Wicked Game (3 page)

Trying to shake the weird sensation clinging to her, Becca drove from the parking lot, her wipers slapping at the rain. The sky had darkened, night dropping quickly. One of her packages had tipped over and the baby gift she’d purchased was spilled on the seat, a bright, whimsical mermaid puppet sewn in silver lamé and pink and green sequins.

That old sadness threatened to overcome her again, but she wouldn’t have any of it. Driving with one hand, she stuffed the puppet back into the shopping bag and headed purposely for the condo she’d once shared with Ben. Now the two-bed-room unit was all hers—all nine hundred square feet of “charming midcentury” architecture, as the literature boasted. In layman’s terms this meant an apartment building constructed in the late fifties and converted to condos with a little updating in the late nineties. But it was home. Even without Ben.

By the time she pulled into her designated slot, Becca had managed to push the damned vision and her own case of the unwanted blues aside, but dusk was gathering quickly and the clouds opened up again.

Rain tossed around her in shivery waves as she headed for the front door, fumbling with her keys. The evening paper was in a plastic sleeve on the stoop and she reached down and grabbed it, juggling it with her packages, as she spilled through the door. She dumped everything she was carrying onto the drop-leaf table that stood in the small foyer, then shrugged out of her dampened coat and hung it in the closet as the ticky-tick of Ringo’s nails across her oak floors heralded her dog’s arrival.

“Hey, bud,” she said as the curly haired black and white mutt furiously waved his tail, gazing at her expectantly. “Look what I got you.”

She held up the blue collar with its little white dog bone motif, but Ringo kept his eyes on hers. If it wasn’t food, he simply wasn’t interested.

“Okay,” Becca relented as she headed to the kitchen. She pulled out a jar of small, dog-shaped treats. Ringo barked twice, happily, as Becca unscrewed the lid and fished out a couple of biscuits, tossing them to the dog, who leaped up and caught them in his jaws, one by one, then raced back to his bed and snuffled and chewed them.

“We’ll go for a walk in a minute,” she said, adding some of his regular dog food to his bowl. Ringo quickly finished his treats and hurried to his bowl, munching on his meal with the same enthusiasm as the biscuits. He was not a picky dog.

She gazed out the kitchen window, which faced the back of another condo across an expanse of grass. She could see right inside to the other kitchen, which was festooned with red and pink foil hearts. A young girl was seated at the table, licking the icing off a cupcake decorated with candy hearts.

She recalled last year’s Valentine’s Day. She’d been waiting for Ben. Though she’d sensed—known, really—that their marriage was in its death throes, she’d spontaneously bought a cake and a bottle of champagne. The cake had been heart shaped with white icing, and in red gel script, it read:
Be Mine
.

Ben had never come home that night and Becca had opened the champagne alone, drunk half a glass, and poured the rest down the drain in the kitchen sink. Calls to his cell phone and text messages had been left unanswered until late in the night when he’d simply texted back:
Something came up. Don’t worry. I’m okay
. She would have panicked and called the police, but deep in her heart she’d known what was coming. He’d shown up the next day to break the news that he was in love with someone else, and that the someone else was pregnant.

Despite telling herself that she’d suspected something like this, Becca had tried not to be shocked, hurt, and upset, but she’d failed on all counts.

Suspecting him of having an affair was one thing.

Having that affair
and pregnancy
confirmed was quite another.

“You told me you never wanted kids,” Becca reminded him, trying to keep from screaming at him at the top of her lungs.

“I guess I changed my mind,” he responded, turning away from her accusing face.

“You guess?”

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“If you didn’t mean for it to happen, you should have used a condom.”

“Who says I didn’t?”

“Did you?” Becca demanded. Did he think she was a moron?

He almost lied to her. She could see him thinking whether he could make her believe him. But he knew her almost as well as she knew him. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” he mumbled, heading for the bedroom and his suitcase.

She followed him, too betrayed to let him just go. She yanked down another bag and stuffed it full of his clothes. Her outrage, her all-consuming fury, helped her cram his Brooks Brothers button-downs into small wads. “Take everything. Everything. Don’t come back. Ever.”

“Becca, you’re just upset. I’ve gotta come back and get—”

“Don’t be reasonable, Ben. I swear to God. Don’t be reasonable or I’ll scream.” She glared at him, but all she saw was the baby. The one he was having…with someone else. “If you can’t carry it now, it’ll be on the front porch.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“I’m ridiculous?” she demanded, dropping one of his white shirts onto the bedroom floor.

