Sleight Malice (35 page)

Then another.

And another.

Before she could get to Brandon, he had the door open and was
already halfway across the deck.

“Nooooo!” Desley watched horrified as in what felt like slow motion,
Nicole crumpled.

Brandon reached her first, sinking onto the stony ground to cradle
her head, tears streaming down his face. Seconds later, Desley joined him,
falling on her knees next to the wounded woman.

Nicole’s eyelids flickered. “Sor…ry…” she stammered, blood oozing
from the corner of her mouth.

Desley squeezed Nicole’s right hand. “Not now. Stay still. You’re
going to be all right. We’re going to get you help,” she murmured, not sure who
she was trying to convince.

Nicole gave one final gasp, blood bubbling from her nose and mouth.
Her body went limp, her hand falling away from her right side to reveal a
gaping wound. She had paid with her life.

Hundreds of orange lilies, yellow
gerberas and white roses filled the small bluestone church, the air heady with
their sweet scent.
Spring
, Desley thought,
a time of new beginnings
.

She stood in the shadows near the door, trying to remain
inconspicuous as possible while she waited for Fergus to arrive. Up the front,
the priest intoned what sounded like a prayer. Looking across the sea of heads,
Desley wondered how many of the congregation she knew. She felt a touch on her
arm and turned.

“Sorry I’m late,” Fergus whispered in her ear. “Have I missed
anything?”

Shaking her head, she hooked her arm through his and leaned into
him. His body heat blended with hers. Comforting. Reassuring. A sense of
belonging. More than Nicole Moore had had in her short life.

Though Desley couldn’t condone Nicole’s actions, she could
understand them. The grief of first losing a father, then her mother and
finally her only sibling had to have been all-encompassing, had to have tipped
the balance of her mind.

Fergus patted her hand. A beaming and unquestionably pregnant Selena
was walking back up the aisle toward them, hand-in-hand with her new husband.
Desley smiled. Trent deserved to become the father he had always wanted to be.
Perhaps not biologically, but in all the ways it counted. The saddest part was
Jeremy Stillson had left a legacy that Nicole never would.

And that’s what Desley couldn’t comprehend. As much as she loved Brandon,
she didn’t know if she could be driven to sacrifice her own life to avenge his
death. Of course, unless she was put in that situation, she would never know.
A
mother’s love on the other hand
, she thought, touching her stomach…

***

Thank you for reading
Sleight Malice. I love to hear from my readers:
[email protected]

Based in rural Victoria, Australia,
she writes fast-paced mystery and suspense novels in contemporary Australian
settings.
More information about Vicki and her books can be
found at:
www.vickityley.com

Craig Edmonds, a
successful stockbroker, reports the disappearance of his wife, Kirsty. What
starts as a typical missing person's case soon evolves into a full-blown
homicide investigation when forensics uncover blood traces and dark-blonde
hairs in the boot of the missing woman's car. Added to this, is Craig's
adulterous affair with the victim's younger sister, Narelle Croswell,
compounded further by a recently acquired $1,000,000 insurance policy on his
wife's life. He is charged with murder but, with no body and only circumstantial
evidence, he walks free when two trials resulting in hung juries fail to
convict him.

Ten years later,
Jacinta Deller, a newspaper journalist is retrenched. Working on a freelance
story about missing persons, she comes across the all but forgotten Edmonds
case. When she discovers her boyfriend, Brett Rhodes, works with Narelle
Croswell, who is not only the victim's sister but is now married to the prime
suspect, her sister's husband, she thinks she has found the perfect angle for
her article. Instead, her life is turned upside down, as befriending the woman,
she becomes embroiled in a warped game of delusion and murder.

PROLOGUE

Craig Edmonds
stared at hands sticky with darkening blood.

His hands.

He held them away from his body and looked down at his chest in
horror. Large, dirty-red blotches marred the once pristine white shirt.
Forgetting the blood on his hands, he tore at the buttons, ripping the shirt
open.

Breathing in short, sharp gasps, he frantically examined his torso,
looking for the wound. No cuts. No injuries. No holes where there shouldn’t be
any. His chest heaved in relief. He wasn’t dying, after all.

But then, mid-sigh, it struck him: if it wasn’t his blood, whose was
it? His head whipped around, his eyes scanning the room like radar on overdrive.

Even in the half-light, he quickly saw all was not as it should be.
The glass shade from one of the bedside lamps lay in shattered fragments on the
floor. The curtain rail over the bedroom’s bay window hung at a precarious
angle. Usually a black-and-white photo of a nude, tattooed woman hung above the
bed; now the frame lay in pieces in the doorway.

He focused on the queen-sized bed. His stomach clenched as he took
in the twisted and disheveled bedclothes. Instinctively, he knew the dark
patches on the sheets weren’t shadows that would disappear once the curtains
were opened.

He swallowed, the acrid morning-after taste of whisky harsh in his
parched mouth.

“Kirsty?” he croaked. Clearing his throat, he called again, hesitant
but louder.

In the crushing silence, time stood still.

“Kirsty!” he screamed, as he dashed into the master bedroom’s
compact, white-tiled en suite. He stumbled, clutching at the doorframe. He took
in the bloodied handprints adorning the vanity unit and walls like some sort of
macabre finger-painting. Fighting an intense wave of nausea, he looked down at
the blood-smeared floor.

Trying desperately to rein in his growing panic, he raced to the
main bathroom. His wife wasn’t there either. Next room.

Out of breath, heart hammering, he reached the internal door that
led to the double garage and opened it. The external roller door was down and
his red Alfa Romeo and Kirsty’s silver Lexus were parked next to each other.

