Queen of the Night. J. A. Jance
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When the rough embrace finally ended, the man stood up and walked away. He walked into the water and sluiced away the blood.
As for Sully Brinker? She did not walk away. The brainy cheerleader, the girl who had it all—money, brains, and looks—the girl once voted most likely to succeed would not succeed at anything because she was lying dead in the sand—dead at age twenty-one—and her parents’ lives would never be the same.
Los Angeles, California
Saturday, October 28, 1978, 11:20 P.M.
63º Fahrenheit
As the quarrel escalated, four-year-old Danny Pardee cowered in his bed. He covered his head with his pillow and tried not to listen, but the pillow didn’t help. He could still hear the voices raging back and forth: his father’s voice and his mother’s. Turning on the TV set might have helped, but if his father came into the bedroom and found the set on when it wasn’t supposed to be, Danny knew what would happen. First the belt would come off and, after that, the beating.
Danny knew how much that belt hurt, so he lay there and willed himself not to listen. He tried to fill his head with the words to one of the songs he had learned at preschool: “You put your right foot in; you put your right foot out. You put your right foot in, and you shake it all about. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.”
He was about to go on to the second verse when he heard something that sounded like a firecracker—or four firecrackers in a row, even though it wasn’t the Fourth of July.
Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam.
After that there was nothing. No other sound. Not his mother’s voice and not his father’s, either. An eerie silence settled over the house. First it filled Danny’s ears and then his heart.
Finally the bedroom door creaked open. Danny knew his father was standing in the doorway, staring down at him, so he kept both eyes shut—shut but not too tightly shut. That would give it away. He didn’t move. He barely breathed. At last, after the door finally clicked closed, he opened his eyes and let out his breath.
He listened to the silence, welcoming it. The room wasn’t completely dark. Streetlights in the parking lot made the room a hazy gray, and there was a sliver of light under the doorway. Soon that went away. Knowing that his father had probably left to go to a bar and drink some more, Danny was able to relax. As the tension left his body, he fell into a deep sleep, slumbering so peacefully that he never heard the sirens of the arriving cop cars or of the useless ambulance that arrived far too late. Danny had no idea that the gunshot victim, his mother, was dead long before the ambulance got there.
Much later, at least it seemed much later to him, someone—a stranger in a uniform—gently shook him awake. The cop wrapped the tangled sheet around Danny and lifted him from the bed.
“Come on, little guy,” he said huskily. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Thousand Oaks, California
Monday, June 1, 2009, 11:45 P.M.
60º Fahrenheit
It was late, well after eleven, as Jonathan sat in the study of his soon-to-be-former McMansion and stared at his so-called wall of honor. The plaques and citations he saw there—his Manager of the Year award, along with all the others that acknowledged his years of exemplary service, were relics from another time and place—from another life. They were the currency and language of some other existence, where the rules as he had once known them no longer applied.
What had happened on Wall Street had trickled down to Main Street. As a result, his banking career was over. His job was gone. His house would be gone soon, and so would his family. He wasn’t supposed to know about the boyfriend Esther had waiting in the wings, but he did. He also knew what she was really waiting for—the money from his 401(k). She wanted that, too, and she wanted it now.
Esther came in then—barged in, really—without knocking. The fact that he might want a little privacy was as foreign a concept as the paltry career trophies still hanging on his walls. She stood there staring at him, hands on her hips.
“You changed the password on the account,” she said accusingly.
“The account I changed the password on isn’t a joint account,” he told her mildly. “It’s mine.”
“We’re still married,” she pointed out. “What’s yours is mine.”
And, of course, that was the way it had always been. He worked. She stayed home and saw to it that they lived beyond their means, which had been considerable when he’d still had a good job. The problem was he no longer had that job, but she was still living the same way. As far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. For him everything had changed. Esther had gone right on spending money like it was water, but now the well had finally run dry. There was no job and no way to get a job. Banks didn’t like having bankers with overdue bills and credit scores in the basement.
“I signed the form when you asked me to so we could both get the money,” she said. “I want my fair share.”
He knew there was nothing about this that was fair. It was the same stunt his mother had pulled on his father, making him cough up money that she had never earned. Well, maybe the scenario wasn’t exactly the same. As far as he knew, his mother hadn’t screwed around on his father, but Jonathan had vowed it wouldn’t happen to him—would never happen to him. Yet here it was happening—and then some.
“It may be in an individual account, but that money is a joint asset,” Esther declared. “You don’t get to have it all.”
She was screaming at him now. He could hear her and so could anyone else in the neighborhood. He was glad they lived at the end of the cul-de-sac—with previously foreclosed houses on either side. It was a neighborhood where living beyond your means went with the territory.
“By the time my lawyer finishes wiping the floor with you, you’ll be lucky to be living in a homeless shelter,” she added. “As for seeing the kids? Forget about it. That’s not going to happen. I’ll see to it.”
With that, she spun around as if to leave. Then, changing her mind, she grabbed the closest thing she could reach, which turned out to be the wooden plaque with the bronze Manager of the Year faceplate, and heaved it at him. The sharp corner of the wood caught him full in the forehead—well, part of his very tall comb-over forehead—and it hurt like hell. It bled like hell.
As blood leaked into his eye and ran down his cheek, all the things he had stifled through the years came to a head. He had reached the end of his rope, the point beyond which he had nothing left to lose.
Opening the top drawer of his desk, he removed the gun—a gun he had purchased with every intention of turning it on himself. Then, rising to his feet, he hurried out of the room, intent on using it on someone else.
His whole body sizzled in a fit of unreasoning hatred. If that had been all there was to it, any defense attorney worthy of the name could have gotten him off on a plea of temporary insanity, because in that moment he was insane—legally insane. He knew nothing about the difference between right and wrong. All he knew was that he had taken all he could take. More than he could take.
The difficulty is that this was only the start of Jonathan Southard’s problems. Everything that happened after that was entirely premeditated.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:00 A.M.
76º Fahrenheit
PIMA COUNTY HOMICIDE detective Brian Fellows loved Saturdays, even hot summer Saturdays. Kath, Brian’s wife, usually worked Saturday shifts at her Border Patrol desk job, which meant Brian had the whole day to spend with his girls, six-year-old twins Annie and Amy. They usually started with breakfast, either sharing a plate-sized sticky sweet roll