She ignored him. Her well-honed cop instincts were revving up, overriding all else. Getting anything from anywhere in Mississippi was too bizarre to ignore—even for great sex. She dug up a pair of latex gloves and scissors. Pulled on the gloves and then slowly cut the envelope’s flap free. Carefully parting the severed edges, she bent her head down and peeked inside.
Adeline jerked back. Her heart bumped her sternum.
“What the hell?” She tucked two fingers inside and pulled the item from the envelope. A white sheet of copy or printer paper with letters pasted across it.
More of that pulse-pounding adrenaline seared through her as she read the cut-and-pasted words.
Pretty, pretty princess. See her smile ... see her die.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Adeline dashed back to the living room, almost slipping on the slick hardwood, and searched through the stack of old mail on the table by the door. In her haste she sent junk mail and monthly statements fluttering to the floor.
Where the hell was that other letter? Unlike this one, the first letter had been hand delivered to her mailbox at home. No return address, no postage. And no prints.
She’d nagged the guys at work, thinking one of them had been playing a joke on her related to her birthday and the fact that she wasabout to be promoted to lieutenant. She’d brought the letter back home that same day. It had to be here.
“Addy! What the hell are you doing?”
“Gimme a minute.” She shoved a handful of hair behind her ear. The letter wasn’t in the stack. Hand shaking, she yanked open the table’s only drawer.
There it was.
She picked up the single sheet of plain white printer paper. Stared at the pasted-on letters that formed the words which now carried entirely new significance.
She was born a princess for all to see. Her light was so bright that they could no longer see me.
Adeline returned to the kitchen to compare the two notes. Paper looked to be the same weight and shade of white. The way the words were pasted on the page, right side angled slightly upward, was the same. No continuity in the spacing.
She set the two letters to the side and looked in the envelope to see what else it contained. A newspaper clipping. Big article. Front page. She pulled it out.Hattiesburg Press.She read the headline.
City Attorney Cherry Prescott Missing
Heart rate rising, Adeline skimmed the article. Prescott served as Hattiesburg’s city attorney. Four years older than Adeline, Prescott was married with two kids. A photo accompanying the article was in black and white, but the woman’s smile was nothing less than dazzling—oozing self-confidence. Blond hair, pretty lady. According to the article she was a brilliant attorney with a great future in politics. Prescott had gone missing three days ago.
Adeline braced her hands on the counter, analyzed the details a second time. The woman’s car had been discovered just outside Moss Point. Only a few miles from where Adeline had grown up.
There were no suspects as of yet. No ransom demand. Just the abandoned vehicle. Prescott’s family was offering a sizable reward for any information that helped to find her and the person responsible for her abduction.
Frustration soared through her and Adeline threw up her hands. “What the hell is this?” Why would some perv send her these stupid princess letters and an article about a woman who’d gone missing near her hometown? A woman Adeline didn’t know ... had never even met? She shook her head. Didn’t make any kind of sense.
And yet there had to be a reason.
Instinct prodded her.
There must be some kind of connection here that she just couldn’t see. This was obviously not just a joke about her thirty-first birthday.
This was ... a piece of some kind of creepy puzzle.
After placing the newspaper clipping next to the letters, Adeline turned her attention back to the envelope and opened it wider to see if there was anything else she had missed.
A postcard or photograph was tucked deep into a corner. She frowned, then shook the envelope until the final item fell free and fluttered to the counter.
A Polaroid snapshot.
Adeline picked it up by the edges. Same woman, Cherry Prescott, pictured in the article. Only in this color snapshot her eyes were closed and she definitely wasn’t smiling. No way to tell if she was dead or alive. No discernible injuries. Since only her upper torso and face were visible in the photo, there was no way to be certain of anything. Her makeup job was overdone, clownish, she wore a tiara and nothing else as far as Adeline could see.
She read the words scrawled in tiny print across the bottom of the photo. As the ramifications of the statement filtered through her confusion, a new kind of tension ignited in Adeline’s veins.
One dead princess, two to go.