It was the most twisted proclamation of sacrifice in the name of love I’d ever heard. Paxton decoded was the worst kind of villain, one with an agenda that wouldn’t be assumed or understood by rational people. He murdered the woman he claimed to love and, in his mind, he’d done her a favor.
“But she went straight to Sterling,” I said softly. “She didn’t try to fight the disqualification. She didn’t turn to you for help.”
“I was going to be there to help her find a new life. I could have shown her that I was all she needed.”
“Jane’s coffee. She had a cup of coffee that day. You intentionally poisoned her.”
“Not enough to kill her. Only enough so she’d need me.” He kept using the words. Need me. All she needed. Anything she needed. Need wasn’t a part of love.
“And Sterling Webster?” I pointed up toward the ceiling. “He’s unconscious in an elevator. Or is he dead by now? And how did you get the laptop in there with him?”
“I left laptops in each of the elevator wells. That message was programmed to come up as soon as someone powered it on.”
“So Sterling was alive when he got onto the elevator? Or did you use enough poison to kill this time?”
“Jane needed more than someone like Sterling could give.”
There was that word again: need. He couldn’t stop using it. “The only thing Jane needed was time. She could take care of herself. For the first time in more than half her life, she experienced what it felt like to be on her own.”
“She needed me!” He slammed his hand down on the counter. “She wouldn’t listen. I tried to make her understand. I didn’t want to hurt her. And then—it was an accident. She should have listened. She should have believed in me.” Slowly, his body crumpled into his chair.
I imagined the events as they must have unfolded. Paxton poisoned Jane’s coffee and followed her upstairs. Hid in a ladies’ room stall, knowing she’d eventually come in. Waited. And in the moments between me leaving her to get help and Gerry Rose coming in, he bashed her head against the tile floor and killed her.
And then ran away.
I thought about the interior of Posh Pit. I’d been distracted by the roses and hadn’t thought twice about the takeout coffee tray in the garbage. Paxton had used Posh Pit to unleash the virus on all of us. Vonda must have caught him, and he’d killed her too.
Whatever role Paxton imagined he could play for Jane, it wouldn’t have worked. He would never have been there for her. At his core, he was a coward.
“You tipped off Donna Nast to write a program to counter the virus. Why?”
“Don’t you understand? The virus was what I left behind. I needed someone to hide my tracks. That’s what her program did. She removed any traces of the virus and that removed any clues that would point back to me. Donna Nast was my secret weapon.”
Paxton stared at the ground. He appeared overcome with guilt and sadness over the result of his actions, but he wasn’t taking ownership of the role he’d played in that outcome. It would have been easy to only see the obvious grief and pain he suffered from, but there was more to this situation than Paxton’s grief and pain. Jane had died in the ladies’ room twenty-three floors above his coffeeshop. His choice to hide behind that Out of Order stall before attacking Jane was the definition of Malice Aforethought.
No, Paxton didn’t deserve my empathy. Not just yet.
“Jane needed time to heal,” I said. “Twenty-five years is a long time to be married. No matter what she said—what she told you—she needed time to recover from her emotions. You pressured her when she wasn’t ready.”
“Jane said Sterling Webster was her future. He took her from me. He should be dead, not her.”
“What about Vonda? What did she do to you?”
“I used Jane’s computer to track the virus. Vonda shouldn’t have been there. She had no reason to go to work after Jane died. I left out the back and was going to hide until she was gone, but she started snooping around. I knocked her out and dragged her to the side of the house.”
“You didn’t knock her out. You killed her. Vonda must have known it was you.”
“I knocked her out and left. She didn’t know it was me.”
“Sterling was Jane’s professional future. Jane was going to join his design firm.”
“No! The reason I hacked into the VIP database was to destroy him. After Sterling Webster had nothing to offer her, she would have come to me.”
I thought about Sterling, barely conscious in an elevator car. I’d been so sure it was a trap that I’d kicked away his hand and ran. Nasty had said the elevators would return to the main floor. If Sterling didn’t make it, I would be complicit in his death.
My eyes swept the desk behind Paxton. Aside from the computers, I saw no weapons. No gun. Nothing that he could use to stop me from saving myself except possibly an ability to overcome me with physical strength.
