Dead to the Max (Max Starr Series, Book 1, a paranormal romance/mystery)

by Jasmine Haynes

  “Testimony? As in a trial?”

  “I want to make sure I get the facts right. The memory can often fade with time.”

  “Nick Drake confessed. There won’t be a trial.”

  He breathed deeply, eyes feral. He had a target for his fury. All pretense disappeared. “There’s always a trial before they execute, just to make everything legal.”

  The words sent a riptide of chills down the muscles of her back. “And you want to get your testimony perfect.”

  “I want to make sure he dies.”

  “For killing Wendy or for stealing your wife from you?”

  He straightened, towered over her. “For both.”

  “You don’t want justice for Wendy. You want it for yourself.”

  His lip lifted in a snarl. “Don’t even begin to think you know me. I just used you to find her killer.”

  “You mean Bud told you to use me.”

  He ignored the insult, shook his head, looked at her down his long nose. Maybe he didn’t even see how he was Traynor’s stooge. “You remind me of her. In fact, when you first walked in, you sounded like her. She always used to say that. ‘What ya doing, Hal?’” The imitation was not pleasant. “She wandered around like a lost waif. She always needed attention. Constantly.”

  “Is that why you hated her?”

  There was such a thin line between love and hate. In Hal Gregory’s eyes, she saw how carefully he’d walked it. “At first, I would have done anything for her.”

  “You mean for her father.”

  He stabbed a finger at her. “For her. I didn’t love her because she was my boss’s daughter.”

  “You don’t even know what love is, Hal.” Watching him now, Max was sure his rage would never die, not even if Nick Drake was executed. She stared at him, feeling the wonder on her face, in her voice. Wendy’s emotion. “She actually hurt you, didn’t she?”

  His lips bared his teeth. “She told Bud first that she was leaving me, as if she had to test it out on him before she brought it to me. Do you know what that feels like?”

  She flipped a hand in the air, mocked him with a widening of her eyes, pushing him, trying to discover how much he’d reveal. “Well, gee, Hal, that certainly was an indication of the state of your marriage.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is that when you decided to kill her?”

  The muscles of his face twitched. He lips went white with tension. His hands fisted at his sides.

  She whispered her next question. “Did Bud tell you his daughter deserved to die for what she did to you?”

  His fisted hands spasmed. Open. Close. Open. Close.

  She stepped around the credenza, reducing the distance between them. “Will you enjoy watching Nick Drake die for something you did? Is that what you’re waiting for?

  He straightened, back ramrod stiff, his words neither confession nor denial. “Wendy died because of him. No matter how you slice it, Drake is guilty. And I will make sure he fries.”

  He’d do his damnedest. It wouldn’t be that difficult. Hell, even Nick believed he was responsible for Wendy’s death.

  Max just had to figure out how to save him before Hal Gregory got his day in court.

  * * * * *

  The sky was dark with premonition outside the two-story structure. At least that’s how it felt as Max started down the stairs from Hal’s suite. As though a curtain of clouds had been drawn across the early afternoon sun. Ominous.

  A rush of air swept up the steps, swirled around her pants leg. She shivered. Yet shimmers of heat rose off the concrete parking lot, the shadow of the tree still covered her car, and she was sweating inside her black jacket.

  A sleek white Cadillac pulled into the lot and parked next to her car. Tinting obscured the windows, but she didn’t need to see inside to know who was driving.

  Something momentous. She’d thought it had to do with Hal, but he was just the appetizer.

  Bud Traynor climbed from the car and slammed the door. He was dressed for golf, saddle shoes, plaid polyester slacks, and a polo shirt. His gray hair gleamed in the sun. Max stood in the shadow of the second floor stairwell, watching his approach. Walking in bright light with his sunglasses on, he shouldn’t have been able to see her.

  Yet like the devil, he could see everything. He smiled.

  Max was frozen to the spot by Wendy’s terror. Her mouth dried up, her heart pounded, and her ears rushed with a sound akin to a speeding freight train.

