TAKEN TO THE GRAVE

A COMPLETELY UNPUTDOWNABLE MYSTERY THRILLER

M.M. CHOUINARD

BOOKS BY M.M. CHOUINARD

DETECTIVE JO FOURNIER NOVELS

1. The Dancing Girls

2. Taken to the Grave

3. Her Daughter’s Cry

4. The Other Mothers

5. Her Silent Prayer

The Vacation

Available in audio

DETECTIVE JO FOURNIER NOVELS

The Dancing Girls (Available in the UK and the US)

Taken to the Grave (Available in the UK and the US)

Her Daughter’s Cry (Available in the UK and the US)

The Other Mothers (Available in the UK and the US)

The Vacation (Available in the UK and the US)

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

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

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Her Daughter’s Cry

M.M. Chouinard’s Email Sign-Up

Books by M.M. Chouinard

A Letter from M.M. Chouinard

The Dancing Girls

The Other Mothers

Her Silent Prayer

The Vacation

Acknowledgements

For Hubby and the FurCrew

ONE

Professor Michael Whorton swore aloud as he narrowly avoided slamming his face into his office door. He gritted his teeth and reminded himself to lift the knob, then shoved his shoulder against the glass. The building was only two years old but was already falling apart, a tribute to the university’s poor planning and money allocation. The resistance gave and he strode inside, tossed his briefcase onto the front-most section of his desk, and pulled out his laptop. The power strip he’d ordered still hadn’t come, so he crawled under the sideways-U-shaped desk to plug it in, and spotted some sort of playing card just out of reach by the door. Typical—probably shoved under by some moronic student who hadn’t thought far enough ahead to bring actual paper for their frantically scribbled grade-change plea. He shook his head. How was he supposed to give a shit when they didn’t?

The landline behind him rang. He swiveled the chair around to snatch up the receiver. “Michael Whorton.”

A rustle crackled across the line.

“Hello?”

The rustling intensified.

“Hello? Speak up or call back.”

He reached forward to hang up the phone, but a hand gripped his shoulder, and pain ripped through his right side. The hand withdrew just as suddenly, the momentum of the release dropping him forward onto the desk.

Michael struggled to right himself and push the chair around, hand reflexively grasping his side. As the rotation finished, his eyes met his attacker’s, then registered the satisfaction there. Fear squeezed his chest as he realized what was happening.

He grabbed for the desk to brace himself, but his hand, now covered in blood, slipped along the edge, and he tumbled to the floor.

“Hel—”

Before he could finish the word, his attacker’s foot crushed his face into the floor. “No, no, no. We can’t have you calling for help.”

The foot rolled, shifting the top of Michael’s head forward.

The air around him compressed, and something sharp sliced into the base of his skull.

TWO

The recognition that registered in his eyes before I killed him made it worthwhile.

I’m not a cruel person. I don’t enjoy other people’s pain. Quite the opposite. I help strangers and I rescue animals and I always try to do the right thing.

And this, without question, was the right thing. Otherwise, he’d have spent the next however many years ruining more lives. Our world is a vile, despicable place because of people who believe they can do whatever they like, hurt whoever they like, with no thought for the consequences to other people. Or, more likely, without care for the destruction they cause to other people. And unless they physically harm someone, there’s no remedy for it, no way to get justice. They wreak havoc and laugh themselves to sleep knowing nobody can do anything about it.

This was the only way to put a stop to it. That’s why I did it.

So, no, I didn’t enjoy killing him.

But I admit, the expression on his face was satisfying. No, far better than satisfying—it was glorious to watch the haughty, superior demeanor evaporate, and show the true soul beneath: the craven, insignificant fool consumed by his own ego. So sublime to watch the ersatz victory he’d savored snatched from him, replaced by his pound of flesh. Glorious, because all of that confirmed he knew what he’d done was wrong, and that he deserved to die.

So, yes, I admit I’m glad my face was the last thing he saw. And if there’s a hell, I hope that image is burned onto his retinas for all eternity, as the flames relentlessly engulf him.

THREE

“You know, you never explained to me why you quit the lieutenant job,” Bob Arnett said over the lid of his coffee.

“I didn’t think I had to,” Jo Fournier answered.

“Try me.”

Jo’s glance flicked to the unrelenting inquisition in Arnett’s brown eyes, then looked back to the rainbow of leaves swirling over the colonial-lined street. She’d known him for nearly twenty years—wow, that was a mental slap to the face—since she first became a detective, and hoped their years of partnering had pushed them past the need for this discussion. If they managed to pick up the smallest shifts in each other’s expressions and use them as road signs during interrogations, why couldn’t he pick up on her cues now?

Answer: he was ignoring them.

“Get a haircut,” she said.

