Ashes to Ashes: Aubrey Blake Thrillers, #1

By Rachel Ford

A private eye and a vigilante priest face off to bring down a corrupt band of evildoers—by the book, or off the books. Her way, or his.

 

Years ago, Aubrey Blake joined the police force to make a difference. She almost lost everything in the pursuit of justice. Now she's about to do it again.

 

Disillusioned with her former career, she makes a living as a private detective. A living, but not a life.

 

Then the killings start. The police are on it. But Blake can't let it be. She can't walk away. She's not wired that way.

 

Then again, neither are the killers…

• Language: English
• Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648904936

Rachel Ford

My name is Rachel Diane Ford, born in Greenville, South Carolina on September 7, 1953. My parents moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when I was 2 years old. I am the third of seven children and a proud single parent of a son and daughter. I graduated in 1971 from William Penn High School and attended Community College. In 1998, I took a course at Temple University for creative writing. I realized my love for writing in 1999. I began sharing my thoughts and my motivation accelerated, but working full time hindered me. However, to my amazement in 2003, I did a name writing for a very dear friend and realized my blessings extended. Doing name writings is also a passion of mine that I intend to pursue. My family and friends continually encourage and support me and my dream to publish a book of Poetry.

Book preview

Chapter One

THE OLD MAN glanced at his watch. Thirteen minutes after nine. He was behind schedule. He should have been at the halfway mark already. He should have passed it thirteen minutes ago.

He gritted his teeth and pressed onward, pumping his legs as fast as they’d go. Not so fast these days. People might say age was only a number, but those people didn’t understand numbers. Numbers weren’t just innocuous lines on a page or a reflection of self-image. Numbers made the difference between success and failure, on time or too late, life and death.

One hundred and forty-five beats per minute.

Eleven hundred feet per second.

One round.

One shot.

One kill.

If you dug deep enough, everything was a numbers game. And right now, he was losing. He’d covered just about two miles. That meant he still had over two miles left. And forty-seven minutes to do it in.

Numbers, again. It all came down to numbers. Twenty years ago, those numbers wouldn’t have made a difference. But age understood the numbers game, even if people didn’t. Arthritic knees and old lungs and stiff hips understood the difference twenty years could make.

He puffed as he walked, drawing in one short, quick breath after the next. He hit the two-mile mark about three minutes later.

Two miles.

Halfway.

Forty-four minutes left.

He hit the nine-thirty mark a little closer to schedule. He still had over a mile to go, but he’d been making up lost time. He was close now.

Nine hours. Thirty minutes after the hour.

There’d be meetings and doctor appointments and lawyer appointments and business openings happening all over town right now. But that wasn’t what those numbers meant to the old man.

He was contemplating an entirely different set of figures.

Eleven hundred feet per second.

One round.

Tyler Morehouse was already dead. If everything had gone according to plan, he would have been dead about five minutes earlier.

One shot.

One kill.

And if it hadn’t? Well, the old man had bigger problems to worry about than his heart rate. And that was certainly higher than one hundred and forty-five beats per minute.

A hundred and forty-five beats per minute was the maximum recommended heart rate for a guy his age, according to something he’d read online a long time ago. American Heart Association, or John Hopkins Medicine, maybe. He didn’t remember at the moment, but he remembered the formula: two hundred and twenty beats per minute, minus your age.

One hundred and forty-five, in his case. Another set of critical numbers. He was feeling the impact of ignoring those numbers.

His breathing had grown more laborious, and his lungs burned. He felt mild tightness in his chest.

Six.

That was what he would have rated himself on the pain scale his doctor liked to use: six out of ten. Which, he decided, pun not intended, left him a little breathing room. He still had four out of ten degrees of pain left before he was either immobile or dead.

Four degrees and thirty minutes to go. He’d faced worse. He could tough that out.

And he did. Half an hour and two minutes later, he made the rendezvous. The bench was occupied, as per the arrangement. He took a seat next to the other man and didn’t say anything. He just sat there puffing with exertion and slipped a smartphone out of his pocket.

