by Lisa Jackson
God, she felt bad.
Maybe she should call her doctor, at least leave a message with his answering service. Slowly, she pulled herself to her feet and wondered, again, where was Lana?
Well, certainly not on the counter, where three days’ worth of coffee cups, dirty glasses, and Lean Cuisine trays littered the chipped tile.
Her stomach still aching, she made her way to the bathroom, told herself she couldn’t let this town beat her down.
Hadn’t she suffered through bulimia?
Hadn’t she done whatever it took?
And even if she wasn’t classically beautiful, she’d been told her face had “character” and “intelligence.” Her auburn hair was still vibrant; the skin around her green eyes and full lips without too many telltale lines.
With a glance in the mirror over the sink, she cringed as she wedged herself into the tiny bathroom. Despite the pep talk to herself, the years were beginning to show, if only a little. She used a ton of products to keep her complexion flawless, and she wasn’t into Botox. Yet. Though she wasn’t ruling it out. Then again, she wouldn’t rule anything out that might force Father Time back a step or two.
But he was a persistent son of a bitch, she thought and pushed the flesh on the sides of her jaw backward in an attempt to see if she really needed to be “tightened up.”
Not yet, thank God. She didn’t have the money for any kind of “work.” And she wasn’t ready to write some kind of trumped-up tell-all book, which her agent had mentioned. She wasn’t even thirty-five yet, for God’s sake, at least not for a few more days; she wasn’t ready to spill her guts just yet. And truth to tell, she didn’t have that much to write about; her life had been pretty dull compared to a lot of her peers.
Noticing the whites of her eyes were a little bloodshot, she removed her contacts, then found the bottle of Visine she kept in the medicine cabinet. After unscrewing the bottle cap, she tilted her head back, blinked in the drops, and resealed the bottle. She closed the mirrored front of the cabinet and caught a glimpse of a shadow behind her.
What?
Her heart clutched and she jerked around. The room was empty; the door behind her open to the living room and the sliding door to her patio.
Her flesh prickled.
“Lana? Is that you?” she called as she stepped into the living area again, the edges of the room blurry from her myopia and the drops that hadn’t quite settled. “Kitty?” Where was the damned cat, a calico she’d named after her favorite movie icon? “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she sang again but decided the cat, who often played a game of hide-and-seek, was lurking in the shadows somewhere, ready to pounce. More than once Lana had leapt from behind the framed pictures set upon the bookcase, scattering the photos, breaking the glass, and, plumping up to twice her size, had startled Shelly. Scaring her was the cat’s favorite pastime. “Here, kitty, kitty . . .”
True to her independent temperament, Lana didn’t appear.
Shelly stood barefoot in the living room. There was something about the apartment, a stillness that suggested no one, not even the cat, was inside.
Which didn’t make sense.
Shelly had left Lana sleeping on the back of the couch when she’d gone out earlier. She was certain of it and remembered the cat desultorily flicking her tail as she lay curled in the soft cushions.
So why did it feel as if the rooms were empty, devoid of life? She heard dry leaves skittering across the patio, bits of brown and rust dancing eerily.
For the love of God, what was wrong with her? It was just the wind, nothing more than dead leaves, for crying out loud. Still, the hairs on the back of her arm lifted.
“Get over yourself.”
Another sharp cramp to her midsection. “Ooh.” She doubled over, the pain intense. This time she didn’t wait. She crab-walked to her purse and fumbled for her cell phone.
The damned thing wasn’t in its usual pocket. “Come on, come on!” This was no time for the phone to be missing. Fingers shaking, she fished through the interior of the purse, then as the pain increased, dumped the contents onto the tile floor. Keys, eyeglass case, wallet, receipts, coins, pack of cigarettes, tampon holder, and her tiny canister of pepper spray went skittering across the tile.
No phone.
What?
She’d had her cell at the bar. She remembered turning it to vibrate, and . . . hadn’t she shoved it back into her purse? Or had she left it at Lizards, on the top of the sleek counter that was fashioned to look like snakeskin?
