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Prologue
Two Years Ago
“Can you shut that stupid dog up?” Jimmy Lee Monroe cast a nasty look toward the anxious pup, which made Bree instantly wary about his aggressive behavior. He had the look of a man who was dealing with a serious mental health disorder—or perhaps some bad drugs. His long hair hung about his face and his eyes flashed with unfocused rage.
“Now, Jimmy Lee, stop being mean to Tiny. He’s just a little nervous being that we’re someplace new.” Jolene Monroe reached out to touch her husband’s arm and he pulled back as if she’d burned him.
“Jimmy Lee, can I get you some water?” Bree offered. The couple had come in after calling her office the day before. Luckily she’d had a cancelation and was able to fit them in her schedule. Jolene and Jimmy Lee Monroe had come in seeking marriage counseling presumably, but Bree was seeing red flags concerning Jimmy Lee’s behavior. More like flashing neon with accompanying horns blaring.
His eyes refocused on Bree and he nodded, calming a little. “Yeah—uh—sure. Thanks.”
Bree kept a water pitcher and glasses on the side table, mostly for distraction when things got intense, like they were now. She stood and moved away from the couple, giving them a minute to gather themselves. Jolene was whispering to Jimmy Lee as he held his head between his hands. Jolene was thin, with long, honey-blonde hair worn back in a clip. Her dark, heavy mascara had migrated and was smudged beneath her eyes.
When Bree returned with two glasses, she handed them both to Jolene. “So, tell me a little about the two of you so I can get to know you a bit better.” The poor puppy who sat in Jolene’s lap continued to shiver and whine, darting repeated nervous glances toward Jimmy Lee.
“Well, we met in high school and we’ve been together ever since. Jimmy’s just having a little bit of a struggle with his bipolar disorder right now.” Jolene said this almost in a whisper.
Jimmy’s tortured gaze fell upon Bree. “It’s the meds. They make me crazy.”
Ah. “Have you been taking them regularly as prescribed?” Bree asked him.
“I was. But then I ran out of one of them. I didn’t have any refills and I couldn’t get back to the doctor right away. But I hate how they make me feel, so I’m trying to get off of them.”
“Has this happened before?” Bree asked, worried that he’d gone off mood stabilizers or antidepressants cold turkey. If that was the case, he wasn’t only chemically unbalanced, he might be in medical jeopardy as well.
Both Jimmy Lee and Jolene nodded.
“Where is your doctor? Are they local?” Bree tried to keep her voice calm, realizing that if she sounded alarmed, her patients would hear it.
“I don’t want to go back there. Please.” Jimmy Lee sounded frantic now.
“Do you have family I can call?” Bree asked, hoping Jimmy Lee had a support system.
Jolene and Jimmy Lee immediately locked eyes and shook their heads as if they’d come to an understanding about something. Or someone.
Bree’s tone was intentionally calming, her words slow and simple. “Jimmy Lee, you feel this way because your brain chemicals are unbalanced. When you stop taking the medication like that, it’s a shock to your system. The only way to feel better is to admit you to the hospital so we can help you get back in balance. If you want this to end, it’s truly the only way.” Her words were simple and straightforward, and likely they’d both heard them before.
“Just make it stop.” Jimmy Lee clutched the sides of his head and moaned.
Bree called 911, which was standard precaution for a patient in the throes of a medical mental crisis. Jolene rather tearfully begged Bree to keep Tiny with her as she rode in the ambulance with Jimmy Lee. Bree agreed because she had very little choice in the matter. And because she’d felt a huge amount of empathy for the scared pup.
The poor guy was shaking and terrified as his momma left him with a complete stranger. “Well, Tiny, I guess we’ll have to make the best of this, won’t we?” Bree wrapped the little animal in a towel and cuddled him until he finally stopped shivering. She emptied out a small tote bag and lowered the pup into it, and tucked him in with a small, soft towel.
After she’d seen her last patient, Bree headed to the hospital where they’d taken Jimmy Lee Monroe to follow up with his care and return sweet Tiny to Jolene. Bree didn’t ask permission to bring him into the hospital, knowing that would require more time than she cared to take. Jolene would have to deal with managing the animal.
Jimmy Lee had been admitted to the inpatient psychiatric ward at North Huntsville Regional Medical Center. She found Jolene in the waiting area. “Any word?”
Jolene shook her head. Bree gently handed the tote bag with a sleeping Tiny inside to Jolene, who thanked her. “The poor little guy wore himself out with worry.”
Jolene peeked inside the bag and her expression softened. “My poor baby. He’s such a needy little thing.”
Bree turned her attention to her patient. “I’ll just check in with the nurse’s station about Jimmy Lee’s condition.”
Jolene stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Th-thanks for helping us. We’ll be okay now. I’ll call his doctor and he’ll take over.”