The other guy didn’t speak either. He took the phone and slid it into his own pocket. They sat there for three minutes, until five after ten.

Then the other guy got up. The old man stayed seated, stayed puffing long breaths of air into old lungs that weren’t used to that kind of exercise.

The other guy said, It’s done.

The old man nodded, but he didn’t speak. Not because it was some predetermined code or anything like that. He was still wheezing for breath.

You okay?

He nodded. You better go. You’re on a schedule.

You sure you’re all right?

Just not used to that kind of pace.

The other guy smiled, the kind of smile that writers would say didn’t quite reach his eyes. The old man hadn’t always understood that phrase, but once he’d lived long enough, he did. Age was more than just a number, after all. Been a long time, hasn’t it?

He nodded and said again, You better go.

And then the other guy did go. The old man sat on his bench alone, no longer counting the minutes as he collected his thoughts and caught his breath.

Tyler Morehouse was dead. It was over.

Chapter Two

AT TWENTY-FIVE years old, the human body was a machine in its prime. Maybe the perfect machine. According to the smart people of the world, the brain had fully matured by then. Or maybe it was at twenty-one or thirty. It depended on which study you read and which smart person you asked. But twenty-five was a nice number anyway, right in the middle of all the estimates. And it was the number they were working with. So Aubrey Blake went with it.

As far as the rest of a twenty-five-year old’s body—well, for most people, it would be in peak condition. The heart, the liver, and the lungs were the healthiest those organs would ever be. And barring some kind of high school or college sports injury, the knees and back hadn’t started feeling the impact of age yet.

No, twenty-five was pretty much as good as it got. It just goes downhill from there.

So maybe, Aubrey figured, that was why a twenty-five-year-old kid in the prime of his life would eat a bullet. Maybe he’d sat in that darkened room, the shades drawn on a bright, sunny morning, and thought about the next seventy years of his life and how it would all be downhill from there. Maybe he’d thought about three or four decades of eight-to-five shifts. Maybe he’d thought about thirty years of mortgages and car payments and PTA meetings. Maybe he’d thought about a lifetime of diets and gym memberships and watching his cholesterol and counting how many beers he drank.

Maybe, she said, he was getting cold feet about the wedding.

Bullshit, Aubrey. You know that’s bullshit. Andy Jefferson drummed his fingers on the desk in an aggravated rhythm.

She shrugged. Andy had been her old partner, back when they were on patrol, and they’d risen through the ranks side by side. They’d made detective within a month of each other, so they had the kind of history to know when one or the other was full of shit. And he was right. It did sound like bullshit, and Aubrey knew it. But the truth was she didn’t much care. Maybe. But if the medical examiner thinks it was suicide, I don’t see what the problem is.

"‘Consistent with.’ She said the injuries are ‘consistent with’ a suicide. Not that it was a suicide."

She would, though, wouldn’t she?

Not the point. I’m saying she didn’t rule out anything else.

What, you mean murder most foul?

Andy frowned at her flippancy. I’m telling you, that kid was murdered. And George Callaghan did it. I know he did it. I can feel it.

Andy was an instincts guy. It used to piss her off because his instincts usually turned out to be dead-on. She sat back in a comfortable office chair and tapped a pen against her lower lip.

Okay. But it seems to me there’s one glaring problem with your theory. You have no evidence.

He didn’t respond to her sarcasm though. It’s worse than that.

Really? You got someone else who confessed to it?

A flicker of annoyance crossed his face. No, Sherlock. He’s got an alibi. A solid alibi.

Aubrey laughed. Hell, Andy. This is one of those happy-ending cases. You’ve got a rapist who decided of his own accord to eat a bullet. Why are you looking for more?

Because he didn’t do it. I know I don’t have the evidence. But when I talked to the grandfather, I could tell he was guilty.

Did he say anything?

