Her Lost Alibi: A gripping suspense thriller. (An Amber Cross Thriller Book 1) Read online

  Her Lost Alibi

  An Amber Cross Thriller

  David Berens

  Craig A. Hart

  Contents

  Get more of my books FREE!

  Her Lost Alibi

  An Amber Cross Thriller Book 1

  Prologue — Blood in the Street

  1. A New Beat

  2. P’s and Q’s

  3. Murder Files

  4. Into the Rabbit Hole

  5. 1000 Miles

  6. The List

  7. Lost Alibi

  8. Into the Cage

  9. New Wine Ministries

  10. Lunch Time

  11. Revelations

  12. Out of Town

  13. Sins of the Father

  14. End of Innocence

  15. Eye Witness

  16. No Time

  17. Tip Line

  18. Anniversary

  19. Layers of Déjà Vu

  20. A Box of Wine

  21. Compulsive Behavior

  22. The Art of Penmanship

  23. Gone, Baby, Gone

  24. Southern Comfort

  25. Bar Rita

  26. The Last Stand

  27. Tomorrow

  Epilogue – Family Ties

  Afterword

  Also by David Berens

  Get more of my books FREE!

  As a thank you for buying this book, I’d like to invite you to join my Beachbum Brigade Reader Group. You can get 4 FREE BOOKS for joining absolutely FREE.

  To join, click tropicalthrillers.com/readergroup and your free stuff will be sent immediately. It will never cost you anything, ever!

  For more information, visit tropicalthrillers.com

  For Laura and Olivia.

  Everything I do, I do it for you.

  Her Lost Alibi

  An Amber Cross Thriller Book 1

  Prologue — Blood in the Street

  The cracked pavement radiated hot, sticky steam in the afternoon. The drain just outside of Sal’s Diner exhaled the rancid breath of urine, vomit, mold, and countless decaying animals unable to escape its rusty grasp. Streetlight’s beams darting through the fog reflected in the freshly pooled water washing down the street. Late night tourists and a few hardy locals wandered up and down, crossing the lane trying not to step in anything that would ruin their shoes.

  Cars parked along the curb nestled impossibly close to each other turned the passage between them into a one-way affair. Eric Torres pulled his green, thrift store raincoat up over his shoulders, tucking a six pack of Modelo under his arms and jogged out of the bodega on 14th. He put his free hand on the trunk of a silver Toyota and rubbed past the bumper, drenching his jeans in the process. He muttered a curse under his breath as he leaned over to brush away the excess moisture. When he stood back up, the gun shot shocked him.

  It was so close, his ears rang like church bells through balls of cotton. In a haze, he looked down to see that two of the bottles in his hands were shattered. The cold beer was soaking into his clothes. And then his hand went numb and the rest of the six-pack tumbled to the ground. He opened his coat to see that the shot had gone through the bottles and hit him in the side. Upon seeing the blood pouring out of the rip in his shirt, the pain stabbed him. He lurched sideways against the silver car. His left leg gave out and he fell to one knee. He clutched at the hole in his side and a red river gushed out. He was hit bad.

  He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing would come out. Or maybe he just couldn’t hear it, his ears still refused to open up. Somewhere in the distance a siren wailed, but it didn’t sound like it was coming his way. He tried to look around for the source of the gun shot. His vision sloshed around like he was underwater. Behind him, the small grocery store was miles away. The normally busy street was suddenly quiet, no one was around. He couldn’t be sure if all the people had run away at the sound of a shot being fired, or if it had been empty when he came out of the store.

  He crumpled to the ground, on his knees, his hand covered in dark, red blood. The pain was excruciating, but he thought if he could keep pressure on the wound, there was a chance someone would happen along and call an ambulance.

  Call, his mind latched onto the word. Call. His phone was in his left pocket, but he dare not move his hand, he might bleed out in seconds. He reached across with his right hand and a fresh knife of pain lanced through his abdomen. He pulled it out to see the screen was smeared with dark, oily blood. Tears began to stream down his face as he wiped it over and over on his pants, but there was too much and he couldn’t get it clean. He tapped the screen and told the virtual assistant to call 9-1-1. Nothing happened and he realized, at the end of a long day of video-chatting, his battery had gone dead.

  A figure, silhouetted in the misty glow of the streetlights next to Sal’s, bent down. Eric had no strength to protest as a hand reached up and pushed the hood of his bargain bin raincoat back off his head. His vision was beginning to dim and he wondered if he was going to make it much longer. To his horror, he saw the figure who had squatted in front of him, held a revolver, almost casually, like a cigarette, or a ring of car keys. Smoke still wafted from the barrel and he realized that it had only been a few seconds since he’d been shot. Time had slowed … here at the end.

  “I told you to stay away from her,” the man’s voice said, just above a whisper.

