Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  He thought it might be his destiny, his quest, to kill her. To kill her might redeem his honor, banish his shame, give him back his place in the order of things. Right all the wrongs.

  Rolling back around against the bark of the tree, he brought the gun up into place. Found the woman through the scope. Traced the crosshairs over her chest like a benediction. Raised the barrel slightly to account for drop. His finger kissed the trigger.

  Kill her.

  Kill her!

  Save yourself!

  Or chase yourself into madness.

  What if the test was of control, of reason, of patience? What if he failed?

  The possibilities tumbled through his head like rocks in an avalanche. He saw himself tumbling with them. Riding shotgun down the avalanche. Being crushed by the brutal weight of it. He didn't know what to do.

  Kill her.

  The blonde danced on. Taunting him. Inviting him. Oblivious of him. Whirling like a dervish. The dance of the dead. An apparition in the night.

  Kill her.

  Kill yourself.

  She turned to a blur in the glass. A kaleidoscope image shifting as he watched. The battle within him wrung his heart like a wet rag, wrenching out tears, squeezing out pain. Trembling, he let go of the trigger and pointed the rifle to the sky, the stars jumping down at him through the barrel of the scope. The bright lights of hope. Still out of reach. Always out of reach.

  CHAPTER

  22

  JUDGES DON'T go about shooting women. . . .

  Mari played the line through her head like a magic chant to ward off danger as she wheeled her Honda in beside a mud-splattered black Jeep Cherokee. Townsend was the one who had brought Lucy to Montana. They had been lovers. Drew thought he had been giving Lucy money—or that Lucy had been extorting money from him. That made him a key to the truth about Lucy's death. Or a suspect in her murder. She tried not to dwell on the latter as she climbed the steps to the front porch of the judge's “cabin.”

  It was a log house on the same lines as Lucy's, only larger and with a more expensive view. The back side faced Irish Peak, which was sparkling as the sun poured down on the mountain's cone of snow. An extravagant getaway from the pressures of the bench. Justice apparently had its rewards. Or the Townsends past and present had been loaded from other pursuits.

  MacDonald Townsend was highly regarded in legal and political circles. Mari had met him once, had seen him from afar on numerous occasions. If they ever made a movie about his life, they would cast Charlton Heston in the lead role and tell him to play it as stiff as an overstarched collar. It was difficult to reconcile that public image with the image of him bending over a billiard table to help himself to a little toot of classic coke. Of course, it was just as difficult to envision the squeaky-clean, all-American public man whose wife was the head of half the charities in Sacramento as the kind of man who would climb into bed with Lucy and set the sheets on fire either. But he was.

  The question was, what else might he be?

  She rang the bell and waited, trying to formulate a conversational strategy. Did you kill my friend seemed a tad blunt and more than a little foolish. After all, what was to stop him from just popping her one and dumping her body down a ravine someplace? What she was really after was hints, feelings, expressions to read. Something more to add to the theory Sheriff Quinn didn't want to hear.

  Inside the house a dog was barking. Mari stepped up to one of the sidelights that flanked the door, cupped her hands around her eyes, and pressed her nose to the glass. A sleek-looking German shorthair was pouncing and bowing at an interior door beyond the foyer and to the right of the living room. The dog barked and scratched the door, seeming frantic to get inside the room.

  Perhaps the door led to a bedroom and Townsend was auditioning replacements for Lucy. Perhaps it was a study and Townsend was meeting with a co-conspirator. Paying off the hit man Sheffield had taken the rap for. A picture of Del Rafferty flashed through her mind, and she shook it away. Del may have been many unfortunate things, but no Rafferty would ever be a hired gun.

  “You're starting to sound like a native, Marilee,” she mumbled, amused and a little dismayed by her automatic defense of the clan. Keeping her eyes on the dog and the door, she reached down and jabbed the doorbell again, holding it an annoyingly long time.