And what did I have? A messenger bag filled with tinted lipstick, SPF, a preowned wallet from the oil baron’s wife—
—and the laptop I’d grabbed from the elevator.
I hadn’t put the battery back into the laptop, but I didn’t need it to work. I just needed it to be heavy.
And I needed a distraction.
For the six months of our friendship, I’d gotten to know Jane well. I’d watched her talk to Paxton every single time we came here for coffee. Now I knew why she had a coffee cup permanently attached to her hand, and more than that, I understood how that could help me.
“Paxton, Jane didn’t want to need anybody. She wanted to be whole. But she did want you. She wanted the best for both of you.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me.” I thought back to that night when Jane had cried over two gallons of ice cream. “She knew your relationship was moving too fast and she wanted to slow things down. Not break them off. She knew what you two had was special and she wanted to protect it.”
He considered my words and while he thought, I slowly slipped my hand into my bag. “Jane told me she was seeing someone and—”
Paxton snapped to attention. “Someone?” he said. “She didn’t say me?” His eyes focused more intent than they’d been moments before. “You don’t know that she wanted me, do you?” He noticed my hand in my bag. “What are you doing? What are you holding?” He stood up and charged me.
My hand closed around the computer battery. I pulled it out and swung. The battery connected with his head. His neck twisted. He fell against the table. He reached for something I couldn’t see. I raised the battery a second time, prepared to bring it down on the back of his skull.
“Madison, don’t.”
I whirled around and swung the battery out of self-defense. Nasty stood in the doorway. She grabbed my wrist with her outstretched hand and wrenched my arm the opposite direction. A sharp slice of pain speared my shoulder. Nasty looked past me. A gun fired. She let go of my arm, and I fell to the floor.
THIRTY-SIX
The coffeeshop was quiet. I looked up at Nasty. She held a gun aimed at a spot on the floor behind me. I turned away from her and saw Paxton Brannigan’s body. In his hand was a shotgun. If Nasty hadn’t killed Paxton, Paxton would have killed me.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
I pulled myself up with the help of a chair. “Yes.”
“Go to the first floor. The police are on their way. I’ll wait here with him.”
“Sterling Webster is—”
“Sterling made it to the lobby. You’re the only person left. Go.”
My blue dress was stretched, shredded, and stained. My matching hat was who knows where. I hobbled two steps toward the exit and then turned back around. “Thank you,” I said. They were two of the hardest words I’d ever spoken.
“Madison, I saw the way you swung that battery. I have no doubt i
f I hadn’t shown up, you still would have walked out of here.” She shook her head as if not believing what she’d seen. “I never thought you’d be the one to last.”
It was a small victory. I managed a smile and joined the police in the lobby.
The shotgun was registered to Paxton Brannigan for the protection of his coffeehouse. It had been stored in the back room, behind the table where he’d set up his computer hacking station. It had never been fired. Had he gotten off a shot at me, it would have been a first for both of us.
Nasty was a hero. After I’d called her, she contacted Republic Tower security and learned the building network had been shut down for tests. When she arrived and discovered the coffeehouse had an open network, she went to investigate. Paxton Brannigan’s only connection to DIDI and VIP was proximity, but he’d used that proximity to manipulate everyone involved in the competition in a twisted effort to win Jane’s heart.
Paxton hadn’t lived to tell us that much, but it was pieced together based on information a team of computer specialists pulled off his network. The origins of the personality virus were there as well, as were floor plans for all thirty-four floors of Republic Tower.
The technicians found one more thing: instructions for how to build a bomb that would level the building. Paxton’s plans involved more than just hacking into a design competition and manipulating Jane’s chances at success. He wanted to destroy everything she valued so the only thing left would be him. Steel girders wouldn’t have stabilized his instability.
The lilac roses I’d seen on the desk at Posh Pit had been sent by Sterling Webster. When he regained consciousness, he told police to look for an accompanying card that welcomed her to his team. He hadn’t known of Jane and my falling out, and when she agreed to work for him, he had hoped I’d fall in line. The flowers he sent me were his way of softening me up.
Clearly, Sterling didn’t know me at all. I’m more of a daisy kind of gal.