Ben, the coward, couldn’t hold her gaze. In tense silence he snatched up the shirt, finished packing his bag, and stormed out. She tossed the other suitcase after him, not caring whether he picked it up or not. It sat on the porch for two days while she stacked other items beside it, crowning the pile with his most prized golf trophy. She half expected the homeowner’s association to complain about the mess, but Ben managed to sweep everything up before that happened. He came when Becca was away, so there were no more angry words. In fact, there were no more words at all for several months. Becca had just determined to open the lines of communication again, preparing for the inevitable divorce, when she got a call from Kendra Wallace—the someone else—who between sobs, shrieks, and tears explained that Ben had died in her arms of an apparent heart attack. At forty-two.

For a good ten minutes Becca heard nothing else. Nothing past the fact that Ben was dead. She surfaced to finally understand that Kendra’s wailing was along the “poor me, what am I going to do” line. “The baby,” Becca said, moving from shock back to reality. Ben was going to be a father…

“The baby is mine!” Kendra snapped sharply, as if aware of Becca’s desire to have a child of her own.

“Do you have family?”
Someone to help you?

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You need someone—”

“I need Ben and he’s dead!” she said, sniffing and sobbing. “And…and…you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

“Your lawyer? Why…” Then it hit her. The divorce wasn’t even final, the arrangement for separating their finances not quite nailed down. Oh, Jesus.

Kendra slammed down the phone.

Becca was left staring into space. She was aware Kendra was going to come after her financially, but if the child was Ben’s, so be it. Then when, after two months, she received no call, she dialed Kendra on the number that Caller ID had coughed up and learned it belonged to Kendra’s mother, who told Becca that Kendra had moved to Los Angeles with her new boyfriend. “What about the baby?” Becca asked, and was told, in a chilly voice, that Kendra’s boyfriend was adopting the little boy and it was none…of…her…concern. The lawyers would handle everything.

And they had. As it turned out, Kendra’s child had ended up with a trust account, funded by half of Ben’s life insurance proceeds and set up by Becca’s lawyer, who had been a friend of Ben’s. Becca accepted that as the child’s due, but if Kendra wanted to come after her for more, the fight was on.

Now Becca hugged Ringo briefly, fitted him with his new collar and clipped on his leash, then slid her arms through her favorite rain jacket. Twisting her hair into a knot with one hand, she crammed a baseball cap onto her head as Ringo danced at the door.

Outside, the night was black with rain and cold as they strolled around the condo’s grounds. Ringo waved his tail at several other dogs, but he didn’t bark. Apart from a woof or two when food was coming his way, he was pretty quiet. Rarely did he growl or make any noise. On walks, he was content to bury his nose or lift his leg on any and all interesting tree trunks.

Today was no exception. There were fewer pedestrians, probably because of the rain. Head ducked into her collar, Becca walked a few blocks toward the river, then back again, giving Ringo time to take care of business.

About a block from her front door, the dog suddenly stopped, planted his feet, and growled low in his throat. Becca tugged on the leash, but Ringo couldn’t be moved. “Come on,” she said as the hairs along the back of her neck lifted. Un-Ringo-like behavior, for sure.

The dog stared into a space about a hundred yards away where a thick grove of firs, branches waving like beckoning arms, stood tall and dark in the slanting rain. Becca’s pulse jumped. Something was wrong. She glanced around jerkily, half expecting the bogeyman to pounce on her.

Ringo gave a sharp bark and lunged, tugged at the leash.

“You’re freaking me out, dog,” Becca rebuked and bent down quickly, sliding the wet animal into her arms and hurrying toward her front door. Ringo’s head swivelled to keep sight of the trees. She could feel the low
grrrrrr
that rumbled through his body.

Inside, she slammed the dead bolt into place, unsnapped the leash, grabbed a towel she kept in the front closet, and tried to towel Ringo off, but he shot to the nearest window, rising on his back legs, nose pressed to the glass, lips pulled back in a silent snarl.

“Stop that,” she ordered as she headed to the kitchen and filled a teakettle with water.
It’s probably just a squirrel. Or the fat yellow tabby cat who’s usually perched on the upper unit’s deck. Nothing more sinister. Get over yourself!

She shook a shiver away, then rummaged around in the cupboard. No champagne this Valentine’s Day. Tea would be just fine.

When she returned to the living room Ringo was sitting on his haunches, but his eyes were still fixed on something outside the window.

Becca tried to woo him to sit on the couch beside her, but when she went to pick him up, he sidled away and paced in front of the glass. Unnerved by his behavior, she picked up the paper and slid it from its plastic sleeve. Her eye fell on a picture of statue. The Madonna inside the maze at St. Elizabeth’s. The bold headline read:
BOYS DISCOVER HUMAN SKELETON INSIDE MAZE
.

