she would get the call to arms. Waiting patiently, she laid her head down on her desk and thought of a sunny child named Martha, the victim of a brutal kidnapping, rape and murder when she was only seven years old. It was Taylor’s first case as a homicide detective. They’d found Martha within twenty-four hours of her disappearance, broken and battered in a sandy lot in North Nashville. Richard Curtis was captured several hours later. Martha’s doll was on the bench seat of his truck. Her tears were lifted from the door handle. A long strand of her honey-blond hair was affixed to Curtis’s boot. It was a slam-dunk case, Taylor’s first taste of success, her first opportunity to prove herself. She had acquitted herself well. Now Curtis was dead as a result of all her hard work. She felt complete.

Taylor had stood vigil for seven years, awaiting this moment. In her mind, Martha was frozen in time, a seven-year-old little girl who would never grow up. She would be fourteen now. Justice had finally been served.

As if in deference to the death of one of their own, Nashville’s criminals were silent on this night, finding better things to do than shoot one another for Taylor’s benefit. She drifted between sleep and wakefulness, thinking about her life, and was relieved when the phone finally rang at 1:00 a.m.

A deep, gruff voice greeted her. “Meet me?” he asked.

“Give me an hour,” she said, looking at her watch. She hung up and smiled for the first time all night.

Chapter Three

“I sure am glad we don’t live in California.”

Detectives Pete Fitzgerald, Lincoln Ross and Marcus Wade were killing time. Nashville’s criminal element seemed to be taking a vacation. They hadn’t had a murder to investigate in nearly two weeks. The city had been strangely quiet. Even the Fourth of July holiday had procured no deaths for their investigative skills. No one was scheduled for court, and their open cases were either resolved or held up by the crime lab. They had hit dead time.

The three men were crammed in their boss’s office, watching TV. A perfectly acceptable pastime, especially since the department had inked a deal with the cable company. Ostensibly, the televisions were to be tuned to twenty-four-hour news networks, but the channels invariably got changed. Usually to accommodate the guilty habit of daytime soaps to which many of the detectives were addicted.

Today though, a car chase through the mean streets of Los Angeles had captured the three detectives’ attention. Exciting, splashy. A kidnapping, a semiautomatic weapon at the ready, even a stolen red Jaguar. The car rolled through the various highways, rarely going under seventy miles an hour, captivating the news announcers that speculated breathlessly about whether the kidnap victim was in the vehicle or not. The homicide team cheered on their brothers in blue.

Fitz swept a beefy arm up and looked at his watch. The chase had been going on for nearly two hours now. “They put that spike strip down about five minutes ago. Wheels should start coming off here soon.”

“There you go.” Marcus pointed to the screen, where a large piece of tire had flown from the back wheel of the Jag, narrowly missing the pursuit car. His brown eyes were shining, excited. Fitz gave him a grin, the kid was just so young.

“You ever done a chase, Marcus?” he asked, leaning back, arms over his prodigious belly.

“No, but I have done all the training for it. I can drive, man, I can drive.”

“Remind me not to give you the keys. It’s over now.” Lincoln Ross stood and stretched, brushing invisible wrinkles from his charcoal-gray Armani suit. “He starts running on rims, they can do a Pitt Maneuver and knock him out. See, there it is.”

The pursuit car slipped up on the Jag like a black-and-white snake, then gently bumped the back right fender. In a textbook reaction, the driver of the Jag spun out, slamming into a guardrail, losing a fender, and came to rest facing traffic. In an instant, vehicles surrounded him, cops with long guns and sidearms pointed at him. No escape.

The TV anchors congratulated themselves on a story well covered, predicting it would be anywhere from five minutes to five hours before the standoff would be over. Promising not to break away from the coverage until there was a resolution, they brought in the experts, a former police officer and a hostage negotiator, for the requisite public speculation of the criminal’s past. A producer somewhere in New York turned off the five-second delay a moment too soon, and the detectives stared as the door to the Jaguar opened. The suspect jumped out, dragging a woman out of the driver’s-side door by the hair.

There was frantic movement on the ground, a quick tightening of the cordon around the kidnapper. The suspect looked up in the air, making sure the overhead helicopter had a moment to focus its long lens on his grinning face. He pulled the woman upright, lifted his arm and shot her in the head. He was gunned down before she hit the ground, the pandemonium obvious. The network went black for a heartbeat, then focused on the face of the shocked anchor. He looked green.

“Like I said, damn glad we don’t live in California,” Fitz grumbled.

The phone rang and he answered, listening carefully while jotting a few notes. “We’re on it.”

“What’s up?” Marcus had leaned so far back in his chair that he threatened to tip over on his back.

“Body out in Bellevue. I’ll go. I’ll call Taylor from the car.”

Lincoln and Marcus were up immediately. “We’re coming, too,” Marcus said. “I know I don’t want to sit around here anymore. Do you, Lincoln?”

“Hell, no.”

