Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work Read online

  Written in Blood Volume 4

  Blood Cries, Blood Oath, and Blood Work, 3 complete John Jordan Mystery novels

  Michael Lister

  Pulpwood Press

  Copyright © 2013 by Michael Lister

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  (Remington James Novels)

  Double Exposure

  (includes intro by Michael Connelly)

  Separation Anxiety

  Blood Shot

  (John Jordan Novels)

  Power in the Blood

  Blood of the Lamb

  Flesh and Blood

  (Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)

  The Body and the Blood

  Double Exposure

  Blood Sacrifice

  Rivers to Blood

  Burnt Offerings

  Innocent Blood

  (Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)

  Separation Anxiety

  Blood Money Blood Moon

  Thunder Beach

  Blood Cries

  A Certain Retribution

  Blood Oath

  Blood Work

  Cold Blood

  Blood Betrayal

  Blood Shot

  Blood Ties

  Blood Stone

  Blood Trail

  (Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)

  The Big Goodbye

  The Big Beyond

  The Big Hello

  The Big Bout

  The Big Blast

  In a Spider’s Web (short story)

  The Big Book of Noir

  (Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)

  Thunder Beach

  A Certain Retribution

  Blood Oath

  Blood Shot

  (Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)

  Burnt Offerings

  Blood Oath

  Cold Blood

  Blood Shot

  (Love Stories)

  Carrie’s Gift

  (Short Story Collections)

  North Florida Noir

  Florida Heat Wave

  Delta Blues

  Another Quiet Night in Desperation

  (The Meaning Series)

  Meaning Every Moment

  The Meaning of Life in Movies

  Sign up for Michael’s newsletter by clicking here or go to

  www.MichaelLister.com and receive a free book.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  How to read the John Jordan Blood Series

  Blood Cries

  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

  Blood Oath

  Author’s Note

  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

  Blood Work

  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

  Be the first to get COLD BLOOD

  Also By The Author

  How to read the John Jordan Blood Series

  The Blood Series

  This New York Times bestselling and award-winning series fea
tures a conflicted detective—a cop with ties to Atlanta who also works as a prison chaplain in Florida. He’s a man of mercy and justice, compassion, open-mindedness. He’s also a smart, relentless detective.

  The John Jordan mystery series is character-driven and realistic—thoughtful mystery thrillers involving the hero’s journey of a good man trying to be even better, as he helps others along the way.

  Like John Jordan, the author, Michael Lister, was a prison chaplain with the state of Florida before leaving to write full-time.

  If you’re new to the John Jordan series, you can begin with any book, but we recommend one of these 3: Power in the Blood, Innocent Blood, or Blood Oath.

  Power in the Blood, the first fiction the author ever wrote, was published over 20 years ago, and though it’s recommended, the books in the John Jordan series don’t have to be read in order.

  All the books in the series are novels—mystery, thrillers, whodunits—except for the 3rd book in the series, Flesh and Blood, which is a collection of short stories featuring temporal and metaphysical mysteries. If you don’t care for short stories, feel free to skip Flesh and Blood and continue with the fourth novel The Body and the Blood.

  If you decided to skip the short stories and continue on with the novels, we recommend that you read the short story “A Taint in the Blood” in the book Flesh and Blood to find out what happened to Laura Matthers from Power in the Blood.

  The 7th book in the series, Innocent Blood, is a prequel going back to John’s very first investigation. Though the 7th in the series, it can be read 1st or 7th since it’s a prequel.

  The 10th book in the series, Blood Cries, is the second in the “Atlanta Years” series within a series following the 7th book Innocent Blood. It can be read 2nd or 10th.

  The 17th book in the seres, Blood Stone, is the 3rd book in the “Atlanta Years” series within the series following the 10th book Blood Cries. It can be read 3rd or 17th.

  John Jordan is an ex-cop in books 1-10, but once again carries a gun and a badge beginning with book 11, Blood Oath.

  All of the John Jordan novels are available in high quality hardback, paperback, ebook, and audio editions.

  Interspersed throughout the “Blood” books there are other related books that are part of the John Jordan universe. These books are extremely important to the series and provide essential backstory for characters, connections, and locations of series regulars. Most of all they answer the questions most readers want to know. They include Double Exposure, Burnt Offerings, Separation Anxiety, Thunder Beach, and A Certain Retribution. These are “Blood Series” books without being John Jordan Mysteries.

