We flew like a desperate bird with a predator on its trail, the road sounds changing as we sped through an underpass. A hundred feet ahead, there was a second tunnel that we whipped through so fast I didn’t notice the momentary blocking of the rain. A blink, we were protected. Another blink, and we were back in the weakening storm.
I twisted again in my seat to watch as he entered the first underpass. He was driving so fast that I fancied I heard the engine over all the other sounds, revving, straining. He sped back into the open, and that was when it happened.
His car slid, the right tires leaving the road like ours had done, but he didn’t seem to notice. The vehicle continued racing forward but at an angle now, in a line that would take it straight into the bridge abutment.
“Please, God,” I whispered over the pounding of my heart. “Please.”
Maybe he tried to steer away. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe God had hold of the wheel. I didn’t know.
But one thing I did know as his car crashed into tons of concrete, as it exploded into a brilliant, breathtaking ball of flame, was that my terror had ended, and my life—my real life, the one I was meant to live—had just begun.
My father was dead.
Tears of joy ran down my face.
—Excerpt, The Unlucky Ones by Jane Gama
Sunday evening, Mila got a call from Ed Lawrence. As she wandered down the hall to talk, Sam watched her until he felt Jessica watching him. Their dinner plates were stacked in front of her, and she was pushing a few leftover peas around the top one with a fork. “He’ll probably fire her. He’s kind of heartless that way.”
Sam figured she was right but didn’t want to jinx anything by agreeing out loud. One of the good things about Jessica, though, was she didn’t need a response to continue the conversation.
“Though, I have to admit, when you have a small business and an employee takes off unexpectedly, it’s not always heartlessness. I can manage the store alone if I have to. It just means I’ll be busier and customers may have to wait a little longer. But when you need a working body riding that mower or using that trimmer, it’s harder to make do. Which doesn’t make Lawrence any less a jerk if he fires her. Where’s the loyalty? The appreciation? It’s sure not in her paycheck or the benefits she doesn’t get.”
Sam shifted his attention fully to Jessica. “You always argue both sides of the story, or only when you’re upset about something?”
Putting the fork down, she sighed wearily. “I’m not upset. Just...worried.”
He had to admit, he was still flustered by the fact that she’d so obviously pushed him and Mila together. Giving them privacy, providing condoms... He was thirty-five years old, and his mother didn’t want to hear that he had a sex life, much less do anything to facilitate it.
But since coming back from visiting her neighbor, Jessica had seemed as satisfied with how things had gone as he and Mila. Almost. No one who hadn’t been in bed with them could possibly feel as satisfied as they did. But maybe reality was settling in with Jessica. Maybe she’d gone from oh-great-day-Mila’s-not-a-virgin-anymore to oh-dear-Lord-Mila-might-get-her-heart-broken.
He reached across the table to hold her hand. “I would never hurt her, Jessica,” he said, putting all his sincerity and trustworthiness into the promise.
For a moment, she stared at him, then jerked her hand away and swatted him. “I know that! Do you think I don’t know that? Just how flawed do you think my judgment is? Just because I didn’t know what was happening to her back then... It was a long time ago, and I’ve learned buckets about people since then. I know who to trust and who not to. I just never dreamed I couldn’t trust my own—”
Pressing her fist to her mouth, she shoved her chair back, stood and escaped to the kitchen with the dishes.
Sam stared after her. Talking about what Mila’s parents had done to her had been even harder for Jessica than he’d realized. Like Mila had said, he could read, talk and learn. He could imagine himself in a situation and think he knew what it was really like, but truth was, all he could do was imagine. Empathize. But he couldn’t know.
Jessica knew. She’d been struggling deep inside all day with knowing and doing and escaping.
Listening to the pad of Poppy’s feet as she wandered to the kitchen looking for a treat, Sam headed that way, too.
Jessica was slicing something in a square pan. She shoveled a huge piece of it onto a plate and pushed it into his hands. “Fruit cocktail cake,” she said, her voice thick with unshed tears. “It’s the reason God invented fruit cocktail. Whipped cream’s in the refrigerator, vanilla ice cream in the freezer. You’ll have to share with the baby if you have ice cream.”
Ignoring Poppy’s thumping tail at the mention of ice cream, he set the saucer aside, leaned against the counter and studied her. “You never talk about it, do you?”
She scooped out two smaller pieces, then covered the rest with foil. “I prefer to pretend it never happened.”
“Does Mila talk about it?”
“Not with me. We should. And she’s willing. It’s me who’s failed. But she’s seen...talked to... There’s someone...”
Mila came into the room, her bare feet making no sound. “She’s trying to say I’ve seen a psychologist ever since I came to live with her without giving away too much of my right to patient privacy.” She set her cell on the counter, then slid her arm around Jessica’s waist and smiled at her, a sweet and amazingly serene smile given what she’d been through the past few weeks.
The past weeks? Hell, the first eleven years of her life. Sam didn’t think he would ever forget the emptiness in her voice that morning when she’d said, “They found parts of bodies. That was all.”
Her mother and father had died right in front of her, and she’d talked about body parts without a shred of sadness. Dear God, what had they done to make her care so little about their deaths? Did he want to know? Could he handle knowing?
If she needed to tell him, damn right he could handle it. If his knowing made it easier for her to bear, he would listen to every tiny detail. If he could take her burden and she could be free... His heart was strong. He was strong.
But maybe not as strong as she was. She’d been through hell, and she was gentle, kind, loving and compassionate. Awkward with people? Preferred solitude over a social life? When the people who were supposed to love you the most hurt you the worst, who wouldn’t find peace with a garden and a dog and four walls?