No, of course not. I tried everything I know to catch him in a lie or a contradiction. He’s sticking to his story. Damn guy’s unflappable, I’ll give him that. But I could see it in his eyes. He knew why I was there before I said a word.

Okay, she said again. And so what?

So what? He killed someone. What do you mean ‘so what?’

Say he did kill Morehouse. Hannah Callaghan is dead because of Tyler Morehouse. Tyler Morehouse is dead because of George Callaghan. She shrugged again. Seems like balance has been restored.

Jesus, Aubrey, that’s not the way this works.

Maybe not. Maybe it should be.

He shook his head at her. Look, I didn’t come here to have this argument all over again. Are you going to help me or not?

She considered for a long moment. Andy was a good guy. He really was. And he was smart, with killer instincts. If he thought George Callaghan had done it, chances were very good that George Callaghan did it.

But was she really going to help someone—even Andy—put a man in prison for killing the man who’d raped his granddaughter? Was she going to put an old guy in jail for killing the man who’d driven his granddaughter to suicide?

Tell me more, she said after a minute.

Then you’ll help?

We’ll see. Tell me about the alibi.

The alibi was about as perfect as an alibi could get. George Callaghan was a creature of habit. His neighbors could attest to that. The waitresses at the café where he had breakfast every morning at exactly ten fifteen could attest to that.

And his smartphone’s fitness tracker could attest to that. Because as soon as the winter snows melted, he followed the same route. At exactly eight o’clock in the morning, George Callaghan left his home, walked half a block to the start of the town’s nature trail, and, for the next two hours, walked the four-mile trail around the lake. The same trail, every morning, rain or shine. He would rest for about five minutes on one of the trail benches and then walk the last ten minutes to the Homestyle Hearth Café.

Tyler Morehouse had killed himself a week prior to Andy Jefferson sitting in her home office, around nine to nine thirty in the morning on a sunny Tuesday. George Callaghan had shown up at the Homestyle Hearth at exactly a quarter after ten, and his phone’s GPS-powered fitness tracker confirmed he’d walked the same route he always did.

And the app’s maker confirmed he left right at eight, from his house, Andy said.

That doesn’t sound legal, she said. Did you have a warrant to obtain that information, Detective Jefferson?

He frowned at her. Her attempts at humor didn’t seem to be hitting the mark. Or maybe they were. Maybe annoying him was the point. I don’t need a warrant. There’s a clause, smarty pants, in the terms and agreements he signed when he installed it.

Ah, ten pages, two hundred subsections deep, I assume?

Six pages. And I don’t know how many subsections. Point is he agreed that law enforcement could request the data without a warrant, and the developer was only too eager to comply. It’s a startup, and apparently, they don’t want trouble.

Good thinking, to look for the app, she said.

That’s the thing though. I didn’t think of it. He volunteered it.

For the first time so far, her ears perked up. Really?

That’s what I’m saying. It was like he had planned this whole thing out. He had his alibi all ready. And when I showed up asking where he was that morning, he knew exactly what to say. And had it documented. Incontrovertible proof.

Aubrey didn’t work on instinct. Instinct, in her estimation, was a dangerous mix of bias and perception—and you never quite knew what blend you were working with at any one time.

Still, right now, her instincts told her Andy was onto something. But Callaghan was a seventy-something-year-old guy. It took him two hours to walk four miles. Tyler Morehouse was a twenty-five-year-old kid who’d played football less than a decade earlier. There was no way a guy like Callaghan could have overpowered a guy like Morehouse and made him put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.

A point that she made and a point that Andy brushed aside, along with her suggestion that Callaghan had an accomplice. He doesn’t have the money to hire a hit. The rest of the family moved after the thing with Hannah. He lives alone. There’s no one else to do it for him. He paused for a moment. And I didn’t say he overpowered Morehouse. There’s no signs of a struggle. More than likely, he threatened him.

With what?

I don’t know. Threatened to kill his fiancée, threatened to shoot his parents…who knows? Point is, he convinced that kid to pull the trigger. When I talked to him, you know what he said?

