by Linda Ladd
Still holding his mother down, Junior stared at him, waiting for her to swallow enough water to drown. Grinning at each other, they both held on to her for dear life until she finally gave up the ghost. Then they kept her down a little longer after that, too, just to make sure. After a couple of minutes, Lucky let go of her legs. They both watched her sink slowly down to the bottom and then float back up to the surface. Then Junior let go, too. His mom’s body bobbed slowly away, floating facedown in the water, her long blond hair loose now, and streaming out on top of the surface.
Lucky rubbed an open palm down the back of her naked thigh. “She was a good lay, I’ll give her that. When she wasn’t too drunk to give back.”
“Ding dong, the witch is dead,” Junior said, very serious. Lucky jerked a quick look at him, and then they both laughed together. Junior felt nothing but relief. No sadness, no guilt, no remorse, nothing at all. He was truly happy for the first time in ages.
“Yep, a witch she surely was. Congrats on a job well done.” Lucky held out his hand, and Junior shook it. In that brief moment, they became partners in crime and inseparable friends.
“Thanks for the help,” Junior said, really meaning it.
“Guess you’ll get all her money now, huh? That’s why you killed her, right? For your inheritance?”
“Yeah, I’ll get every penny. But I killed her because I hate her guts.”
“Don’t blame you. I hated my mom, too, before I took off.” He glanced back at the dead body and nodded, content. “All that money can buy us some big-time fun.” Lucky started laughing again. “Bet she didn’t expect you to just up and murder her. You do have some guts, I’ll give you that. Very impressive, Junior. I wouldn’t’ve thought you had it in you, man.”
Lucky’s high praise made Junior feel good. He was beginning to like this pool boy a lot. “How about we spend it together? Unless you intend to turn me in to the cops or blackmail me. Then I’d have to kill you, too. Don’t think I won’t. Because I will, Lucky, better believe it.”
“Maybe you would. Or maybe I’ll kill you first. But hey, know what? No need for us to talk tough like this. I won’t tell anybody what we did. What? You think your mom’s the first woman I’ve killed?”
Junior didn’t know what to say to that. Surprised by Lucky admitting to committing murder, Junior just stared at him. But he was seeing the guy in a whole new light now.
Lucky grinned back, then turned and waded out toward the shallow end. He stopped at the steps and glanced back at Junior. “If I were you, man, I’d get the hell out of here right now and get yourself a damn good alibi. Looks open and shut to me. Your mom’s been drinking like a lush all day, that’s the good thing about all this. She’s got to have a huge blood alcohol level. The cops’ll think she passed out and rolled off that float and drowned. You might even get by with a few bruises on her, the way she works out at the gym every day. You’re home free with the cops, trust me. But right now, we gotta get going before your cook shows up. She comes in at four to cook dinner, right? That doesn’t give us much time to work out our alibis.”
Junior sloshed out, too, and watched Lucky pick up a fluffy white towel and dry off. He was really curious about Lucky now. He grabbed a towel. “Hey, Lucky, you really mean you’ve actually killed somebody before?”
“What do you think? Don’t know you well enough to start spilling my guts. This your first one?”
“Yes.” Junior glanced back at the body. “Just my mom. Never really wanted to kill anybody else.”
“No worries, you’ll get used to it. And then you’ll like it, trust me. I’m just glad I was here to help you hold her under or you might be headed off to the hoosegow right now. And know what would’ve happened then? They’d have thrown you inside a loony bin for the criminally insane. That’s what they did to me when I was thirteen, but I escaped after a couple of months and took off. They never caught me. Thus, the name Lucky.” He laughed some more.
“Who’d you kill?”
“I don’t know their names. Didn’t ask.” He hesitated, and then he said, “I guess I can trust you after what we just did. Who’re you gonna tell without me telling on you? Once, when I was driving my truck over to clean this lady’s pool, about seven or eight months ago, I guess, I just ran this guy down who was crossing the street with his little dog. It was over in Glendale, and nobody was around. Street was completely deserted.” He shook his head and rubbed the towel over his hair. “It was crazy, bro. I just got this sudden, uncontrollable urge. Probably like you just did with your mom out there. That’s what happened to you, right?”
