Dead Certain

by Mariah Stewart

  “Who’s that?” Vince looked up and recognized the man who had at one time occupied the cell next to his. “Hey, Burt-man. How’s it going, man?”

  “Goin’ good.” The head bobbed up and down. “Couldn’t be better. I’m on my way outta here. I am done with this place, man.”

  “Your time is up?”

  “As of today. Honest to God, there were times I thought this day would never come.”

  “That’s good, man. I’m glad for you. Got a whole life out there.”

  Burt laughed ruefully. “Yeah, well, some life. I been in here nearly thirteen years. My wife divorced me while I was in here, remarried, moved someplace, no one told me where. Took my kids. I got no job and a zilch-o chance of finding one, no education, no money. But at least I will be out there.” He paused and looked past Vince. “Out there and outta here.”

  “So you got no plans . . . ?”

  “Only plans I got are for a few cold beers and a few hot women.” He shrugged. “After that, who knows.”

  “Burt,” a voice from the hall called out. “Get back in here. You shouldn’t be talking to him. He’s going into isolation.”

  “What are you gonna do to me, Ralphie boy? Suspend my exercise privileges? I ain’t hurting no one.” He turned back to Vince. “Just waiting for the nurse to come back and sign my clearance, and then I’m hitting the first bar I come to. I been dreaming about that beer for weeks now.”

  He started to move back out the door. “Well, good seeing you, Vince. Maybe we’ll run into each other one of these days, out there.”

  “There ain’t gonna be no ‘out there’ for me.” Vince shook his head.

  “Not this time, eh?”

  “I’m afraid my luck has run out.”

  “Yeah, well. Sorry to hear that, you know? You take care, Vince.”

  “Burt-man.”

  The man turned and looked back over his shoulder.

  “You always impressed me as being a stand-up guy.”

  “Thanks, Vince. I appreciate that.”

  “You a guy who understands what honor among thieves means, Burt-man?”

  “Hey, I been in here a long time, man. I know what it means to be able to trust someone to watch your back. That what you’re talking about?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I meant.” Vince had to think this through quickly. There was little time to make a decision. “Listen, I’m wondering if you’d do something for me when you get out there.”

  “What’s that?” Burt-man’s eyes narrowed.

  Vince’s voice dropped. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I can tell you where I have cash—a whole lot of cash—stashed on the outside. Seems to me that a fellow like you, with no obvious means of support, might be able to use that cash. I’ll never get to spend it.” He laughed ruefully. “My lawyer has already told me that I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to get off this time, so I might as well fire him and get the court to appoint a lawyer for me. I’d rather see that money go to you than to have it found someday by some kids.”

  “What would I have to do?” Burt’s sharp eyes sparked with interest.

  “There’s someone who has a job to do for me out there. I just want you to make sure he does it.”

  Burt came back into the room. “That’s all I have to do? Make sure someone does a job for you?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Burt! Come on, man, get outta there. You’re gonna get me in trouble,” the guard called from the doorway.

  “Get lost, Ralphie. I’ll be along in a minute.” Burt turned back to Giordano and lowered his voice. “And you’ll tell me where this money is stashed if I just keep an eye on someone for you?”

  “It’s all for you, Burt-man. No one else knows it’s out there. You just gotta keep this guy honest. Make sure he does what he’s supposed to do. It’s important to me, Burt-man. It’s real important to me.”

  “In that case, I’m all ears, Vince.” Burt-man knelt on one knee and leaned closer. “Tell me more. Tell me everything. . . .”

  Also by Mariah Stewart:

  DEAD WRONG

  UNTIL DARK

  THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER

  Mercer touched the goblet and shook his head. “Crazy, isn’t it, what some people will kill for?”

  It took a long moment for his words to sink in.

  “Kill for?” Amanda straightened up slowly, her hands gripping the edge of the counter. “You think someone killed Derek for this?”

  “Someone might have.” He gazed down at her, his expression unreadable. “Let’s start with you, Ms. Crosby.”

  “Me?”

  “You have to admit, you make a really good suspect.” His dark eyes studied her carefully.

  “Mr. England just spent your cash cushion on a piece of stolen pottery that you’re going to have to send back, which puts you out a great deal of money.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “And then there’s this little matter. . . .”

  From his pocket he withdrew a cell phone. Amanda recognized it as Derek’s. Mercer scrolled down the screen, then pushed a button. He needn’t have bothered. Amanda knew full well what the message was.

  “Derek, you are so dead. If you have any sense at all, you’ll stay in Italy, because the minute I see you, I am going to kill you.”

  Mercer turned off the phone. “Do I need to play it again?”

  Read on for an exciting preview of

  DEAD WRONG

  by Mariah Stewart

  Published by Ballantine Books

  in June 2004.

  Oh, sure, I heard the little one crying. And the middle one, too. Only one I never heard was the older one, the boy. They ain’t lived here long—maybe a month or so. I never saw much of them. Oh, once in a while, I’d pass the boy on the steps. He never had much to say. No, never saw the mother bring men home. Never saw her much at all, though—don’t know when she came or went. Heard her sometimes, though. God knows she was loud enough, screaming at them kids the way she done. No, don’t know what she was doin’ to ’em to make ’em cry like that. No, never saw no social worker come around. Don’t know if the kids went to school.