“Are you sure?” Bree asked, gleaning from Jolene’s expression that she wasn’t sure at all.
Jolene nodded and their eyes locked. Jolene suddenly grabbed hold of Bree’s wrist and Bree read a soul-deep desperation in her eyes. “Please keep Tiny for me. Just a day or two until I get Jimmy Lee squared away?” She paused. “I know it’s a lot to ask from a stranger, but he really seems to like you, and there’s nobody else I can trust with him. He’s really…important.”
Bree was at a loss for words. It was a big ask. But her heart broke for the sweet pup who had no place to be while things were turned upside down in his world. “Just for a day or two.” Plus, Bree was in the middle of her own personal crisis, and she had to admit that having Tiny to care for was distracting from her own immediate situation.
Chapter One
Now
“Doc, the problem is that she’s gone and gotten fat, ya know? I mean, you’ve seen her, right? She doesn’t look the same.” Ralph Barnes stated this as if Bree Hawthorne, his recently hired therapist, would surely agree with his side of this conundrum. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but—geez.” He visibly cringed.
To her credit, Bree kept her facial expression neutral. “Ralph, didn’t Carlee have a baby two months ago?” Critically speaking, Ralph was no prize. He sat firmly on the dad bod side of things as a man in his early thirties, which would’ve been just fine if he hadn’t been in her office specifically to complain about his wife’s recent postpartum form.
He nodded, unfazed. “Well, yes she did.”
Ralph clearly wasn’t an intelligent man, or perhaps he had a brain tumor. Either way, his wasting Bree’s valuable time complaining about his overweight wife who’d recently given birth showed a complete lack of good sense. Bree wondered if Carlee had sent him for therapy knowing it might be the only way he would listen to reason, because he’d never take her word for it that he was ridiculous.
Bree took a calming breath, trying to take the most professional route possible despite the urge to smack him upside his foolish head. “Would you say you loved your wife, Ralph?”
“Of course. We’ve been together since high school. I just hate to see her let herself go like this. My momma got fat and my daddy left her when I was a kid. Never saw him again.”
Ah, this was more about his mother than his wife. It often was. “Ralph, people gain weight for all sorts of reasons. One of the most common is growing a baby inside one’s body for nine months. I will give you my best clinical advice: don’t say a word about Carlee’s weight. Ever.”
“But—” He started to protest.
Bree held up her hand. “You’re paying me for advice right?”
He nodded.
“Carlee’s body is full of postpartum hormones right now, which affect her moods, her sleep, and her weight. Her body, emotions, and brain are recovering from producing your precious baby girl.” She wanted to say: If you tell her she’s fat right now, she’s likely to take a shovel from the barn and kill you with it. Instead, she said, “Ralph, Carlee is walking a fine emotional line right now. You can do her real harm if you criticize her weight or anything else. It’s only been a few weeks since she’s created a miracle. Surely you can give her some time to allow her body and hormones to recover.”
“Well, I guess that’s only fair,” Ralph conceded.
“Watch what you say to Carlee. Be helpful and kind. Do what she tells you. She’ll lose the weight, and if she doesn’t, that’s okay too. You promised to love her anyway.”
Ralph appeared torn. “I guess things change after babies, huh?”
“They do change, Ralph. And if you want to keep your family together, you’d better change too. And remember that your relationship with Carlee doesn’t have anything to do with your parents. You were a child when your dad left and there were undoubtedly many other factors that led to his leaving the family.” Bree felt this in her soul from personal experience.
Once Bree had ushered Ralph out of her office, she glanced over to where Tiny, her excessively small Chihuahua mix, lay on the plush pillow napping beside Bree’s desk. Tiny opened his eyes upon Ralph’s exit as if to say, yes, Momma, he was an asshole.
Tiny had become Bree’s little soulmate. It was hard to remember life without the precious pup. They’d moved together to Moonshine, Georgia, from just outside of Huntsville, Alabama, almost two years ago after Bree’s momma passed, and not long after Bree had broken up with her boyfriend, Doug, a local dentist. Doug had finally bought Bree an engagement ring at Christmas after they’d dated for five years, but two months before the wedding, she’d caught him after hours with his hygienist in one of the operatories, making use of the dental chair in a most unhygienic way. Doug had wasted several years of Bree’s biological clock while dragging his feet on making a commitment. It had been a hard lesson.
The job in Moonshine with Moonshine General Hospital had been a godsend in its timing, and it was around that time—just before she’d left Huntsville—that she’d unexpectedly gotten Tiny. So, she’d packed up and taken Tiny with her to start a new life.
Moonshine, Georgia, was a town in the southern Appalachian foothills of the North Georgia Mountains. It was charming, and despite the small population, there were plenty of folks in need of Bree’s services. Mental health covered a wide range of issues, and addiction was a major concern in the area.