“Yeah. I didn’t plan to do it, not really. I got mad, and it just happened.”
“Looks like we got a lot in common, huh? C’mon, let’s get out of here. You got someplace to go, where they’ll remember seeing you and can alibi you later?”
“I guess so. There’s a big chess tournament at UCLA that started at noon. I’m sure it’s still going on. Everybody’s concentrating on their games and stuff, so nobody will probably notice when I come in. They’ll just notice that I beat the crap out of them.”
Lucky nodded. “That’s right, you’re the big brainiac at school, aren’t you? Something tells me that we’re gonna have some fun together, you and me. Just wait and see. I’ll be the brawn and you’ll be the brains.”
Junior hoped so. He glanced back at his dead mother’s corpse. She had floated over and bumped the top of her head against the side. Strange, but he felt exactly nothing. Just an overwhelming urge to smile and congratulate himself on a job well done. Right now, however, Lucky was right. Junior needed to get as far away from his house and his mom’s dead body as humanly possible. Lucky had already disappeared around the side of the house, heading for his old Dodge truck. Junior ran down to his bedroom in the basement, threw on some clothes, and headed for the triple car garage.
His day was certainly looking up.
Chapter 4
The front porch of the estate was long and pillared, with an elegant style of rustic grandeur. It ran the entire length of the home’s front. Although the designer used logs and rough-hewn wood on the exterior, somehow the house looked completely modern. Quite a trick to pull off. Lots of dark wood, lots of half logs, lots of river rock, lots of flagstones. It was designed to blend into the lake’s granite cliffs and towering old trees. In Claire’s opinion, the architect had gotten it exactly right. The blinking lights were giving her a headache, though, making her want to scream for mercy. Why couldn’t the owner have been a Scrooge? Christmas overkill, and nothing less.
The house sat high on the bluff. She stopped on the porch and looked out over a lake that was obscured by the growing darkness and bad weather. You couldn’t see the water at all, but in the quiet landscape you could hear the stiff winds pushing waves up onto the rocky beach far below. The wind up top had died down momentarily, and the sleet had miraculously turned back into large, intricate snowflakes floating softly to the ground in perfect straight lines. They looked like bits of torn lace dropping down all around them, but in this case each and every flake turned from white to red to green to blue and then to orange by the damned blinking and winking and twinkling tangle of lights. It was enough to make one dive for cover. Claire loved Christmas, especially now that she had Black and Rico to spend it with, an actual true-life family, which was a new concept for her heretofore bleak and lonely life. But this place? This was a sleazy L.A. overkill production with look-at-me syndrome. She could spot extreme narcissism anywhere. Especially here.
Way too much glitz and glamour, like everything else in L.A., which made that city her least favorite place on earth. Strike that—in the universe. She had worked LAPD when she’d first started out in law enforcement and had ended up the target of media sharks there, too. So she knew how celebrity Angelinos thought. If the owner of this place turned out to be an actor, or, heaven forbid, an A-list star, he or she would b
e an arrogant jerk and hard to work with. Count on it. It would be a miracle if said person wasn’t self-centered, self-entitled, and self-righteous. In her experience, they all turned into pompous fools in accordance with their degree of fame, each and every single celebrity that she’d ever met.
Best scenario? There would be a heavy snowfall that would ground their deluxe private jets and keep them in warm and sunny southern California. Then she and Bud could conduct their celebrity interviews over the phone and not have to actually be near anyone. Now that would be a Christmas present worth its weight in gold. She wondered if Black could arrange it; he’d been able to arrange just about everything else she’d ever wanted. Bless his little darlin’ heart.