Gripping the door handle, he sagged against the door. He took a deep
breath. Fought for control of his adrenaline-charged body. He lurched into the
kitchen, heading for the sink.

Hands shaking violently, he somehow managed to turn on the cold
water tap. He watched, mesmerized, as the blood from his hands, diluted by
water, swirled in a pink eddy in the bottom of the sink before disappearing
down the plughole.

Oblivious to the water dripping from his hands, he dropped onto the
pine storage-box-cum-bench beneath the window at the end of the kitchen. Elbows
on knees, he dropped his forehead into his hands. If only the infernal pounding
would let up, he could think straight.

His memory of the previous evening was patchy, to say the least. He
had a vague recollection of arriving home stressed after a late-night meeting
at the office and, bypassing the dried-out dinner Kirsty had kept warm for him,
heading for the bottle of Chivas Regal. After that, it was anyone’s guess as to
what had happened.

A series of short clips flashed through his mind. In one, he saw
himself shouting at Kirsty, her throwing up her hands and yelling back. What
had they been arguing about? In another, he was picking up his car keys, and…

Damn it! Why can’t I remember?
he
thought, glancing towards the door leading into the garage. It was then he saw
the set of four smudged, rust-brown streaks low on the doorframe. He closed his
eyes, praying for the nightmare to end.

Except he had a feeling the nightmare was only beginning…

When
soon-to-be-wed Tanya Clark is confronted with her fiancé's naked corpse hanging
from a wardrobe rail in the upmarket Melbourne apartment they share, her life
is torn apart. Two months later, distraught and unable to cope, she drowns her
sorrows in a lethal cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs.

On the other side
of Australia, a grieving Jemma Dalton struggles to come to terms with the
suicide of her only sibling. Despite there being no evidence to the contrary,
Jemma refuses to accept Tanya had intended to kill herself. Not her sister.
Then the coroner's report reveals that at the time of her death she had been
six weeks pregnant. The will, too, raises more questions than it answers. How
did a young woman on a personal assistant's wage amass shares worth in excess
of $1,000,000?

In a desperate bid
to uncover the truth, Jemma puts her own life at risk and starts to probe the
shadows of her sister's life. But shadows, like bones, grow brittle with age. The
consequences can be deadly.

PROLOGUE

One foot inside the apartment, the
smell hit her. Sour, like cat pee. Except they didn’t own a cat.

“Sean?” she
called, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. “Sean, honey, are you
home?” Louder this time.

Not a sound.
Only that putrid smell.

She dumped her
heavy satchel on the floor, kicked the door closed, and surveyed the room.

The late
afternoon sun streamed through the balcony-facing floor-to-ceiling windows.
Long shadows from the life-sized, headless bronze nudes standing sentry sliced
the living area.
The Age
newspaper lay open at the business section in
the middle of the narrow glass-topped dining table, Sean’s mobile phone next to
it. Apart from one of the eight chairs sitting askew from the table, she could
have stepped into the pages of
Home Beautiful
.

She crossed the
carpet toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms and stuck her head into
the apartment’s galley-style kitchen. Tomatoes, red onions and a cling-wrapped
tray of meat – the makings of what looked to be one of her fiancé’s
specialties,
Spanish steak – sat on the
stainless steel drainer next to the sink. Further down the bench, she spotted a
bottle of red wine together with two wine glasses, one of which was already
poured. She sniffed the air and moved on.

Usually wide
open, the door to the guest bedroom was half-closed. Hoping Sean hadn’t offered
a bed to one of his boozy mates, she hesitated for a moment and then gave the
door a sharp shove.

The door swung
in, releasing a rush of sour air. Pinching her nostrils together, she leaned
into the room, ready to beat a hasty retreat if anyone was in there. Her gaze
went first to the queen-sized bed. Although the quilt looked rumpled, the bed
itself didn’t appear to have been slept in.

Breathing out
through her mouth, she glanced across the bedroom to where sunlight, filtered
through the window’s upward angled Venetians, striped the ceiling.

She took
another step into the room and turned around. The leather strap of her handbag
slid from her shoulder. She didn’t try to stop it, couldn’t stop it. Unable to
move, all she could do was gape at the open wardrobe, her eyes bulging almost
as much as the vacant ones staring back at her.

A silent scream
blocked her throat. She couldn’t breathe in; she couldn’t breathe out. Her
lungs wanted to burst. The purple, bloated face of the naked man hanging from
the wardrobe’s steel rail on a belt, his swollen tongue protruding from his
mouth, was almost unrecognizable. Almost.

She stumbled
backwards, snaring her handbag as she landed in a heap next to the bed. She
scrambled in the bottom of her bag, her mobile phone eluding her like wet soap
in the bathtub. When she did manage to get hold of it, she struggled to still
her shaking hands. Her fingers felt fat and clumsy, the buttons on her phone
tinier than she remembered.

“Emergency.
What service do you require? Police, Fire, Ambulance?”

She opened her
mouth to answer, but a magazine page stuck to her leg now had her attention
instead. She peeled it off, dangling the magazine at arm’s length as if it were
a dirty sock. She had never seen anything quite like it. Naked flesh. Entwined
bodies. Explicit sex scenes.

If she had
thought things couldn’t get any worse, she had thought wrong. She shook her
head, unable to come to terms with what she was seeing. Her fiancé, her lover,
her partner was dead; dead and surrounded with hard-core homosexual
pornography.

“...easy, fluid
readability factor. I didn't want to put the book down, and it was immensely
enjoyable.” -MotherLode blog