What?

He said, ‘Maybe the weight of what he did to our Hannah finally caught up to him.’

Maybe it did, she said.

Yeah, maybe. But I don’t buy it. There was too much satisfaction in his eyes.

I don’t know. I’d be pretty satisfied, too, if the piece of shit who raped one of my family members blew his own brains out.

Andy drummed his fingers on the desk again. Look, you know why I’m here.

You need my help.

Yes. Unfortunately. You could always spot the details I missed. And right now, I need that. Chief says if I don’t bring him something by the end of the week, the coroner is going to come back with a ruling of self-inflicted death. So are you going to help or not?

Aubrey nodded. All right, I’ll take a look. But it’s a long shot, Andy. All you’ve got is an old man with a rock-solid alibi who is happy the guy who raped his grandkid is dead. That’s shit for evidence.

I know. And if you don’t see anything, well, I guess I was wrong.

You could be getting paranoid in your old age.

He snorted. I’m a cop. I’ve always been paranoid. I’ve got the stuff on a memory card. When do you think you’ll have a chance to look it over?

She hemmed and hawed for a minute about the case she was working on, as if it was more than a single cheating spouse surveillance gig. Then said, I can probably get started later today.

Good. And remember, this is all off the books. If the chief found out—

She waved him away. She knew better than him about conduct unbefitting a police officer, didn’t she? Yeah, yeah. Not a word.

Thanks. You’re the best.

She snorted. I know. And next time you bother me, you better at least bring me a coffee from Gecko’s or something.

You got it. Just like old times.

God, I hope not. Just leave the card and go.

So he did, and she waited until he’d pulled out of her drive before loading it. She perused a folder full of documents and photographs—the kind of stuff that would get Andy fired in a heartbeat if anyone ever found out he’d passed it along. Much less to her.

She started with the report of the death. Ashley Carter had been the one to make the call. Aubrey glanced through Andy’s notes and, in a moment, figured out where Carter fit in: twenty-four-year-old Caucasian female, engaged to and lived with the deceased.

Andy had a file of notes on her. She’d been at work the morning of Tyler’s death. She was an RN at the St. Joseph’s and Fredrick Morehouse Memorial Hospital in town, where she worked three twelve-hour shifts a week: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, plus every third weekend.

Andy had confirmed that she did work her full shift. He’d spoken to her supervisor and coworkers. It had been a busy day, and even a temporary absence would have been noticed. That was what her boss had said, and that was what her coworkers had said. And, on top of all that, Andy had uniform go through the hospital’s surveillance footage and document Carter’s comings and goings. She had arrived fifteen minutes before seven, and she’d left ten minutes after.

That left one possible conclusion: Ashley Carter hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Aubrey went back to the call. Carter had phoned 911 thirty-three minutes after seven o’clock. Aubrey saw that Andy had copied the audio recording onto her card, but she stuck for the moment to the transcript. The written word didn’t lie the way spoken did. There was no emotive appeal beyond what you saw: no breaking voice, no choking up, nothing to play at the reader’s sympathy. A transcribed [incoherent sobbing] just didn’t pull at the heartstrings the way actually hearing it did. And Aubrey didn’t mean to have her heartstrings pulled.

She wanted to view this case like a new investigator, as if she knew nothing about it—not Andy’s suspicions, not Tyler’s past, nothing. And nine times out of ten, when someone ended up dead at home, the spouse, the significant other, or the ex had something to do with it. In this case, that would be Carter.

So far, she’d eliminated Carter as the triggerwoman. That didn’t prove she was innocent, but it did mean that if she had something to do with it, she had an accomplice.

What the odds of that might be, Aubrey couldn’t say. But she didn’t think they’d be high. The Morehouses were one of the wealthier families in the area. If they’d been married, or if Tyler’s parents had died already, inheritance might have been a factor. But according to Andy’s notes, Tyler’s house was still in his dad’s name. So was his truck and his Corvette. And nobody ever killed anyone over a deaf hunting dog, which seemed to be the only thing Tyler Morehouse actually owned. At least, not in Marsh Point.

