Mortal Faults (31 page)
Author’s Note
As always, readers are invited to visit me at
michaelprescott.net
, where you’ll find information on my other books, as well as interviews, essays, and an email address
Tess and Abby, the heroines of
Mortal Faults
, teamed up (reluctantly, as always) in my previous book,
Dangerous Games
, and reunited in the follow-up,
Final Sins
. They also appeared separately in two earlier novels. Tess McCallum stars in
Next Victim
, and Abby Sinclair is
The Shadow Hunter.
My gratitude goes out to all the people who helped me with the original print edition of
Mortal Faults
, including editor Tracy Bernstein, whose careful reading of the manuscript resulted in many improvements; Doug Grad, formerly of NAL, who first suggested pairing off two of my characters; copyeditor Michele Alpern; and Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. I’d also like to thank my friends in Florida, Sherry and Cullenthia, for their support, and Lisa DuMond for supplying me with the “brass ovaries” line. That’s one I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.
Turn the page for a preview of the Amazon bestselling thriller
THE SHOP
by J. CARSON BLACK
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND
Aspen, Colorado
Landry thought: The kid’s positively giddy.
Landry had been getting comfortable with the night, watching from the woods as the party wound down at the house on Castle Creek Road, people getting into their expensive cars and driving away, leaving just the core group.
Shortly after, the young man came out and made his unsteady way to the railing. He had spiky hair and his clothes hugged a scarecrow frame. He looked down at the rushing water, then up at the stars. Landry could see his smile even from where he was. The kid’s skinny arms hugged his body, as if he couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. Tipsy—more than tipsy, inebriated—but something had delighted him, thrilled him. Something had gone very right for him today.
The young man twirled around, looking at the stars. Mesmerized by them. He could have been the leading man in his own musical—the wonderful story of his life. He could barely contain his joy. He had less than an hour to live.
*
*
*
As they reached the walkway, Landry said, “Gloves and masks from now on.”
They split up. Jackson would go in first, through the back door. Landry and Davis would go in the front. Green would remain outside; he was surveillance only.
They waited for Jackson to report in. “Upstairs clear.”
“How many?”
“Two. The couple. They were laying in bed.”
“Lying,” Landry said.
“What?”
“Lying in bed. Not laying.”
A pause. Then, “Roger that.”
Davis opened the front door in one smooth, quick motion, and they stepped inside.
The lights were on. Landry saw the expensive furnishings and enormous stone fireplace; cataloging these things briefly before dismissing them. His eye was on the four targets. Three of them were sleeping: a male and female entwined on a zebra skin near the fireplace and a young woman crashed out on the couch. The fourth was in the process of walking unsteadily toward the kitchen. He was the kid Landry had seen twirling under the stars. A lot worse for wear. He’d done some steady imbibing, or toking, or snorting, since last Landry saw him on the deck.
The kid looked at them. His eyes had difficulty tracking. He said, “You should’ve come earlier, there was a lot more food.”
Landry fell into step with the kid and put an arm around his shoulder, casually pulling him around so he had him from behind. He slit the kid’s throat and dropped him like a sack of grain. Dead in eight seconds.
Davis finished dispatching the couple as Landry turned his attention to the sleeper, who was half-sitting, half-lying, her head resting against the couch back. Some sixth sense must have awakened her because she cocked her head upward, her eyes bewildered.
Startled.
He’d seen her before. It came to him—Brienne Cross. One of those celebrities in the news all the time. His daughter had a poster of her up in her room.
He hesitated just long enough for alarm to dawn in her eyes, which dismayed him. He touched a finger to his lips, letting her know it was all right, and pulled her up toward him with one hand. He drew his knife across her throat with the other.
Her mouth went slack. The light in her eyes died. He let her back down on the couch, gently.
“Four here,” he said into the radio.
Thinking:
Brienne Cross
.
Jackson joined them. There were six people. All in all the operation had taken fewer than five minutes.
Landry looked at Jackson. Jackson shifted his feet, then started back toward the stairway. His reluctance was clear. He might not do a convincing job.
Landry said: “I’ll do it.”
*
*
*
The couple lay in bed, naked above the sheets. They looked peaceful despite their slashed throats. Landry crossed himself, tried to think of what he did next as gutting a deer. They were dead; they would feel nothing. But their mutilation bothered him.
Done, he glanced around the room, which now resembled an abattoir. His regret at the desecration of these young people was eclipsed by the satisfaction of a job accomplished with flawless precision. It had taken him three and a half minutes, including painting the two eights on the mirror with the woman’s blood.