  The malice and hate in the statement chilled Eric and he began to whimper as the man raised the gun. He placed the barrel against his forehead, between his eyebrows. Eric tried to scream, but his strength was gone. He wondered why the man would shoot him again, he’d be dead in seconds anyway. Another siren wailed, but it was too far away.

  “Please,” Eric gasped.

  A flash of light. An impossibly loud bang. Then … nothing.

  The killer tucked the gun away and stood. He glanced around. The street was still empty. He walked past Sal’s as a server in a grungy white apron pushed through the door carrying two trash bags on the verge of exploding. The kid never looked up at him as he stepped off the curb and disappeared into the night.

  1

  A New Beat

  Thirty-one days into her new job with the Savannah Police Department, Amber Cross screwed up. Not the kind of screw up that gets a person fired, or demoted, or reprimanded, but the kind that causes the police chief to seek out menial tasks to assign to the person. For a few days, it was walking two blocks north to the Ashford Tea Company to get iced coffee for the chief. That was a nightmare. With the humidity just above boiling pea soup, she’d often return to her desk covered in a sheen of sweat. Thankfully, someone higher up suggested that such orders could be misconstrued as sexist and borderline harassment, so new chores had been dreamed up to keep her busy and out of the way of “more seasoned” officers.

  Three days before her twenty-fourth birthday, Fat Rick—she didn’t give him that nickname, that’s just what everyone in the department called him—steepled his thick, sausage-like fingers on the front of her battleship gray desk. Amber was careful not to look directly at his expansive stomach for fear that one of the buttons might fly loose at any second, straining under his tight barrel of a belly. A red stain smeared across the bottom of his 1990’s era paisley tie told her that his lunch had probably been pizza or spaghetti or maybe something drenched in ketchup. Whatever he’d eaten had presumably dripped. Or he might’ve wiped his mouth on his tie. Either scenario was plausible with Fat Rick.

  “Yo ‘Ber,” he said, chewing on a toothpick. “Chief’s got a
new assignment for you.”

  Ber. Everyone here called her that. Not Amber. Not Officer Cross. Hell, not even just Cross, which she would’ve preferred immensely to the shortened version of her name that sounded like a sharp object stuck under a saddle. It was like the men in the department—all twelve of them—just couldn’t handle her not being “one of the guys” and insisted on giving her a flat, non-feminine moniker.

  Fat Rick, or officially, Detective Rick Thompson, was not directly her boss. He was in charge of the Central Precinct, which included some of the rougher parts of town. He often had a shooting or a robbery to deal with, along with the occasional drug bust and the rarer sexual assault. His beat was like an episode of Law & Order, but with Spanish moss, antebellum architecture, and a bunch of old marble fountains. Being the head of the most difficult precinct in Savannah gave him a sense of seniority—and truth be told, he probably had dealt with more really bad guys than most during his long tenure on the force. But, even with all of that, Amber had been hired as a part of the K.E.Y.S. initiative. The Keep Everything Yours Safe program often rolled out holiday safety reminders, children in hot cars warnings, bicycle security tips, and other yawn-inducing news items. Amber’s job was to update the website, print flyers, engage on social media, and very occasionally, report to the scene involving any K.E.Y.S. violations.

  At least, that’s what she’d been doing until … the screw up.

  It has been said that the first citation an officer writes in her career, will often be the most difficult. After that, they’re like a Hallmark Christmas movie—all pretty much the same. Amber had been reluctant to issue her first ticket, even when the offense was obvious. Like all new officers, she was put on parking meters, school zones, church exit crowd control, parking lots, and pet poop patrol at various apartment buildings or parks. She passed over more than one pup’s owner for leaving an offensive pile in the grass.

  “Ber,” Chief Decker had said to her on her third day, “If you don’t ticket somethin’ today, I’m going to recommend you be reassigned. I need men … and women … who can effectively police this town. Do you understand what I’m gettin’ at?”

  Felton Decker reminded Amber of Morgan Freeman with a little Samuel L. Jackson (or was it Ving Rhames?) mixed in for good measure. He was well over six-foot-four, shiny bowling ball bald head, and wore a thick black caterpillar of a mustache on his lip. He always sat on the edge of his desk, or in his squeaky, mahogany chair so he wouldn’t tower over her.

  “I do, sir.”

  “Just pick somethin’ easy. Go find an expired meter. Don’t even have to be anybody there,” he said, raising both hands in a surrender gesture. “Stick a ticket on the windshield and disappear. Yeah?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She had left the office with the intention of doing exactly that, but as she approached the intersection of East Congress and Habersham, a long, beige Cadillac barreled around her, clipped the mirror on her cruiser, shearing it clean off. The ancient boat of a car screeched through the turn onto Congress exceeding the posted limit by at least twenty miles per hour.

  “Bingo,” Amber said aloud.

  She flipped the switch to turn on her siren and gave chase. She had the offender pulled over by the time they reached Franklin Square and was fighting to calm her racing pulse. Picking up her radio, she called in the license plate number.