Sterling made one more confession. He didn’t think the police were on the right track. Jane had been murdered in the ladies’ room, and despite the sign on the door, he wanted to see it for himself and try to establish a theory. He hid when I came in and would have left after I left if I hadn’t confronted the closed door.
A week had passed. In light of Paxton’s actions, the DIDI offices postponed the judging of VIP for one week, allowing all of us a chance to finish what we started. It was the first week in October, a week that, six months ago, felt far in my future. It was my deadline for making a decision between Hudson and Tex, though when I drove past Hudson’s house and saw the For Rent sign in the yard, the decision felt anticlimactic. I’d be lying if I claimed not to care.
Even though I’d made my decision, neither Tex nor I (nor the rest of my VIP team) spoke of it. I spent one night in the hospital and another in my bed while Rocky bunked with his pal Wojciehowicz. When I showed up at the apartment building on Gaston Avenue, to help put the finishing touches on the Mad for Mod entry to the Very Important Projects contest before the judges arrived, I knew we had a real shot of winning.
And we did.
The front yard had been assembled per my sketch. Yellow stones, blue-green grass, and cherry-red impatiens created a patchwork quilt to set off the newly power-washed building exterior. The white brick was accented with colorful shutters in the same colors—all of which matched the interior rooms. White decorative breeze blocks had been mortared into four-foot tall walls on either side of the front door, behind which were beds of turquoise sand that closely matched the Cool Cat paint inside.
I stood back on the sidewalk while my team celebrated. One member was missing, but only because the police force waits for no one. As Effie popped a bottle of champagne and filled the latest round of mid-century modern glassware the Bickners had sold me before heading out on their anniversary cruise with their family, one overriding thought filled my mind.
Maybe collaborating with friends wasn’t so bad after all.
Epilogue
One week later, dressed in a red turtleneck, red pull-on stirrup pants from Thelma Johnson’s own closet, and the vintage baseball jersey Tex had given me, I stood in the security line outside the Texas Rangers’ stadium. An employee waved me forward. I walked through the security scanner and an alarm bell rang on the other side.
I’d anticipated as much. My knee had been injured and healed too many times to ever make a full recovery, and the metal knee brace under my knit pants was a part of my life. Nerves over a date with Tex had made me forget about my handicap until now. I turned back toward Tex, who was standing on the other side of the scanner.
“I’m not perfect,” I said. I knocked on the metal brace. “I’m part bionic. And the part that’s not bionic is equal parts angry and afraid. Are you sure about this?”
Tex held my stare for a moment. Was he seeing the reality of dating me for the first time? He pulled his shirttails up to expose his chest and stomach. His abdomen held a four-inch horizontal scar and a six-inch vertical scar. There was a small cluster of puncture wounds over his left pec.
He pointed to the scar on his right side. “Appendix. Fourteen years old.” He pointed to the vertical scar. “Knife. Twenty-first birthday.”
I left the scanner and pointed to the cluster of scars on his chest.
“Badge and medals on my uniform. Sometimes people like to hug cops.”
“Are you saying I’m weird because I’m not a hugger?” I asked.
“I’m saying you’re not the only one here with battle wounds.” He put his hand behind my neck and kissed me. Stadium security and fellow baseball fans all melted away into the background, and for the tiniest moment, I had absolutely no idea where my future was headed.
It felt great. Like a bright, sunny day.
About the Author
After two decades working for a top luxury retailer, Diane Vallere traded fashion accessories for accessories to murder. The Pajama Frame, #5 in her Madison Night Mad for Mod Mystery Series, came out February 2018. She also writes the Samantha Kidd, Lefty Award-nominated Material Witness and Costume Shop, and Sylvia Stryker Outer Space mysteries. She started her own detective agency at age ten and has maintained a passion for shoes, clues, and clothes ever since.
The Madison Night Mystery Series
by Diane Vallere
PILLOW STALK (#1)
THAT TOUCH OF INK (#2)
WITH VICS YOU GET EGGROLL (#3)
THE DECORATOR WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (#4)
THE PAJAMA FRAME (#5)
LOVER COME HACK (#6)
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LOVER COME HACK Page 22