Her lips parted in shock.

The teakettle shrieked and Becca gave an aborted scream. Ringo flew into frenzied barking. It took long moments before she could calm the dog and her own rocketing pulse enough to actually read the article about the body found on the grounds of the private high school she’d attended, a school now being razed.

When she was finished, she counted her still-accelerated heartbeats and stared at the rivulets of rain running down her window, her thoughts far from this miserable Valentine’s Day, her deceased husband, and whatever had spooked Ringo.

Her mind slid easily into the past and those days of high school. She knew the skeletal remains belonged to Jessie Brentwood, the girl from her vision, the friend from high school who’d disappeared without a trace, the girlfriend of Hudson Walker, Becca’s own secret crush and the father of Becca’s unborn child, had he but known it.

Jezebel “Jessie” Brentwood. Sixteen when she disappeared.

She’d come to Becca in a dream today.

Jessie had said something. Something important. While the wind had tossed her hair and she’d eased her toes over the edge of the cliff. Her whispered words meant something. Something Becca needed to understand, yet didn’t.

“Jessie…” she said aloud, her gaze dropping to the newspaper and the ghostly image of the Madonna statue. “What happened to you?”

Sam McNally stood hatless in the rain, examining the taped-off areas the crime scene technicians had painstakingly combed over the last twenty hours. The crowd had thinned, the press long gone, most of the officers either home or on duty elsewhere. Tonight the area was a dark, soggy, muddy mess. The bones had been removed and the techs were doing what they could with them. Preliminary findings said the bones were from a girl, around fifteen or sixteen years old. If these remains weren’t Jezebel Brentwood, he would eat a kangaroo, something his son had said too often to count back when Levi was a toddler.

He glanced around the overgrown maze where berry vines wound and grappled their way through the once-tended hedges. There had been talk years ago, rumors, that the maze had been planted by a rogue priest at war with the bishop and archdiocese, that there were secrets hidden in the verdant labyrinth, but they were largely disputed and laughed about. An urban legend that just wouldn’t die, held by conspiracy theorists. But then there was the very real murder of a student years before, a boy by the name of Jake Marcott who literally took one through the heart—at the Valentine’s Day dance, no less. A perfect irony. Killed in this very maze over twenty years earlier.

And now these bones.

A girl, in her mid-teens.
The techs had found her pelvis, but some of the other bones had been scattered, the skeleton not intact, fragments missing or in the wrong place, as if animals had dug through the shallow grave and pulled her apart. One of her ulnae had been located six feet away, under the hedge, pulled from her right arm. There were other scattered bones as well, and what was left of her had been hauled away in bags to be reassembled in the morgue. A gruesome job, but one he thought he might have the stomach to observe.

Who are you kidding? Just the thought of her beautiful body being torn apart churns your stomach.

He scowled into the darkness. “Damn it all to hell,” he muttered and glanced at the excavation site, a shallow grave at the base of the statue of Mary. What kind of sick bastard killed and buried her with a private marker?

Had he buried her here so he could return and relive the killing? Or pay penance? Leave flowers on her unmarked grave? It had happened time and time again; even now there were dried remnants of roses that had been placed at the base of the Madonna, roses now saturated with rain and mud and carted off to the lab.

You son of a bitch,
he thought,
I’m gonna find you, and I know just where to look.

“Hey, Mac!” One of the techs waved him over to the base of the statue. The Madonna was tilted, still serene, arms uplifted to the heavens, well, now…kind of skewed, but you got the idea.

Rain slipped icy fingers down his neck, but he ignored it as he picked his way over the sticky clods of mud. His boots weighed double their usual amount, they were so caked with the gooey dirt.

“Yeah?” No one called him Sam. No one ever had, or probably ever would, he guessed.

“You think you found her, huh?”

In the shadowy weird, eerie illumination cast by the klieg lights, Mac gazed at the man coolly. It had been a thing around the department for twenty years—his need to learn the truth about Jessie Brentwood’s disappearance. And though it generally didn’t bother him much, he found it incredibly annoying that his interest in the case even had the techs pausing in their work to theorize and jaw and wonder. Pissed him off no end.

Not that he didn’t understand it. He didn’t like to admit it, but he had been obsessed about the girl. It had eaten at him in a way he’d never experienced before or since.

“You got something for me?” Mac asked. “Or you just want to talk?”

“You could be right, is all. Sure looks like it might be that girl. Jaime.”

“Jessie.”

