Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Bolstered by the revelation that my mother’s name was not among this list, I raised my hand. “Technically, I’m not dead yet, so I’d really appreciate it if you don’t lump me in with that crowd. But since I’m going to die anyway, I have to ask: Why kill Carla Malfi in the first place? Historically speaking, murder has the unwanted effect of bringing more, not less, attention to bear on the complainant of a lawsuit.”

  “She’s the only one who refused to settle out of court.” Flat reportage from Grace Beidermeyer, her voice as dry and dead as a tumbleweed. “She’d have fought until doomsday with Valentine’s money backing her. And with Valentine bringing your mother in to nose around, it was only a matter of time before they connected everything back to us.”

  “If you killed Carla and framed Valentine, you’d effectively be neutralizing two threats with one blow,” I said. “Do I have that right?”

  “See?” Garland Beidermeyer gestured to me with an open palm. “She understands it. No wonder she’s the rightful valedictorian.”

  At this, Melanie flinched like a kicked puppy.

  “Melanie will be the rightful valedictorian.” Mrs. Beidermeyer stared out into the middle distance, an extension of the landscape of her incomprehensible mind. “When Jane is dead.”

  “I don’t want to overstep my bounds here,” I said, turning to Melanie’s mother, “but I get the feeling you might just be harboring a grudge against me. Which, frankly, totally hurts my feelings.” Lie. “What have I ever done to you?”

  “It’s not about what you did. It’s about what you knew.” Mrs. Beidermeyer’s dark-blue eyes shone like precious stones, her face just as hard. “The day of the graduation, when we encountered you in the parking lot, and you mentioned Melanie’s slim victory and Dean Koontz’s wife passing, I knew your mother must have told you something.”

  I flashed back to our conversation. The sarcasm that had dripped effortlessly from my tongue.

  Did he not get enough of a chance to heap praise on you at the graduation for your slim victory?

  It’s a good thing he has friends like your parents to lean on. I’m sure Mrs. Koontz’s recent passing has been very hard on him.

  Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

  I couldn’t remember if my mother had said this or Shakespeare.

  My chest deflated on an exasperated sigh. “My mother didn’t tell me shit. I was being an asshole. It’s my thing. It’s what I do.”

  Grace’s eyebrows tried, and failed, to crease the center of her obviously Botoxed forehead. “You mean you didn’t know anything about Dean Koontz? Or his wife? Or the medical trial?”

  “No!” I shook my head emphatically. Because emphatically felt like the only correct way to do anything when someone was describing why they had decided to kill you.

  “Well, isn’t that an unfortunate misunderstanding.” Grace folded her arms across her chest and slouched like an elegant—if slightly unhinged—scarecrow. “And here I had assumed your mother must have gotten word to you when she realized that she was being watched at the graduation—”

  “My mother was being watched at the graduation?”

  “Oh, yes.” An ugly smile tugged at the corners of Mrs. Beidermeyer’s mouth. She wiped it away with bony, beringed fingers, smearing her own lipstick into a manic, clownish grin. “By the same two gentlemen who visited your apartment later that evening, in fact. Of course, they believed they were watching your mother for Valentine. Just as they believed that Valentine had sent them to kill you. Men like that don’t care who they’re working for as long as the cash comes on time.”

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  During the entire graduation, I had been so concerned with looking for my mother that it never had occurred to me someone else might be looking for her. Or at her.

  Shepard was right.

  I was oblivious.

  “By the time we came across you in the parking lot, I’d already heard from my contacts. I knew your mother had given them the slip. So I had them follow you instead. I thought surely she’d come back for you at some point.”

  “But Shepard slaughtered your contacts at my apartment, so when you saw me at the Tilted Tiger, you decided to lure me to Valentine’s building site so you could have someone pick me off with a rifle.”

  Grace nodded. “I would have preferred a more creative demise for you, but it was the best I could do on such short notice. But that awful Officer Bixby followed you and spoiled everything.”

  “Are you hearing this?” I asked, turning to Melanie, who had been watching this exchange with openmouthed dismay. “Your mother is directly responsible for relieving your intended of three fingers. I want you to consider this when you’re engaged in an intimate moment and he has to switch hands.”

  “Bixby’s not my intended.” Melanie’s cheeks flushed piglet pink. “He hasn’t even agreed to go out with me yet.”

  “Oh, yes, he has.” Lie. “He said as soon as he’s out of the hospital and can dial a phone again, he’s totally calling you.”

  “He did?” Melanie brightened, a hand floating up to fluff her hair as if the mere mention of Bixby’s name would allow him power to see the room.

  “Swear to God.” I brought my arm up, elbow bent, palm forward, hoping it wouldn’t act as a lightning rod when He/She/It finally tired of my bullshit and elected to smite the bejesus out of me.

  “We will not have our daughter shacking up with some blue-collar, badge-wielding paper pusher.” Garland’s manicured hands tightened into fists at his sides. I highly doubted that he’d know what the hell to do if he actually had to swing one.

  “I quite agree.” Melanie’s mother stood beside her husband in a show of solidarity, resting a gem-studded hand on his bicep. If such a meatless bone could even deserve that title.

