by Judy Alter
Desperate for Death
by
Judy Alter
Kelly O’Connell Mysteries
Copyright © 2015, Judy Alter
Desperate for Death
Media > Books > Fiction > Mystery Novels
Keywords: mystery, cozy mystery, murder, series
Digital ISBN: 978-1-62237-405-2
Digital Release: May 2015
Editor, Suzanne Barrett
Cover Design by Calliope-Designs.com
Stock art by istockphotos.com
All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work, in whole or part, by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, is illegal and forbidden.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, places or settings, and/or occurrences. Any incidences of resemblance are purely coincidental.
This edition is published by agreement with Turquoise Morning Press, a division of Turquoise Morning, LLC, PO Box 43958, Louisville, KY 40253-0958.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
ABOUT JUDY ALTER
DEDICATION
For
Morgan and Kegan
Sawyer and Ford
Madison and Eden
Jacob
with the hope they all love books
as much as I do
DESPERATE FOR DEATH
Kelly is puzzled by arson, a young girl’s disappearance, two men using the same name, and a surprise inheritance, but she knows she has to make the pieces fit if she is to protect her family and all she holds dear.
Just when Kelly’s life has calmed, she faces yet another of life’s puzzles. Except the pieces in this one don’t fit. First the apartment behind her house is torched, then a string of bizarre “accidents” occur to set her off-balance. Who is stalking her? Where does the disappearance of a young girl and her disreputable boyfriend fit in? And why are two men using the same name? Is the surprise inheritance another part of the puzzle? At a time when she is most vulnerable, Kelly can’t make the pieces fit, but she knows she must protect her daughters. Before Kelly can get the whole picture, she helps the family of a hostage, rescues a kidnap victim and attends a wild and wonderful wedding.
Chapter One
Gus woke me. I can tell, from the depths of sleep, how serious the threat to our safety is, ranging from a scampering squirrel to someone pounding on the door. This sounded pretty serious, the barking frantic. I reached for Mike and found only an empty pillow, still warm. Alarmed, I groped for shoes and gun (Mike by now had me trained well) and rushed downstairs to the girls’ bedrooms. Each slept soundly.
Then everything happened at once—the phone began to ring, I was aware of a distant alarm sound, not close enough to be the house system but perhaps the guest apartment, and through the windows of the girls’ rooms, I saw the flashing red lights of emergency vehicles. Someone pounded on the front door, driving Gus even more frantic. I grabbed him and rushed for the door, forgetting that I only had on a T-shirt and underpants. Maggie would be so embarrassed when the commotion woke her!
I shut off the alarm, turned the deadbolt, and opened the door cautiously, just in case it wasn’t Mike.
It wasn’t, and I was glad to hide my immodesty behind the door as I looked at a uniformed firefighter. Behind him I heard shouts and yelling.
“Ma’am, is there anyone in your guest apartment? I’m afraid it’s on fire.”
I yelped, forgot my modesty, and nearly dropped Gus. “On fire? Seriously? No!”
Behind me, Maggie demanded, “Mom, what’s going on now,” her voice echoed by Em who asked more gently, “What’s wrong this time?” My girls knew commotion in the middle of the night meant trouble.
Mike and I did occasionally put people in the guesthouse when they need a safe—or in one case cheap—haven, but no one had lived there for months, and we didn’t go out there when it was unoccupied. I managed to tell the firefighter there was no one out there. Maggie grabbed Gus, and I closed the door in the man’s face and ran for pants and shoes. It was October but darn cold outside. As I pulled on flannel pants and slid into tennis shoes, I worried about Mike. Where could he be? Grabbing a coat from the closet, I ordered the girls to stay inside and ran through the kitchen so fast I nearly missed the note on the table. I snatched it up, turned on the yard lights and ran outside, expecting the worst.
It was the worst. I could see flames through the open door of the apartment; firefighters with hoses tramped through. Whether burnt or waterlogged, everything would be ruined. And I knew enough about house fires, unfortunately, to know that they would pull all the wiring out of the ceiling. I stood and stared until Kelly Coconauer, the fire chief of the local station, put a gentle arm around my shoulders. We’d met several years ago when a property I was renovating burned. Our shared first name had made us friends.
“What happened?”
“Fellows tell me it started in the kitchen. Looks like a pan of grease caught fire. You been cooking out there? Maybe one of your girls?”
I shook my head. “No one’s been out there for months. In fact, I kept thinking I should get out there and clean it thoroughly. No way there was a pan of grease on the stove.”
“Good thing you didn’t waste the effort cleaning it. You’ll have to have it professionally repaired and cleaned now. I’ll get a report to you for your records. I think they’ve got it under control. Structure won’t be a total loss.”
It looked a total loss to me, except that the walls and roof appeared untouched. I’d call Anthony, my carpenter elevated to construction manager, first thing in the morning. I remembered the note, now crumpled in my hand. I could almost read it by the outdoor lights. Thank goodness Anthony had installed them in the patio ceiling when he built the add-on to our house.
