The Best Victim (Kindle Serial)

by Thompson, Colleen

  The Best Victim

  The Best Victim

  Colleen Thompson

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Colleen Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  e-ISBN: 9781477868461

  Cover design by Inkd Inc

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  EPISODE ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  EPISODE TWO

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EPISODE ONE

  Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.

  —Alfred Hitchcock

  CHAPTER ONE

  The news must have severed her mind, shearing it free from her body and its actions. How else could Lauren return, her movements as smoothly automatic as a robot’s, to filling the dog’s water bowl and loading the dishwasher, the same mundane tasks that had been interrupted by the ringing of her father’s old corded phone almost an hour earlier?

  The same tasks begun before the police detective had told her…

  Stomach lurching, she forced herself to swallow. To gulp back the tears, the rage, the raw grief that threatened to consume her.

  The knife and fork she’d used last night slipped from her hand, clinking into place in the silverware basket. The spoons came next, spoons she’d used to stir the milk into her coffee, to lift the cereal to her mouth…

  Had Rachel tested the pistol’s weight in her hand while Lauren sat eating breakfast? Had there still been time then, time to make a call that could have distracted her or cheered her up, preventing her from pressing the muzzle to the silky, wheat-blond temple that Lauren had so often stroked when her younger sister was small?

  As the kitchen clock’s black hands ticked off another minute, a stark image filled her mind: Rachel’s beautiful, long hair soaked with blood, her skull blown open, and her face shattered into jigsaw pieces.

  The horror of the thought sent the teaspoons clattering to the kitchen floor. Dumpling, the plump, gray-muzzled dachshund Lauren had rescued from a roadside a few days after leaving her California home to pack up the old farmhouse where she and her sister had grown up, bolted from the room, her tail tucked between her stumpy legs.

  “It’s all right, girl,” Lauren called, though it would never be all right again. How could it be if Rachel—? Her throat knotted with the thought.

  Maybe, Lauren thought, she should try calling her sister’s cell one more time. Her last two calls had rolled straight over to voicemail, but maybe Rachel had decided to start her weekend early and had gone out to a Friday morning movie or the gym or somewhere instead of work at the hospital admissions department where she’d been employed the past three years. With her phone turned off, Rachel would never know about this awful mix up. Would be horrified to learn that someone had mistakenly told her sister she was dead.

  When the doorbell rang, Dumpling reappeared, then charged over to bark with all the gusto she usually reserved for eating.

  Too overwhelmed to deal with anyone, Lauren turned away, but instead of giving up, the visitor rang the bell again and pounded at the door, feeding her small protector’s frenzy.

  “Settle down,” Lauren managed. Her command ignored, she scooped the struggling little sausage up in her arms and shushed her into silence.

  When another knock came, Lauren called, “Not interested,” certain it must be someone peddling religion or selling vacuum cleaners. It wasn’t as if she’d reconnected with any old classmates who might have stuck around her North Texas hometown, and her few neighbors along the rural road outside of Bright’s Prairie never stopped by unannounced.

  But then again, neither did solicitors. Then who—?

  “FBI, Ms. Miller.” The person on the other side answered her unspoken question, the voice deep and masculine and ringing with authority. “I need to speak with you about your sister.”

  Lauren’s hand was trembling so hard, she fumbled with the lock. Maybe he’s here to say the call was a mistake. A wrong number or a cruel prank. She didn’t care which, as long as Rachel was alive.

  Heart racing with the surge of hope, Lauren opened the door and peered at a tall, solidly built man wearing a dark suit and sunglasses, despite the swath of clouds. Wind ruffled neatly trimmed, dark-brown hair frosted with silver, and the tips of both his nose and ears had reddened, proof that the forecast blue norther had brought the cold Canadian air mass well into Texas after all.

  “Ms. Miller,” he said, opening a thin, black leather case he’d pulled from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, “I’m Special Agent Brent Durant, from the Oklahoma City field office. I’m sorry to bother you at such a difficult time, but—”

  “It wasn’t her,” Lauren blurted, shivering in the draft and barely glancing at the badge and ID. Or wondering what a federal agent from Oklahoma City would be doing more than two hundred miles from his home turf. “That’s why you’re here, right? Because the Austin police messed up?”

  Shaking his head, he explained, “I’ve been part of a joint task force with members of the Austin PD, so they knew I’d be in this area. The officer working your sister’s case, Detective Cruz Jimenez, asked me to stop by to talk to you about—”

  “No,” she argued, desperate to make him see that this was wrong.

  Impossible. She had spoken to Rachel only a few days earlier. “My sister’s always inviting people to come and stay with her—an out-of-work friend, a neighbor who’s having trouble with a boyfriend.” With a sister who would rather sit at home with her computers, safe behind her firewall.

  The agent pulled off his sunglasses, the compassion in his brown eyes and his silence speaking volumes. Still, Lauren wasn’t having any of it.

