Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1)

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  Bingo.

  I sidestepped the spoiled squirt, shuffling as fast as I could in my oversize panda feet, when I felt myself jerked backward.

  The little shit had grabbed my little nub of tail.

  And so, with a gentle but judicious nudge of my cushioned hind paw, I sent him flying into the hedge. His surprised yelp was just a hair more satisfying than it should have been.

  Slowly, mindfully, I crept into the maze, listening as I inched along the shrubbery.

  I recognized the sound by degrees.

  The same voice that had so often criticized and cajoled me in an office crowded by books and leather furniture. The space where Dean Koontz, blocked by the wooden moat of his desk, tried to convince me with words larger than necessary not to do whatever it was I was doing.

  But that’s not at all what he was saying to the fresh young thing trapped between him and six feet of perfectly clipped hedge.

  Nope.

  Dean Koontz was trying to score himself a blow job.

  In exchange for grades.

  Bits of conversation filtered through the shrubbery like lawn clippings on the breeze. Things like “underwhelming performance” and “oral examination,” and “library in ten minutes” and “special study session.”

  Sweat poured down my face. And not just because my head was currently encapsulated in a personal sauna of fur and foam.

  How come I had never been offered this option?

  I mean, not that I would have taken it, because eww, but still. I was a little insulted.

  The girl, apparently, was not. She stood there tremulous in the wake of his departure.

  I was on the point of whispering to her through the hedge like Jiminy Cricket when a voice on the opposite side of the leafy pathway hijacked my attention. Even harsh and quaking with rage, it was a voice I placed immediately.

  Mrs. Beidermeyer.

  I crossed to the opposite wall of the maze, boring a hole in the small branches with my paws.

  Mr. Beidermeyer stood opposite his wife, looking like a Great Gatsby party guest in his 1920s straw boater hat, bow tie, and deck shoes. A sad attempt at classy carny chic.

  The snatches of conversation I heard were enough to send the meatballs racing up my throat. I swallowed hard, lest I vomit inside my own costume head.

  Library. Body. Rid of it.

  And then I could hear nothing over the hammering of my heart.

  I needed to get to the library and fast.

  I shuffled back the way I’d come and had barely escaped the maze when I was forced to duck behind a midway game booth. The kid I had nudged into the hedge was clutching the sleeve of a red-faced woman, who was in the process of haranguing some poor security guard.

  “What do you mean, you can’t find it?” she shrieked. “How hard can it be to track down a giant panda?”

  The guard mumbled something about security perimeters and assignments.

  “But the panda assaulted my child,” the woman insisted.

  “He doesn’t look assaulted.”

  I could have told the guard this was the wrong answer even before the woman’s face went white with rage. Not that I would have, because the woman taking a swing at him happened to be the perfect distraction. By the time he had her subdued, I had already slid out of my hiding place and was hauling ass across the lawn toward the house.

  “Staff restrooms are outside.” The Beidermeyer butler stood in the grand foyer, blocking my progress purely with the authority of his fussy, tuxedoed presence. “If you go back outside, you’ll find that several porta-potties have been set up on the west lawn.”

  Now, violence wouldn’t have been my first choice.

  But as time was of the essence, and there was no way in hell I could figure out how to communicate with gesticulation of paw that my purpose was to stop some hapless coed from gargling Koontz’s noodle, I tased him a little.

  Just a quick thirty thousand volts to relieve him of his knees.

  Which is about when I remembered that I had absolutely no goddamn clue where the library actually was and probably should have asked the butler before dropping him. I briefly considered calling Melanie, whom I’d yet to encounter among the carnival’s attendees, when I passed a double-door entryway to a room sporting plentiful rows of books.

  Promising enough.

  Suffocation imminent, I stripped off my costume and dropped the mound of sweaty fur outside the door.

  I crept around the corner and froze.

  Dean Koontz loved a desk, all right. So much so, he’d decided to park his ass on the edge of one while a blonde head bobbed over his crotch.

  “Small . . . price to pay for . . . three-tenths . . . of a point,” he puffed in time with her bobs. His eyes closed tight, sweat oiling his brow. “I have to say, I’m not looking forward to the end of our installment plan.”