  There was always Lucy's hired hand to consider for the hit man lineup. Kendall Morton, shady drifter. She knew little about him, but by his description he sounded as if he just might be the kind of man willing to waste someone for spending money and then disappear. She wondered if she could get his criminal record if she called the sheriff's department and claimed to be a business owner checking Morton out before hiring him. Quinn wouldn't give it to her any other way.

  She heaved a sigh and hit the doorbell yet again. The interior door remained closed, but the dog was diverted. It bounded toward her, loping through the house with big, loose-limbed strides, ears up, pale eyes boring into hers. It jumped up and put its paws on the side light, toenails clicking against the glass, and stared Mari in the face. He was very clearly male and, as he slurped his long, pink tongue against the glass, he was very clearly not a killer watchdog. He jumped down from the window, galloped around in a tight circle, barking, made a dash toward the closed interior door, then dashed back toward Mari, whining.

  Mari tried the door. Maybe the old geezer had keeled over while auditioning paramours and was lying on the bedroom floor, praying his trustworthy dog would fetch help. Or maybe the hit man had wasted him.

  The door was unlocked. She slipped into the foyer, feeling like a thief. The dog danced around her, his thunderous barks resounding off the adobe-look walls.

  “Judge Townsend? Anybody home?”

  After the third call, the dog tried again to get her to follow him to the closed door beyond the living room. He had scratched deep gouges into the door, leaving raw open wounds in the pine. Not far from the door, beside a potted fig tree that sat along a bank of windows, he had left a big pile of doggie business that was fresh enough to make Mari wrinkle her nose.

  Standing close beside the door, she listened for voices. Silence.

  “Judge Townsend?” She drummed her knuckles against the center panel, inciting another booming bark from the dog, then silence again. The dog shoved his wet nose into her hand, as if he thought he could physically compel her to reach for the doorknob. Scowling, Mari wiped the dog snot off her palm onto the leg of her jeans and reached for the knob of her own accord.

  The door swung open to reveal a spectacular study. Dark wood and big windows, a forest of leather-upholstered wing chairs, and a fieldstone fireplace. The heads of a number of unfortunate creatures were mounted on the wall above the fireplace. A mule deer, an elk, a mountain goat, several antelopelike creatures she had never seen outside the pages of National Geographic. There was a zebra hide tacked up on the far wall with an enormous tiger skin beside it. The disparity in size would have made zebras glad they didn't live in tiger country. A grizzly bear stood in the far corner, petrified for all eternity on his hind legs with his lips curled back in an ugly snarl.

  Centered along the windowed wall was Townsend's desk, a massive polished walnut piece with brass accents. Slumped over on the desk was Townsend. By the look of things, he had stuck a gun in his mouth and blown the top of his head off.

  For a long while Mari stood frozen, staring. Every detail of the scene soaked into her memory like indelible ink. She wanted to look away, but couldn't. The shock had shorted out the brain synapses that had to do with motor functions. She was trapped there, staring at the carnage, a detached corner of her brain studying the play of the sunlight through the blood and brain matter splattered on the window glass behind the desk. Blood-stained glass. The air in the sun-warmed room was rank with the thick, gagging stench of violent death.

  Her gaze drifted to Townsend again. The body was a dead husk, crumpled and discarded. The essence of the person had gone on to places unknown
. His right hand was still wrapped around the handle of the pistol that had shattered the crown of his head like the shell of a soft-boiled egg.

  In a heartbeat Mari's brain kicked back into action and she jolted into motion. Her whole body jerked backward.

  “Oh, my God!” she whispered, as if she were afraid of waking him. “Oh, my God!”

  The gasp jammed in her throat as her breakfast rushed up from her stomach. Clamping a hand over her mouth, she stumbled back through the maze of wing chairs and out of the room. There wasn't time to hunt for a bathroom. The kitchen was a straight shot through the living room on the other end of the house. She managed to make it to the sink before the sight of the judge and the smell of dog shit made her gag.

  When there was nothing left of her Rainbow Cafe buttermilk pancakes, she turned the faucet on and stuck her face under it, as if she could wash away what her eyes had seen. Trembling violently, she reached for a dish towel and pressed it against her cheeks.