  Did I what? No, never called nobody about it. Wasn’t none of my business, what went on over there. Hey, I got troubles of my own. . . .

  Mara Douglas rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers, an unconscious gesture she made when steeped in thought or deeply upset. Reading through the notes she’d taken while interviewing the elderly, toothless, across-the-hall neighbor of the Feehan family, she was at once immersed in the children’s situation and sick to her stomach. The refrain was all too familiar. The neighbors heard, the neighbors turned a deaf ear rather than get involved. It was none of their business what a woman did to her children, none of their business if the kids had fallen through all the cracks. In neighborhoods as poor as this, all the tenants seemed to live in their own hell. Who could worry about someone else’s?

  Mara rested her elbow on the edge of the dining room table, her chin in the palm of her hand, and marveled how a child could survive such neglect and abuse and so often still defend the parent who had inflicted the physical and emotional pain.

  Time after time, case after case, she’d seen the bond between parent and child tested, stretched to the very limit. Sometimes even years of the worst kind of abuse and neglect failed to fray that connection.

  She turned her attention back to the case she was working on now. The mother’s rights were being challenged by the paternal grandparents, who’d had custody of the three children—ages four, seven, and nine—for the past seven months. Mara was the court-appointed advocate for the children, the one who would speak on their behalf at all legal proceedings, the one whose primary interest—whose only interest—was the best interests of the children.

  As their champion, Mara spent many hours reviewing the files provided by the social workers from the county
Children and Youth Services department and medical reports from their physicians, and still more hours interviewing the social workers themselves, along with neighbors and teachers, emergency room personnel, family members, and family friends. All in an effort to determine what was best for the children, where their needs—all their needs—might best be met, and by whom.

  Mara approached every case as a sacred trust, an opportunity to stand for that child as she would stand for her own. Tomorrow she would do exactly that, when she presented her report and her testimony to the judge who would determine whether Kelly Feehan’s parental rights should be terminated and custody of her three children awarded to their deceased father’s parents. It probably wouldn’t be too tough a call.

  Kelly, an admitted prostitute and heroin addict, had watched her world begin to close in on her after her fifth arrest for solicitation. Her nine-year-old had stayed home from school to take care of his siblings until Kelly could make bail. Unfortunately for Kelly, her former in-laws, who had been searching for the children for months while their mother had moved them from one low-rent dive to another, had finally tracked them down. The Feehans had called the police. Their next move had been to take temporary custody of the children, who were found bruised, battered, and badly malnourished.

  Over time, it became apparent that Kelly wasn’t doing much to rehabilitate herself. She’d shown up high on two of her last three visitation days, and the grandparents had promptly filed a petition to terminate Kelly’s parental rights permanently. Total termination of parental rights was a drastic step, one never made lightly nor without a certain amount of angst and soul searching.

  Mara knew all too well the torment of losing a child.

  In the end, of course, the decision would rest in the hands of Judge McKettrick, whom Mara knew from experience was always reluctant to sever a parent’s rights when the parent contested as vehemently as Kelly Feehan had. Much would depend on the information brought to the court in the morning. The responsibility to present everything fairly, without judgment or embellishment, was one that Mara took very seriously.

  With the flick of her finger, the screen of Mara’s laptop went blank, then filled with the image of a newborn snuggled up against a shoulder covered by a yellow and white hospital gown. The infant’s hair was little more than pale fuzz, the eyes closed in slumber, the perfect rosebud mouth puckered just so.

  Another flick of a finger, and the image was gone.

  Mara’s throat constricted with the pain of remembrance, the memories of the joy that had filled her every time she’d held that tiny body against her own. Abruptly she pushed back from the table and walked to the door.

  “Spike,” she called, and from the living room came the unmistakable sound of a little dog tail thumping on hard wood. “It’s time to go for a walk.”

  Spike knew walk, but not time, which was just as well, since it was past one in the morning. But once the thorn of memory began to throb, Mara had to work it out of her system. Her conditioned response to emotional pain was physical. Any kind of sustained movement would do—a walk, a run, a bike ride, a trip to the gym. Anything that got her on her feet was acceptable, as long as it got her moving through the pain so that she could get past it for a while.

  Mara pursued exhaustion where others might have chosen a bottle or a needle or a handful of pills, though there’d been times in the past when she’d considered those, too.

  By day, Mara’s neighborhood in a suburban Philadelphia college town was normally quiet, but at night, it was as silent as a tomb. She walked briskly, the soles of her walking shoes padding softly on the sidewalk, the occasional streetlamp lighting her way, Spike’s little Jack Russell legs keeping pace. Four blocks down, four blocks over, and back again. That’s what it usually took to clear her head. Tonight she made the loop in record time. She still had work to do, and an appointment in court at nine the next morning.