“Oh, God,” she whispered, sweat breaking out on her forehead, her pulse jumping. She didn’t have a landline; there was no way to call for help except for—
Sccrrraape!
The dry, rasping sound seemed to echo through her head.
What the hell was that?
The cat?
“Lana?” she said nervously, then noticed the sliding door was open, just the tiniest of cracks.
Hadn’t it been shut?
Absolutely. She remembered sliding it closed, though, of course it didn’t latch, because that stupid building super, Merlin, hadn’t gotten around to fixing it.
Oh, Jesus! Her scalp prickled and her heart began to knock, though she told herself she was being paranoid. No one was in the apartment, lurking inside, lying in wait for her.
You’ve been auditioning for too many victims in those cheap horror flicks.
Still ...
Ears straining, heart thudding, she glanced toward her bedroom door, open just a crack. She had taken two steps in the direction of the open door when, from the corner of her eye, she saw movement, a dark figure at the edge of the slider, on the other side of the glass.
An intruder! Oh, no!
She opened her mouth to scream.
Then stopped when she recognized the guy from the bar. In his hand was her cell phone. Palm over her pounding heart, she declared, “You scared me half to death!” as she pushed the door open. “How’d you get my—?”
But she knew before he said, “You left it on the bar.”
“So, how did you find me?”
Again the slow, crooked grin. “Your address is in the contact information. Under home.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
He really was a heart-stopper with that square jaw, dark hair, and eyes that showed a bit of the devil in their blue depths.
“Most people come to the front door and knock.” She couldn’t help but be a little irritated. Besides, she felt like hell.
His lips twitched. “Maybe I’m not most people.”
She couldn’t argue with that and wasn’t about to try when another pain, sharp enough that she had to double over, cut through her. “Oh . . . oh . . . geez.” She placed a hand against the glass-topped table and sucked in her breath. Again, she was perspiring, this time feeling a little faint.
“Are you okay?”
“No.” She was shaking her head. “You’d better leave. I’m sorry—oh!” She sucked in her breath. This time her knees buckled, and he caught her, strong arms surrounding her.
“You need help.”
Before she could protest, he picked her up and carried her unerringly to the bedroom. “Hey, wait a second. . . .”
“Just lie down,” he said calmly.
She didn’t have a choice. The bedroom was spinning, the bedside lamp seeming to swirl in front of her eyes. Man, she was sick.... Oh, wait ... a new panic rose in her as he lay her on the mussed bedcovers. The mattress gave slightly with her weight.
“I don’t think . . .” He left her for a second, and she thought about trying to escape. Something about his appearance at her back door was all wrong. She knew it now, despite the agony roiling through her insides. Her meeting him at the bar, the illness, him showing up on her patio ...
Jesus, had he turned on the shower? She heard the rush of water and a creak as the old pipes were shut off. What was that all about?
Before she could move, he was back, holding her cell phone out to
her. “I’ve already called nine-one-one,” he said and she attempted to reach for the phone but couldn’t. She tried to force her arm upward, but her fingers were limp and useless as her arm flopped back onto the mattress.
Oh, God, oh, God, she had to get away. . . . This was sooo wrong.
He set the cell next to her face, on the quilt her grandmother had pieced for her when she was ten....
From the bed, with its tangle of blankets and sheets, she looked up at him and saw him grin again, and this time she was certain there was no mirth in his smile, just a cold, deadly satisfaction. His once handsome face now appearing demonic.
“What did you do?” she tried to say, though the words were barely intelligible.
“Sweet dreams.” He walked to the doorway and paused, and she felt a chill as cold as death.
“Nine-one-one,” a female voice said crisply from the phone. “Please state your name and emergen—”
“Help,” Shelly cried frantically, her voice the barest of whispers. Her mouth wouldn’t work, her tongue thick and unresponsive.
“Pardon me?”
“I need help,” she tried to say more loudly, but the words were garbled, even to her own ears.