  Townsend was dead. Lucy was dead, then Miller Daggrepont, now Townsend had killed himself. She could still see the look of surprise in his eyes, as if he had seen something unexpected in that final split second between life and death. She could still see the blood that had run out of his mouth to puddle on the desktop, and the hand that still gripped the butt of the gun.

  She used the kitchen phone to call the sheriff's department, shaking so badly she had difficulty punching out 911. The dispatcher assured her a car would be sent out right away—as soon as they could determine where exactly Judge Townsend lived.

  Too shaken to sit still, Mari wandered through the house. She found a bottle of Glenfiddich on the sideboard in the dining room and drank a little to soothe her jangling nerves and calm the chaos swirling like a cyclone through her head. Townsend's grisly last portrait remained in her brain, but she was now able to concentrate on other aspects of the picture—a clean slice of sky in the window; the scales of justice sitting front and center on the desk, one side weighed down by a handful of change and a roll of stamps; the telephone, black and high-tech, its receiver nowhere in sight, a red light burning on the console.

  No receiver. She stared out the window at the front yard, waiting for the distant cloud of dust that would signify the imminent arrival of a deputy. She took another sip of scotch and held the cool, heavy tumbler against her cheek. No receiver. Had he taken the receiver off the hook so as not to be interrupted by some telemarketing flunky as he carried out his final verdict on himself? Or had he been calling someone?

  If his suicide had anything to do with Lucy's death . . . if he had been talking to someone shortly before his own death . . . might that person have some connection to Lucy?

  The dog came into the dining room, whining, and bumped against Mari's legs, gazing up at her with worried eyes. She stroked his head absently and set her glass aside. Quinn was fed up to his eyeteeth with her theories. He wouldn't want to hear this one either. He certainly wouldn't allow her to nose around the crime scene. She would be summarily removed from the vicinity and escorted back to the station to make her statement with no embellishments or queries allowed.

  With the German shorthair trailing despondently after her, she went back into the living room and stared at the open study door while her heart did a slow drumbeat against her sternum and the scotch simmered in her stomach. She ordered the dog to stay and walked on into the study as purposefully as her quaking knees would allow. Keeping her eyes trained away from the judge, she skirted around the front side of the desk to the end where the telephone sat with its red light glowing like an evil eye.

  The redial button was just to the left of Townsend's ravaged head. Concentrating on the button, she reached out with the eraser end of a pencil and punched it. The electronic music of modern technology played over the receiver, which lay on the floor. Mari watched the number appear in the LCD display above the answering machine cassette compartment, listened to the phone ringing on the other end of the line. On the third ring a woman with a heavy eastern-European accent answered.

  “Mr. Bryce's residence. 'Ello?”

  Samantha stretched out in the lounge chair, her eyes shaded from the glare of the sun on the pool by a pair of sunglasses that cost more than she made in a week. Bryce had loaned them to her. Actually, he had given them to her, but she felt more comfortable considering it a loan than a gift.

  She had called in sick to work. After their discussion the night before, she had no desire to run into Mr. Van Dellen today. Bryce told her not to worry about it. Drew was meddling where he didn't belong without knowing all the facts, he said. Drew didn't understand their friendship, he said. He didn't understand what she was going through with Will. He was feeling protective of her—like a brother for a sister—but wasn't that ironic, since Bryce felt the same way? No need for a conflict when their goals were essentially the same.

  Bryce's words had soothed her last night. Just the sound of his voice soothed her, warm and rich as it was. He smiled at her with that movie-star smile, his eyes kind and wise, and for a moment her life didn't seem quite so screwed up. But when she woke up alone in her bed with the morning sun glaring like a spotlight on her shabby room, Bryce's comfort had faded away and Mr. Van Dellen's disapproval had shone through.

  Think what you're doing, Samantha! You're not like them. Can't you see that?