  “Why?” The anguish in Melanie’s voice cut straight through to my heart. “Why are you doing this? Why couldn’t you just run a legitimate business?”

  “Oh, darling.” Mrs. Beidermeyer flitted over to her offspring, hovering like a nervous bird. “We’ve become used to a certain way of life. And in order to maintain it, B-Tech needs to sell for a certain amount of money. And if the problems we’ve been having with the clinical trials got out, there’s no way that could happen. You see?”

  “The point everyone seems to be missing here is that Jane has to die.” Koontz spoke up at last, having endured this whole conversation with a good deal of foot shifting and eye rolling.

  “Well, fuck you hard and to the left,” I said.

  “No thanks.” He made a show of patting his pants-weasel. “I’m no longer accepting bribes.”

  The infinite stretch of what happened next began with the subtlest shift of Dean Koontz’s eyes. Starting with me and flicking to Garland Beidermeyer.

  Then many things happened at once.

  Garland made a grab for his sport coat. I reached back to the waistband of my pants. One of us would get there first.

  The world went quiet.

  I felt her around me.

  My mother.

  Some sensory memory remnant from the time we had both shared her body. When both of our hearts beat inside her. Her words blew around me like a swirl of leaves, brushing my cheeks with an almost physical presence.

  Courage, Janey.

  Panic gets people killed.

  Keep both eyes open.

  Breathe slowly. Think calmly. Then decide.

  The gun came out of Garland Beidermeyer’s pocket. Rising. Rising until that lidless, empty eye stared directly at the flat space between mine.

  The space between life and death can be both as narrow as one breath and as slow and searing as hot tar. I was both acting and watching everything unfold from somewhere far above the fray.

  I stepped into Garland Beidermeyer instead of away. Drove an elbow upward into his jaw. His head snapped backward as I rode him to the ground, my hand aiming for the wrist that aimed his gun.

  Dean Koontz was a blur
in my periphery. Melanie flashed into action, dropping him with some kind of complicated pirouette/karate-chop thing and somehow still managing to look graceful as she did it. I guessed she hadn’t been shitting me about those self-defense lessons after all.

  Somehow, Garland and I were still falling. It didn’t seem right that we could still be falling when so many things with a beginning and a middle and an end had happened and were still happening. At last I felt the impact of the marble floor through his body. Felt his chest depress as the air was knocked out of him and the gun clattered from his hand.

  “Garland!” Mrs. Beidermeyer shrieked as the dreadful sound of his bones meeting the marble echoed through the room. She leaped at me, clawing at my hands as I fought both to lay hold of my gun and to keep Garland from grabbing his.

  And to my absolute and utter shock, Melanie launched herself at her mother, pulling her off me as they rolled.

  Of course, if Melanie had bothered to consult me first, I could have told her that they only do that kind of thing in the movies. It may look great on camera, but in real life, it’s difficult to control your momentum, and you’re as likely as not to end up with a bruised ass and not a whole hell of a lot to show for it.

  Which is about how it ended up this time.

  Melanie and her mother lay on the ground in a tangle of long, elegant limbs and blonde hair, yanking and slapping and growling elegant little threats through their nearly identical, even teeth.

  Much later, when I was analyzing exactly what it was that I felt guilty for not mentioning to Melanie, this moment would return to me.

  Because not only had Melanie halved the number of assailants I had to fight off, but her swan dive from grace had also successfully hijacked her father’s attention for the split second I needed to gain the upper hand.

  By the time he’d fully returned it to me, I was standing over him with his own gun (a tactically inferior but showy Smith & Wesson) in my left hand, trained at the space between his silvered eyebrows, and Face-Gravy in my right, aimed at his wife’s sternum.

  “Hands up, kids,” I said.

  Melanie’s parents glanced at each other, their arms creaking skyward like action figures whose parts weren’t designed to bend to such an undignified posture.

  “At least they follow instructions,” I said. “Melanie? Would you be so kind as to call the police while I keep an eye on these two?”

  Melanie slowly rose to her feet.

  “Melanie, wait!” Garland’s Adam’s apple bobbed under the smoothly barbered skin of his throat. “We were only doing what we thought was best for you. That’s all we ever wanted. For you to have the things we didn’t. To be respected. Successful. Admired.”

  And watching how his words changed Melanie’s face made me realize that all this time, I’d had something she hadn’t.

  Love?

  Have you learned nothing about me yet?

  I’m talking about the ability to disable someone’s voice box with a swift throat-stomp.

  Which I did, very carefully.

  “I’m so sorry, Father,” Melanie said, striding toward the door. “This is for the good of the family. I hope you’ll understand.”

  I inwardly applauded her as she sashayed out of the grand library entrance.

  “We could adopt you,” Garland offered when she was out of earshot. His voice was the raspy croak of a frog with throat cancer. “You could be an heiress. Our daughter.”

  I cocked both guns at once. “I’m Alex Avery’s daughter, and you and your wife are so going to jail.”

  Seconds later, Melanie returned from wherever she’d gone to make the call and stood by my side.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For everything, I guess.”