  The evening’s storm had passed through earlier, and now a full moon hung overhead and cast shadows behind her as she made her way back up the brick walk to her front door. She’d let Spike off the leash at the end of their drive and now stood watching as the dog sniffed at something in the grass.

  “Spike,” she whispered loudly, and the dog looked up, wagging his tail enthusiastically. “Come on, buddy. Time to go in.”

  With obvious reluctance, Spike left whatever it was he’d found on the lawn and followed his mistress to the front steps. Mara unlocked the front door, but did not go immediately inside. She crossed her arms and stared up at the night sky for a long moment, thinking of her own child, wondering once again where in this vast world she was at that exact moment, and who, if anyone, was standing up for her.

  On the television screen, the earnest five o’clock news anchor droned on and on, his delivery as flat as his crew cut. Mara turned the volume down to answer the ringing phone.

  “What’s for dinner?” Mara’s sister, Anne Marie, dispensed with a greeting and cut to the chase.

  “I was just asking myself that very thing.” Mara grinned, delighted to hear Annie’s voice.

  “How ’bout a little Chinese?”

  “You buying?”

  “And delivering.”

  “You’re back?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “What time will you be here?”

  “Thirty minutes, give or take. I’m just leaving the airport. If you call in an order at that little place on Dover Drive, I’ll swing past and pick it up.”

  “Perfect. What do you want?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Okay. See you soon.”

  Pleased with the unexpected prospect of Annie’s company, Mara found herself whistling while she hunted up the menu. She called in the order, then set about clearing the kitchen table of all the mail that had accumulated over the past several weeks while she had worked on the Feehan case. That case having been heard just that morning, Mara could pack up the materials she’d reviewed and return them to the courthouse in the morning. She wondered where Kelly Feehan had gone that night to drown her sorrows, her parental rights having been severed by Judge McKettrick until such time as Kelly successfully completed a rehabilitation program and obtained legitimate employment, at which time she could file for visitation rights. The odds that Kelly would follow through were slim to none, but the option was there. It had been the best the judge could do for all involved.

  While the decision was clearly in the best interests of the children, it still gave Mara pause to have played a part, however small, in another mother being separated from her babies, even though she knew full well that Kelly had brought her troubles upon herself. Mara had wanted to shake the young mother, shake her good and hard, for having put herself and her children in such a situation.

  You had a choice, Mara had wanted to shout at the sobbing woman as her children left the courtroom with their grandparents. We don’t all get a choice. . . .

  Mara scooped dry dog food into Spike’s new Scooby-Doo dish, then gave him fresh water. She turned up the volume on the television, hoping to catch the weather forecast for the morning. She’d been looking forward to her early morning twice-weekly run with several friends and was hoping that the prediction of rain had changed.

  “. . . and in other news, we have a somewhat bizarre story of two women who have the same name, who lived in the same town, and who met with the same fate exactly one week apart.” The anchorman spoke directly into the camera. “Jason Wrigley is standing by at the Avon County courthouse with the story.”

  Headlights flashing through the living room window announced Annie’s arrival. Mara had just begun to head for the front door when the reporter’s face appeared on the television.

  “This is Mary Douglas,” the reporter was saying as he displayed a picture of a white-haired woman in her early sixties.

  Mara watched in fascination as he held up a second photograph of another woman years younger, with dark hair and an olive complexion, and said, “And this
is Mary Douglas. What do these two women have in common besides their names?”

  The reporter paused for effect, then faced the camera squarely, both photographs held in one hand, the microphone in the other.

  “Both of these women lived in Lyndon. Both women were killed in their homes in that small community, in exactly the same manner, exactly one week apart. The body of the second victim was found earlier this afternoon. Local police have admitted that they are baffled as to motive.”

  Spike ran to the door and barked when he heard Annie’s heels on the walk, but Mara’s attention remained fixed on the television.

  Video played of a prerecorded press conference. “Without divulging the manner in which the women were murdered, we’re investigating the possibility that the first killing was an error. That the second victim may have been the intended target.”

  The police spokesman paused to listen to a question from the floor, then repeated the question for those who had not heard. “Do we feel it was a contract killing, was the question. I can only say at this point that anything is possible. It has been suggested that perhaps the killer had known only the name of his victim—no description, no address—and that after killing the first victim and perhaps seeing some news coverage or reading the obituary in the newspaper, he realized that he hadn’t killed the right woman. According to friends and family of both victims, neither Mary Douglas had an enemy in the world. Both women were well liked, both lived somewhat quiet lives. So with no apparent motive, we can’t rule out any scenario yet.”

  “Mara?” Annie called from the doorway.

  The police spokesman’s face was taut with concentration as he spoke of the murders. “Yes, we think he sought out the second Mary Douglas and killed her, though we do not know why either of these women would have been targeted, for that matter. . . .”

  “Mara?”

  “This is bizarre.” Mara shook her head.

  “What is?” Annie set the bag she carried on the coffee table.

  “This news report . . .” She was still shaking her head slowly, side to side. “Two women named Mary Douglas were murdered one week apart. Killed in the same way, but the police aren’t saying how they were killed.”