by M. Z. Kelly
When she was arrested and the state later found her insane, she was sent to the hospital. Things had been difficult, at first. Azazel was upset that she’d acted on her own in killing her mother. He’d abandoned her for a time. But as the months passed, he began to visit, eventually agreeing to kill Dr. Thurston for raping her.
After that, Azazel came at least once a month, telling her of his plans if she could convince the authorities to release her. He made it sound like it was all fated, reminding her how he’d chosen her, brought her back to life to take revenge.
Her beloved had repeated his instructions so many times that it all seemed real, even before it happened. The final act in their revenge was now playing out. The circle will soon be complete.
“First, we kill the bitch that raised your sister,” Azazel had said. “And then her fiancé. But before he dies you have an affair with Jackson. We make sure Karma knows that he cheated with you. When we finally kill your sister, it will be payback for the life you were denied.”
It was later that Azazel told her about the Predators, how they would pay money to watch the proceedings.
“The Predators want you to have a family,” he’d said one day. “They want you to have sisters—blood sisters.” Myra soon realized that the Predators liked to watch the sex, the games, the parties, and the killings.
“They will think they’re deciding what happens,” Azazel had told her. “But I will be making the decisions, leading them along, as we kill everyone that’s close to your sister, before we kill Karma. When it’s all over we’ll take the money and begin our new life together.”
“Mommy, can I try on another dress and go to the party with you and Daddy tonight?” Emily asks.
Myra tosses the wallet onto the bed, turns and smiles as her daughter shows off her dress. “You’re staying with Grandma tonight. In fact, she should be picking you up any minute.”
Five minutes later Emily’s grandmother rings the bell. Myra says her goodbyes and promises to pick her daughter up in the morning. It’s a lie. She has no intention of ever seeing Emily again.
With her daughter gone, Myra returns to the bedroom. As she walks into the master suite she sees the housekeeper examining the driver’s license she left on the bed.
“What do you think you’re doing, Gloria?” Myra demands, coming over and snatching the license from the maid’s hand.
“I sorry,” Gloria says, her eyes downcast. “I just try to clean up. I don’t mean nothing.”
It’s too late. Myra feels a burning sensation behind her eyes, a jolt of electricity. She knows what she must do. There’s no way Gloria can live knowing that she once had another identity. The maid would likely see the photos of her on TV, make the connection, and then go to the authorities.
After the elderly maid is butchered Myra drags the body into the bathroom, dumps it into the bathtub, and covers it with towels. There will be time to dispose of the corpse later. At the moment there are other things on her mind.
Myra has to murder her husband.
Chapter Forty-Six
On the way to the airport, I stopped by Mom’s house and threw a few things in a bag…since I only had a few things. We dropped Bernie off at Mack’s place where I met Piper, the pet sitter.
The elderly Filipino woman told me, “I no let Bernie do funny business with the girls. He try anything and he regret it.”
“I hope she doesn’t do anything drastic,” I told Mack as we left. “I’m not sure Bernie can control himself around Thelma.”
“Piper’s like a mother hen, but she’s harmless,” he assured me. “The worst that will happen is she’ll spend the night playing sex referee.”
Less than an hour later, we were airborne on a private jet that Mack said he used to meet with his clients.
“I sometimes have to be in other parts of the world on short notice,” he explained over coffee and a delicious assortment of pastries that made my pity party seem a distant memory. “One of the few perks of my job.”
“You said that your clients are kidnap victims?”
“Sometimes. There’s a lot of kidnap-for-ransom cases going on in Mexico as well as in other countries. I occasionally work as an intermediary for the parents of the victims, trying to negotiate a safe release. It’s one of the advantages of speaking six languages.”
“I’m impressed.”
“No reason to be. Mom was a linguist. I grew up with her speaking to me in a variety of languages.” He laughed. “One of my elementary school teachers told her that sometimes when I was called on in class, I’d answer in Mandarin.”
There was no bravado in anything he said. The more I was around Mack, the more I found him to be direct and even humble when he talked about himself. And the more I saw of that, the more I had to admit to myself that I liked him.
“What about you?” he said. “I mean, as far as school went.”
I could have told him how much I liked school, about the subjects I loved, and my favorite teachers, but all that would have been a lie.
“I hated school, especially high school. The truth is I’m lucky I graduated. I skipped class so often they should have given me a degree in surfing.”
“A surfer girl,” he said, before sipping his coffee.
“A lost girl.” I lost myself again for a moment, this time in his eyes. They were the color of a deep ocean. “My dad was a cop, shot in a local park while off duty.” My gaze drifted away. “The crime was never solved. I was only four when it happened, but I took the loss inside and didn’t deal with things very well.”
I looked back at him. “When I was hired by the department and took the psychological exam, their shrink said something about me trying to make up for what happened to my father.” I took a sip of bottled water. “She was probably right.” My eyes lost focus as my thoughts drifted off. After a moment I found his eyes again and smiled. “And then, after my dad died my mom became…my mom…” I searched for the words to explain my mother. “She became a little eccentric. I think it was her way of putting what happened behind us, but we both got a little lost in the process.”