  Three-tenths of a point.

  It hit me with the force of a Mack truck.

  This wasn’t the blonde from the maze at all.

  “Melanie?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Koontz’s eyes flew open. He scrambled off the edge of the desk and yanked his pants up, but not before I discovered a schlong far more sizeable than the one I’d accidentally palmed on graduation day.

  I gasped, my hands flying to my mouth.

  “I know,” Koontz said, oozing confidence. “I’m a grower, not a shower. Come to take a turn?”

  Melanie was still on her knees. Not turning around. Not looking at me.

  I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t force air into my lungs. “You—”

  “I imagine your mother had a very similar look on her face the first time she made the connection you’re making now. If she hadn’t been so insistent about her daughter being the valedictorian, she might have been able to stay for the graduation. Funny old life, eh?”

  My head reeled with memory.

  Camera flashes.

  The smell of mums.

  The feel of leather on my damp palm.

  The look on Dean Koontz’s face.

  My mother. Gone. “Where is she?” The words arrived thick with the emotion I’d battled to hold at bay since the second I’d seen the empty space in the crowd.

  He shrugged. “I really don’t know. I wasn’t in charge of the arrangements.”

  “Arrangements—”

  Voices from the hallway stopped me short. The tail end of an argument.

  Mrs. and Mr. Beidermeyer cantered into the room side by side like a couple of thoroughbreds. Necks stiff. Nostrils flared. Color high.

  I think Mr. Beidermeyer twigged to it first.

  Dean Koontz’s sweaty face. His daughter on her knees by the desk.

  “Oh, Melanie, darling. No. We pay for things like that,” he said.

  Melanie finally got to her feet, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand as she faced her parents. “At least I earned it myself.”

  “Technically, I earned it,” I pointed out. “You stole it by sucking cock.” The rush of anger I expected to feel failed to materialize. Pity, yes. And something like sadness. Maybe even a little admiration.

  “Yes, right. But I didn’t have my parents buy it for me. That’s what I was getting at.”

  Mrs. Beidermeyer, who had been looking from her daughter to Koontz with puzzlement marring her fine features, finally caught up to the rest of us.

  “David? You . . . my daughter . . . We had a deal.”

  “We did,” Koontz said. “But your daughter didn’t know that.”

  With a high, thin scream, Mrs. Beidermeyer launched herself at him with the ferocity of a lioness. Her body barreled into his, the desk squeaking as the momentum of both bodies knocked it a good few inches across the parquet floor.

  Which is when the hand flopped out from behind the desk.

  Dean Koontz jumped away from it like it was a bomb.

  Garland Beidermeyer clucked disapprovingly, regarding the upturned palm and stiff fingers like a rat that had crawled from beneath the antiq
ue credenza.

  Melanie gasped and executed a perfect swoon onto a nearby chaise longue while her mother stared with a kind of cold, detached satisfaction, her ire temporarily forgotten.

  I alone moved toward it. Drawn as if through water. Weightless and strange in my approach.

  As I came closer, the hand slimmed into a wrist. Pale and lovely, the snowy terrain shot through with delicate tributaries of blue-green veins. Newly dead, then.

  Her blood had not yet settled.

  The wrist gave way to forearm, then the crease of an elbow. Then to a shoulder interrupted by the scalloped edge of a lace sleeve, across which a single lock of flame-red hair had fallen. That hadn’t been dulled by death like her eyes had been.

  Eyes once a similar shade to Valentine’s.

  The light had gone out of them, along with whatever knowledge that had brought her to this untimely end. And this time, I didn’t need to wait for autopsy results to find out the manner.

  Strangulation.

  A fact proclaimed boldly and without question by the angry red and purple bruises marring the lovely white column of her throat.

  I placed a hand on her cooling forehead, already going waxy beneath the pale freckles. I hadn’t known her well enough to have the right to real sorrow.

  “Jane?” Melanie’s voice was pitchy, bordering on hysterical. “Who is that?”

  I glanced at her over the top of the desk. “Kristin Flickner.”