“Called out. Didn’t want to wake you. Don’t know how long I’ll be. Love, Mike.”
Mike was chief at the district police station and didn’t get called out at night too often, so it must have been something big, which worried me. But in the last few years, I’d gotten used to living with a policeman who’s on duty twenty-four/seven. I shoved the note in my pocket.
Just then two girls, shivering even in their coats, crept up behind me. Usually by October in Texas, temperatures were falling into the upper forties at night, but this night the predicted low was in the upper thirties and a brisk wind fanned the flames and froze the girls and me as we stood around.
“Where’s Mike?” Em asked. “I’d feel better if he was here.” Em relied on her stepfather for safety; clearly, she didn’t think her mom provided it, since I’d gotten myself into more dangerous situations than I cared to remember.
“He got called out,” I told her.
Maggie was less tentative. “Mom, you promised no more danger. You promised Mike, and you promised us.”
Embarrassed that Kelly Coconauer was hearing this bit of family intimacy, I said defensively, “I didn’t do anything! The apartment caught fire. We don’t know h
ow it happened. You girls go back in the house and stay there, as I told you.”
Maggie turned away angrily, and after a moment Em followed her. Uselessly, I called after them, “You girls go back to bed now.” They just kept walking without answering or turning to look at me. I had realized lately that I was losing my daughters, in the way all mothers lose them as they head toward their teens. They no longer thought I was right about everything, and they didn’t confide in me the way they had just a year ago. I told myself family dynamics changed, and it was the nature of life.
Meanwhile, Kelly Coconauer demanded my attention. “Arson team will investigate. Unless you left grease on the stove, could be some mischief involved. And I believe you that you didn’t. You’re not the type to leave grease on the stove in an unoccupied guest house.”
I thought back to the time Maggie hid a runaway girl in the house. Could a homeless person have moved in? There would be signs, if either the fire or the efforts to put it out didn’t destroy them.
I stared at him in disbelief. “Are you kidding? Arson?” A spontaneous fire was one thing; arson was a whole different thing.
“Not ruling it out,” he said.
At that moment, I would have sunk in a pile of self-pity if Mike hadn’t come up the driveway at a run.
He nodded at Kelly and demanded, “What the hell is going on?”
“Fire in your guest house,” Kelly said. “We’ll get to the root of it.”
Mike exploded. “How can there be a fire? No one’s been out there in months.”
Kelly just looked at him, and Mike turned to me. “Kelly, you’re turning blue in the cold. Go back to bed. I’ll stay out here until they wrap it up.”
Usually I would have protested, but I was miserably cold and nothing sounded better than my bed. I felt a bit sick, but probably it was just the tension of wondering about the fire.
****
Next morning, Mike wanted to talk about the fire, and I wanted to throw up. Which I did, and then crawled back into bed. Mike went off to feed the girls and get them ready for school, saying he’d take them and come back. I drifted off, dreaming of burning pans of grease. When I woke up, Mike was sitting on the side of the bed.
“You okay? Did you eat something?”
I shook my head. “We all had the same thing for dinner last night…smothered steak with noodles shouldn’t make anyone sick. You okay?”
“Other than tired, yeah, fine.”
“It’s just me. I’ll get up and move slowly.” And I did, but while I crept around the bedroom getting ready for the day, he questioned me.
“Kelly, I’m with Coconauer on this. It wasn’t a spontaneous fire. Someone was trying to get our attention, maybe trying to get revenge. Can you think of anyone you’ve angered?”
I’ve angered! I wanted to shout what about Mike himself? He arrested people and put them in jail all the time. More likely someone would want vengeance on him. Somehow it always seemed to come back to me. But I just shook my head. Yes, I’d been involved in several major “incidents” as he called them, but most of the people who would be angry with me for those were either dead or in prison.
I countered by asking, “Why did you have to go out last night?”
“Domestic violence. A kid really, nineteen, hit his girlfriend several times, and she called 9-1-1.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventeen.”
“What happened?”
“He says he lost his temper. I’m not sure over what. He’s just one of those punk kids who thinks he’s a big power. Gave up pretty easily—all bluff and no substance—and he’s cooling his heels at taxpayers’ expense. She refuses to press charges. Even when her folks came to get her, she was adamant. She loves him, it was just a bad moment, and she won’t file.”
“Will he do time?”
“No, and he would because she’s a minor. Law gets all confused at this point. Her parents could press charges, but it doesn’t sound to me like they will. They were letting her live with him.”
“At seventeen?” I squeaked.
“Yeah, Kelly, not everyone lives like we do. She dropped out of school, and I suspect she’s working to support him. Now back to this fire….”
“I need to eat something,” I announced.