“I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. Please speak up. What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Help me, please! Send someone!” Shelly tried to say, now in a full-blown panic. Oh, God, help me! The room was swimming around her; the words she wanted to cry out were trapped in her mind. She managed to jerk her arm toward the phone but it slid off the bed and to the floor.
Her head lolled to one side, but she saw him standing in the doorway, staring back at her. The “killer” smile had slid from his face, and he glared at her with pure, undisguised hatred.
Why? Why me?
Evil glinted in the eyes she’d found so intriguing just hours before.
She knew in the few last moments of her life that her death hadn’t been random; for some godforsaken reason, he had targeted her. Theirs hadn’t been a chance meeting in the bar.
God help me, she thought, a tear rolling from her eye, the certainty of death dawning. From the doorway, the mysterious stranger with his disturbing smile stared at her as she drew in a slow, shallow breath.
A voice was squawking from the phone on the floor, but it seemed distant, a million miles away. She watched as he came closer again and placed the vial of pills at her bedside. Then, while staring into her eyes, telling her silently that he was the cause of her death, he slowly and methodically began stripping her of her clothes....
CHAPTER 1
Balancing a cup of coffee and a chocolate macadamia nut cookie from Joltz, the local coffee shop, in one hand and the case holding her laptop in the other, Dr. Acacia “Kacey” Lambert hurried along the sidewalk. Though it was nearly dawn, streetlights glowed, Christmas lights were strung and burning bright, dancing in the icy November wind that whistled through the small town of Grizzly Falls.
Winter had come early this year and with gale force, bringing early snow and ice, which was causing all kinds of electrical outages and traffic problems.
Just as it had a year earlier, she thought.
So much for global warming.
A steady stream of cars, this part of Montana’s rush hour, was cutting through the surface streets on the way to the highway as people headed for work. Pedestrians in thick jackets, scarfs, wool hats, and boots walked briskly past, their breath fogging, their cheeks red from the cold.
Winters here were harsh, much more frigid than they had been in Seattle, but she loved this part of the country and didn’t regret for a second moving back to the small town where she’d grown up.
At the clinic, located in the lower level of the town, a few blocks from the courthouse and the river, she juggled her keys and unlocked the front door. Another blast of winter air cut through her down jacket as it raced along the river’s chasm, rattling storefronts.
Colder than a witch’s teat. Or so her grandfather would have said. Alfred Lambert, eyes a mischievous blue behind wire-rimmed glasses, had never given up his salty language, though his wife, Bess, had forever reprimanded him.
God, she still missed them both. Sometimes achingly so. She lived in the farmhouse where they’d spent over fifty years together, and consequently thought of them often.
A truck rolled by, and despite the cold, the passenger window was rolled down a bit, the nose of a hound of some kind poking out, the strains of “Jingle Bell Rock” audible.
“Still too early,” she muttered as the door unlocked and she slipped into the empty reception area of the low-slung building that housed one of only two clinics in town. A row of slightly worn chairs rimmed the walls, magazines had been placed on the scattered tables, a dying betel palm filled a corner, and there were a few toys for the little ones stacked neatly near the reception window.
Lights were glowing from behind a wall of glass, and Heather Ramsey, the receptionist, was already planted at the long counter that served as her desk on the other side of the window. Nose to computer monitor screen, Heather was rapt, her eyes rapidly scanning the series of pages in front of her.
The images weren’t patient charts, records, or anything remotely to do with the clinic’s business.
As usual Heather was reading the latest on the gossip columns and blogs before she settled down to her work routine. “Brace yourself,” she said, without even glancing up.
“For?”
“Your twin died,” Heather said sadly. “Suicide.”
“My twin,” Kacey repeated, arching an eyebrow. “Since I’m an only child, who exactly would that be?”
“Shelly Bonaventure!”
“Shelly who? Oh, the actress who was in ... Oh, God, I can’t remember the film.” But she did remember Shelly’s face as pretty and even-featured, with big green eyes, short nose, pointed chin, and high cheekbones. Heather’s comparison was definitely a compliment.