“You said right from the start that she was murdered. Killed by that group of boys, then covered up. Twenty years…” He shook his head in wonder. “Twenty goddamn years.”

Almost to the day, Mac thought, but didn’t add fuel to the fire.

“What are you gonna do now?”

Mac moved away from the curious technician. “Not really my case,” he said with a shrug.

“Bull-fucking-shit. Been your case from the beginning, man.”

Yeah, well…
Mac headed back to his black department-issue sedan, switched out of his boots to shoes that weren’t quite so caked with mud, then climbed in behind the wheel and backed away from the crime scene. In the distance, the prehistoric outlines of heavy construction equipment were black against a faintly lighter sky. St. Elizabeth’s was being torn down. Even without the kids who’d stumbled upon Jessie’s grave, her skeletal remains would have inevitably been discovered.

He shoved the car into Drive and rolled out of the pockmarked parking lot that separated the convent from the school. A few lights still shone in the windows of the nuns’ quarters, which were to be saved from the developer’s bulldozers. The convent was still owned by the church and was to remain that way, at least until a better offer from a developer landed on the archdiocese’s table.

Driving past what remained of the gymnasium while the police radio crackled and the rain peppered his windshield, Mac did a quick mental inventory of himself, an exercise he performed automatically, something he’d learned from the ridicule and exposure he’d received after he’d insisted that the group of boys who made up Jessie Brentwood’s friends were involved. He decided he was okay. He wasn’t nuts and never had been, and that group of boys—the Preppy Pricks, as he’d dubbed them—were the real ones with problems.

They’d all known Jessie. They’d all insisted they were innocent in her disappearance.

He remembered them with surprising clarity. Christopher Delacroix III, a filthy-rich kid who had hidden behind Daddy’s money. The Third, as the others called him, seemed to be a ringleader. Now he, like his namesakes, was a Portland attorney and a son of a bitch. Mitch Bellotti, the heavyset football player, had been a smart-ass. He was still around and rumored to be a helluva mechanic. Scott Pascal was a weasel if there ever had been one. He and a buddy—Glenn Stafford—had opened a fancy restaurant together. Most of the others were around as well, and their names and faces ran through his head: Jarrett Erikson, Zeke St. John, and Hudson Walker.

He liked to check his own emotional temperature. He’d learned restraint. He’d learned how to keep things to himself.

But he’d never stopped believing one of the Preppy Pricks, or several working together, were responsible for Jessie Brentwood’s disappearance and death. Maybe there were some guys involved outside of their core group, too; Mac had certainly harassed others who were also friends or acquaintances of Jessie. But the Preppy Pricks were at the top of his list. He’d made their lives hellish twenty years ago; he could admit it now. He’d been twenty-five, full of his own self-importance; brash, cocky, and a real pain in the ass. But he couldn’t break them. Hadn’t been able to poke holes in their stories. And he’d ended up being the laughingstock of the police department. He’d damned near been demoted from missing persons to some nondescript desk job. It had taken years to become a respected homicide detective, and even to this day some of his superiors regarded him with a baleful eye and most of his partners left him as soon as they could. The Jezebel Brentwood case—his obsession with it—had put its stamp on him.

And now…her bones had been discovered.

If they were Jessie’s. And he believed with all his heart that they were. His headlights reflected on the wet, crumbling pavement and reflected off the eyes of a lumbering racoon that scuttled into the surrounding shrubbery skirting the abandoned school’s main entrance.

Checking his feelings, Mac expected to experience some kind of satisfied “I told you so” building up inside. Maybe there was a little of that, but mostly he sensed his curiosity about the case, a long-slumbering beast, stir from its resting place and lift a nose to the wind.

He pulled onto the highway running through the canyons that carved the west hills of Portland where tall firs flanked the road and elegant homes from the early 1900s were cut into the steep hillsides.

What had happened to Jessie? he wondered. A prank gone bad? A lovers’ quarrel that had escalated out of control? An accident? Or was it murder? The cold, calculated snuffing out of a pretty girl’s life.

Bile rose in his throat, the way it always did when he was dealing with the abuse or death of the young. Of the innocent. Though, from what he knew about Jessie Brentwood, she was older than her years and far from innocent…an intriguing underage woman who was as manipulating as she’d been alluring. One of those females who knew intrinsically all of her attributes, how to use those wide hazel eyes and turned-up smile to get what she wanted, even if it meant playing with fire.

And he asked himself the question that everyone else seemed consumed with: Why was he so fascinated with this case? A simple missing persons case, they’d all said. Why did Mac care about this one so much?

