A Darling of Death

by Gin Jones

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  A DARLING OF DEATH

  by

  GIN JONES

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  Copyright © 2017 by Gin Jones

  Gemma Halliday Publishing

  http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  This book is dedicated to my other nieces and nephews, Sarah, Nick, Aaron, and Gillian, who also have all of the good qualities of Helen's nieces but none of their annoying ones.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Helen Binney wanted to hit something. Punch, kick, or stomp something.

  In fact, somewhere deep inside, where her darkest thoughts were hidden even from herself most of the time, she wanted to hit someone, and she didn't much care who it was.

  For some people, that might not have been so unusual, but Helen had never been inclined to violence before. She'd always been a firm believer in the power of rational argument and civilized discussions. Besides, even if she'd wanted to get into fights, she'd always been short and small-boned, with little noticeable muscle, making her far more suited for verbal tussles than physical ones.

  Helen was tempted to blame the weather for her bad mood. It had been particularly hot and humid recently, leading to reports of road rage. Helen didn't think that was the main cause of her own violent inclinations, though. Having to retire in her forties due to lupus flares had made her somewhat cranky for the last three or four years, but she'd grown accustomed to a certain baseline level of irritability.

  What worried her was that it had increased exponentially in the past few weeks, leading her to believe the real cause was the month she'd spent in Boston, undergoing seemingly endless tests and medical consultations in the search for better control of her lupus symptoms. She wouldn't have minded the experience so much if she'd actually gotten some concrete answers for her treatment. Instead, she'd had to return to her cozy little cottage in the little town of Wharton, in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, without any real plan of action.

  She would never understand how, with an estimated five million people affected by the condition worldwide, it was possible that medical science hadn't yet figured out how to fix it. Just thinking about all her unanswerable medical questions left her itching for a fight.

  At the moment, Helen was particularly annoyed with Ambrose Tate, her ex-lawyer and current significant other. It didn't help that she knew her irritation with him wasn't even remotely his fault. After all, he'd only been doing what she'd asked of him, staying here in Wharton, while she'd been living with her city-dwelling niece, Lily Binney, for the duration of the testing. Tate had made the two-hour drive to Boston twice during the month Helen had been there, and she was quite irrationally irritated with him, both because he hadn't visited more often and, in equal measure, because he'd visited at all, when she'd asked him not to.

  Helen was used to getting annoyed when people did well-intentioned but unhelpful things that complicated her already challenging life. What she wasn't used to was doing foolish, unhelpful things herself. Taking out her bad mood on Tate didn't do anyone any good.

  This morning Tate had sent her a brief text that had struck her as a very lawyer-like non-apology for some unspecified transgression. Probably because he'd realized she was upset with him, had no idea why, but was willing to take the blame. When even that had irritated her, Helen had realized she was out of control, and it was more than time to take some action to get over her bad mood. She couldn't do anything about the unpleasant weather, and she couldn't do anything to get medical answers that just didn't exist, but she could do something about how she responded to those stimuli.

  She'd called her driver, Jack Clary, to arrange to get her out of her isolated cottage where even her cat, Vicky, was hiding from Helen's bad mood. When she heard his truck coming up her gravel driveway, she grabbed her cane and the small backpack she'd filled earlier with what she was going to need today and headed outside. By the time she closed the door behind her, Jack had already parked his vehicle, climbed into her Subaru Forester, and turned it around to wait for her at the end of the front path.

  Jack was a wiry, bald, middle-aged man who'd worked for a local luxury-car service when Helen had first moved to Wharton. During her years as the wife of the state's governor, she'd been chauffeured everywhere, and then after her divorce and worsening lupus flares, she'd decided it would be safer for everyone if she didn't get behind the wheel. They'd become friends over the course of her investigation of the death of her visiting nurse, and now he was her on-call driver whenever he wasn't in too much demand as the maker of custom clay avatars for gamers. In Jack's original job, he'd worn an official uniform, often complete with a driving hat and gloves, but these days he generally stuck to business casual sport shirts and khaki pants. The only trace of his previous formality was his insistence on calling her "Ms. Binney" despite frequent reminders that he was welcome to use her first name.

  Later, Helen planned to stop by the exotic lumber warehouse to pick up an apology gift for Tate, but for now, her destination was the Zubov House of Sambo. She was determined to find a better way to work out her frustrations than sniping at her friends. Learning a martial art seemed like just the thing.

  Helen had to give Jack credit for not arguing with her about her plans for the day. He simply said, "Anything you want, Ms. Binney," and set the car in motion down her long, gravel driveway.

