Page 36 of Dirty Valentine (A J.J. Graves Mystery #17)
Jack nodded and continued. “Then they moved on to Judith Hughes. But that didn’t go as planned either.
Maybe Victoria got some good licks in and the killer was weakened.
Or maybe they just didn’t plan on Judith running the way she did, but whatever the case, we have a living witness once she can get past the fear and start talking coherently. ”
“The killer spent time here too,” I said. “Other than her tongue being removed and all the blood, look how clean she is. She’s been deliberately placed here, almost reverently, like on an altar.”
The rain outside had intensified, and despite the building’s restored roof, water seeped through the ancient stone walls where centuries of freeze-thaw cycles had opened gaps between the carefully fitted rocks.
The historical society had done remarkable work preserving the mill—the wheel mechanism had been rebuilt to working condition, the grinding stones restored, educational plaques installed—but no amount of preservation could completely seal a building that had stood since the 1720s.
The team worked faster, protecting evidence from the encroaching moisture.
“Got something!” Potts announced from near the restored mill wheel mechanism. She was photographing something wedged between two massive stones. “Looks like paper.”
We watched as she carefully extracted what appeared to be an aged piece of parchment, protected from the rain by the reconstructed wooden housing that sheltered the mill wheel—part of the historical society’s efforts to show visitors how the mechanism would have originally functioned.
The paper looked genuinely old, yellowed and brittle at the edges.
“It’s wrapped in plastic,” she observed, using tweezers to carefully unfold it. “Someone wanted to make sure we’d find this intact.”
Even from where I stood, I could see elaborate script covering the page.
Daniels leaned in with a magnifying glass to photograph the text clearly.
“What does it say?” I asked, looking at Jack. I knew he was thinking about the call we’d received on our way here.
“It says,” Daniels said. “The serpent had many heads. One has been severed, but others still speak with forked tongues. The scales of justice remain unbalanced. Those who built their fortunes on innocent blood must pay the debt in full.” She looked up.
“We’ll need a document expert to analyze the paper and ink. ”
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the damp air. “That’s three murders and another attempted murder in the last three days. That’s rapid escalation.”
“That’s premeditated,” Jack said. “Someone who planned out methods and places well ahead of time. Someone who’s done surveillance and knows they won’t be seen at certain times of the day or night.”
“And they’re obviously not just killing descendants,” I said. “They’re killing anyone they see as complicit in the cover-up. Margaret knew about Thomas’s research, tried to stop him from pursuing it.”
I stood up from Margaret’s body, my knees protesting after kneeling on the hard floor. Every muscle in my body felt tight with tension.
The Suburban arrived just as we were finishing our initial processing.
Lily jumped out from the driver’s side, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing scrubs under her rain jacket.
Sheldon emerged from the passenger side, somehow managing to look both professional and slightly disheveled despite his rain gear.
His attempts at the emo look from yesterday were mostly gone, though I could still see traces of eyeliner he hadn’t quite managed to remove.
“Another one?” Lily said, her expression grim as she took in the scene. Despite her exhaustion from finals, she was all business. “Sheldon, let’s get the gurney.”
They worked together, navigating the rain-slicked ground and ancient doorway. Lily’s medical training showed in the careful way she helped position Margaret’s body for transport, while Sheldon handled the technical aspects with surprising competence.
“Tongue’s been removed,” I told Lily quietly as we prepared to zip the body bag. “You can assist with this one. It’ll be interesting.”
“That’s a perk to my week,” she said. “I have one more final and then I’m going to sleep for seventy-two hours.”
Cole returned from interviewing Blackwood.
“His story checks out so far. Phone shows an incoming call from a blocked number at eleven forty-seven. Duration one minute twelve seconds. He says he got the call last night telling him to meet her here at 2 p.m. today. Just arrived about five minutes before you all showed up. Said he saw her and freaked out and fell down the stairs. That’s why he’s all banged up.
Tore his clothes and palms of his hands. ”
Martinez piped in and said, “I’ve got Chen pulling footage from every traffic cam between Blackwood’s house and here.”
The scene was winding down, evidence catalogued and bagged.
As we prepared to leave, I took one last look at the grinding platform where Margaret had been displayed.
The CSI team had finished their documentation, evidence markers removed, but I could still see her there in my mind’s eye—silenced forever for trying to protect someone she cared about.
She wasn’t part of the original bloodlines, but she’d gotten in the killer’s way.
The rain followed us out of the mill, turning the world into a gray blur of water and shadow. The killer was playing a game with rules we didn’t fully understand, moving pieces on a board we couldn’t quite see.
The storm that had been building all day finally broke in earnest, thunder rattling the windows and lightning illuminating the Virginia countryside in stark, momentary revelations. It felt appropriate somehow—nature itself acknowledging that something dark had been unleashed in King George County.