He still had no answer. Maybe he’d been a little in love, a little in lust, with the beautiful, mysterious girl he’d never met. He’d handled dozens of cases where kids disappeared, but this one was different.
She
was different. He’d followed all the leads he could, dreamed about her, even. Fantasized about her, for God’s sake, and he’d taken a lot of heat for it. At the time his friends on the force thought he’d gone around the bend. She was a sixteen-year-old runaway. He was an up-and-coming hotshot detective who was obsessed by a ghost.

In retrospect, maybe they hadn’t been that far off the mark.

Now, twenty years later, a single father working homicide, Mac knew he’d definitely mellowed. He didn’t really want this case now. Old wounds. And problems.

But those Preppy Pricks were still out there. He wondered how they felt, knowing Jessie’s body had been discovered. One, or several of them, must be sweating bullets now.

Mac smiled thinly. Well, maybe this was the way it should be after all. Him, heading up a homicide case, a cold case that put all the smug bastards on the hot seat.

It was sounding better by the minute.

Becca set the newspaper on the coffee table and sank back on the couch, still staring at the folded pages as if they were Satan’s diary. She felt cold inside and out. What was this? What did it mean?

Ringo circled her feet, tail down, a soft, nearly inaudible growl emanating from his throat.

“Stop it, there’s nothing out there,” she said softly, as much to soothe her own jangled nerves as to calm the dog.

Jessie Brentwood had disappeared twenty years earlier when she’d been sixteen and a student at St. Elizabeth’s, the private Catholic school that had gone co-ed only a few years before. Becca had attended St. Elizabeth’s, too, though she was a year behind Jessie, a freshman. But she’d been friends with Jessie’s crowd, and she remembered all too well how she’d secretly yearned for Jessie’s boyfriend, Hudson Walker, with his dark, longish hair, slow, easy smile, and cowboy drawl. He’d been different from the others, a boy who seemed a tad older somehow, one with a cynical sense of humor and a distance to him that had made him all the more interesting. It was as if he’d known everyone for what they were, had seen through their teenaged façades, and had been amused by all their foolish antics.

Or maybe she’d just fantasized that he’d been more mature and intelligent and innately sexy than his peers. All she knew now was that she’d been crazy in love with him and had hidden it for years.

But that changed, didn’t it? Once Jessie was gone…then you made your move. You, Becca, were as calculating as she was.

Oh, God…

Becca pressed her palm into her flushed cheek, embarrassed and guilty anew, aware that she’d used Jessie’s disappearance and Hudson’s confusion and grief to her own advantage. Sure, it had been much later, after Hudson and Becca were out of high school and Jessie had been missing for years, but Becca now knew her own motives had not been pure. She’d been in love with Hudson. And when the opportunity arose for her to have her shining moment with him, she’d grabbed it with both hands and had vowed never to let go.

How foolish it all seemed now and yet, after all the years that had passed, over twenty since she’d first laid eyes upon him, those old feelings could rise to the surface in an instant. She’d read somewhere that first love never truly disappeared, that it always lay just under the surface, lingering there, waiting, like dry tinder that only needed the touch of a match, a spark, to ignite.

Did she still feel some of that? She hoped not. She hoped her first love was long behind her.

Yet she couldn’t stop thinking about Jessie. And Hudson. And her schoolgirl infatuation that she’d believed was true love. She’d harbored her feelings for years, then had seized her chance to make fantasy a reality.

It had been the summer after high school for Becca; the summer after his first year of college for Hudson when opportunity knocked. She’d ostensibly “run into him” one hot evening, although she’d driven by his parents’ home enough times to learn Hudson’s schedule and then had followed him to Dino’s, a pizzeria that had popped up that year, a place frequented by teenagers and the newly graduated.

Hudson had been meeting Zeke St. John at the pizzeria, as it turned out, and when Becca blithely swept through the swinging doors, she’d managed to hide her disappointment that Hudson wasn’t alone behind a bright smile. Zeke and Hudson had been friends in high school and apparently still were, Becca assumed, although she learned later that the friendship was barely on life support.

But when she sailed inside the pizzeria that evening, she only knew that she wanted to connect with Hudson. Her pulse ran light and fast, and though her grin was wide, she was trembling a bit. If she wasn’t careful her lips would quiver in a kind of excited fear, and she couldn’t have that. She sensed that she’d been treated as an afterthought with his group. Hudson’s twin sister, Renee, had barely looked at her, and it was only a carefully cultivated friendship with another girl, Tamara Pitts, that allowed Becca entry into their tight circle. Being a year behind them was like having a demerit—or worse yet, a scar that said “nerdy underclassman” burned into her forehead. So that night she needed to be confident, in control, and friendly.