  She made her first mistake in her haste to get the ticket written and hand it to the speeder. She got out of the car before the station could send her the plate info.

  She made her second mistake at the driver’s window.

  “May I see your license and registration, please?” She heard the nervous quavering in her voice and thought for a split second she might throw up.

  The man in the car smiled, his magnificent teeth practically glowing from his tan face. He licked his lips and she saw his eyes flick down to her name, embroidered on her chest. His voice was almost as buttery as his skin. With his right hand, he pushed jet black hair straight back on top of his head—had to be implants, nobody has hair that thick and perfect.

  “Miss Cross,” he started.

  “Officer Cross,” she corrected.

  He snorted, but gently. “Of course. Officer Cross. You don’t know who I am,” he paused, searching her eyes for recognition, “do you?”

  “I’m sorry, no,” Amber said, forcing her words to come across as confident and stern. “But I will after you produce a legal driver’s license and registration, sir.”

  The man bit his lower lip in such a way that his teeth looked even more perfectly symmetrical and white—geez did the guy just come from the dentist?

  “Officer Cross,” the man said, the slightest tinge of impatience slipping into his tone, “my name is Ballentine. Rock White Ballentine.”

  It was Amber’s turn to snort. It just slipped out. Ever since she was four, she’d developed a bad habit of snorting when she laughed. It only happened when laughter surprised her … as it had just then.

  “You find that funny, Officer Cross?” Now the man’s smile had fallen completely away and he suddenly looked dangerous.

  “No, sir,” she rasped. Without looking away from the man, she tore away the first ticket on the top of the pad and handed it to him. “You can just mail that in. No need to go to downtown.”

  She nearly jogged back to her car and slammed the door. Her radio crackled as she pulled out and raced away from the man still parked on the side of the road.

  “Ber, are you there? What the hell is going on?” It was Lenny. Of all the other officers, he was the one that had been the nicest to her when she started.

  “Nothing. All good.”

  “Okay, cool. Look, just let this one go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Caddy. No ticket. Just let it go.”

  Amber turned onto River Street, her hands just beginning to stop shaking. “It’s all good. Already issued the citation. On my way for number two down by the river.”

  “Oh, shit,” Lenny said.

  “Huh? What?”

  “You wrote a ticket to Ballentine?”

  A trickle of ice-cold fear crept into her spine. “I did. Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Just come on in. Chief’ll get it tossed. No biggie.”

  “Tossed? Wait, what are you talking about?”

  There was a pause on the radio. “Senator Ballentine is protected by the general assembly law. The assembly is in session. He can’t be ticketed right now.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You just ticketed a member of the general assembly, who, by law, cannot be ticketed right now,” Lenny said. “It’s fine. Just come on back. Decker will make it so it never happened.”

  When Amber pulled her cruiser into the station’s parking lot, Fat Rick was standing out front, arms crossed shaking his head. The nausea was too much. She opened her door and vomited on the pavement.

  “Christ, Ber,” he grunted. “Get ahold of yourself. Chief needs you in his office right now.

  The dressing down was short, heated, and then over in less than fifteen minutes. And that’s when her life on the K.E.Y.S. beat began.

  Until today ... three days before her twenty-fourth birthday.

  2

  P’s and Q’s

  Chief Felton Ambrose Decker had been with the Savannah, Georgia police department for over thirty-five years. He’d patrolled school zones, parking lots, alleyways, crack houses, sex-trafficking hovels, and murder scenes. Throughout his thirty-five years, he’d been slowly climbing the ladder, serving as Narcotics Unit Sergeant, Training Section Commander, and Operations Support Section Commander, where he supervised the SWAT Team, K-9 Unit, Gang Intervention Unit, and Pattern Crimes Unit until he was finally promoted to run the three main stations that make up the prestigious department. He was only the second black man to hold the position since its founding in 1864. He was proud to have an unblemished record and was looking forward to retirin
g as a celebrated leader of the community.

  When a man like Chief Decker is on the force longer than most of the politicians he serves under, he often receives calls from them when they come into office. Some are fresh, young optimists who want to change the world and, sometimes, reinvent the wheel. Others are hardened, a little shady, and seeking kickbacks and special favors. Governor Jerry Cruz was something different. He and Felton had shared bourbon and cigars on many occasions. The Governor had always been a straight shooter and had never asked the chief to do anything untoward or even slightly gray in the black and white scheme of things.

  When

  called, Decker answered the phone … always.

  “I have a call from the Governor for Chief Decker,” the voice on the line said.

  Felton shook his head. They had just called, asked for the chief, been put on hold, then connected to his office. He wondered if it was a subtle power play on Cruz’s part to have his assistant speak first to assure that it was the chief on the line.

  “Hold on, let me see if I can find him,” Felton said. “He was out back in the poker room just a minute ago sweeping mountains of chips off the table into his lap. For all I know, he might’ve won enough to finally retire.”