As he started down the stairs, Landry flashed on the girl on the couch, the look in her eyes: frightened, then trusting, and finally, empty.
His daughter had her poster on her wall.
They were almost out of here. One last check of the perimeter and—
Then he heard sirens. They were a long way off but coming fast.
Simultaneously, Green’s voice crackled in his ear.
“Police heading this way.”
“Where?”
“Up from the valley. Two units.”
“We’re out of here.”
Landry turned off the lights and slipped out the back door. The sirens screaming in the night now. His mind ranging far ahead as he tried to make sense of this. He wasn’t worried about escaping. What worried him was something else.
Who had betrayed them?
He melted into the woods, found a suitable vantage point and stretched out, stomach-down, on the ground. Relied on his training to make himself part of the forest.
Cataloging faces, phone calls, names.
Who?
The lights burst through the trees below, blinking white, red and blue. Engines straining. In his mind’s eye he saw them swerving in at the house, slamming into park—
But that did not happen.
The cars did not slow. They rocketed past, two Pitkin County sheriff’s cars.
It was OK.
No one had betrayed them.
As the sirens receded, he spoke into his radio. “Wait where you are until I give the signal.”
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND
NICK
1
It came to Nick Holloway, gradually, that he lay on cold hard concrete. Something above held him fast. His shirt was hooked on the undercarriage of a car.
He managed to get loose, tearing his shirt in the process, and crawled out from under. Enveloped by the stench of motor oil, shaking and sick, Nick finally realized where he was: the two-car garage beneath the Aspen House.
The last thing he remembered was talking to a guy named Mars at the
Soul Mate
wrap party. He’d never seen Mars before. It was an exclusive wrap party—just Brienne Cross, the contestants and their guests, himself, and the crew. But Nick remembered talking to the mysterious Mars, the two of them sitting on the back deck, the movement of Castle Creek rushing underneath the slats making him dizzy.
After that it was lights out.
Nick pulled himself to his feet. His legs didn’t work very well, and the smell of flowers and cut lawn sickened him. He became aware of the bright yellow ribbon stretched across the entrance to the garage. Written on the tape were the words: CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.
A policeman behind the tape stared in at him, mouth open in shock. Then he started yelling.
*
*
*
A Pitkin County Sheriff’s detective with long legs, big shoes, and a face like a hatchet took him to a brown Chevy Caprice, exactly the kind of car Nick had described in
Hype
.
“Do you have some I.D.?” the detective said.
Nick had a question of his own. “Do you know how I ended up in the garage?”
“I thought maybe you could tell me that.”
Nick realized that he had to stare at the air conditioner vent in the cracked dash to avoid spinning. “I have no idea.”
“I.D.,” the detective reminded him quietly.
Nick shifted to pull his wallet out of his back pocket and nearly passed out. He stared at the vent until the double vision stopped. “Jesus.”
Hatchet Face took the wallet and looked at his driver’s license. “Nick Holloway. I’ve heard that name before.”
“Maybe it was my book,
Hype
. Number thirteen on the New York Times Bestseller list.”
“I don’t read. The wife does, though. It’s not about vampires, is it? She loves that stuff.” Hatchet Face had his license out and was tapping it against his leg. “Did you know the people in the house?”
Nick noticed the past tense. He wondered if the cast and crew had blackballed him, but that seemed silly. The aspirin taste seeped into his mouth again—he was going to be sick.
“Mr. Holloway.”
But Nick had already passed out.
*
*
*
They resumed the interview in the emergency room. They had plenty of privacy. It had been two hours and a nurse had poked her head through the curtain once, ducking out instantly in case anyone asked her for anything. Nick lay in a surgical gown on the crank-a-bed. Hatchet Face, Detective Derek Sloan, sat on a plastic chair.
“You mean they’re all dead? Brienne? Justin? All of them?”
Nick wasn’t quite able to grasp it, but he
knew it was huge. Logically, he understood that he had just escaped death, but in his current state, was unable to assimilate it.
Sloan switched his ankle from one knee to the other. “You have any idea how you came to be in the garage?”
“Nope.” Nick told the story again: he remembered talking to Mars on the deck. Feeling pretty good. Then looking down at the rushing water between the slats of the deck, feeling sick. “I think I was looking for a bathroom.”
“That’s the last thing you remember?”
“Until I woke up under an oil pan.”
“You were writing an article for
Vanity Fair
?”
