Thriller (44 page)

would be entertaining clients late. It had seemed like an irrelevant detail at the time. Her dad liked to have his female assistant

leave his greeting message, so Kate couldn’t even take comfort

in her father’s soothing baritone voice. At the sound of the tone,

her eyes misted and her throat clogged.

She hung up.

Her mother had flown to a convention in San Francisco two

days before, where she was no doubt lecturing her fellow real estate agents on how to get ahead in life by sucking the air out of

every room you entered. Her mother couldn’t find out about this.

She would just find a way to make it Kate’s fault. Surely, Kate had

missed something, some vital sign that her boyfriend was screwing other guys he met online. Surely, Kate could have planned

for this contingency. Her mother loved plans. Right now, Kate’s

plan was to get home and crawl under the covers until her father arrived.

In downtown L.A., she hit a procession of brake lights and

spent the next two hours in the slow crawl of chromium heading into the Valley on the 101 Freeway. It was a little past midnight when she reached her house, a Cape Cod-style cottage that

sat on a meandering street at the base of the foothills. There was

a good chance Rick might get a ride back from one of his friends

and come looking for her, so Kate parked a block away and

around the corner.

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When Kate opened the front door, the alarm system let out a

short burst of beeps. She was at the panel, ready to punch in the

code, when the beeps stopped—not a warning that the siren was

about to go off, just the perimeter alert that sounded every time

a door or window in the house was opened. The house was dark.

Her father had left without remembering to set the thing. That

wasn’t normal.

Her heart was racing. Even though she had been sitting in traffic for most of it, the drive home had left her feeling as if she had

run a marathon. The door to her father’s office was half-open.

The mess of papers on his desk didn’t look right; his computer

was missing. That morning her father had said something about

her mother taking the PC into the shop before she left town so

that she could get the hard drive whipped; she wanted to buy

him a new one and give the thing to her own mother as a Christmas gift.

Now that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she could

make out a weak flickering light on the walls around her. It

came from the second floor. At the end of the second-floor hallway, the door to her parents’ bedroom was half-open. She could

see a spread of tea candles on top of the credenza. There were

many more that she couldn’t see; they filled the entire bedroom

with a ghostly luminescence. Whoever was in the bedroom had

heard her come in and not blown out a single candle. This

thought loosened the knot of fear in her chest. Maybe her father

was in the tub.

Gently, she pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom. She

was about to call out to her father when she saw a different man

lying facedown across the bed, a dark stain curling out from

under his head across the tan comforter. He was stocky and muscular and she could just make out his short cap of brown hair.

Again, she thought he was naked until she noticed the red band

of his jockstrap tucked under the cheeks of his ass. Hours earlier,

she had seen a picture of the man on her boyfriend’s computer

screen and she almost whispered the words
Fun For Right Now
.

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Before Kate could scream, a patch of darkness stepped forward

from the bathroom door and lifted one arm in her direction. The

silhouette seemed vaguely familiar at first, then Kate saw that her

mother had tucked her long hair inside the back of her black

sweater; it made a misshapen lump on the back of her head.

The guilt hit first. Kate saw the wide-eyed shock on Rick’s face

when she had confronted him. She had misread his pained

breaths and wide-eyed fear as signs of guilt, when all the while

Rick had known the truth and been afraid to tell her. Then she

saw the two of them asleep in her bed just down the hall as her

father padded silently out of her room with Rick’s laptop in his

hands. Because his own computer was in the shop. Kate tried to

see through the halo of candlelight around the man’s body, tried

to detect some small motion that indicated life.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“Would you like to hear what they did together? One time, I

was away. You were asleep. In the yard, Kate. They did it in the

yard while you were sleeping.”

A car slowed outside, then turned up the driveway, tires

crunching gravel. Her father was home, and Kate had walked

right into a trap her mother had set for him. “Once I explain,

you’ll understand, Kate. I spent days talking to this young man,

days finding out what he and your father did together. Once you

hear, Kate, once you
know,
it will be very hard for you to be

Daddy’s little girl anymore.”

Kate bolted from the room. Halfway down the steps she lost

her balance. The hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs rose up

to meet her face. The impact knocked the wind out of her. She

lifted herself up onto all fours. A shadow dimmed the strips of

leaded glass on either side of the front door. Keys rattled against

the lock outside. “Kate,” her mother said quietly and firmly.

Kate could hear the challenge in her mother’s voice. Maybe if she

just let her explain. Maybe she could understand. Maybe then

she wouldn’t have to risk her own life for a father who was guilty

of the indiscretions she had just accused her boyfriend of.

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As soon as a crack of light appeared around the edge of the

front door, Kate rose to her knees and hurled the front door shut,

heard her father let out a surprised grunt. Steeling herself for the

gunshot she was sure would come next, Kate dropped to the

hardwood floor.

“Well,” her mother said quietly. “It looks like you’ve made

your choice.”

Kate heard the door to the master bedroom close. Then there

was a quick sharp sound that Kate couldn’t place. A movie sound.

Her mind groped to give it a word.
Silencer.

By then, Kate’s father was standing over her, his jacket slung

over one arm and his tie loose, his head cocked to one side like

a puppy as he tried to make sense of the scene before him and

the strange sound that had just come from his bedroom.

Kate didn’t explain any of it for him. She let him go upstairs

and discover the scene for himself, just as her mother had intended.