  Melanie turned a blanched face toward her parents. “Mother? Father? Why is Kristin Flickner dead in our library?”

  Grace and Garland glanced at each other.

  “Our library?” The Beidermeyer patriarch sent a withering glare in his daughter’s direction. “After what I’ve seen here this afternoon, I’m not certain you’ll even be living under this roof. You’re a failure and a disappointment, and you will go to your room immediately.”

  Melanie shot up from the chaise longue. “Yes, Father. I’m sorry, Father.” Head ducked, shoulders sagging, she scampered toward the door like a kicked puppy.

  “Hold it right there, Melanie Beidermeyer,” I said, possessed by a sudden and inexplicable rush of defensive energy for my bubbly blonde archrival. “Lesson number two. No one tells you what to do. Least of all that carny-looking fuckstick.”

  “But he’s my father.” Her wide-eyed gaze darted back and forth between me and her parents like a startled deer.

  “Yeah, well, I hate to be the one to tell you this—actually, that’s not entirely true, because you’ve been blowing Dean Koontz to rob me of an honor I’ve basically been working for my whole life and I might be feeling just the tiniest bit resentful about it—but I’m ninety-seven percent sure your parents are murderous twat-muffins.”

  The room’s occupants all stared at me openmouthed, apparently as surprised as I was that I’d managed all that in one breath.

  Melanie’s blonde curls bounced around her shoulders as she shook her head in soap opera–caliber denial. “My parents would never do that.” She turned pleading eyes on first her father, then her mother. “Tell Jane you’d never do that.”

  “We will do no such thing.” Grace Beidermeyer’s spine stiffened as she drew herself up to the full height allowed by her designer stilettos. “I will not explain what I do in my own home to some ill-bred, ill-mannered, foul-mouthed little slut.”

  “Hey!” My fists found a home on my hips. “I am not a slut.” I was on the verge of pointing out that I had not, in fact, played hostess to an actual dick in over two years when I decided this wouldn’t be likely to improve my position with any of the parties present.

  Dean Koontz, who had been casually inching toward me, peeked over the edge of the desk. When he saw what Melanie could not from her vantage point on the fainting couch, his face screwed itself up like he’d freshly shat a pit bull. “Jesus Christ, Grace. You actually murdered the lawyer in your own house? What were you thinking?”

  “She knew Melanie had lifted records.” Grace pulled a phone I recognized as Melanie’s from the pocket of her tailored blazer.

  Melanie looked like she was about to hack up a hairball. “But how did you—”

  “She texted you this afternoon to set up an in-person meeting while she was here for the benefit.” Grace wore the blank smile of a department store mannequin. A shallow crease that didn’t quite make it all the way to her eyes. “It’s a good thing I took your phone away after that incident at the country club, isn’t it?” she said absently. “I tried to speak with her rationally. Convince her what a mistake it would be to report you to Gary Dawes, but she simply wouldn’t listen.”

  “You killed her because of me?” Tears welled above Melanie’s lower lids. “Because she knew that I’d stolen files and was threatening to tell Gary Dawes? Why would you do that?”

  “How can you even ask me that? Everything I do, I do for you. I always have.” Grace Beidermeyer’s face went stony as an Easter Island monolith. “I always will.”

  This revelation chilled me as much as anything I’d heard thus far.

  “We had a plan,” Dean Koontz said. “How could you divert from it so carelessly?”

  “We had a plan?” Garland Beidermeyer repeated. “What is he talking about, Grace?”

  Grace Beidermeyer didn’t seem to hear her husband, responding instead to Koontz’s previous statement. “You’re one to talk, David. After what happened to your wife.”

  “But your wife died of liver failure,” I said. “Sam Shook let me read the case file.”

  “She did.” Koontz leaned against the desk, the pleats in his cheap khaki pants somehow made vulgar by the theatre-size velvet curtain behind him. “But just like Carla Malfi found out shortly before she expired, all kinds of things can cause liver failure. Disease. Certain medications.” The corners of Koontz’s mouth curled into an exaggerated grin, revealing the edges of his horsey dentures. He really should have practiced his villain grin at home in light of his periodontal limitations. “When you’re already dying of a well-documented illness, they don’t always pay attention to how many narcotics you’re taking. Or the experimental medications. So I gave her a little help and a lot of Norhep.”