  “It was someone staying at her place, not her,” she said. “Rachel’s not dead. Sure, she’s been through a lot this past year, with the accident, but she would never—” Her mind spasmed, contracting around the hard knot of what had to be a lie. “She’s only twenty-five. She has her whole life. She—”

  Agent Durant tried to look past her into the house. “Is there someone here with you? Someone I could call? Your husband?”

  “Not anymore. I’m here on my own.” Soon after she’d driven halfway across the country to deal with her late father’s estate, her husband of four years had informed her that there was no need to come back.

  “Have you called anybody yet? Told anyone about your sister?” Concern lined the agent’s expressive face. A handsome face, and one she sensed was younger than the early frost of gray suggested. Still, he looked worn, perhaps burdened by the things he had witnessed on the job.

  “It really was a mistake, wasn’t it?” she pleaded. “Don’t worry. I haven’t had the chance to let anybody know yet.”

  She’d been holed up in the old, white clapboard farmhouse for months, with only the throwaway dachshund and the winds that continuously scoured the wide North Texas plains to keep her company. As soon as she’d set up the high-speed Internet connection she needed to keep up with her remote net administrator business, she’d offered to buy her sister’s share of the house, saying that the silence suited her.

  You can run, but you can’t hide—not from life,
Rachel had responded. Believe me, I’ve spent way too long lately trying. How ’bout you come and see me next week—check out Austin. You might like the techie vibe here, some of the people, too. And I wouldn’t mind a roommate for a while if you’re up for it.

  “It might be better if we talked inside.” Agent Durant rubbed his arms against the crisp chill, and she noticed the small puffs of steam rising off each word. “Mind if I come in?”

  Lauren shushed her growling dog just before a gust drew her attention outdoors, where a flurry of dried leaves rattled against the dark-blue sedan he’d pulled into the driveway. The same cold wind bent over the prairie grasses in the front yard and the field across the street. Though it wasn’t quite nine a.m., the leaden sky was quickly dimming, whispering a promise of snow flurries. Or perhaps a threat.

  She stepped back for him to enter.

  Once she’d closed the door behind him, she waved him toward her father’s recliner. She hadn’t planned to sit, but the graveness in his eyes had her sinking down to a worn plaid sofa, her soul swamped by the knowledge that he hadn’t come to bring the news she’d wanted.

  She began to quiver, still clutching the fat dog for dear life. Stalling for time, she stammered, “C-could I get you some coffee? There’s a fresh pot, and you look so cold.”

  Instead of answering, he said bluntly, “I need you to understand, it’s true, what the police in Austin told you. After a neighbor reported hearing what sounded like a shot, a blond woman was found dead in the bathroom of your sister’s apartment, with what appeared to be a single bullet wound to her head and a gun next to her hand. I understand the police have asked you to come to the medical examiner’s office for an official identification—”

  “Before five,” she interjected. “That’s what the detective told me. I was about to get ready, so I can get this straightened out before the weekend.”

  “But that’s just a formality. The responding officers made a preliminary ID from the photo on her driver’s license.”

  Lauren stared into Durant’s face, cursing the cold that had come in with him, peppering her like icy pellets. Stinging her skin and intensifying the tremors that racked her body. “My sister would never do this.” She shook her head. “She wouldn’t. After the accident, she promised me, no matter how down she was feeling, no matter how many idiots trashed her after that stupid cable TV woman—”

  “So you were aware your sister was depressed?”

  “For a while, of course she was. She felt so guilty, even though it was Megan who begged her to try to make it so she could get home to her kids.”

  “Rachel was behind the wheel. She felt responsible.”

  “But she wasn’t. Even the grand jury didn’t think so.” Tears blurred Lauren’s vision as she rushed to her sister’s defense. “It was the storm. The water came up so fast.” Seven people had drowned that day. Five of them in different accidents in Austin, yet only Rachel—caught on videotape driving around a barricade into rising waters—had been persecuted.

  “No one’s here to blame her.” He raised his palms to calm her, his voice as patient as it was professional. “I’m just trying to help you understand why she might have been struggling with guilt.”

  “But she’s better now. Much better. Her insurance company had settled on the civil suit, so it was finally all over. She’d just invited me to come visit.” Why didn’t I say yes? If only I’d been there, she never would have…

  “The medical examiner won’t make a determination of the cause of death until the autopsy’s completed. But there was a note found that appears consistent with other samples of your sister’s handwriting.”

  “What note? What did it say?”

  “She only said, ‘Choice is only an illusion. This is what I have to do.’’’

  “That’s it? Nothing else? You’re certain?”

  When he nodded, she made him repeat the message, the words burning their way into her memory forever. She tried to imagine her sister, who’d seemed so cheerful and upbeat during their last conversation, saying such a thing, much less writing it before she’d put a gun to her head.

  Impossible. “There has to be more.”

  Special Agent Durant confirmed that this was the information the Austin police detective had relayed to him. “I’m very sorry this has happened. Sorry for your loss. Is there anyone I should call for you?”