  Yes, she could see it. Apparently, everybody could see it—that she was just a dumb, gawky half-breed kid trying to be something she wasn't. Everybody saw it except Bryce. He treated her as if she were just as good as, just as important as any of his rich and famous friends. He treated her like a beautiful woman instead of a kid sister. That was what she could see: that she had a husband who didn't care and a man—a friend—who treated her better than her own father ever had, even in her dreams. Bryce saw possibilities for her; he gave her encouragement when all she had ever gotten from anyone else was pity or ridicule or nothing at all. Nobody else seemed to understand that.

  So she had sought refuge today with her friend. She could spend the day on his mountain, beside his pool, hiding away from the reality of her life. She could leave Sam the tomboy barmaid behind on the dusty side streets of New Eden and become Samantha of the hip crowd for a day. She could lie by the pool with Uma Kimball in the next chair and a famous trial lawyer bringing her drinks and staring at her cleavage.

  Actually, the last part made her uncomfortable, so she turned onto her stomach on the chaise and pulled her long hair over her shoulders for a curtain.

  “Thanks,” she murmured, setting the margarita aside on a low glass-topped table.

  Ben Lucas grinned at her as if she had just said something truly witty. He stood between her and the pool, a tan, health-club body in orange Speedo trunks.

  “You'll get a better tan without the shirt,” he said.

  Samantha stared up at him, seeing her reflection in the mirror lenses of his sunglasses. From the selection of swimwear in the guest room, she had chosen a simple, modest turquoise tank suit, which she had felt compelled to cover up with the white oxford shirt she'd taken out of Will's end of the closet at home that morning. In the chair to her right, Uma Kimball lay soaking up the rays, wearing nothing but the bottom portion of a yellow thong bikini, a scrap of fabric too small to clean her sunglasses with. Uma's chest was as flat as a Cub Scout's, her nipples tiny pebbles in coins of brown flesh.

  “I have a built-in tan,” Samantha said, feeling conspicuously overdressed and far too conscious of her long-limbed body. A direct contrast to the people around her, who never seemed self-conscious about anything.

  Sharon sauntered up to Lucas and made a production of running an ice cube along her lower lip, then dropping it in the glass he held. She was slightly taller than he in her gold eelskin slings. Her bathing suit looked like one long piece of black silk gauze that criss-crossed her chest, wrapped down between her long, perfect legs, and disappeared between the firmly rounded cheeks of her buttocks.

  “Sam is modest,�
� she said, her amusement as cool as the cube she'd presented Lucas with. “Isn't that sweet, Ben?”

  Uma rolled over onto her side, her glassy eyes bright with amazement as she fixed them on Samantha. “So are you really like an Indian, or what?”

  “Part,” Samantha murmured.

  “The kind from A Passage to India or the kind from Dances with Wolves?”

  “The kind from Montana. My mother is Cheyenne.”

  “The singer? How cool!”

  Sharon breathed an impatient sigh. “Jesus, Uma, are you ever not on something?”

  The actress slid a pair of sunglasses down from the top of her head to the tip of her pixie nose. She sent Sharon a look over the frames and smiled slyly. “Are you ever not a bitch?”

  Something like embarrassment crawled over Samantha's skin as raw dislike charged the air between the two women. She ducked her head down, hiding behind her curtain of dark hair. Mr. Van Dellen's words rang in her ears—You're not one of them. . . .

  “Reisa is setting out a light snack,” Bryce announced, walking blithely into the thick of things. He was unaffected by the tensions in the air, looking chic and relaxed in a pair of full-cut white gauze pants and an open jungle-print shirt. His sun-bleached hair was swept back into its usual queue. He smiled a pleasant, even smile, a flash of ivory in his lean, tanned face as he regarded Sharon through the lenses of his sunglasses. “Why don't you go sink your teeth into something that won't bleed, cuz?”

  “Join me,” Sharon countered, holding his gaze. “We have business to discuss.”

  “In a minute.” Bryce dismissed her and started to turn back toward Samantha.