The Guardian Read online

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  All Rights Reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information or retrieval system, is forbidden without the prior written permission of both the publisher and copyright owner of this book. For information write to [email protected], P.O. Box 141 Williamsburg, VA 23187.

  This book is a work of fiction and is a product of the author’s imagination or is used fictitiously. Names, characters, places and incidents in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone, living or dead, bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual, known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention from the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Marliss Melton

  All rights reserved.

  First James-York Press electronic edition: July 2012

  James-York Press

  P. O. Box 141

  Williamsburg, VA 23187

  Edited by Sydney Baily-Gould and Rachel Fontana

  Cover Design and Illustration by More Than Publicity

  ISBN: 10: 1938732006

  ISBN-13: 978-1-938732-00-3

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  SEMPER FI

  This book is dedicated to the brave men and women of the United States Marine Corps, in gratitude for the sacrifice and commitment you have given to the American people throughout our turbid history. May God bless you all for your extreme dedication.

  FOREWARD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  An article in the newspaper caught my eye: the body of an unidentified African American male had been found on fire just up the road from where I lived. An autopsy later showed that he had been burned alive. The tattoo on his arm, that of a crescent moon, a star and the number seven, all circumscribed by a sun, labeled the victim as a member of a gang called the Five Percent Nation. He had probably tried to leave the gang, and for that offense, he was beaten, drugged, dumped on the side of the road and set on fire. His fate prompted a story idea, resulting in this book.

  There are elements in THE GUARDIAN that made me uncomfortable to touch upon—both racial and religious elements. Readers, please be assured that I consider all people of every race and religion to be my brothers and sisters. We are all children of the one true God. I also respect everyone’s right to choose whatever pathway brings them closer to peace and enlightenment. But extremism and fanaticism of any kind is dangerous, in my opinion. Gangs are dangerous. And labeling anyone on the basis of race is dangerous. And that is the statement I wish for this story to make.

  In addition, THE GUARDIAN has political elements that do not necessarily reflect my personal beliefs. I am in no way qualified to say whether the government is overly suspicious of certain sectors of the American population. I only know that threats exist. And I am grateful to the men and women who safeguard the majority by watching over us as they do.

  I could not have completed this ambitious work of fiction without the help of several very devoted people who deserve to be acknowledged. Heartfelt thanks goes to Rachel Fontana, my beta reader extraordinaire, who devoted untold hours reading and rereading my chapters and suggesting changes. I am grateful to Jeff, a counselor for prisoners, for answering my many questions about legal processes. And I owe so much thanks to my best friend and editor, Sydney Baily-Gould, who knows how to make a manuscript sparkle. There are others, too, who helped—Janie Hawkins, Trish Dechant, Wendie Grogan, Don Klein, and Marilyn Rowe. Thank you, all, from the bottom of my heart!

  Prologue

  Officer Rupert Davis glanced in the rearview mirror at the teenage girl in his back seat. A young one. Not even scared yet—thinking he was taking her home. He smirked, and she glanced up, saw his smile, and smiled timidly back. Then she rapped on the glass. Left here, please.

  He ignored her. Sorry, little mama. Not on my scheduled stop tonight.

  Accelerating, he continued on to the southeast side of Washington D.C., where folks turned a blind eye to things they didn’t want to hear or see. Minutes later, he turned into a dark alley between two abandoned buildings. She had started to panic. He could see that in his rearview mirror. Coming to a sudden stop, he hit the unlock button, and she scrambled to escape, but he was quicker. Clamping a hand over her mouth, he dragged her to the nearest building, down three steps into his basement hideaway.

  “I don’t understand!” she wailed, as he tossed her down on a pile of blankets like a rag doll.

  Ignoring her, feeding off of her rising panic, he threw himself down on her, counting on his burly frame to knock the wind out of her so she couldn’t scream. By the time she dragged enough air into her lungs to shriek in protest, he had torn her clothes to shreds. She bucked beneath him, screaming. Her helplessness made him feel all-powerful, like a god.

  “Quiet, bitch!” He slapped her face with an open palm. There was just enough light in the gloomy space to see her eyes flare with horror. He almost pitied her—almost. After all, she was just an innocent-looking girl, still dressed in her school uniform, allegedly walking home from a special church service. It had been pure bad luck that made her run into the coke-sniffing hoodlum, Curtis, who tried to make time with her.

  Good thing Officer Davis had shown up when he did.

  Good thing she’d gotten into the back of his cop car quickly, with no one but Curtis to see.

  “No more screaming,” he warned her as he slipped on a condom.

  He groped her breasts with one hand, her crotch with the other. She tried to twist away but kept quiet. When he entered her, she screamed again, on a note so piercing that he flinched and cuffed her hard, without thinking.