After the cheerful glare outside, the interior of the home looked like an exploding supernova. What was wrong with these people? On the other hand, it was as warm as toast in there, which felt good to Claire’s frozen nose. Bud already looked like a new man and was jerking off his brown sock hat. The interior was as woodsy as the exterior, but in a very “wow” and “whoopee” kind of way, and only if you disregarded the myriad of silver tinsel and endless evergreen swags from hell. The room itself was beautiful and smelled utterly delicious, like a fresh pine forest bedecked with cinnamon sticks and pumpkin pies and lots of other holiday things that Claire loved. Her stomach growled at the thought of pumpkin pie. With lots and lots of Cool Whip curled up high on top. She’d skipped dinner, and lunch, too. Her appetite would die off completely when they found the body, of course. It always did, so she definitely wouldn’t have to suffer hunger pains long. They stopped just inside the big, bizarre, lightning-bolted front door. There, they tugged on protective paper booties and pulled on the obligatory disposable gloves.
Claire glanced around the central hallway. Giant and spacious and spread out, big time. It looked like there were two floors, both with matching hallways radiating out to either side and going on forever, all in the aforementioned rustic modern style. Somehow it was sort of elegant, too. A new and unusual concept. Cedar Bend Lodge was rustic, too, but with a homey kind of elegance that didn’t sport the stark modern bent and modular furniture inside this house. She hadn’t seen this décor anywhere else, lots of bare wood and black glass and marble and stainless steel, all very pricey by the looks of it. Everything reeked of Beverly Hills panache and exorbitant prices.
There was a black marble-topped table in the center of the foyer with a tall copper statue on its top that depicted Claire knew not what. Looked pretty damned peculiar to her, like an upside-down angel with barbwire sticking out everywhere. But, to each his own—even if their own was damn hideous. The walls were painted a warm, golden yellow, with fancy dark wood moldings just about everywhere you looked. Like something that would have its own spread in Lake Living for L.A. Living Legends. Black would probably love this place. Claire preferred small, cozy, old, and comfortable. Shabby chic floated her boat just fine.
The cop posted at the bottom of the main staircase was another young guy Claire didn’t know. This one had the sense to be polite and respectful and not ignorant. He pointed at a door at the back of the hall, under a fabulous staircase that swept up into a wide spiral on both sides. “The victim is back there, Detectives. We checked out the room but didn’t touch anything.”
This new recruit was so young and fresh-faced that Claire suddenly felt decrepit. He had shaved off his hair, but she could tell by the shadows on his scalp that he’d had plenty of hair before he went crazy with that razor. His baldness looked out of place with his baby face, smooth skin, and innocent brown eyes. But he smiled at her, and it was a pleasant one. Better than that, he didn’t mention People magazine or the National Enquirer, so she took to him right off the bat. His black name plate read Paul Wingate.
“Thank you, Wingate. Good job,” she said to him.
Bud stood back and allowed her to precede him into the library. He was a veritable Rhett Butler, unless it came to foodstuffs. Then he’d eat all the pizza, except for her one piece. They stopped inside the door and observed the room. Unfortunately, more holiday decorations, stem to stern, top to bottom. A good Walmart aisle’s worth of lights everywhere. Even Santa Claus’s elves wouldn’t subject some poor innocent family to this. Soft music played somewhere: Christmas carols. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Ironic, maybe, but not funny.
Bud was looking at a seventy-inch television screen right across from them. “How does anybody watch a football game with all these lights reflecting onto the screen? That would drive me up a wall.”
“Maybe he hasn’t moved in yet. My God, this is simply blinding. Wonder where we could pull the plug?”
Claire then looked down the long length of the room. One honking big Christmas tree took up most of the far wall, where it stood in front of a ton of built-in log bookcases, all empty of tomes. But her eyes latched solely onto the victim. The woman appeared to be dressed like an angel. She was wearing some kind of diaphanous, loose white garment, or maybe it was a flowing nightgown. There was a wide balcony running around the top of the room, lined on all four walls with more empty bookshelves. It looked as if the young woman had been posed to sit atop the balcony bannister right above the tree. Her arms seemed to be holding onto the rail, and her robe had been pulled out over the top of the tree.
