Linda Ladd - Say Your Goodbyes

Table of Contents

BOOKS BY LINDA LADD

C LAIRE M ORGAN H OMICIDE T HRILLERS

Head to Head

Dark Places

Die Smiling

Enter Evil

Remember Murder

Mostly Murder

Bad Bones

C LAIRE M ORGAN I NVESTIGATIONS S ERIES

Devil Dead

Gone Black

W ILL N OVAK T HRILLERS

Bad Road to Nowhere

Say Your Goodbyes

Epilogue

As soon as Jenn was almost well enough to travel, Novak left the Mayans mountain ranch and drove back to her house on the beach in Belize. Once there, he cleaned up the blood and gore on the floors and the walls and the deck, Jenns blood and the blood of Luisa Mendez. He had scrubbed it clean with a bottle of bleach, and then he had aired the foul stench out of the house and straightened the furniture and cleared away the debris and placed a fresh bouquet of red roses in a vase beside her bed. After all that was done to his satisfaction, he had brought Jenn back home. He had carried her inside and put her in her bed, and once she was settled and comfortable, he hovered over her and nursed her back to health. When she was well enough and invited him into her bed, he made love to her, and that was as good as it ever had been. They stayed there together by the beautiful sea for nearly a month, while he had the best boat salvage company in Mexico City raise his boat and completely refurbish it at great cost. But it was a cost that was worth it to him a million times over.

Novak and Jenn were good together, just as they had been in the past. Doctors in Belize City had reattached the small part of her scalp that had been severed, and her hair was growing, just as fine and silky and blond as ever. After enough time had passed and when he knew it was time for him to go, he had the Sweet Sarah brought to Jenns beach and anchored just outside the breakers. He hated to leave her there alone, but he had a life to live and so did she. When he told her goodbye this time around, it turned out to be a slow and gentle farewell that lasted almost two more weeks. And then he made her promise that she would come to Bonne Terre and stay with him for as long as she liked. She promised she would. So he boarded the clean and refurbished Sweet Sarah alone and took her out to sea, and then sailed north toward the Gulf of Mexico and home. It had been a terrible, bloody ordeal, but they had both gotten through it alive. Now he was ready to go back to his plantation in the bayou and see what awaited him there. Maybe Jenn would change her mind and come live in Louisiana with him for a time until she had healed enough, mentally and physically, to go back to work. She was welcome for as long as she wanted to stay. Maybe she would decide to take a flight and beat him back to Bonne Terre. Maybe she would be waiting on the veranda of his plantation house when he docked his boat on the bayou behind the old mansion. Maybe she would wave and laugh and beckon him to hurry. Oh yeah, that sounded good to Novak. He would like that, all right, but he wasnt counting on it. He wasnt counting on it at all.

LOST GIRL

She was last seen in New Orleans. Her father, a rich, powerful arms dealer, believes she was abducted. For ransom. For revenge. For reasons too horrible to imagine.

LOST INNOCENCE

Claire Morgan, recent former cop turned private investigator, and her new partner begin their search at the girls school, where a violent junkie attacks Claire with scissors, raves of demons and devils, and then takes her own life.

LAST RITES

Sinister clues lead Claire on a twisted trail through the bars and bayous of New Orleans to a bloodstained altar in Paris. Vast, secret, and powerful, it is a world that few enter or escape. And Claire is going in the devil be damned ...

BAD OMEN

Homicide detective Claire Morgan has a bad feeling when a mans body is found in a Missouri state park. The crime scene is buried in snow. The corpse is frozen in ice. And nearly every bone has been broken, shattered, or crushed...

BAD BLOOD

Claires suspicions only get worse when the body is thawed and identified. The victim was an ultimate fighter on the cage-match circuit. His wife blames her ex-husband, a Russian mafioso. But Claire knows this is no mob-style execution. This is something worse. Something evil...

BAD BONES

Raised from childhood to inflict pain, the killer uses rage as a weapon. Punishing without mercy. Killing without conscience. Upholding a dark family tradition that is so twisted, so powerful, it destroys everything in its path. And Claire is about to meet the family...

MOSTLY FEAR

She suffered a terrifying coma. She survived a serial killers obsession. Now homicide detective Claire Morgan hopes to forget the nightmare of her Missouri past in the city of New Orleans. But when a body is discovered near her home, her darkest fears come rushing back...

MOSTLY SUPERSTITION

Surrounded by candles and skulls, the victim is bound to an altar like a human sacrifice. More disturbing to Claire is the voodoo doll in the womans hands. A doll pierced with pins and wearing a picture on its face. A picture of Claire Morgan...

MOSTLY MURDER

Claire doesnt believe in voodoo. But she does believe in the power of superstition to warp a persons mind and feed a killers madness. It is here, in the muddy bayous where it festers, that Claire must face her fear head-onand meet the man whos marked her for death...

Chapter One

No, no! Please! Help me!

Will Novak opened his eyes and stared into utter darkness. He had been drinking earlier that evening before he passed out. He wasnt drunk anymore, maybe hungover some, but he could think straight. He knew who had been calling for help. The same dream had come to him every night. It was Mariah Murrays voice, his beautiful sister-in-law who called to him from the dark corners of his troubled mind. She had died on his doorstep, not a fortnight ago. He had promised to protect her. But he had failed, and now she haunted him, just like his dead wife and his dead children haunted him. All those voices that he loved so much and missed so desperately called out to him, distant and tinny, like static on an old Motorola radio. But he couldnt help any of them. They were gone forever. Sarah and Kelly and Katie had perished when the south tower came down on 9/11. He had watched it happen, unable to help them in that terrible moment, and unable to help them now. He couldnt help Mariah, either. She was dead. Everybody he loved was dead. Those voices calling to him were why he drank himself to oblivion, hoping to stifle the pain and forget his guilt and regret. But it never worked.