  I endured her awkward side-hug. Melanie’s bony hip jutting into the bottom of my ribs. Her cold, slender fingers squeezing my shoulder.

  Where the hell were people supposed to put their hands in a situation like this anyway?

  “This doesn’t mean we’re friends, you know,” I said.

  “But why not? I incapacitated Dean Koontz and tackled my own mother for you.”

  “(a) Your mother is about as difficult to tackle as a three-legged dog, (b) Dean Koontz got away, so your incapacitation game needs some serious work, and (c) I still haven’t forgotten about the whole valedictory suck-off thing.”

  We stood by like every fictional private detective and assistant combo in literary history as the police flooded the library.

  It took everything I had not to point to her parents and utter a terse Get them outta my sight, or Take them away, or something similar.

  What they did take away were my guns, apparently unconvinced that the finders keepers precedence superseded the need to secure the scene of Kristin’s homicide.

  A scene that was short my discarded panda suit and one pencil-necked dean. It’s not like I could blame him. I mean, if I had been running from a full complement of police officers, I might have been tempted to snag the first available disguise as well. Opportunity and all that.

  “There was one more,” I said as they hauled the Beidermeyers to their feet, hands cuffed behind their backs. “But he shouldn’t be too hard for you to find. And I have a suspicion he may be dressed as a giant panda.”

  The officer in charge asked me to repeat my description three separate times before reaching for the radio clipped to his belt, perhaps not especially thrilled with the idea of calling this one in.

  Unfortunately for Dean Koontz, it wasn’t the cops who found him.

  It was Shepard.

  After my third interview with the cops in less than a week, I’d made my way out to the lawn, where the party equipment was mostly broken down. Flapping canvas tents and felled poles. The disassembled remains of bar tents, and the olfactory siren’s song of funnel cake still heavy on the air.

  But it was the man pinning a headless panda to the grass that made my mouth water.

  Shepard hunkered over Koontz like a great dark cat. Deadly sleek in his uniform of tight black T-shirt and fatigue pants, he had one knee between the panda’s nondescript shoulder blades and a tattooed, muscular forearm bunched beneath his neck.

  The panda head sat nose down in the grass several feet away, likely knocked off in the takedown.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “D-Town and I were doing surveillance nearby and listening to the police scanner. When we heard a call go out for an unknown assailant in a panda suit wanted for assault and destruction of property, I had an idea you might be involved somehow. D-Town stayed on the job. I came here.”

  Over his shoulder, I saw Valentine emerging from the collapsing bar tent, a half-empty glass in his hand and pain legible in his alcohol-blunted eyes.

  He knew about Kristin. He knew about all of it.

  I had no doubt Koontz had sung like a bird while he still had air enough for singing. At the moment, his face had begun turning that particular shade of purple common to eggplants and erotic asphyxiation victims.

  “I’m so sorry about—”

  Valentine held up a hand to silence me. “Not here,” he said. “Not now.”

  “But—”

  “Jane, you’re a decently intelligent woman. Perhaps you can tell me why it takes someone I’ve fired to successfully foil an attempt on my life.”

  As much as Shepard could ever be said to brighten, he brightened. Which was really just him looking slightly less like he wanted to tear someone’s arm off and beat them with it. The security guards flanking Valentine from a respectful distance all glanced at their shoes.

  “At first, when the panda came cozying up to me with a strangulation wire in its paws, I was hoping you’d decided to take me up on my earlier offer. So imagine my disappointment when Shepard here tackles the panda to the ground and pulls its head off, and I see it’s Koontz.”

  I knew what Valentine was doing, of course, being somewhat of an expert in the class
ic psychological hand-waving techniques. When someone gets too close to anything with the power to actually hurt you, force their attention to something else.

  “And what about you?” I caught Shepard’s eye again. “Did you tackle the panda thinking it was me?”

  “No,” Shepard said. “I knew it wasn’t you.”

  “But you couldn’t see my face.”

  “I know how you move.”

  Our eyes met, and I swear to God, I felt an egg drop into the chute.

  “This doesn’t mean you’re forgiven, you know.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I did get my job back.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it,” I said, with perhaps a hair less delight than the assertion called for.

  “Also, I wanted to apologize.” It was the first time I could remember someone offering me an apology while pinning another human to the ground.

  Part of me hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For a lot of things.” The dean grunted as Shepard leaned onto his forearm, driving his elbow farther into Koontz’s back. “For the way I acted at the hospital. For the things I said. I was out of line.”

  I smiled to show there were no hard feelings. Aside from the one I remembered pressed against my back. “And I’m sorry for calling you a monosyllabic meathead.”

  “Apology acc—wait. When did you say that?”

  I waved a hand at him. “Not important. The point is, we’re both sorry, and we can enjoy a very fruitful and pleasant business relationship.”

  He nodded despite his mouth tightening into a flat line.

  We understood each other.

  “I don’t know what sickens me more.” Valentine swayed over Koontz, looking for the briefest of seconds like he wanted to crush his skull with the heel of his expensive Italian leather loafer. “That Melanie’s own parents probably sent her to try and suck my cock, or that she actually succeeded in sucking his.”