  “Max.” He reached up to remove his glasses. Max winced, paralyzed for a moment by the mere thought of what lay hidden behind those dark lenses. Traynor slid them slowly from behind his ears, folded each stem, then slipped them in his shirt pocket. “How good to see you.”

  She sighed, looking into his eyes. Just a man, she told herself. Not the devil ready to steal her soul.

  She was on the third step from the bottom, and therefore held a height advantage. It should have been an advantage. It wasn’t. She immediately went into attack mode, didn’t even think about the wisdom of it.

  “I know what you did.” The challenge was out, lying on the pebbled cement between them.

  His eyes flashed. Grey to black to grey again. Too fast to follow, she had no idea what the expression meant. “What do you think you know, Max?” His voice was low, malignant.

  She wanted to see him dead, had never wanted anything more in her life, yet she was debased by the strength of that need. Because it hadn’t come from Wendy. She suddenly wished for Cameron’s sweet peppermint scent, his energy, his sanity.

  The thought of him rushed through her, calmed her. She started again. “Did you love your daughter, Mr. Traynor?”

  The smile was slow to grow. A cold smile that never touched his cheeks or his eyes. “No.”

  She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. A lie, at best. Certainly not such unvarnished truth. Wendy’s pain stabbed her heart. “God, the men she chose to surround herself with.”

  A father who didn’t love her, a husband who’d ended up hating her.

  “I like your wording. She chose.”

  “Why?” The question came out on a breath.

  “She needed strong men around her. She was that way.”

  “Weak?” Max shook her head. “Not that last day.”

  “Because she packed a bag and left? She would have been back before the week was out. I’d even have bet on Tuesday.”

  Max heard phones ringing until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears and scream to shut the sound out. Phones ringing. All day. That day. Monday. Wendy’s death day. “How many times did you call her the day she died?”

  He wagged a finger at her. “Very intuitive, Max. You’re good at following things to their logical conclusion.”

  “No, I’m just psychic.” God, she prayed Cameron could hear her, that he knew how much the admission cost her, that she’d done it for him. Or she’d done it for Wendy, to get back at Bud.

  “Why did you call her, Bud?”

  “I wanted to help her understand what things would be like without Hal. Without me. The car needed regular service. Hal always took care of that. He took her grocery shopping, bought her clothes, and paid her bills. Did you know she’d never filled her own car with gas? Or taken it through the car wash?”

  Oh yes, Max knew. “Small things scared her the most.” Small things for which, as a child, Wendy’d received the severest of punishments.

  “How would she have been able to get an apartment, start up the electricity, the phone, buy the furniture, and get her own insurance policy? The tasks ahead of her were horrendous.”

  Max’s eyelids drifted down briefly. She bit her lip. Her insides turned to jelly. The immensity of it. Wendy had been terrified. Bud Traynor had known. He’d twisted the knife in her fear, poured salt, and listened to her writhe on the end of that phone line.

  And enjoyed every gram of power he wielded over her.

  “If you didn’t love her, why did you want her back?”

  The smile disapp
eared, his nostrils flared, then relaxed. “I don’t like losing. Remember that.”

  A dream image shuddered through her mind. Wendy cowering in the closet, praying for daylight when her good Daddy would come back. Wendy survived because of her delusions, but they’d also kept her prisoner. Bud Traynor had always been that nighttime Daddy, even in the light of day. If she’d known that, Wendy might have left long ago.

  Left and lived.

  “How long did you know about Nick Drake and Wendy?”

  He shook his head, admiration glinting in his eye. “Damn, you’re good. I knew when it was just a glimmer in that girl’s head. She was so transparent. Hal told me she got up at four in the morning, because she had so much work to do. Work, my ass. I confronted her. She broke down. She wouldn’t give me his name, but the choices were limited. Unless she’d stooped to one of the boys in the warehouse, which I wouldn’t have put past her. Women find something so attractive about the lower classes.”

  “What about Remy?”

  “I thought of him first.” He pursed his lips, shook his head. “She didn’t react to his name. Nicholas Drake was a different story. Red face. Couldn’t meet my eyes. She was scared to death.”