  The scream broke off abruptly as her head snapped to one side. With a muttered curse, he pushed deeper into her untried flesh then stilled when he realized she wasn’t fighting him anymore. Son of a bitch. Had he knocked her out? He liked it when they struggled.

  “Wake up, girl.”

  He gave her cheek another slap, and her head lolled lifelessly the other way. Shit!

  He jerked away from her rapidly cooling flesh. What the hell? She had gone and died on him, the little bitch. Hell if he was into fucking dead girls.

  Luckily, he was well-prepared to erase the evidence. Bundling her body in the blankets, he strafed the chamber with an ultraviolet light to make sure no trace of DNA remained, then carried her back into the alley and tossed her in the dumpster, blanket and all. Her body hit the refuse inside with a soft thump.

  Locating the gasoline can he kept tucked
away for emergencies, Rupert Davis sloshed gas into the dumpster. Then he stood back, lit a match, and tossed it in.

  The contents exploded with a whoosh. Flames crackled and writhed, licking the dark alley with amber tongues.

  Whistling a casual tune, he retreated to his cruiser, backed it into the street, and drove away.

  By the time the girl’s body was found, there’d be no evidence left to indict him. He was an eight-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Department. He knew how to frustrate forensics. He also knew everything and everyone in D.C.’s teeming underworld. Hell, he orchestrated most of what went on. And he owned thugs like Curtis. The boy wouldn’t dare betray him. This would be just one more unsolved case for the detectives to gnaw on.

  Chapter One

  Journalist Lena Alexandra jeopardized her surveillance by lowering the windows of the Jeep Wrangler several inches. A brisk breeze wafted in, alleviating the sauna-like temperature within the vehicle. Climbing onto her knees in the passenger seat, she put her flushed face to the vent she’d created, inhaled the pungent scent of the nearby Patuxent River, and aimed her camera through the crack, hoping no one would see her.

  She knew she’d be a lot cooler standing out in the open, but she needed the long-range scope on her camera to help her identify her sister’s killer, and she couldn’t risk the ex-cons across the street guessing she was a reporter, specifically the prolific crime journalist Lena Alexandra. That would ruin all her plans.

  The ex-cons were fresh out of prison. Their reintegration program, aptly named Gateway, was situated near the rural town of Mechanicville, Maryland on a campus consisting of a roadside motel, a lovely gold-domed mosque with a minaret, and a modest home for the leaders. Every parolee at Gateway had converted to Islam, adopting new names and identities while serving time in jail.

  TIME magazine called Gateway “a triumph for moderate Muslims.” With ninety percent of its graduates living crime-free, socially responsible lives, it had become a national model for effective reintegration.

  But every positive statistic had a downside didn’t it?

  Of the twelve parolees she had counted, one or two would revert to criminal behavior. Picking out the subject of her investigation, Lena had no doubt Rupert D. Davis would return to his former ways, which meant that he would kill again.

  But not if she could help it.

  Nausea roiled through her as the face of her sister’s killer came into focus. To think he’d gotten away with such a monstrous crime. A charred skeleton and a tiny scrap of a school uniform were all that had remained of Alexa. And when the only witness to Alexa’s abduction disappeared, the case against Davis had been dropped.

  Six months later, he’d gone to jail for drug-trafficking. Eight years into his fifteen-year sentence, Davis convinced the parole board he was a changed man because he’d found Allah in prison.

  “Malakas,” Lena hissed in her parents’ native Greek as she depressed the shutter.

  To her disgust, Davis didn’t look a day older than when her family had faced him in the pre-trial hearing. If anything, he was trimmer and more muscular than ever, and not a single silver hair glimmered in the dark whorls of his closely-cropped hair.

  So unfair, she thought, having plucked occasional silver threads from her own dark curls since the bastard got away with murder.

  Unable to stomach the sight of him a moment longer, she panned her camera over the remaining parolees. The majority of them were African American. One appeared Asian, another Hispanic. These are the ninety percent who will turn their lives around, she assured herself, determined not to judge them for what they’d done. They might have committed felonies and petty larceny, but their crimes were probably not like Davis’s. Their conversions might have been sincere. She felt vaguely sorry for them laboring to construct a shed under the blazing August sun.

  A man of commanding stature caught her eye as he hauled on the pulley rope to raise the rafter beams. Rivulets of sweat trekked from his neatly shaved hairline, past thick lashes that obscured eyes of a light hue, over his square jaw. The effort he put in to his work aroused her respect.

  Handsome devil, she mused, snapping off several shots. His dusky-colored skin made her think of mocha-flavored coffee, her favorite.

  Look this way, Mocha Man, she willed, but his feet remained planted. With each tug of the rope, his long, powerful limbs flexed. Lena switched to the sport’s setting on her camera and caught the fluid motion in a series of rapid-fire shots.