Mike made me scrambled eggs and dry toast, bland enough to sit well on my stomach, and we both went off to our jobs without talking any more about the fire.
****
Keisha, my all-purpose assistant, was busily typing into her computer when I arrived at the office of Spencer and O’Connell. She raised an eyebrow at me but didn’t speak, her way of chastising me for being late.
I am the sole owner of Spencer and O’Connell, a real estate/renovation company in the Historic Fairmount District of Fort Worth. Spencer refers to my ex-husband, but he was murdered several years ago after he had already left the girls and me and the company. I kept his name not out of sentimentality for him but because I thought O’Connell Realty sounded lame. It needed two names.
Keisha came to me from a work-study program for non-traditional students through the school district. I wouldn’t have guessed it when she walked through the door, but she proved to be a gem. She appeared that first day in tight jeans, a flowing, swirling top printed with pink, purple and chartreuse, and the highest chartreuse heels I’d ever seen. I was astounded…and hesitant, but I’ve thanked my stars ever since that I gave her a trial run.
Today she wore a bright pink muumuu, matching heels, and her spiky hair had been tinted pink at the ends, matching her outfit and her nails, both toe and hand. She was nothing if not coordinated.
“Sorry I’m late. I wasn’t feeling well this morning. Think I have a touch of a stomach bug.”
“Uh-huh. I know what bug it is.”
My heart sank. Keisha had sixth sense, and she usually knew things long before I did. But this time I also thought I knew what was wrong, and if she sensed it, it suddenly became gospel to me.
“We had a rough night,” I said, trying to change the subject.
“Uh-huh. José goes to morning report before he meets me for breakfast. He told me about it. Any idea who set the fire?”
“No, you?”
“I got my suspicions.” Changing the subject she said, “Messages for you on your desk. And the fire was in the paper…tiny little notice. Still Sheila saw it, and she’s worried. You better call her.”
Sheila was one of the people Mike and I had taken in for protection, especially from her televangelist husband and his goons. He was now in jail, which meant I could count him out on Mike’s list of suspects. Sheila was at home in her updated Craftsman house in Fairmount, with her three-month-old baby girl, Lorna, and, I suspected, with Don Kenner, her ex-husband’s former lawyer who had jumped ship at the dishonesty and unethical practices of Reverend Dr. Bruce Hollister.
I called, and even as Sheila answered I could hear the cooing soft sounds of an infant. For a moment, I was speechless, remembering those days with my girls and, frankly, longing for them again. Then, “Sheila? It’s Kelly. Everything’s okay. Not to worry.”
“You sure? I read it might be arson, and I’ve been wracking my brain to think of any of Bruce’s so-called followers who might have done this. Would Nick come back?”
“I doubt it.” My tone was wry. Nick was a hired killer out of New York who had been sent to help Bruce Hollister—for a price, I’m sure. But the Alamo Heights police department, along with Mike, had outwitted both him and Bruce, only to have Nick post bail and jump bond within twenty-four hours. “I don’t think Nick will ever set foot in Texas again or even the States. There are warrants out for him—he’s probably on some tropical island that doesn’t have an extradition agreement with the U.S. And Bruce has no money now to pay him. Nope, this is definitely not connected to you.”
Changing the subject. “How’s Lorna?” The baby was named after Sheila’s late mother, Lorna McDavid, but that’s another long and involved story.
“Yeah,” I muttered, and my stomach did this funny flip-flop thing. We signed off, each promising to call soon. I didn’t ask all the things I should have—what was Don doing these days, had he moved in, all those girl things to talk about. I wasn’t in a girl-talk mood.
I waited until Keisha had gone to run errands before I called my doctor. I simply told her nurse that I hadn’t been feeling well—stomach issues—and when could I get in. She scanned her calendar and said, “How about tomorrow at nine in the morning?”
“Fine,” I said reluctantly. I wanted to know but I didn’t. I thanked her and hung up. In less than twenty-four hours, I’d know if our lives were going to change forever. I didn’t know how I felt about it. I could have gone to the drugstore and gotten one of those test kits, but I figured another twelve hours or so in denial might give me a break.
When Keisha came back, her first, oh-so-cheerful question was, “What did your doctor’s office say?”
“They’ll see me tomorrow.”
“Well,” she said with a sigh, settling down at her desk, “at least you’ll know if you have a tumor.” She gave a wicked little laugh.
Thank goodness the conversation was stopped by Anthony’s arrival. He blustered in, loudly complaining, “Whoever did this knows about fires, Miss Kelly. Very clever. I suppose the arson people took the pan—it wasn’t there—but I doubt they’ll get fingerprints. The wiring in the entire place will have to be replaced. And everything is covered with soot. You might as well chuck most of the furniture, the curtains, all that. I’ll see what I can salvage. Insurance should replace wood floor, appliances, that sort of stuff. You call them yet?”
“No,” I sighed. “I’m waiting for you to get me some hard figure.”