  “No. There’s no one else, no one but me and Rachel. Why? Why would she do this now, after everything she’s been through?”

  “Your sister was troubled,” he suggested.

  “She wouldn’t have bailed now, especially without a word to me.” Lauren cried as the old dachshund snuggled against her sweatshirt and licked her hand in an attempt to offer comfort. But there was no easing the pain pulsing at her temples, the nausea threatening to start her heaving. The creeping fear that this was not a bad dream, but a horrible new reality.

  “The two of you were close?”

  “Very. We didn’t see each other a lot, but we text and e-mail all the time. And every week, we talk—I mean, we talked—” Lauren’s voice broke as she struggled with the shattering concept of her sister, relegated to the past tense. “We spoke by phone every Sunday. For hours, sometimes. About anything and everything. But never—She was the one trying to cheer me up. Trying to talk me into reconnecting with the world.”

  “After your divorce?” he coaxed.

  Lauren nodded, not bothering to explain that the “getting back out into the world” talk had been a running theme throughout her life. Where Rachel had been generous and gregarious, Lauren had never been able to bond with more than a couple of people at any given time. And now, both of them—her husband and her sister—had been ripped from her life. Taken.

  “Rachel hated guns,” she blurted, fury surging through her as she leapt onto the detail. “Even after Megan’s husband threatened her, she refused to have one in her apartment.”

  Durant pulled a small, sleek pen and pad of paper from his shirt pocket and jotted a note. “Jon Rutherford, right?”

  Lauren looked at him oddly, thinking how odd it was that an out-of-state FBI agent would know so much about Rachel’s accident.

  As if he’d read her mind, he explained, “Detective Jimenez filled me in this morning on your sister’s recent history.”

  Lauren nodded rapidly. “That night at the hospital, Rutherford said Rachel should’ve been the one to drown, not Megan. Megan was the one with a husband and two children, another on the way. He said no one—” She choked up. “—no one would even miss my sister. As if her friends, our dad, and I didn’t matter in the least.”

  Durant looked up from his writing, his brown eyes as grave as they were thoughtful. “Did he ever threaten her directly?”

  Lauren blew out a shaky breath, regretting that she hadn’t been there when her sister needed her. Just like this morning. “Rachel told me he lunged at her the night of the accident. If hospital security hadn’t restrained him, he might’ve killed her then and there.”

  “What about afterward? Was there ever any hint of violence?”

  She shook her head. “We figured his lawyer warned him off—the one he hired to sue Rachel. But now that the suit’s settled, maybe it’s just hitting him that money won’t bring back his wife. It won’t comfort his children when they wake up crying for their mother or help him deal with their boy’s special needs.”

  “Hard to imagine him risking a stint in prison with those two kids to think about,” Durant said, “especially almost a year later, when there’s been no contact and no threats.”

  “Rachel did say he moved. He took the kids and went back home to some suburb outside of Houston, where his parents could help him out. But he could have left the kids there and then come back here to hurt Rachel.”

  “If you tell Detective Jimenez, I’m sure he’ll look into it,” Durant said, but something in his voice clued Lauren in to the fact that he’d only been pretending to seriously consider Rutherfo
rd as a suspect. Humoring the grieving sister of a suicide.

  She glared. “He did it. I know it. Or someone else, some psycho or one of those people who kept calling her after that trashy cable ‘news’ show—” She sketched quotes with her fingers. “—first ran on TV about a month after the accident. Did you know she had to change her number?”

  “The apartment was locked from the inside, including the deadbolt on the front door. And your sister kept a broomstick in the sliding patio door for security, so it’s highly unlikely anyone else could’ve been with her.”

  “There must’ve been an extra key.” Lauren knew she was grasping at straws, but she couldn’t stop herself. “He locked the door behind him.”

  Patiently, the agent went on. “You need to understand, the ME’s bound to rule your sister’s death a suicide, Ms. Miller. I know how hard it is to accept—”

  Anger roaring in her ears, Lauren slapped her palms hard against the cushions as she pushed herself to her feet. “You’re with the FBI, right? So why are you even here, if all you’re going to do is feed me the cops’ regurgitated bullshit?”

  “I was called in as part of a related investigation. When your sister’s suicide was reported, she had my card in her apartment.”

  “Not a suicide. She didn’t. Do it,” Lauren insisted, her hand shaking as she raked back her tangled light-brown hair. “That note she left— There’s no way she wrote it. It doesn’t sound like her at all.”

  The chair springs creaked, and he rose slowly, moving as though he had all the time on earth. Taking a step toward her, and to Lauren’s utter shock, reaching down and enfolding both her hands in his.

  His were cool and callused, chapped from winter’s cold. The creases fanning from the corners of his eyes crinkled, as if he squinted against bright sunlight often, but beyond the windows, the cold February day had grown as somber as the grim line of his mouth.