Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (50 page)

“It makes no sense to me.”

“A sixth sense.”

“Is that what you are?”

“Nope, I’m a vision.”

“You’re not a vision of loveliness, that’s for sure.”

“Never planned to be. And if you think I like being dragged out of the ether just to help you, Kiddo, you have another think coming.”

“I’m a big girl. I can do this on my own.”

“Sure, Kiddo. The thing with picking out pets, though. Who knows if you made the right choice. You
think
you did, because it worked out. But there are
other
choices, and you didn’t make them, and who’s not to say they weren’t better?”

“I chose what I chose.”

“Yeah, and that’s that. So here, you’re thinking there’s another choice.”

“Somewhere, maybe.”

“There’s always another choice. The road not traveled. The sight-unseen.” He pointed his finger at her chest. “
You
just have to figure out what you haven’t been seeing.”

And then he was gone.

The smell of Lucky Strikes, though, remained.

What was she missing?

Where could she look for it?

It was the middle of the night. Matt lay in the bed beside her, his breathing even in sleep. The moon stole in through the window, making her think of her own personal ghost. Her alter-ego, really.

Why after all these years didn’t she trust herself? Why did she always have to have her old partner come from outside to awaken her to what she needed to think about? Could it be that he really
was
just another part of her own brain? The part that wasn’t literal and measured.

The creative part of her brain.

Maybe he was another tool, like the jigsaw puzzles.

Yeah, Frank
, she thought.
You can be a real tool
.

She got out of bed and tiptoed across the Saltillo tile, feeling the slight chill on her feet. She looked out the front window. The moon sat like a pearl in the sky. She picked up her laptop, sat on the couch and powered up, resting her feet on the coffee table.

Facebook
.

Wasn’t everything these days related to public media? To social media? No man was an island, and this era proved that.

She found Ruby Ballantine’s page and looked at her friends. There were three rows of faces on the left-hand side. The nine faces in the box marked “Friends” were unfamiliar. She clicked on all seven-hundred-and-twenty-eight friends and scrolled down, thinking:
this is ridiculous
.

Faces rolled by. She didn’t recognize any of them. Why was she wasting her time like this?

She abandoned the whole fruitless exercise, powered down the computer, and tried to get some sleep.

But the next morning, she found herself looking at Ruby Ballantine’s Facebook page again. She stared at the page for a moment before clicking on “Friends” again. Ruby had a lot of friends—many of them women her age. Ruby knew people from all over the country. Even her estranged husband was listed.

She looked for Sean Perrin but didn’t see him. She thought it sad that Ruby wasn’t Facebook friends with her own brother.

Her mind wandered. This was a total waste of time.

She scrolled so fast she almost missed it—

A face she recognized.

A name she recognized: Alex Williams.

But the face and the name didn’t go together.

Alex Williams, Madison Neville’s friend, was a beautiful girl. An incredibly beautiful girl. But Laura knew her not as Alex Williams, but as Madison Neville.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Deception

Her full name was Alex Madison Williams. Williams was her married name. Her maiden name was Neville.

Laura thought:
You shouldn’t have played it so coy
.

Williams should have come up with another name entirely. And she shouldn’t have “friended” Ruby Ballantine. And she definitely shouldn’t have given Laura the number for Alex Williams.

“Thought you were cute, having me call your own phone,” Laura murmured. She had to admire the audacity: “Call my friend Alex.” Just a couple of girls having dinner, drinking too much and having a girlie gabfest.

Then “Alex” texts Laura back—no voice to recognize—and gives Madison Neville her alibi.

But who was real? Madison Neville or Alex Williams?

Alex Williams
.

Laura reached Anthony—it was still early but she’d guessed correctly that he was up and about—and gave him the news.

There was silence on the other end of the line. Was he savoring the magnitude of Madison Neville’s deception?

Finally: “Wow.”

“Yeah, wow.”

“Jesus.”

“When you pick your jaw up off the floor,” Laura said, “Will you be able to speak in complete sentences?”

“This would make a
great
film.”

“Uh-huh.”

“A beautiful girl, hot but psycho. Man! You know who I could see playing a girl like that? Sofia Vergara. She would be perfect!”

He had the screenplay already written. Laura said, “Okay, so how does this look to you? She killed Sean Perrin, right?”

“Yeah. It fits. He plans to meet her for a moonlight hike. There’s no one else there. She walks right up and offs him. No muss, no fuss. Easy Peasy.”

Laura agreed. “Maybe they met a couple of times and went for hikes, and the second, or third, or fourth time was the charm. Nobody around…”

“So she pops him.”

Laura thought about it. Thought about his eyes—shut—and just the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Not something that you could use in court, because looks could be deceiving, but it bolstered what she thought she knew. “Picture this. She calls and says she has a surprise for him. When he gets there, she comes out of the restroom, has the gun behind her back. And she says—”

“‘Close your eyes, baby. I got a surprise for you.’ Okay, so that’s probably what happened. What’s the motive?”

Laura said, “She’s friends on Facebook with Ruby Ballantine.”

“It looks like a professional hit,” Anthony said. “Maybe Ruby hired her.”

“Dumb dumb dumb.”

“What?”

“‘Friending’ Alex Williams,” Laura said.

First thing they did was go back to see Joel Strickland.

“What do you want now?” he said. “I’m busy.”

“Just a couple more things,” Laura said. “Was there any reason you and your wife split up?”

“Plenty of reasons.”

“Could you elaborate?”

He sighed, pushed his laptop away. “I didn’t like being her cover.”

“Cover?”

“Ruby is gay.”

Tell me something I don’t know
. “You married her knowing that?”

“No, I found out about it later.”

“She wasn’t honest with you.”

“Nope. But I wasn’t honest with her, either.” He rubbed his neck. “I’m going to be honest here. I liked her a lot, we got along well, good sex—at least I thought it was good sex, at least for me—and yes, my business could have used an infusion of cash at the time we got serious about each other. I thought that might be possible. But it turned out we were mismatched from the beginning. We had an argument the first month we were married, and she told me she had a lover—a woman. I hung on for a while after that, mostly because she kept leading me on as far as helping finance my company. She’s still doing it. We decided it was better if I moved out, but we both had reasons to stay married. She kept holding the bait over my head, and I was a good cover for her.”

“Why did she need cover?” Anthony asked. “Gay’s the new black.”

Laura gave him a look, but he ignored it.

“Because of her father. He was virulently anti-homosexual. She could have her store assistants or friends—whoever she was seeing at the time—and he never suspected a thing.” His face turned hard. “I don’t know what I was thinking. She used me, dangling that bait all the time, and I never got anything out of it. But that’s going to change.”

Anthony said, “What about Sean? Would he have inherited the estate?”

“Hard to tell. Ruby was the one who nursed the father and stuck with him. Sean didn’t seem to care about the money. He was too busy living in his own little world. But if her father ever found out about her love life, who knows what he would do?”

“Do you know who she’s seeing?”

“No, but she did tell me she was beautiful and young.”

“She didn’t give a name?”

He thought for a minute. “Seems to me it began with an ‘A’. Amy or Alice or something like that.”

“Alex?”

“Could be. I don’t know, and I don’t care. What I’m trying to do now is extricate myself. I’m going to cut bait while I still have some dignity left.”

“Lovers,” Anthony said.

“
Scheming
lovers.”

“Makes sense to me. Big Sis lures her brother here where it will be easy to kill him, and Alex does the dirty deed.”

“I was thinking she might have been a hired assassin.”

“Maybe,” Anthony said. “Or a hired assassin with benefits.”