“She was in lots of movies, just wasn’t the star. Off the top of my head, there was Joint Custody and Sorority Night, but that was a few years back, and, oh, crap, what about Thirty Going On Fifteen?” Now she was scanning an article in the e-zine, getting her info from the computer screen. “Mainly she was known for her role on What’s Blood Got to Do With It, you know, that vampire drama where Joey Banner got his start.”
“Never saw it,” Kacey admitted, but that wasn’t surprising as she wasn’t into television; just didn’t have a lot of extra time. Between college, med school, residency, and her internship, she’d missed what seemed like a whole generation of pop culture.
“Wow, you missed out. But it’s on DVD and Blu-ray. The whole series, starting with the pilot. It was great. She was great.” Heather was really going now. Animated. “She was from around here, you know. Her real name was Michelle Bentley.” Heather looked up, her brown eyes blinking with the adjustment to the light. “She was just thirty-five, or would have been this coming week.”
Another thing in common. “And she committed suicide?” Kacey said. “A shame.”
“Yeah, she didn’t leave a note, either, or at least the police aren’t copping to it ... Oh, get it, ‘copping’ to it?” Heather’s smile was wide, showing off adult braces as she caught her own joke.
“Got it.” Kacey was already passing examination rooms and snapping on the lights in the short hallway. “Too bad.”
“Yeah . . . weird. But she really does—did—look like you.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Kacey said as she stepped into her office, a small room lined with bookshelves and one window overlooking the parking lot. Sleet was slanting from the still-dark sky, pinging against the window and drizzling down. Kacey set her computer on the desk, pulled it from its case, flipped it open, and plugged it in. As it warmed up, she adjusted the shade that allowed her to see out but no one to look into the office, then flipped through a stack of messages as she munched on her breakfast cookie and sipped her coffee.
Patients weren’t due to arr
ive for nearly an hour, so she had time to catch up on paperwork, e-mail, and settle in for another day in the throes of flu season. She returned a couple of calls, heard the rest of the staff arriving, and through the window noticed steely clouds rolling in over the Bitter-root Mountains.
She’d just hung up from a consultation with a colleague in Spokane about a patient with breast cancer when Heather poked her head through the door, which Kacey kept ajar during most of the day. “Mrs. Ingles called and canceled, something about her nephew needing a babysitter.”
“Okay.” Helen Ingles was battling type 2 diabetes and had been scheduled for more blood work.
“Oh, and here. I ran off this article about Shelly Bonaventure.”
Kacey looked over the tops of her reading glasses.
Heather dropped a couple of pages onto Kacey’s desk. “Yeah, yeah, I know it’s time to get to work, but”—she shrugged her slim shoulders—“she was a local celeb, and just look at how much she resembles you.”
“Enough already,” Kacey said, shaking her head, as she pushed the article to the side of her desk. For years, she’d heard that she and several Hollywood actresses had similar facial characteristics. Hadn’t her wide grin been compared to Julia Roberts’s smile? Even her ex-husband, Jeffrey Charles Lambert—oh, wait, just JC to his friends—had told her that her face had the same shape as Jennifer Garner’s, which wasn’t true at all. As for Shelly Bonaventure, the only real resemblance, as she saw it, was that their eyes were the same shape and color, that is, if Shelly hadn’t worn tinted contacts.
“Okay, okay ... I get it.” Heather held up her hands in surrender as she backed out of the office. “Mrs. Whitaker is here already.”
“Great.” Constance Whitaker was a hypochondriac who had too much time on her hands and spent it investigating illnesses on the Internet, then freaking herself out because she was certain she was contracting the latest disease du jour. “What about Dr. Cortez?” Kacey asked, shrugging into her lab coat.
“He called around fifteen minutes ago. He’s on his way from the hospital,” Heather said as headlights flashed across the window and Dr. Martin Cortez’s Range Rover wheeled into the lot. “Record time.”