They marched dutifully from the office, gathering suit jackets and keys on the way out. Lincoln grinned, happy at last for an excursion. “At least there won’t be a car chase.”

The day was stifling, humidity in the high nineties, a threat of rain on the horizon. Though it was full light, the sun was not shining. A thick miasma of haze blanketed the sky, turning the blue to gray. Nashville in the summer.

The crime scene was populated with sweating men and women. Their movements were sluggish, practiced, not at all urgent. Several wore masks to shelter their fragile sinuses from the smell. A decomposing body in ninety-degree heat could fell even the strongest professional.

They were assembled in a grassy field at the Highway 70 and Highway 70 South split, near the westernmost edge of Davidson County. The area was known as Bellevue, only fifteen minutes from downtown. Another couple of miles and Cheatham County would have the job. It was Metro Homicide who had gotten the call instead. Taylor had felt the same sense of boredom her detectives were experiencing, and was happy for the diversion.

She stood over the body, drinking in the scene. Her blond hair was pulled into a messy ponytail, her long body casting grotesque muted shadows in the high grass. She wore no mask, her nostrils pinched and white, her mouth open so she could breathe without inhaling death. A Jane Doe, young, brown hair massed beneath her swollen body. Brown eyes glinted dully from cracked eyelids. The bugs had done their duty, ingesting, laying eggs, repopulating their masses. A struggling white larva spilled from the girl’s mouth.

Taylor nearly came undone, imagining that worm in her own mouth, and mistakenly took in a deep breath through her nose. She winced and turned away for a moment, watching the activity around her. Usually the death greeters would swarm like their own type of insect, but no one was in much of a hurry today. Fitz was ambling back toward the crime scene control area, he’d taken a cursory look at the body, covered his mouth and politely excused himself. She could see Marcus and Lincoln conferring in the distance, waves of heat shimmering around their bodies. Crime scene techs carried brown paper bags to their vehicles, patrol officers kept their backs to the body. The scene stirred, listless, the entire group indolent in the heat.

Except the man striding effortlessly toward her. He was a big man, dark haired, graceful. He wasn’t one of hers.

He stopped in front of one of the patrol officers, flipped open a small leather identification case, speaking loud enough for Taylor to hear. “Special Agent John Baldwin. FBI.”

The officer stepped aside to let Baldwin continue his trek toward Taylor. He slipped the case into his breast pocket, then came to her with his right hand outstretched. He winked as he took her hand. She felt the warm pad of flesh press her own for a brief instant. A concussive touch, she felt it all the way to her toes. She stood straighter. At nearly six feet, she generally towered over men. This one was taller by nearly five inches, and she had to look up to meet his eyes. They were the oddest shade of green, deeper than jade, lighter than emeralds. Cat eyes, she thought.

Her heart beat a little faster. Taylor’s right hand went to her neck, an unconscious gesture. The four-inch scar was barely healed; she still looked as if she’d been garroted. A knife slash, compliments of a crazed suspect. A permanent souvenir from her last case. Gathering herself, she flipped her ponytail off her shoulder and gave Baldwin a brief but warm smile.

“What are you doing here? I didn’t ask for FBI backup. It’s just a murder.” She paused for a moment, concerned by the expression on his angular face. She knew the look. “Please tell me it’s just a murder?”

“I wish I could.”

“Why the posturing?” Taylor looked over Baldwin’s shoulder. There were few people on the scene who weren’t familiar with John Baldwin. Her team—Fitz, Marcus and Lincoln—had worked with him before.

“I needed this to be an official consultation. I think I know who she is.” He gestured almost carelessly at the body prostrate at their feet.

“Ah. Out of state, I’d guess. We haven’t had any missing persons reported in the right time frame for this.”

“Out of state. Right. Mississippi.” The statement was absent, an afterthought. Baldwin was circling the body, taking in all the details. The bruises around the girl’s neck were visible despite the decomposition. He made another circle, smiling to himself with a bizarre look of triumph. The body had no hands.

“I think this may be the work of our boy.”

“Your boy?” Taylor’s eyebrow went up an inch. “You know who did this?”

He ignored the question for a moment. “Is it okay to touch her?”

“Yes. The crime scene techs have finished with her for now, and we’re waiting for the medical examiner to haul her out of here. I was just giving her one last look.”

Baldwin reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of thin white latex gloves. He squatted next to the body and reached for the girl’s right stump, knocking a few maggots off in the process.

Taylor prompted him again. “Your boy, you say?”

“Mmm, hmm. I don’t know his name, of course, but I recognize his work.”

Taylor went down on one knee beside him. “He’s done this before?” She spoke quietly. No personnel were within earshot, but just in case, she didn’t want the leaks to start before she had a grip on what was happening. Habit.

“Twice, that I know of. Though he hasn’t hit for a month. We’ve dubbed him the Southern Strangler, for lack of a better name. You know us feds, not an original thought between us.” He tried for a smile, but it came out as a leer.