“A series, actually. ‘The Reality Show Diaries.’ Not my choice for a title. I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Sucking Up for Fun and Profit.’” Once again it hit home that all of them had been killed. If he hadn’t been in the garage, he would have been killed, too.
The detective questioned him about that at length, and also asked if he knew of anyone who would want to kill everyone in the house. He mentioned white supremacists.
The room began to spin again.
Somebody in blue scrubs bustled in and told Sloan to leave.
SIX WEEKS LATER
JOLIE
2
North Florida
The pond behind Jolie Burke’s house was about two-thirds the length of a backyard swimming pool. She figured it would take her eight strokes to reach the opposite bank.
There could be snakes in the pond. Maybe an alligator. During the day, the pond was usually opaque. The shadows were deep and almost impossible to look into. Little bubbles spiraled up near the bank where decaying vegetation and cypress trees met.
Never once before today had she contemplated swimming in it.
That all changed earlier today, when she and her cat Rex took their morning walk along the waist-high chain link fence dividing her yard from the pond, and Jolie experienced a sudden and overwhelming sense of doom.
One minute it was a normal day, the morning close and sticky, the sun hot on the top of her head.
Jolie’s mind still on her parents’ first house, which she’d walked through the day before.
Then she glanced at the pond.
The feeling came up fast and gripped her hard. She couldn’t get enough air. Her heart pounded. Her hands and feet went numb. She felt as if some unimaginable horror was threatening to carry her away to a place of darkness. If she moved at all, she would fall in and the darkness would close around her and she would be lost forever.
It was the pond, a dark snare, impenetrable.
Jolie forced herself to move, to turn around. She walked back to the house. The feeling of doom followed her up the steps onto the screened-in porch and on inside to the kitchen. She sat down on a chair at the kitchen table.
Jolie sat in the chair for maybe half an hour. Time seemed to expand. The clock ticked loudly. Rex begged for his food but she couldn’t stand up to give it to him.
Finally, legs shaking, she rose to her feet and fed the cat, then went to the bedroom and put on the clothes she’d laid out the night before. She got into the car. By the time she drove into the parking lot at the Palm County Sheriff’s Office, Detective Jolie Burke felt almost normal.
* * *
After dinner, she walked out onto the screened-in porch and looked in the direction of the pond. The trees were black against the sky. Between the trunks, she could see the faint glimmer where a slice of moon was reflected in the water.
Jolie made the decision then. She went back to the bedroom and pulled on her swimsuit, nosed her feet into her flip flops, grabbed a towel from the linen closet and slapped down the path and through the gate to the pond’s edge—
we’re going to fix this thing once and for all
.
The moment she hit the path the feeling started to build.
By the time she reached the bank, there was thunder in her ears. Her heart pounded.
Then the chasm started to open up beneath her feet.
Ignore it
.
She stepped up to the edge of the pond. The world seemed to slither from view. Her legs shook. She dug her toes into the damp earth. Whether this would result in a dive or keep her chained to the ground, Jolie wasn’t sure. Just then, the phone rang inside the house.
It startled her so much, she almost sat down. Instead, she sprinted for the back door, thinking:
I’ll be back later, and we’ll finish this
.
*
*
*
The person on the phone was Lonnie Crenshaw, the Palm County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher.
“We have a report of shots fired at the Starliner Motel in Gardenia, and at least one gunshot victim. The victim is deceased. Can you take this?”
“Sure.”
Jolie held on to the phone with one hand and stripped out of her swimsuit with the other. She walked to the closet and eyed blouses and slacks on a row of hangers. Grateful for the distraction. She would put the other stuff—the terrifying notion that this weird phobia was here to stay—out of her mind. “What’s the situation? We’re backup for the Gardenia PD?”
“Negative. It’s now a crime scene. They’re asking for one of ours to work the case.” There was a pause. “The deceased is Jim Akers.”
“
Chief
Akers?”
“That’s right. Are you sure you want to take this?”
It took a moment for the magnitude of the situation to sink in. Adrenaline surged as she realized both the opportunity this presented, and the possible pitfalls.
“You want Louis to take it?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can. Who’s there?”
“Gardenia PD. We have two units of our own on the way.”
“Tell them to stay out of my scene.”
_____________
J. Carson Black’s
THE SHOP
Kindle Edition
Buy it now at
www.amazon.com/The-Shop-ebook/dp/B005WWC67G
/
Published by
Breakaway Media
Visit
jcarsonblack.com