  “The preliminary tests for Norhep were reviewed by an extensive panel of medical experts.” The sentence felt cheap and plastic, even in Garland Beidermeyer’s sonorous recitation.

  “Which is a great story for your marketers.” Dean Koontz processed around the end of the desk in that same self-important way I’d come to know and loathe from my frequent office visits. A pompous, stiff-legged gait that always left me wondering if he might be trying to keep a roll of quarters clenched between his butt cheeks.

  “But we both know you’ve been praying the sale of B-Tech goes through before word of this potential lawsuit gets leaked to national health care reporters.”

  “So that’s why you wanted the case reassigned to Kristin?” I asked. “Because she is—was—Melanie’s mentor, and that would give her access to the medical records?”

  Her father shrugged, the gravity of the gesture compromised by his riotously hued jacket. “Details are often lost in a transition from attorney to attorney. Case files. Certain damning depositions . . . and in light of Miss Flickner’s untimely passing, I’m sure Gary Dawes will be willing to let you pursue the case, Melanie.”

  “No.” Melanie’s fingers curled into fists at her sides, her blue eyes hardening like ice. “No more. I won’t do it.”

  “You will do it.” Anger made the Beidermeyer patriarch’s cheeks go a mottled red. “Or never again call yourself my daughter.”

  “Wait. Time out from dysfunctional Family Feud.” I made a T with my hands and turned to Dean Koontz. “Your wife was involved in the same medical trial as Carla Malfi? That seems like quite a coincidence.”

  “You say coincidence, I say connection.” He shrugged. “It pays to have them. Naturally, when the final GPA scores came in and I realized you were set to beat Miss Beidermeyer by four-tenths of a point�
�”

  “Four-tenths of a point?” A sudden pop of joy fluttered through my chest. “I beat Melanie by four-tenths of a point?” I was on the verge of a spontaneous happy dance when I glanced around and remembered where I was and why. Dead bodies. Missing people. Big, hairy scandal.

  In short, suboptimal dance conditions.

  Dean Koontz cleared his throat, a sound I had come to loathe as it generally preceded an extended period of his self-important prattling.

  “As a close friend of the family for some time now, I’ve been privy to certain information. And if Grace chose to confide in me about the ongoing saga of the medical trial and her concerns about her daughter’s progress, what sort of friend would I be if I didn’t offer to come to her assistance? In exchange for a very small favor, that is.”

  “I’d hardly call assisting with your wife’s demise and falsifying medical records to make it look like she’d been taking part in our medical trial a small favor,” Grace commented.

  Dean Koontz held up a hand. “Small or large, it would have worked perfectly, had someone not gotten greedy.” The dean cut his eyes to Mrs. Beidermeyer, whose narrow body had gone as tense as a suspension wire. “If you’d just let Carla burn without sending little Jane here to the site, she might never have looked into the medical trial in the first place. Nor realized that there were also records including my wife in it.”

  “Greedy is filing a wrongful-death suit after I falsified the records of your wife’s involvement in the medical trial,” Grace said through clenched teeth.

  “You know that was just for show,” Koontz said. “It would have looked more suspicious if I hadn’t.”

  “Looks to me like Dean David was doing a little double-dipping,” I said, wagging my finger at him. “Making a deal with Mrs. Beidermeyer, then giving poor Melanie the squeeze. Trying to sweep his wife’s death under the medical trial rug, then make a buck on the lawsuit.”

  Mr. Beidermeyer, whose eyes had been pinballing back and forth all this time, cast an irritated look at his wife. “Do realize what you’ve done, Grace? If it weren’t for this ridiculous valedictorian business, Alex Avery wouldn’t have followed that trail straight back to you. To us. And now, instead of one dying woman, we’re accountable for the deaths of his wife”—here, he cast an accusatory finger at Dean Koontz—“the Flickner woman, and Jane.”