  The Zubov House of Sambo occupied a rectangular, two-story warehouse building. The side that faced the street was far from impressive, with nothing but a pair of loading docks and a sign that indicated the entrance was around the corner on the longer wall that ran perpendicular to the street. That facade wasn't much more interesting, just an expanse of plain metal siding interrupted only by a row of transom windows just below the eave and a pair of glass doors near the far end.

  The place must have employed quite a few people when it had been used as a warehouse, because the parking lot could have held at least a hundred cars. At the moment, though, there were only four parked vehicles. One was a van Helen recognized as belonging to Marty Reed, who'd installed the security system in her cottage. Two of the others probably belonged to the staff, since they were parked a considerable distance from the building, leaving the prime spots for customers.

  A little red Mazda Miata had entered the lot just in front of Helen's more sedate Subaru. Jack followed the other car at a slow, safe distance while it zipped into the closest space to the front door, not counting the three with handicapped-only signs. As Jack came even with the parked Miata, Helen watched a woman with spiky, short hair almost the same color as her car jump out of the little convertible. The woman snagged a battered gym bag from the passen
ger seat and raced for the front door.

  Helen had barely had time to remember wistfully that once she too could have been that quick and nimble getting out of a vehicle—although she'd never been quite that perky and didn't aspire to be; it would only have exhausted her and probably annoyed Tate—when there was a loud, metallic crunch. Her airbag deployed, smashing into her upper body and face.

  She wasn't physically dazed, just so startled that it took a moment to realize what had happened. A pickup truck had slammed into the front driver's side of her car.

  Jack muttered something short and sharp under his breath before turning to Helen. "Are you okay, Ms. Binney?"

  "I'm fine." She'd been so distracted by her thoughts that she hadn't seen the oncoming vehicle in time to tense up in anticipation, so while she'd been startled by the impact and the airbags, she was unhurt. Jack was more likely to have tensed up enough to feel sore later. "What about you?"

  He cautiously pushed his airbag more fully out of his way before rolling his neck and then his shoulders. "I'll be okay. Nothing permanently wrong."

  He gestured through the windshield at the man who was climbing out of a truck with Taylor Electrical painted on the door. At first, only the man's head was visible through the window. Based on what little she could see—a little head overshadowed by thick, dark, shoulder-length brown hair, and smaller-than-average hands gripping the edge of the window frame—he appeared to be even more petite than Helen was. But then he emerged from behind the door, slamming it shut, and she could see that the rest of him more than compensated for what appeared to be a particularly thin and narrow skeleton. He was so bulked up that his neck was larger in circumference than his head, and the muscles exposed by his purple tank top—emblazoned, like the truck, with his employer's name—were impossibly huge for such a small bone structure.

  The man began alternately kicking his truck's tires, pounding on the hood, and yelling obscenities in the general direction of the Subaru.

  Jack remained in his seat, apparently unmoved by the swearing. He'd probably heard worse during his many years as a chauffeur. "That guy looks like he's going to have a heart attack. Just like some of my passengers before I started working for you. Any little problem, and they'd be turning red, and their neck veins would be bulging."

  "Even when the problem was their own fault?" Helen might not drive these days, but she did know the rules for who had the right of way. The truck had been turning left in front of them and was clearly at fault here.

  Since the man was too busy having a temper tantrum to call 9-1-1, and Jack had a bit of a difficult history with the local police, Helen pushed the airbag out of her way and bent forward to retrieve her phone. For a moment, she thought she might have forgotten to transfer it from her yarn bag when she'd filled the small backpack this morning.

  Helen would have expected the other driver's outbursts to have abated by the time she'd finished talking to the police dispatcher, but he was still going strong. If anything, he'd ratcheted his tantrum up a notch, racing around the back of the truck occasionally to taunt Jack with invitations to "take it outside," apparently not noticing that he was already in a parking lot without any shelter from the hot summer sun.

  Helen was torn between being impressed with the man's stamina and worrying that, if this man was representative of the Zubov House of Sambo students, learning a martial art might not be the best means for controlling her urge to hit something.

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  Jack suggested that Helen go on inside while he waited for the police, but she could hear the anxiety in his voice. He'd be less nervous if she stayed with him. Jack was a good man, but some members of the Wharton Police Department had preconceived notions about anyone with the last name of Clary. Admittedly, there were some less-than-law-abiding Clarys—Tate had kept quite a few of them out of jail before he'd retired—and Jack himself had done some foolish things in the past, which hadn't endeared him to the cops.

  She decided to wait in the car, just until she was sure no one would blame Jack for an accident that clearly hadn't been his fault. After all, her trip to the Zubov House of Sambo had been a spur-of-the-moment decision this morning, so it wasn't as if she had a specific appointment for her foray into the martial arts.