“Which one?” He laughed. The joke was almost as old as the partnership. His hair, black when they’d first met, was more salt than pepper now, and always managed to look just a bit scruffy. “But seriously.”

“Did it occur to you that I missed our partnership too much? That I couldn’t face the day without your engaging wit?” Subconsciously motivated by the hank of hair sticking out above his ear, she tucked a chestnut lock behind her own.

“No.” His eyes bored into her.

“You’re smarter than you look.” She laughed. “The job just wasn’t for me. Why’s that so hard for everyone to understand?”

“Because people don’t walk away from upgrades in money and power.”

She sighed mentally, and shifted in her seat. “Why’s this coming up now all of a sudden after all this time? Boring weekend?”

“Partly because I waited, nice and polite, for you to tell me yourself, and it never happened. But mostly because Garber just quit and the position’s open yet again. Rockney asked me if I thought you’d consider it.”

Jo braked her turn onto Oakhurst University Ave for a pedestrian, and used the pause as an excuse to delay. He wouldn’t like part of the answer, and wouldn’t understand the rest. Hell, she didn’t fully understand it.

“Part of it was the politics. I’m not like you, my friend. I mind being hated.”

He chuckled. “And the rest of it?”

She returned the pedestrian’s wave and resumed the turn. “Rockney promised I’d be able to keep my boots on the ground, but that was a pipe dream. The Jeanine Hammond case confirmed what I worried about all along. Profiling behind closed doors when we could squeeze out a minute here and there? That’s not what I went to the academy for.”

“I knew you never let that one go.” He shook his head and chugged his coffee.

She bristled. Partly from annoyance, but mostly because he was right, she hadn’t let it go. They’d closed the case, which had involved at least six murdered women, but only because the killer had shown up dead on the other side of the country, purportedly a suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. Although everyone told her she was crazy for looking a gift horse in the mouth, she’d been convinced at the time that there was more to the case, and she was convinced of it still. She’d learned everything she could about the killer’s past, and requested reports on all Golden Gate Bridge suicides several times a year. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but analyzed them until she went cross-eyed, certain something would eventually emerge.

But she wasn’t going to admit that to Arnett. “It just brought my issues with the job to a head. Anyway, enough about me. Laura’s shingles any better?”

He narrowed his eyes at her, but turned back around. “Yeah, it looks like they’ll be gone for good shortly. We were supposed to go on a romantic camping trip this coming weekend to celebrate, but apparently Kylie’s moving back in, and Laura wants to be there to help.”

Jo resisted the urge to comment on Laura’s propensity to over-accommodate, a sore spot for Arnett that had contributed to on-going problems in their relationship. “Have I mentioned lately how glad I am I don’t have kids?”

“Uh-huh. And you’ll keep mentioning it until your mother lays down another guilt trip, and then I’ll catch you googling how-to-freeze-your-eggs again.” He smiled.

Jo laughed and rolled her eyes. “Something go wrong with Kylie’s job?”

“Depends what you mean by wrong. Turns out writing dialogue for video games isn’t the be-all-end-all she hoped it would be.”

Jo shook her head in a show of solidarity. The younger of Arnett’s two daughters, Kylie, drove him batty. She’d dropped out of university—the very one they were approaching—after her freshman year, convinced that real-world experience was the path to success. The problem was, she wasn’t sure what type of real-world experience. This was the death of her third fledgling career, in less than two years. “Patience. She’s finding herself.”

“So Laura keeps telling me. What the hell does that even mean?”

“Damned if I know. But then, I can’t remember a time I didn’t want to be a cop.” Jo pulled up behind the two campus police vehicles and the Oakhurst PD squad car framing the entrance to Dyer Hall, which housed the biology department. “Huh. I don’t think we’ve been here since they built this.”

Oakhurst University had undergone a recent renaissance. The founder of UniversalApps, a software giant, had bequeathed a hundred million dollars to his alma mater six years before. That caliber of donation catapulted a university’s raison d’être, because it was the kind of money you invested rather than spent and then lived off the yielded interest in perpetuity. So, since then, the university set about redefining itself as a top-tier research school. That meant new programs, new priorities, and more than a few new buildings.

Jo and Arnett strode past a crowd of students held back by caution tape, and stared up at the structure.

“Yeah, well. I hope the vic’s the guy who designed it,” Arnett said.

Jo considered the glass-and-cement planes, discordant among the surrounding red-brick federal buildings. “It’s intended to be quote-unquote green. To let in as much natural light as possible. And the cement and metal don’t need paint, so there’s no toxic run-off into the environment.”

“Ugly as hell.”

She bobbed her head from side to side, trying to find the beauty in it. “You’re not wrong.”

They took the elevator to the third floor, and spotted more caution tape as they stepped out. As they strode toward it, the office in question came into view, door open and forensics team inside. A completely filled sign-up sheet for today’s office hours, Tuesday 1 p.m.–3 p.m., hung under the nameplate.