“He made her look like an angel tree-topper,” Claire said, feeling a bit sick.
“Good God,” Bud breathed out from next to her.
Together, they walked slowly down the room toward the tree. Claire couldn’t take her eyes off the victim high above them. “How did he get her to stay up there like that?”
“Dunno. Man, she looks like she’s just a kid,” Bud said.
At the bottom of the tree, they stopped and stared up at the victim. Her arms were outstretched at her sides, maybe tied somehow to the bannister railing, and the sleeves of her gown had been draped artistically, as if they were wings. The pose gave the impression that she was hovering up there on outstretched wings. But Claire could not take her eyes off the woman’s face. Bud was right: She was young, really young. Her eyes were wide open, pale blue and staring straight down at them. She had been struck from behind. They couldn’t see the damage done to her skull, but they could see the blood from the wound. It had run down over her face, weaving together in intersecting red rivulets. The blow that had killed her must have been brutal as hell.
Claire moved slightly to her right. That’s when she saw the huge hole behind the girl’s right ear. Long blond hair was matted with blood, making it look dark and sticky. More blood had soaked down into the front of the white gown, and the killer had wound a string of blinking white lights around her forehead to resemble a bright and glowing halo. Claire swallowed her revulsion. This young girl was dead and gone forever. A Christmas angel, no more.
“This guy is psycho, man,” Bud muttered, angry. “What is she? Eighteen? Nineteen? Why would anybody wanna do this to some young teenager like her?”
Claire met his eyes. He had the most appalled look on his face—even after so many years in homicide, he was affected. So was she. She knelt down at the base of the tree and examined the small gift sitting just under the lowest tree limb. It looked like a ring box, maybe. She didn’t touch it and wouldn’t until the photographers had shot crime scene photos. But she could read the tag.
“What’s it say?” Bud asked.
“It says: ‘To my cop friends. Merry Christmas. May this angel light your way to me. I’ll be waiting. Game on.’”
“Oh my God, this is gonna be brutal. Looks like he left us the murder weapon, too, Claire. See it back there, behind those presents?”
Claire hadn’t seen it. “The killer’s already playing games with us, Bud. Leaving the murder weapon behind is nothing but a taunt. He feels secure. And you can bet he wiped the thing clean, like everything else he touched.”
“Killer could be a she. This is a staged scene li
ke no other that I’ve ever seen.”
“Highly imaginative, too.” Claire hunkered down and studied what she could see of the weapon. It looked like some kind of a trophy. Another gift for them, this one unwrapped. It also looked heavy, and about a foot tall. “There’s blood on it, and maybe some brain matter.”
Bud squatted down beside her. “Yeah, I see that. Think he found that trophy somewhere in this house? What is that on top of it?”
“Looks like a bishop from a chess set, I think.”
Bud turned his attention on her. “Chess? Really? Why would those guys get trophies? Trophies are for real sports. Contact sports, like football.”
“Give me a break, Bud. Chess is a game. There are winners and losers. It’s not like checkers. You’ve got to have brains to play it well. These guys pit themselves against each other in tournaments and get themselves a trophy to sit around and collect dust. Until they want to murder somebody with it. Like this guy.”
“Trophies for chess?” Bud was still grousing around. “Man, that just does not seem kosher. Hell, Claire, they just sit there and stare at those little things on the board. No effort in that. So you’re sayin’ we got ourselves some kind of nerd killer?”
“I’m not saying that. And not all chess players are nerds. You have to be smart to play the game well. You know, lots of strategic moves and second-guessing what the other player’s gonna do.”
“How do you know all that? Don’t tell me you play chess?”
“Well, no, of course not. Black does, but not with me. Too boring, and it takes forever. I tried once to play with him but I fell asleep waiting for him to make a move. Fast paced it’s not.”