  As it turned out, Helen needn't have worried. The responding officer was Eleanor Almeida, a tall, solid-looking black woman in her late twenties. Instead of a uniform, she wore a white blouse with a severe navy pants suit that had looked stiff and costume-like when Helen had first met her last fall, but was looking more natural on her now that she'd grown more accustomed to her plain-clothes job as a detective. She'd let her hair grow out a bit more naturally too, instead of being the highly stylized helmet it had been when they'd first met at a mansion that had been the site of a murder.

  Almeida glared at the pickup's driver. It took a few seconds for him to settle down, but then he did stop shouting and kicking tires. Only then did the detective talk to him briefly, indicating he should have a seat in the truck's cab. Then she returned to where Jack had rolled down his window. She peered inside. "Do either of you need medical attention?"

  "I'm fine," Jack and Helen said in unison.

  Almeida gave Jack a once-over and then gave Helen a slower visual inspection. "Are you sure?"

  Helen nodded. "Shouldn't you be dealing with something bigger than a minor fender-bender?" The woman was a junior detective, after all, usually shadowing the Wharton Police Department's chief detective, Hank Peterson, around serious crime scenes or working her own assignments involving domestic violence.

  Almeida smiled wryly. "It wouldn't be wise for me to admit I sometimes wish there was something bigger going on, would it? The whole point of my job is to keep the peace, after all. But the fact is, there hasn't been much in the way of serious crime since Sheryl Toth's murder a few months ago. Even the work I do as the domestic violence officer has been slow recently, although that's likely to change with all this hot weather. It makes everyone cranky. But for now, I've been temporarily assigned as a floater, filling in as needed. Today, it's responding to minor motor vehicle accidents."

  "You knew Wharton was a small town when you applied for the job here," Helen said. "You can't expect there to be a murder or other major crime case every week."

  "I know." Almeida turned to glare at the driver of the truck, who had begun pounding his almost child-sized fist against his dashboard. She waited for him to settle down again before saying, "And trust me, I'm grateful for that. I really don't want anyone hurt or otherwise victimized. Besides, as long as I'm working as a floater, I don't have to run interference between my boss and the citizens he irritates."

  Another thud came from inside the truck. The man's tiny hands were in clear view, crossed over his bulky chest, so he must have resorted to kicking, where the movement would have been out of Almeida's sight.

  "I understand," Helen said. "I can't imagine there's a whole lot of job satisfaction in taking down he-said/she-said reports. Especially since you still have to deal with difficult people, like that driver and his road rage."

  Almeida shrugged. "Yeah, but at least I can toss this guy in jail if he really annoys me. I can't do that to my senior officer."

  CHAPTER TWO

  No longer worried that her driver would be treated unfairly, Helen grabbed her little backpack and left Jack to deal with the police report. The intense sun fell directly on the entrance to the martial arts studio, creating glare that prevented her from seeing through the double glass doors. She opened them with a bit of trepidation, feeling even more self-conscious about her cane than usual. Everyone inside would be in far better physical shape than she was. She'd only recently taken up some light gardening, but other than that, she'd been unable to do much physical activity in the last few years. She'd hoped that her recent stay in Boston for medical tests and consultations would have enabled better management of her lupus symptoms, but so far, that hadn't happened. Her hip was still unreliable, and it would ha
ve been foolish to risk a serious fall by giving in to vanity and pretending she didn't really need the security of her cane.

  The interior of the studio was cavernous, extending about a hundred feet from front to back and a bit more than that in width. To her immediate left, what looked like a newly constructed and freshly painted wall ran the full length of that side of the building, carving out an area for office and locker space, and leaving the rest of the space wide open. To the far right, where the old loading dock doors dominated the wall opposite the office and locker space, there was a collection of exercise equipment, including the punching bag Helen had been hoping to use. She thought she recognized Marty Reed using some of the free weights there with another man she didn't know as his spotter.

  The remainder of the interior was nothing but open space that served to emphasize the absence of customers. The rubber floor held an assortment of thick square mats in a variety of colors to delineate separate activity areas, none of which were in use.

  About halfway down the left wall was an opening that, according to a free-standing sign, led to offices and locker rooms. The owner, Kolya Zubov, stood in the opening with his arms crossed over his chest. His eyes were half closed, and he was motionless enough that anyone who didn't know him might suspect he was asleep on his feet. Helen had met him before, though, and was fairly certain he was keeping a diligent, if non-intrusive, watch over the two men using free weights.

  Kolya was a solemn, gray-haired man in his fifties. He wore tight-fitting jeans with an equally clingy ash-colored tank top that revealed muscles that would have made a man half his age jealous, but looked far more natural on him than the musculature on the pickup truck driver outside. Kolya's shirt was printed with the same text as the sign outside: "House of Sambo" beneath Cyrillic letters that Helen assumed spelled out "Zubov."