The Burning Girls: A completely gripping crime thriller packed with heart-pounding twists (Detective Ellie Reeves Book 3) Read online

  The Burning Girls

  A completely gripping crime thriller packed with heart-pounding twists

  Rita Herron

  Books by Rita Herron

  Detective Ellie Reeves

  1. The Silent Dolls

  2. Wildflower Graves

  3. The Burning Girls

  Available in audio

  The Silent Dolls (available in the UK and the US)

  Wildflower Graves (available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Chapter 151

  Chapter 152

  Chapter 153

  Chapter 154

  Chapter 155

  Chapter 156

  Chapter 157

  Chapter 158

  Chapter 159

  Chapter 160

  Chapter 161

  Hear More from Rita

  Books by Rita Herron

  Wildflower Graves

  The Silent Dolls

  A Letter from Rita

  Acknowledgments

  To my mother, who taught me to appreciate all things Southern. May she rest in peace.

  Prologue

  Thirty years ago—Teardrop Falls, North Georgia

  Her father would kill her if they found out what had happened.

  Isabella had to run away. Save herself. Save them from the shame.

  Fear and nausea clawed at her as she threw some clothes in her backpack. She snatched the cash she kept in the shoebox and stuffed it inside the bag, then grabbed her toothbrush and hairbrush and… oh, God, what else did she need?

  Panic caused her heart to pound. Summer break had just started. She’d been so excited about starting college last year and returning in the fall. She was the first in her family to do so. But now…

  She couldn’t go back. And she couldn’t stay at home. Where could she go? How would she get by?

  A noise outside. She looked through the window and spotted headlights down at the holler.

  The picture of her mother and her in their matching Christmas pajamas taunted her, and tears stung her eyes. She’d yelled at her mom that she was too old for such silly nonsense. “You’ll always be my little girl,” her mother had said.

  The love in her mother’s voice had gotten to her, and she’d caved, putting on the reindeer hat and pjs, even though she’d been frowning in the picture.

  Her mother would be devastated when she left…

  She’d be even more devastated if she learned the truth.

  Eyes clouding over, she jammed the picture in her backpack, then grabbed her pink jacket and tugged it on. Slinging her backpack over her shoulder, she eased open the window and crawled through it. Grabbing hold of the nearest tree branch, she climbed down, just as she had so many times in high school when she’d snuck out to see her friends.

  She would miss them, too.

  But she had to go.

  Tree bark scraped her palms, but she bit back a cry, maneuvered down and dropped to the ground. Nausea twisted her stomach, but she swallowed it. Poised like a cat, she turned and peered through the darkness. Trees rustled in the wind.

  Brush parted as something—or someone—pushed through it.

  Terror seized her, and she glanced at the street and her yard. Deciding it was safer to cut through the woods, that maybe she could make it to the bus stop in town, she darted around the side of
the house and sprinted into the thicket of pines and cypresses backing the property.

  Not far from Moody Hollow, where vacationers hiked up to the waterfalls, she might even be able to hitch a ride.

  Her feet skidded over pine straw and she stumbled over a tree stump, but she raced through the brush, grateful she’d run track last year. Just as she veered onto the trail that would take her to the falls, she heard the sound of footsteps crunching, closing in on her. Suddenly someone jumped from behind a boulder and grabbed her.

  She kicked and screamed and tried to bite, but something jammed in her neck, and then she felt her body go numb. Unable to move or fight, she hung limp and terrified as the man dragged her deeper into the forest.

  1

  Winding Rock

  The bones of the body were charred so badly they looked like ashes.

  Detective Ellie Reeves had never seen anything like it. Her own family’s house had burned down a few weeks ago, blazing away her childhood room and all her memories. Her parents were starting to sift through the ashes now and rebuild their lives.

  But this… this person had died a miserable, painful death.

  And the stones… a circle of them stood around the body like a monument. So different from the rocks that had skidded down the hill into the ravine and lay in a natural pile.

  These stones resembled giant arrowheads and had been driven into the ground with their tips pointing toward the sky. Her pulse jumped. She was sure she had seen something like this before, but she couldn’t quite place where.

  She turned to scan the area, looking for clues to tell the story. Something to identify the body.

  There was no ID in sight. No wallet, purse, jacket or backpack. The clothing was scorched, light-gray fibers had caught on a patch of briars.

  Pulling her bandana over her nose to stifle the stench, Ellie leaned closer, noting a chain hanging loosely around the brittle ankle bones. Scattered by the water’s edge, she spotted tiny pearls from a necklace. A lone black shoe dangled from a thorn bush, the kind of shoe a woman might wear to an office or to dinner, not to hike in the rocky terrain of the Appalachian Mountains.

  “It’s a woman,” Ellie mumbled, half to herself, half to Cord McClain, a ranger who worked Search and Rescue in Bluff County. As a teen, she’d had a crush on the brooding tough guy. Years ago, after a harrowing rescue mission, they’d slept together. Afterwards, he’d been distant and she’d been trying to prove herself as a cop, so romance was not in the picture. Although occasionally she glimpsed a spark of interest in his eyes, and felt it, too.