So, Carter wouldn’t have offed him for his share of the Morehouse money because he didn’t have it yet. Then why else would someone about to marry into the family want to kill the Morehouse scion? Aside from money, the family had clout. The Hannah Callaghan business had proved that when Tyler had walked away from an open-and-shut rape case with an acquittal.

It had been a load of bullshit, and everyone knew it. Aubrey couldn’t prove it, of course, but she’d have bet her right arm there’d been payoffs involved. The evidence had been conclusive. Tyler’s DNA had been found all over the victim, and her injuries were consistent with the violent sexual trauma she alleged. That should have sealed a conviction. And with an actual video of Morehouse bragging about the assault to a friend? He shouldn’t have seen the light of day for years.

And yet a jury of his peers acquitted Tyler Morehouse on all charges except underage drinking. He’d paid a fine and done twenty hours of community service.

It had been absolute bullshit. But to someone marrying into the family, maybe it had been more. Maybe it had been a cautionary tale. Maybe the subsequent hounding of Hannah and her family, maybe the two-year vendetta that drove the girl to hang herself, had been a warning of what happened when you crossed a Morehouse.

Maybe it hadn’t been Tyler getting cold feet about the wedding at all. Maybe it had been Carter.

Then again, Carter’s family wasn’t from around the area. They weren’t even from the same state. According to Andy’s notes, they’d met two years earlier at a mutual friend’s wedding. So Carter didn’t have to fear the Morehouse clout. Not even their power crossed state lines.

Conclusion: Ashley Carter had no apparent motive for killing Tyler.

Still, Aubrey read the transcript rather than listened to the call.

Hello, this is 911 emergency services dispatch.

"Hello? This is Ashley Carter, 1173 Morehouse Drive. My fiancé, Tyler—oh my god, he…he shot himself. I don’t know… [incoherent sobbing]."

Miss Carter, I need you to stay calm. Tell me what happened.

I don’t know. I just got home. He’s…just dead. He shot himself. There’s a gun, and an exit wound in the back of his head, and… Oh my god, why?

Ma’am, stay with me. Is anyone else at the residence?

No, it’s just me and Tyler.

The call went on until the police arrived. Carter described the GSW—gunshot wound—in one breath and broke down sobbing with the next. Nothing raised Aubrey’s suspicions. Ashley Carter was a nurse. She’d seen blood and gunshot wounds and suicide attempts before. She had trained to handle them like a professional. Of course, she hadn’t trained to find her fiancé dead of a self-inflicted wound. So, there was nothing unexpected about the professionalism or the breakdowns.

Aubrey moved on to the medical examiner’s report. This was fairly straightforward: One GSW to the head. The bullet entered the hard palate of the oral cavity, shattering the bone as it went and continuing on into the brain. The report chronicled specific tissue and bone damage, but the long and short of it was that a 9mm round entered Tyler Morehouse’s head via his mouth and exited from the back of his head, taking quite a bit of skull with it. Entire sections of his right and left temporal and occipital lobes had been evaporated either by the kinetic energy of the bullet itself or by the shattered bone that followed it. Based on the angle of the shot and the ensuing damage, death would have been almost instantaneous.

It had been a clean kill shot. The angle was consistent with being self-inflicted. A quick perusal of the other forensic documents showed that the bullet had been fired from Morehouse’s gun, and the forensic examiner had found high levels of gunshot residue consistent with him being the shooter.

Aubrey sighed and got up. So far, absolutely nothing about this case looked to be anything more or less than suicide. What the hell is Andy wasting my time for?

She headed to her coffee maker. It was one of those single-cup contraptions that had seemed like a good idea at the time. Her doctor kept advising her to drink less caffeine on account of her blood pressure, so buying her coffee at fifty cents a pod had sounded like a way to monitor and limit how many cups she drank a day.