  “You mean you beat it out of her.”

  The look in his eye was a challenge, enough to say, “Yeah? What of it?” Traynor didn’t even bother to comment on it. “I knew it was him.”

  “Why the elaborate scheme for getting me to help you and Hal when you already knew?”

  He sighed, his lids lowering lazily, satisfied, as if he’d just had his first cigarette of the day. Or an orgasm. “I did it to bring you closer. It’s such a pleasure to take off the mask. You can’t know what it’s like to have to hide behind all that civility.”

  She suppressed a shiver of reaction and ignored the desire heating his black eyes. “Even with Hal?”

  “Hal especially. I’m grooming him, and it wouldn’t do for him to know too much yet. He’s got years of training left.”

  Grooming him for what? The question shuddered down Max’s legs into her toes and left them with frostbite. “I suppose I don’t present any challenge to you at all.”

  “On the contrary, you looked at me with those big brown eyes and saw who I was the moment you shook my hand at the cemetery. That’s a first. I want more firsts from you.”

  Her nipples puckered. God, it wasn’t even sexual attraction. It was something worse. Something Wendy felt hiding in her closet. A sinful, horrible, uncontrollable wetness between the legs. Fear reaction. Power overload.

  He’d bred it into his daughter with years of abuse, a feeling so strong Max couldn’t shake it off. It made her sick. “If I didn’t have such a strong constitution, I’d throw up on your shoes.”

  “I’m going to enjoy bringing you to heel, Max.”

  She stared, incredulous, her eyes feeling as big as fried eggs. “Yeah right, after you spend a lifetime in prison for engineering your daughter’s murder.”

  He laughed, a sound like nails on a chalkboard. “Why would I bother? Wendy wasn’t worth the sacrifice. In the scheme of things, she was nothing more than bugshit on my windshield.”

  Wendy’s essence throbbed inside her, robbed her of her breath. “She was just a toy to you.”

  “Everyone’s a toy. Even you. But some toys can be so much more fun than others.”

  She clenched her fists so tightly, her fingers hurt. If he touched her right now, she’d scream. Or she’d come, and then she’d die because of it. She understood Wendy’s closet dream like visceral punch. This man had manipulated a child’s body into doing his bidding. She’d been susceptible to him ever since. He’d played her, debased her, then made her believe it was all her fault. Wendy had hated herself for that lack of control.

  “You’re a monster.”

  He gave a crooked half-smile, stroked his chin. “Thank you for the compliment.”

  “Nobody can be that bad,” she whispered. “You’re yanking my chain.”

  “You’re smarter than that. You know exactly who I am.” He leaned his head to one side, then the other, like an artist sizing up his model. “Hal likes you, but I like you better.”

  He put his hand on her arm. The chill bled through her jacket, spread across her flesh. A gush of moisture drenched her panties. She could rush home and shower it all off, but she’d never be clean again.

  She jerked away, resisted rubbing her arm, and said coldly, “I’ll kill you if you ever touch me again.”

  “I do believe you’d try.”

  “You will pay for what you did to Wendy. I promise.”

  “I love a game of wits. But remember, I always win.”

  He moved past her then, forcing her to turn to the side on the narrow stairway. His arm brushed her breast. Her womb tightened. Readied.

  Just as Wendy’s had in the closet when she was thirteen.

  Bud Traynor smiled before he disappeared along the second floor corridor. He knew the affect he’d had on her body.

  The only thing more evil than what he’d done to the child Wendy had been was making her believe she’d deserved it.

  Max understood just how he’d accomplished that, with the evidence of the shameful betrayal of her own body.

  Stumbling down the three steps, she fell to her knees and threw up in the shrubbery at the bottom of the stairs.

  God, if she kept this up, her body would waste away to a shadow.

  And Bud Traynor would win.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The sun was down. Hackett’s parking lot was empty, windows, dark, and the street silent except for the train whistle a block away.

  Max couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there.