  Recently they’d been thrown together investigating murders on the trail, and she’d hurt him by questioning his involvement in the crimes. One day she hoped to repair the damage. She had no idea if that could ever happen, though.

  A squawking bird drew her attention back to the case, and questions rattled through her head. What exactly had happened here? Was the woman out here alone? Had she been meeting someone for a romantic rendezvous?

  Ranger Cord McClain wiped sweat from his forehead. The heat was oppressive, magnified ten times by the brush fire that had rippled through the woods earlier in the day.

  The third in the last few days. Trouble was they didn’t know if the fires were accidental or if they’d been intentionally set. So far, they had no clear evidence and, with the recent drought, a campfire or a match accidentally dropped could have set the dry brush ablaze.

  A frown tugged at Cord’s chiseled face as he shined his flashlight across the blackened ground. “She could have been hiking but got caught out here and didn’t see the fire until it was on her. But what do you make of those stones? It looks like someone arranged them that way.”

  “Which means this was no accident,” replied Ellie. “According to folklore, standing stones represent social circles where people gathered to mourn the dead.”

  “How do you know all that?” Cord asked.

  “My dad used to fill me with stories when we went camping,” Ellie said. “After that, I checked out books on the area and read about the folklore.”

  Cord’s voice was gruff. “Bodies are burned during cremation to symbolize that we are nothing, that we’ll be turned to ashes after death.”

  Ellie shivered, his comment reminding her of Cord’s troubled past. As a foster kid, he’d grown up above a funeral home. Worse, his foster father had defiled the bodies he was supposed to take care of. That dark time still haunted his eyes and had made him a suspect in the last case she’d worked, where the killer had buried the bodies in a ritualistic pattern. He was cleared, but their relationship was far from repaired.

  She pulled at her T-shirt, desperate for relief from the heat and the suffocating air.

  Instead, a breeze stirred the sickening scent of burned flesh and bone, and her stomach roiled.

  Reining in her repulsion, she scanned the area again. It was odd for females to hike alone, but it happened. God knows she’d gone off into the wilds of the mountains by herself when she’d needed space and time alone to think.

  “Looks like she was by herself,” she said. “But why? The news and park service have issued warnings for people to stay away until we get a handle on these brush fires.” With the steep cliffs, wild animals, and endless miles of forest, hiking alone was dangerous at any time. But especially now. The fires were robbing the precious land of its beautiful greenery, killing forest animals and destroying the natural order on the Appalachian Trail.

  As the fires raged, the local prayer group known as the Porch Sitters met daily, sending pleas up to the heavens for much-needed rain and the safety of the firefighters and park rangers who protected the land. They also prayed for the adventure seekers who tackled the treacherous 2,200-mile trail that started in Georgia and stretched all the way to Maine.

  But until today, the fires hadn’t taken a life.

  Voices echoed, and she glanced up to see the medical examiner, Dr. Laney Whitefeather, pushing through the mass of pines and oaks, the crime scene investigators close behind.

  “God,” Laney said as soon as she spotted the burned body.

  The CSI team paused, expressions pained as they absorbed the gruesome image.

  Laney recovered first. “Who found her?” she asked.

  “Firefighters,” Cord responded. “They were trying to extinguish the blaze and called it in.” He gestured toward a tall, broad-shouldered man in a firefighter’s uniform combing the area.

  “That the arson investigator?”

  Cord nodded. “A newbie to Bluff County Fire Department. Name’s Max Weatherby. He’s looking for signs it was a campfire that got out of hand, and for the point of origin.”

  Ellie nodded. The blaze had cut a path through the woods about six feet wide, destroying the dense weeds and eating at the trees, the dry land prime for spreading it. She studied the spot where the woman’s body lay for indications that the fire began there, but with nothing but ashes and charred debris, the expert would have to make a call on that. But if the fire had been set intentionally, the point of origin could be some distance away. In that case, there would have been smoke, heat and flames shooting into the sky, so why hadn’t the woman seen it and gotten out of there? Because she’d been killed first? The stones pointed to that theory.

  Ellie rubbed her chin. “Who reported the fire?”

  Cord shrugged. “Another ranger.”

  “I guess you can’t tell cause of death or time yet?” Ellie said to the ME.

  Laney rolled her eyes. “You know I can’t. I’ll have to request an expert forensic anthropologist on this one. Bones aren’t my specialty. With the body being burned so severely, we’ll have to rely on PMCT for identification and to determine what caused death.”

  “PMCT?” Cord asked.

  “Postmortem computed tomography,” Ellie explained.

  “Exactly,” Laney confirmed. “It’s complicated, but analyzes toxicology, looks for traumatic fractures, surgical dissection of foreign bodies and state of carbon
ization.”