When Alex Kava wrote her first novel,
A Perfect Evil,
she had

no intention of making it the beginning of a new series. In

fact, the character, FBI profiler Special Agent Maggie O’Dell

doesn’t enter the story until the seventh chapter. Instead of

a series, Kava had simply based her story on two separate

crimes that had occurred in Nebraska during the 1980s. One

of the crimes, a serial killer who preyed on little boys, happened in the community where Kava was then working as a

copy editor and paste-up artist for a small-town newspaper.

Years later, when Kava decided to write a novel, it was the

same summer John Joubert—who thirteen years earlier had

confessed to and was convicted for killing three little boys—

was executed. The other crime, another little boy who was

murdered in nearby Omaha several years after Joubert’s capture, remains unsolved to this day. These two real-life crimes

inspired Kava. However, because of
A Perfect Evil
and Maggie O’Dell’s international success, Kava was compelled to develop a series. The results are four more novels featuring

Special Agent Maggie O’Dell:
Split Second, The Soul Catcher,

At the Stroke of Madness
and
A Necessary Evil.
Her one stand-
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alone thriller,
One False Move,
is also loosely based on a real

crime.

Kava believes that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction,

which seems to be reiterated every time she begins research

for a novel. One aspect of the Maggie O’Dell series that readers often comment on is the relationship between Maggie and

her mother. It can best be described as challenging and confrontational, and definitely a far cry from what we perceive

as a typical mother-daughter relationship. And yet, just like

in real life there remains a bond, though sometimes unexplainable and often irrational. Here, in
Goodnight, Sweet

Mother,
Kava takes Maggie and her mother on a road trip to

illustrate that relationships, as well as perceptions, aren’t always what they appear to be.

GOODNIGHT, SWEET MOTHER

Maggie O’Dell knew this road trip with her mother was a mistake long before she heard the sickening scrape of metal grinding against metal, before she smelled the burning rubber of

skidding tires.

Hours earlier she had declared it a mistake even as she slid into

a cracked red vinyl booth in a place called Freddie’s Dine—

actually Diner if you counted the faded area where an “r” had

once been. The diner wasn’t a part of the mistake. It didn’t bother

her eating in places that couldn’t afford to replace an “r.” After

all, she had gobbled cheeseburgers in autopsy suites and had enjoyed deli sandwiches in an abandoned rock quarry while surrounded by barrels stuffed with dead bodies. No, the little diner

could actually be called quaint.

Maggie had stared at a piece of apple pie à la mode the waitress had plopped down in front of her before splashing more coffee into her and her mom’s cups. The pie had looked perfectly

fine and even smelled freshly baked, served warm so that the ice

cream had begun to melt and trickle off the edges. The pie hadn’t

been the mistake either, although without much effort Maggie

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had too easily envisioned blood instead of ice cream dripping

down onto the white bone china plate. She had to take a sip of

water, close her eyes and steady herself before opening her eyes

again to ice cream instead of blood.

No, the real mistake had been that Maggie didn’t order the pie.

Her mother had. Forcing Maggie, once again, to wonder if Kathleen O’Dell was simply insensitive or if she honestly did not remember the incident that could trigger her daughter’s sudden

uncontrollable nausea. How could she not remember one of the

few times Maggie had shared something from her life as an FBI

profiler? Of course, that incident had been several years ago and

back then her mother had been drinking Jack Daniel’s in tumblers

instead of shot glasses, goading Maggie into arresting her if she

didn’t like it. Maggie remembered all too vividly what she had told

her mother. She told her she didn’t waste time arresting suicidal

alcoholics. She should have stopped there, but didn’t. Instead, she

ended up pulling out and tossing onto her mother’s glass-top coffee table Poloraids from the crime scene she had just left.

“This is what I do for a living,” she had told her mother, as if

the woman needed a shocking reminder. And Maggie remembered purposely dropping the last, most brilliant one on top of

the pile, the photo a close-up of a container left on the victim’s

kitchen counter. Maggie would never forget that plastic take-out

container, nor its contents—a perfect piece of apple pie with the

victim’s bloody spleen neatly arranged on top.

That her mother had chosen to forget or block it out shouldn’t

surprise Maggie. The one survival tactic the woman possessed

was her strong sense of denial, her ability to pretend certain incidents had simply not happened. How else could she explain

letting her twelve-year-old daughter fend for herself while she

stumbled home drunk each night, bringing along the stranger

who had supplied her for that particular night? It wasn’t until

one of Kathleen O’Dell’s gentleman friends suggested a threesome

with mother, daughter and himself that it occurred to her mother

to get a hotel room. Maggie had had to learn at an early age to

345

take care of herself. She had grown up alone, and only now,

years after her divorce, did she realize she associated being alone

with being safe.

But her mother had come a long way since then, or so Maggie had believed. That was before this road trip, before she had

ordered the piece of apple pie. Perhaps Maggie should see it for

what it was—the perfect microcosm of their relationship, a relationship that should never include road trips or the mere opportunity for sharing a piece of pie at a quaint little diner.

She had watched as her mother sipped coffee in between swiping up bites of her own pie. As an FBI criminal profiler, Maggie

O’Dell tracked killers for a living, and yet a simple outing with

her mother could conjure up images of a serial killer’s leftover

surprises tucked away in take-out containers. Just another day

at the office. She supposed she wasn’t as good as her mother at

denial, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Suddenly Kathleen O’Dell had pointed her fork at something

over Maggie’s shoulder, unable to speak because, of course, it was