  We hope you will enjoy all the books in the John Jordan series and eagerly await each new entry.

  Be sure to join Michael Lister's Readers' Group for news, updates, and special deals on the John Jordan series.

  Blood Cries

  a John Jordan Mystery, Book 10

  by Michael Lister

  1

  From the summer of ’79 until the spring of ’81, a serial killer stalked the African-American children of the city of Atlanta.

  The Atlanta Child Murders, as they came to be known, was a two-year nightmare the city couldn’t wake itself up from.

  During this terrible reign of terror, twenty-eight children, adolescents, and adults were murdered.

  It began on July 21, 1979, when Edward Hope Smith went missing, and ended on May 24, 1981, when the body of twenty-seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater was fished from the Chattahoochee River.

  Between these two murders, some twenty-six others were committed, as many as one a week near the end.

  Of course, these weren’t the only murder victims in Atlanta during the time. They weren’t even the only black children to be murdered. They were the only ones who made it onto the task force’s ill-advised and incomplete list.

  Wayne Bertram Williams, a twenty-three-year-old music promoter, was arrested on June 21, 1981.

  Just a few short months before—during a family trip to Atlanta over the last weekend of November in 1980—I had come face-to-face with Williams in the arcade of the Omni Hotel.

  He was there passing out his flyers, and I had intervened when I saw him harassing one of the other kids.

  I had been obsessed with him and the case ever since.

  On February 27, 1982, he was convicted of the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne, two of only a few adults on the list.

  He was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.

  Labeled the Atlanta Child Murderer, Williams was never charged with, tried for, or convicted of killing a single child—an irony and injustice I had never been able to get over.

  Following his trial, officials claimed Williams could be linked to some twenty-five of the twenty-eight names on the list through trace evidence—specifically, green trilobal carpet fibers found in Williams’s bedroom and on the victims—and closed those cases.

  Those same officials claimed the murders stopped.

  Officials stopped counting them.

  Reporters stopped reporting them.

  The world stopped watching.

  The list stopped.

  The murders did not.

  And like Abel of old, their blood cries out—tortured, mournful, inconsolable cries I couldn’t help but hear, couldn’t help but be haunted by.

  2

  I was sitting on an uncomfortable barstool in a dive on Memorial Drive, trying to find the sweet spot.

  It was early in November of ’86, less than a month since I had buried Jordan and Martin, and some four years after Wayne Williams was convicted.

  The storefront bar was named Scarlet’s and it was in the end of a tin-building strip mall with a cluttered video store, a passable pizza place, and a consignment shop with a meager amount of merchandise.

  The bartender-owner was a middle-aged lesbian lush named Margaret.

  She had of late become one of my closest companions and the nearest thing to a mother I had in Atlanta.

  “What’s your sweet spot?” I asked.

  “I’m old and dried up,” she said. “Got no sweet spot no more. But my niece . . .”

  Always trying to set me up with her niece—for Margaret, all roads led to Susan Daniels. But she was wasting her breath. I wasn’t interested in Susan or anyone else.

  A thin forty-something woman with shoulder-length wavy brown hair and big blue eyes, Margaret looked like a former tennis pro. Nothing about her looked old or dried up.

  I was only interested in finding my sweet spot in, at, or near the bottom of my next glass—the one that would cause the specters of Jordan Moore and Martin Fisher to fade.

  “I didn’t say G-spot. I said sweet spot.”

  I could hear the slightest of slurs in the words tumbling out of my mouth a little too freely. But even if I hadn’t, I could tell I was drunk by the way I felt my center wasn’t holding.

  That thought led to a line or two of unbidden verse. Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . . Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

  “Things fall apart,” I said.

  “Never a truer statement uttered,” she said.

  “‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world,’” I said. “‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere . . . The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’”

  Meeting Jordan the first time made its way into my mind.

  I’m Jordan Moore, she said, extending her small, cold hand.

  I smiled. Really? I’m John Jordan.

  She smiled back but looked a bit embarrassed, her face and neck blushing crimson.

  “Is that biblical?” Margaret asked.

  “Might as well be,” I said. “Yeats.”