  The afternoon was a blank, as if she’d hidden next to the stairs outside Hal’s office building in a daze until dusk. But no, there had been a panicked flight, Wendy’s heart pounding in her ears, Wendy’s hands on the steering wheel, and Wendy’s frantic breath in her chest.

  If spirit possession was real, not a product of her own fractured mind, then Max was well and truly possessed. She went with it. She had no choice. Together, she and Wendy rushed toward a goal like that train out there on the tracks.

  The problem was that Max had no idea where to stop. She wasn’t sure Wendy did either.

  She climbed from her car, rooted around in her purse for the key she kept on a separate chain. The shop closed at five on a Saturday and was empty by half-past. Deserted. Cold and creepy, like Bud Traynor’s voice along her nerve endings.

  In her office, the fronds of Wendy’s spider plant crawled toward non-existent sunlight and water. She stroked a leaf, felt it with the tenderness of a mother.

  Inside her, Wendy was pleased.

  With the greenery once again happy, Max sat at the desk, stretched, and reveled in the silence. Pulling open a drawer, she ran her fingers across the tabs of the folders, flashes like a rainbow. When she closed her eyes, prisms of color danced against her lids.

  She turned on the computer, went into the word processing program, and started her list.

  Bud Traynor. She left the text black. For evil.

  Carla Drake. She turned it green. For envy.

  Hal Gregory. She chose yellow. For being the pale angry shadow of Wendy’s father.

  Remy Hackett. Red. For draining the life blood of the people who worked for him.

  Nicholas Drake. Blue. For sadness.

  The computer froze. Her cursor stopped blinking. She hit the escape several times. Nothing. Damn thing. Remy wouldn’t spring for an updated model. Max crawled beneath the desk and reached for the power button. The CPU beeped, and the fan whirred.

  “What’s going on here?”

  She shrieked, jumped, rammed her head into the underside of the middle desk drawer, and flopped over onto one hip.

  Remy.

  “Jeez, you scared me.” She rubbed the bump on the top of her head, tried backing up, then wriggled around to peer out at his legs. She couldn’t see past his abdome
n.

  “What are you doing under there?”

  I knew you were coming, and I hid.

  Wendy’s words, just like the Closet Dream.

  With them, Max tumbled straight into yet another of Wendy’s nightmares. This time, she was wide awake.

  She slammed the phone down, anger and impotence shuddering up her arm and coming to rest in some soft, squishy part of her mind, diminishing her resolve. Father’s voice had always done that to her. Weak. Weak. “God, I hate you,” she whispered. Her father. Her husband. Herself.

  Wendy’s office. Wendy’s voice. Wendy’s slight hand still on the receiver. Max was just along for the ride. Again.

  She didn’t turn when she heard him breathing at her door. The dragon was out. Remy was pissed. Always. Endlessly. There’d never been a time she hadn’t done something wrong, hadn’t screwed up, hadn’t been stupid. Not before Remy came into her life, not now, and probably never in the future.

  She seemed destined to gravitate to men like Remy. Like Hal. Like Father.

  Remy hovered close to her desk. “Theresa says the copy machine’s broken.”

  “Marvin isn’t answering his cell phone.”

  “Call again.”

  She looked at him, gut protruding, smile triumphant, and pinkie ring glinting under the fluorescent light. Some synapse in her brain misfired. “You want him here, you call him.” She never spoke to him like that, never braved the retribution.

  She didn’t care anymore.

  For Remy, that was the beginning, middle, and end of the argument. “In my office. Now.”

  For Wendy, it was a divine revelation.

  Something happened to her body. A dampness between her legs. A subtle contraction of her muscles. A pleasurable tug of heat. They were signs she used to ignore. She knew what he wanted. This time he would get so much more.

  She rose, looked down at the coral polish of her fingernails, imagined them a crimson red. The color of his blood.

  Theresa the viper stood just outside the office door, a self-important, back-stabbing smile on her freshly painted lips.

  Trailing Remy down the hall, Wendy saw him disappear into his office. He didn’t turn, didn’t bother to see if she did as he ordered. He was so sure of her.