In reality, it just meant she spent a lot more on coffee. She slipped a pod in and followed the right sequence of buttons, and then the machine started to huff and puff and burble, and the smell of coffee filled the air.

It was like someone flipped a reset button in her head. Just the smell of freshly brewed dark roast made her happy, made her see clearer and feel sharper. Like some kind of addict about to get my damned fix.

She splashed a bit of milk into the mug and took the coffee back to her seat. She stared at her laptop screen for a minute and then at her camera. Katherine Walker would be expecting her report by end of week. Katherine had been convinced her husband, Albert, was banging the new secretary at his private law firm.

The good news was Katherine had been wrong about the secretary. Their relationship was nothing more than professional. The bad news was Albert seemed to be screwing just about everyone else at the office.

Aubrey would have to make sure she got paid before handing over the evidence. Cases like this tended to go one of two ways: the wronged partner wanted revenge and would pay handsomely for the evidence, or the wronged partner would deny it all and try to pretend nothing had happened. Since there was no real way to tell which way it would go beforehand, this would be a payment-first case.

God, she hated this kind of work. Then again, disgraced detectives didn’t get to turn up their noses at paying work, did they?

She glanced back at her laptop. The screen had gone dark after it entered sleep mode. She moved the mouse, and her files flickered back onscreen. Cheating Albert and wailing Katherine could wait.

The rest of the files bore out what Andy said. George Callaghan’s alibi was rock solid. He’d left home on schedule, just like he always did. He walked the same trail that he always did, ate at the same café, and walked home. When it was all said and done, he had the same four-point-seven-eight miles clocked that he normally logged every morning. And GPS coordinates to confirm his path. And witness statements from the restaurant to further confirm the timeframes.

George Callaghan’s alibi was perfect.

Conclusion: he didn’t do it.

Chapter Three

THE OLD MAN rested on the same bench he’d sat on a week ago, thinking about the same things he’d thought about then. Tyler Morehouse was dead. So far, no one seemed the wiser about what had really happened. George had told him he’d heard from a detective called Jefferson, but just the once.

George said he thought the cop suspected something. But the alibi had held up, just as he’d told him it would. There’s an advantage to being old and stuck in your ways. You have an established routine. Everyone knows it. No one expects you to change them, and they notice if you do.

He watched the people come and go. Some of them, he supposed, had routines of their own. Some of them might notice him sitting there like he would have noticed them if this had been a normal occurrence for him. Maybe it should be. After last Tuesday’s hustle, maybe getting on the trail a few times a week might be a good thing. Might add a few years to his lifespan, might get him used to having an elevated heart rate again…so he wouldn’t feel like he was dying next time.

Of course, there wasn’t going to be a next time. They’d done what they needed to.

One shot. One kill.

One life for another life.

Neat and tidy, Old Testament–style justice: an eye for an eye.

He watched a mother push her stroller past, yelling at a toddler who was running too far ahead. It was a nice day, sunny and warm. Sunday would bring the Easter egg hunt, and this place would be swarmed with families like that one.

But not the Morehouses. They’d be home mourning.

And not the young Callaghans because they had left Marsh Point a long time ago.

One shot.

One kill.

An eye for an eye.

People came and went, and the afternoon ran long. The old man would have to head home soon. He stretched his stiff legs and got ready to stand up.

Then he paused. He saw someone he knew, not personally but by sight. A cop. No, that wasn’t right. She wasn’t a cop, not anymore. She’d been fired a few years back in something of a scandal. He tried to remember her name or what the charges had been. He couldn’t though.

All he could remember was the face. It was a pretty face, with bright blue eyes and raven-dark hair. The kind of look the Brothers Grimm might have had in mind when they wrote about Snow White. But this was no princess. She carried herself with a briskness that gave off distinct don’t-fuck-with-me vibes. It probably wasn’t even deliberate. Cops tended to give off that air, the way priests came across as reverential and waitresses seemed approachable. The spiritual accoutrements of the job, an invisible chasuble that the laborer adopted and never quite took off.

She