They stopped in front of the uniformed officer guarding the tape, whose badge identified him as M. Sheehan. Young, possibly right out of the academy, with a muscular frame and a blond buzz cut. He eyed Jo up and down, and she shoved down a flash of annoyance. Even in a progressive New England university town like Oakhurst, she regularly ran into people who were nonplussed by a female detective. Admittedly, her five-six, one-hundred-ten-pound frame didn’t cut an impressive figure, but she’d been told one too many times that her green eyes and wide smile were too pretty for a policewoman, so her solution was to head off the bullshit before it got started.

She met his eye without blinking. “I’m Detective Josette Fournier, and this is Detective Bob Arnett. We have a stabbing?”

His face flicked to Arnett’s and back, then shifted to a professional blank. “Yes, ma’am. Professor Michael Whorton. A student showed up for office hours and found the door closed, with blood seeping out from under it.” He pointed to the coagulating mess.

“The student’s name?” Jo asked.

Sheehan consulted his notes. “Rosanna Trenton.”

“Where is she now?” Jo asked.

“Department offices on the first floor, being treated for shock.”

“Has the next of kin been notified?”

“Yes, ma’am. The vic’s wife is somewhere in Maine on a business trip. They notified her. She’s finishing up there and driving back as soon as she can, sometime tomorrow.”

Arnett was incredulous. “Finishing up?”

Sheehan shrugged. “Garcia talked to her. He didn’t get the sense she was all that broken up.”

Jo peered into the office. Small, about ten feet by ten. The door was made entirely of glass, but Michael Whorton had plastered the inside with copy paper to occlude visibility. Between the two medicolegals working the scene she caught glimpses of walls lined with bookshelves, and a U-shaped desk that lined the back and right walls then jutted out to bisect the room. A laptop sat open on the desk displaying a stock shot of the Grand Canyon on the screen, next to stacks of papers and a briefcase. Shades covered the solitary window.

She recognized one of the individuals through the hazmat-esque scrubs. “How’d the tournament go, Janet?”

Janet Marzillo turned and shook her head. Her current obsession was Texas Hold ’Em, and she spent a fair amount of time in free online games. She’d taken her first shot at the real thing in Atlantic City a few weeks before. “Almost too easy. First time out, and I made it to the final table. Then I got flustered and overcommitted, and had to bluff my way through a mediocre hand that rapidly turned to guano. But, I placed high enough to win back more than my entry fee, so there’s that. How’s that new boyfriend of yours?”

“Boyfriend? I’ve been dating him three weeks.” Jo rolled her eyes.

“Two more than usual,” she said.

Arnett choked back a laugh, and covered by craning his neck to examine the room.

Jo smiled, but changed the subject. “Any information for us yet?”

“We still have quite a bit to do. You want to kit yourselves out and join, or wait?”

“We don’t want to get in your way, and I can see most of it clearly from here. Just give us the short version for now,” Jo answered.

Marzillo’s sassy smile rearranged into focused concentration. “Vic was stabbed first in the side, then at the base of the skull, which almost certainly resulted in instantaneous death. Which is strange, because if you have the sort of savvy for a kill like that, why bother to stab the man in the side first? As best I can tell, the killer had a clear shot—looks like the vic was on the phone, back to the door, and the killer came up behind him.” She pointed first to the landline dangling over the side of the back desk, then to a bloody handprint. “My guess is he tried to stand up after the first strike, then fell down before the attacker stabbed him in the neck, because there’s no blood flow down the back, only sideways onto the floor. And based on the blood patterns, there wasn’t much of a struggle.”

“Time of death?” Arnett asked.

“We got here at one forty-five. He’s been dead no longer than an hour before that.”

Jo checked her watch, then stepped to her left to see the entire figure. Michael Whorton was sprawled partially out of the desk’s U, lying awkwardly on his stomach, hunched slightly toward the door. His black slacks and pale green shirt were well cut, and made from quality material. One blood-covered hand jutted out from under him, and the other lay palm-down on the floor. His eyes were open, gazing up toward the ceiling. The position and the face reminded her of something, but she couldn’t remember what. She bent down to look more directly at the eyes, and the memory prodded her, but didn’t come. “There’s fear in his eyes, but something else, too. Can you see it?”

Arnett and Marzillo looked at his face, and Arnett nodded. “Like he was doing some sort of calculation.”

“I think that might just be because he’s looking up,” Marzillo said.

“Fear and calculation, yes, but also something else.” She shook her head and stood up. “Do we have time to do an interview before you’re finished?”

“At least that, I’d say. I’ll text you when we’re done and walk you through the rest.”

“Much appreciated.” Jo turned to Arnett. “Rosanna Trenton first?”