“You seem to have come through the other side okay,” he said. A beat later he added, “Someone once said that the scars of childhood become the armor of adulthood.”
There was something about the way he said it that made me think he was talking from personal experience. “You don’t seem the type of have scars.”
“My dad left my mom and me when I was five. It was a difficult time, but those scars made me realize the importance of loyalty and commitment.”
It went on like that most of the way to Florida; Mack and me talking about childhood, school, our shared interests. I found him both fascinating and surprisingly grounded in a way that I didn’t often see, especially in my line of work. I alternated between fantasizing about him and then feeling guilty because of Jack.
The two men were opposites in many ways, but they both had something confident and genuine in their manner that attracted me. I’d called Jack earlier, on my way to the airport, to check on him. The conversation was brief. He said he was having dinner with a colleague and was feeling better.
It was mid-morning, the day of Karma’s party, by the time we got to Broward Correctional Institution in Fort Lauderdale, just north of Miami.
After completing some visitation paperwork, showing our identifications to a clerk with yellow hair, and waiting for almost an hour, we met Elaine Deerfield in an interview room that was adjacent to her housing unit.
James Redford’s former girlfriend was in her mid-fifties, with stringy blonde hair and tired blue eyes. Her first question was why we were there.
“We’re looking into some issues involving James Redford’s daughter,” Mack explained. “Her name is Lenore Christine Redford.”
“She murdered her father,” Deerfield said. “She’s the reason I’m in here.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Mack and I looked at each other. He then said to Deerfield,
“Can you explain what you mean?”
“I told my public defender everything. He said even if the bitch admitted to the crime, unless she was willing to sign a confession that she killed her father it wouldn’t do me any good.”
“Let’s go over this slowly,” I said. “Can you begin by telling us about your relationship with James Redford?”
She exhaled, ran a hand through her hair that I realized in the bright overhead lights was thinning. “Jim was a musician. We met in a club where he played with his band. He was never able to keep a steady job—always had these dreams about making it big with his music.”
“What about Lenore?” I asked. “How old was she when you met Jim?”
“Four or five, I think. Her mother bailed when she was just a baby. Jim and I were on the road a lot. He decided he couldn’t take care of her, gave up custody.”
“She went into the foster care system?”
Deerfield nodded, picking at a fingernail with her teeth. “I found out later that she got attacked while she was in a foster home.” She bit another nail. “That’s why she killed him and set me up to take the rap.”
I looked at Mack, then back at her. “What makes you think that Lenore killed her father?”
“She came to see me; told me everything.”
“When did this happen?”
“About a year ago, I think. Yeah, it was just before Christmas. The bitch came here, all dressed in black like something out of a scary movie.” Deerfield gave us a hard stare. “I told her to fuck off before she left.”
“Let’s talk about her father’s death,” Mack said. “How did he die?”
“Jim and I were separated, just seeing one another off and on when he was murdered. Lenore said she hid in his house and waited for him to come home. She used a knife and butchered him. She said that before the murder she’d been watching us. She broke into my apartment when I wasn’t home and got a knife with my fingerprints on it. She left it at the murder scene.”
I’d studied Deerfield as she talked and had the sense she was telling the truth. “And Lenore told you all this?”
She nodded. “Like I said, I told my public defender everything.” She leaned forward, the pitch in her voice lifting. “Do you think there’s any chance Lenore would sign a confession?”
“We don’t know where she is.”
She bit a nail again. “Figures.”
“Why do you think Lenore went to all the trouble of coming here and telling you what happened?” Mack asked.
“She said it was revenge, she wanted anyone who had a connection to her father to suffer.”
I made some notes of the interview as Mack asked, “Is there anything else you can tell us about Lenore?”
“She’s crazy. I can tell you that.”
“What do you mean?”
“She said she died.”
I looked up at her and thought about Chloe Bryant telling me the same thing. “Did she explain what she meant?”
“She told me that when she was in the foster home some guy strangled her. She said she died but was brought back to life.”
“Do you think she meant that she was given CPR and was revived?” Mack asked.
Deerfield shook her head. “She said she died and met somebody she called Axel, or something like that.”
“Azazel?,” I asked, feeling my pulse quicken. “Did she say his name was Azazel?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I think it was something like that. The crazy bitch said he’s the one who brought her back to life and told her to kill her father.”
We went back over Deerfield’s story several times, confirming the details about what she’d said, before I told her, “I just have one more question, Ms. Deerfield. Did Lenore ever refer to herself as Myra when she visited you?”
She shook her head. “No, but you’ve got her last name wrong. She went by Hastings not Redford.”
On our way out of the prison, Mack and I discussed what Deerfield told us. I stopped in the parking lot and said, “I’m going to go back and check with the clerk on the visitation records that Myra or Lenore Hastings used when she came to see Deerfield. Maybe they have a record of a birthdate.”