  Then she sat back on her heels to admire them. Very nice.

  He was honed from shoulder to calf. The damp cotton of his sleeveless T-shirt outlined a muscular chest and taut abs. Basketball shorts hung so low on his round butt they looked in danger of falling off. He could make a fortune modeling underwear, she considered with a cynical smile. What a shame he’d gone to jail, instead.

  Rising onto her knees again, she forced her attention back on Davis, only to swivel it toward Mocha Man as he turned suddenly in her direction.

  The vision in her lens made her gasp with appreciation. Handsome was an understatement. Gray-green eyes, so unexpectedly light against his tan complexion, narrowed as he scanned the side of the street where her Jeep was parked. In the next instant, he looked straight into her camera.

  Lena jerked away from the window. Dropping onto her bottom, she slid to the end of the seat so that her head barely cleared the door panel. Her heart thumped as she sneaked a peak out the window to see if he was still looking.

  And he was.

  He can’t see me through the tinted window.

  But apparently he could. Either that or those freaky-deaky eyes gave him X-ray vision.

  With her mouth desert dry, she threw a leg over the gear shift and clambered awkwardly into the driver’s seat. Keeping her head low, she disassembled her camera, placed the components back inside the carrying case, and stuffed the case under the seat out of sight.

  She had just one thing left to do.

  Who the hell? Special Agent Jackson Maddox stewed, shading his eyes from the sun’s harsh glare. Above the cracked passenger window of the black Jeep Wrangler parked across the old highway, he had glimpsed the unmistakable glare of a camera lens. Behind it, the face of the woman holding it had reflected guilt before she ducked out of sight.

  He’d known it. The prickling of his scalp had warned him that he was being watched. He’d just assumed it was the clergy at Gateway secretly spying on the men, looking out for slackers feigning their exertion and leaving the labor-intensive work up to the others. Only the creeping sensation had continued, prompting him to take a good look around.

  The truth turned out to be far worse. A stranger had just taken his picture with a camera typically used by professional journalists. Well, God damn.

  Gateway had been the object of media attention since TIME Magazine published an article about its success rate. But journalist or not, Jackson couldn’t risk his likeness appearing in any public forum. Curiously, the woman didn’t appear to be in any great hurry to leave. He could just make out the top of her head as she stepped out of the far side of her vehicle.

  “You can take a break right after you seat this rafter,” promised the engineer overseeing the project.

  Jackson put all his weight into hauling on the rope. With any luck, he could dart across the highway and confront the journalist before she left.

  Lena stepped out of the driver’s side door, shielded from the parolees’ view by the Jeep’s tall frame. It had to be twenty degrees cooler outside the vehicle than in it, not that Maryland was cool in August.

  Checking her reflection in the tinted window, she combed fingers through her jet-black ringlets and realized her pink bra could be seen through the damp silk of her ivory blouse. The narrow black skirt she wore was sticking to her thighs. She looked like she’d been sitting in a sauna fully clothed. Not the best look for a job interview.

  With a shrug of resignation, she turned and hastened into the convenience s
tore on strappy high-heeled sandals. Her gaze snared briefly on the horse and buggy that had pulled up to the lot minutes before. It wasn’t every day you saw an Amish man pop into a convenience store, but Mechanicsville, she recalled, was home to a small Amish community.

  Hauling open the heavy door, Lena set off a chime that prompted the only two occupants turning their heads to gawk at her. One was the clerk, the other the Amish man, dressed in black suspenders and clutching his broad-brimmed hat. He appeared to be purchasing a Lotto ticket, of all things.

  “Hello,” she said as they continued to stare. Accustomed to her effect on the opposite sex, Lena closed her eyes a moment, gathering up her hair to cool her neck under the blasting A/C. Then she headed toward the drinks at the back of the store, aware that the place was dead silent but for the classical music coming from the overhead speakers. Commuters likely thronged the place on their way in and out of D.C., the closest city, but during the day, it was just a quaint country store off an old highway.

  By the time she approached the register with her bottle of grape Gatorade, the gambling Amish man had taken off. She could hear his buggy rumbling away with the clip-clop of horse hooves, leaving just her and the clerk alone, just as she’d hoped.

  “Dollar seventy four,” said the clerk, trying not to ogle at her as he took her money and fished change from the register. He was middle-aged and balding with a friendly face.

  “How are you today?” she asked him.

  “Oh, can’t complain.” He colored faintly as he glanced up, his gray eyes straying toward her bosom.

  “Are you still looking for help?” She had spotted the HELP WANTED poster while suffering miserably in the hot SUV, and it had seemed like serendipity. Before seeing it, she had wondered how she was going to befriend the parolees while appearing to be a part of the community. A job at Artie’s One Stop Shop offered the perfect cover from which to incriminate her sister’s killer.