People sought therapy for lots of reasons. Unhappiness mostly. And there were more reasons for unhappiness than happiness as far as Bree was concerned. She’d like to be proven wrong someday, though. Hope was an elusive bitch, and Bree planned to hang on to it as long as she could, despite patients like Ralph. Hopefully he could gain some enlightenment along the way.
Bree inhaled deeply a couple of times, shaking off the negativity that somebody like Ralph could leave in his wake—in her office.
She gently tucked in Tiny with his favorite blanket into her Louis Vuitton tote. Tiny had gotten used to the bag as his personal space when Bree transitioned here and there. Bree hated to leave Tiny alone for more than a few moments since the poor animal hated to be out of earshot from her.
A woman’s body had turned up two days ago at the bottom of a gravel pit in Dalton, Georgia, just east of the Alabama state line. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Mitch Calloway just got word that he’d been handed the case that morning.
As he approached the crime scene, Mitch cleared his mind. Putting himself in the victim’s mindset was important. How had she come to be there? Had she suffered? Had she fought? Was she helpless at the hands of her killer? He visualized the incident, filling in the blanks with his imagined version of how things might’ve gone down. It helped him wrap his mind around the case. He immersed himself into the scene.
Every investigator had their process and their quirks. Mostly, Mitch started with what he envisioned and then allowed the evidence to tell the victim’s story. And the perpetrator’s.
The forensics team was already there setting up a perimeter around the body—or skeleton was a more apt description. The GBI had been called in to provide support to local law enforcement. Local authorities often didn’t have the kind of manpower and specialized investigative tools and labs that the GBI had. In the case of bones, a forensic anthropologist was brought in who specialized in skeletal remains.
The gravel pit had been cleared of most of the heaps of rocks that would’ve normally been there, according to the foreman who’d found the remains. They’d been prepping the area to do some construction when they’d discovered the bones.
It was hot, dry and dusty, and there hadn’t been any rain in the area for at least three weeks. No moisture meant it was less likely they would find any footprints in the rock dust. Of course the place had been tracked up by workers before the body was found, so that wasn’t helpful either.
“What do have, Dave?” he asked the investigator who was hovering just over the skull of the body with a camera. GBI special agents and crime scene investigators often knew one another after working cases together over and over.
“Female. Probably early thirties. ID we found confirms it. There’s a purse just over here. ID says she’s from Huntsville. A Jolene Monroe.” He pointed to an evidence bag lying among several others marked with numbers. “Already bagged and tagged it.”
“Any prints?”
“None that we could see. There were a few items inside. There.” He pointed to more labeled bags. “She was rolled in a tarp, so everything was together.”
“Any idea about cause of death yet?” Mitch asked.
The forensics guy shook his head. “Not yet. We’ll get the body back to the lab and have a closer look. Not much left of her. Nothing obvious to show what killed her.”
“Besides being at the bottom of a few metric tons of crushed rock.”
“Yeah. Besides that.”
Mitch stood and scanned the area. So many workers had come in and out of here with dozers and trucks. It would be impossible to identify a specific set of boot or tire prints after this long. Now, it was time to go to management and start looking at security footage, assuming there was any. Interviewing every worker who’d been on the ground here since Jolene Monroe’s forced interment was another important place to start. Murder investigations were rarely simple, especially when bones turned up.
After loading the photos of the items in the dead woman’s purse, Mitch looked more closely at them on his laptop in his car.
They’d uncovered a purse with forty-two dollars in cash, an ID registered to a Jolene Monroe, a maxed-out credit card that hadn’t been used since her disappearance, bright pink lipstick, a wadded-up Kleenex, and a phone number scribbled on a fast food receipt from a McDonald’s in Huntsville, but no cell phone or keys. The body had obviously been there over a year based on the decomposition—mostly skeletal remains with some hair and clothing. Mitch hoped to hear back soon on the cause of death from the forensic anthropologist once the body was moved to the Whitfield County medical examiner’s office in Dalton, Georgia.
He pulled up a photo of the victim on his phone and noted her green eyes and bright smile. In the photo she was holding her very tiny dog. Chihuahua maybe? Not quite. A mix most probably. Cute little thing. He wondered what might’ve happened to it.
Tomorrow, he would do some research on the life of Jolene Monroe. Who she was, who she associated with, her family, and where they were now. Where she’d worked and lived. And he’d call that phone number they’d found in her purse.
After that, he would drive the two hours to Moonshine, Georgia, to meet with the owner of the gravel pit where they’d discovered Jolene Monroe’s remains. He would rather play nice and have the owner willingly cooperate so that the GBI could do a deep dive in his records, security tapes, and employees than have to get a court order. But he’d get one if necessary.
End of Excerpt