He pulled out his phone. “I’ll use the time to make a couple of calls.”
Once I was back inside the prison reception area, I showed my police identification to the clerk with yellow hair and explained that I needed to see the visitation log for Elaine Deerfield.
“Why didn’t you let me know you were law enforcement before?” the clerk asked. “You wouldn’t have had to wait if I’d known.”
“I’m from out of state, so I didn’t think it mattered,” I lied. I hadn’t used my LAPD credentials because I didn’t want to take any chance that a record of my visit would get back to Skully.
It took only a few minutes for the clerk to retrieve the visitation log. She made a copy and handed it over to me.
As I walked back to the parking lot, I went down the names and dates of Elaine Deerfield’s visitors. It looked like her sister and a few friends had visited over the years. Then I saw a record for December 19th of last year—Lenore Hastings, date of birth, 09-21-83.
When I was back in the parking lot, I showed Mack what I’d found.
“Let’s run her through NCIC and see what we come up with,” he suggested.
I looked at my watch. It was already 2:00 p.m., Pacific Time. “By the time we get back and run the checks, Karma’s party will already be underway.”
“Let me call in a few favors.”
After he made a couple of calls on our way to the airport, I saw him writing something down. He ended the call and said, “Lenore Hastings was convicted of murdering her mother in Austin, Texas, in 2000. She was found criminally insane and spent eight years in a mental hospital, before being released in November, 2008.”
My voice pitched higher, the adrenaline pumping. “She has to be our girl.”
“I’m having the records and her mug shots sent electronically. We’ll be able to print everything out using the computers on the plane.”
“I’ve got to get this information to the taskforce at the party. The mugs should be able to help them ID her. I’m just not sure how to do that.”
Mack smiled at me. In that way he had that made all things seem possible, he said, “Why don’t we crash the party?”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Myra glances out the window and sees that the sun has begun to set. The blackness of night flows into her like a dark syrup. A delicious, icy feeling slips down her spine. She feels the doorway to the one who saved her beginning to open again.
Azazel.
If everything goes according to plan her beloved will be at the party tonight. When the night is over, he’s promised they will marry. Myra has told him that she wants to go back to the church where she gave her confession. They will force the priest to marry them before leaving the country.
The front door opens. Myra hears the voice of her husband calling to her. She takes the gun from her nightstand, straightens the nurse’s cap affixed to her blonde wig, and moves into the living room with the weapon behind her back.
“Wow, love the costume,” her husband says, tossing his cap and his keys into a chair, and coming over to her.
Myra feels his hands on her body, moving over her breasts. His breath is hot and stale.
“I think we’ve got enough time for a little recreation before the party,” he says.
Myra pulls back from him. “Let’s talk for a moment.”
He walks into the living room with her. “Where’s Emily?”
“With your mother. I told her that we’d pick her up in the morning.”
Myra pulls him over to the sofa, still concealing the weapon behind her back. She smiles sweetly as she begins her story.
“Remember when we first met, how I told you that I had an abusive ex-husband in Texas? How we needed to change our identities and start a new life together to get away from him?”
�
��Don’t tell me he’s found you? Everything’s been going so well.”
Myra shakes her head. “No, but there’s a few things I haven’t told you about.”
He reaches over and takes her hand. “What is it, sweetheart?”
She pulls away and continues, “I had a friend. She was like a sister, really. Her name was Rose. She was very committed to me. Rose was the one who got me access to Karma. She supplied a man named, Harley Porter with drugs and sexual favors. He’s a music producer for the rapper, Trevon Jackson, Karma’s fiancé, who died.”
“I had no idea about any…”
“Let me finish,” Myra says. “You need to know the whole story.”
She studies him for a moment as he gives her a sympathetic nod. Her stomach twists into a knot, the contempt for him rising. “I needed to have complete access to Karma so that I could set things in place. As you know, I eventually got you a job working for her. What you don’t know is that happened because I fucked her best friend, Vee.”
“What?”
Myra nods. “Vee was easy to manipulate. She told Karma about my accounting skills, and, thanks to her, I eventually became her business manager.”
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me any of this.”
The anger and betrayal in her husband’s voice pleases Myra. “I want you to know about the part you’re playing in history.” She studies his shocked expression before continuing. “After we both had jobs and I’d gained Karma’s trust, I fucked her fiancé so that I could make her jealous.”
Her husband stands, his fists shaking with rage. “You need to leave, now.”
Myra brings the gun out, stands, and pushes the barrel against his temple. “I killed them both. First, I murdered Karma’s surrogate mother, Harriett, and then her fiancé, Trevon. Tonight, Karma dies. You’re going to drive me to the party.”
“You’re crazy. I don’t understand why you’re doing any of this.”
A smile finds Myra’s full, pouty lips. Her pupils darken. “So that I can marry my beloved. The one who gave me life.”