Mila hugged Jessica before her small hand pushed Sam out of the way to open the freezer and get the ice cream. He was so lost, because even that brief touch made him want to pull her close and never let go.
“You didn’t fail, Gramma. You saved my life. You gave me a home. You loved me. You found Dr. Fleischer for me. You gave me Poppy. And you make the best fruit cocktail cake in the world. You’re my superhero.”
“Wow.” Sam joined her in trying to lighten the moment. “She sets high standards. If I want to be your hero, too, I’m gonna have to work hard, aren’t I?” He hadn’t saved her life or given her a home, though he had one he could offer. He hadn’t found a psychologist for her or a puppy who needed her exactly as much as she’d needed to be needed, and he couldn’t bake any kind of cake that didn’t come out of a box.
But he loved her. That counted for something, didn’t it?
Mila pried the lid off the carton, then paused, wielding a big scoop. “I do have standards. And you’ve exceeded all of them. Your tights, bodysuit and cape will be arriving in the near future.”
He grinned. “Just no pink. I don’t look good in pink.”
“I’ve made a note of it.”
He traded spots with her and dished ice cream onto each of the three plates, then a final scoop in Poppy’s dish. They moved into the living room, where Mila alternated taking a bite of her own dessert with spooning up ice cream for the dog. Pop
py was surprisingly well behaved as long the scents of sugar and cream remained in the air. When Mila showed her that both dishes were empty, she immediately turned to Sam with an eager smile.
“What did the ogre say?” Jessica asked, reminding them of Ed Lawrence’s call.
Mila pulled her feet onto the sofa, patting the cushions, and Poppy, who wasn’t having much luck getting Sam’s ice cream, jumped up and flopped out beside her. “He said I could have Monday and Tuesday off, that he would just make the guys in our crew work a couple extra hours both days. If I’m not back by Wednesday, I’m fired.” She buried her hand in the dog’s fuzzy fur. “I told him I quit.”
Sam’s eyes widened as something sweet and fragrant bloomed in his chest. “Really?”
Jessica’s reaction was less subdued. After putting her dessert on the end table, she jumped up and danced circles around the chair. “Oh, I’ve been wanting you to look elsewhere for so long, but you’re twenty-six. I can’t make you do what I want. This is a wonderful day!”
Mila’s gaze shifted to Sam, her expression a mix of relief, uncertainty and possibility. She raised her brows, as if asking if she’d made a mistake, and he gave her a thumbs-up. The uncertainty eased but didn’t go away completely.
“You’ll be able to take off long enough to let your wrist heal fully,” Jessica said, “and then you’ll find someone better to work for.” She grinned broadly before grousing, “It would be hard to find someone worse.”
Jessica danced her way into the kitchen to get drinks for them. While she was gone, Sam reached toward Mila, resting his hand lightly on her fingertips. “Just today my mother asked me if I knew anyone interested in a job at the nursery.”
Her brows narrowed. “She just asked? You didn’t suggest anything?”
“Nope. Two of their employees are leaving soon. One’s having a baby, and one’s going back to college. Apparently, Dad thought maybe Mom would step in and work full-time, but she made him understand that’s not going to happen. So, if you’re interested...”
She chewed on her lower lip. “You wouldn’t say anything to them? You wouldn’t say, ‘I like her and she needs a job so please hire her’?”
“Not if you don’t want me to. But they’ll figure it out soon enough when I bring you to work every morning and pick you up every night.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m not gonna be comfortable with you out of my sight as long as the killer is free. Even after we catch him, I’ll still be so traumatized by what happened yesterday that I’ll probably need to see you a dozen times a day to make sure you’re safe.”
The words brought her a small smile of nothing but pleasure. “And you think your parents would put up with that better than someone like Mr. Lawrence.”
“Oh, hell, yeah. They love me. They’ll love who I love.”
The last three words hung in the air between them, making her eyes softer, the smile smaller and more intimate. She opened her mouth to say something, but Jessica’s return with three glasses and a bottle of wine deterred her. Jessica poured and passed the glasses around, then lifted hers in salute.
“To life. Ain’t it grand?”
* * *
When Sam got to the station Monday morning, Ben was waiting, a sheaf of papers clutched in his hand and a grim look on his face. He followed Sam into his office and sat down while Sam set his hat aside and quickly scanned the messages he’d picked up on his way in: the usual minor complaints, scheduling and other petty stuff. So much of his life was spent dealing with the petty.
Or the life-and-death important.
He’d been feeling pretty damn good before he got here, considering the circumstances—funny how waking up next to a beautiful woman could brighten a man’s outlook before he even got out of bed—but disquiet simmered around his detective. Knowing how unflappable Ben was, Sam’s own good mood dissipated like water down a drain.
“Is this something Daniel needs to hear?”
Ben nodded. “He’ll be here in a minute.”
It probably was only sixty seconds before Daniel came through the door, but it seemed an eternity. Before he got settled in the only other chair, Ben started.
“I called the Phoenix Police Department to ask about the car wreck that killed Mila’s parents. There was a bad wreck near there fifteen years ago. Car hit a bridge at a high speed, exploded, huge fireball, killed two people. They sent me the report.”
That was on top of his stack of papers. Sam knew they were organized, from the first one he needed to the last, because that was the way Ben did things.
“The victims were identified as David Brumley and Teresa Mackay. Brumley by logic, mostly—the car was registered to him, and he had a driver’s license in that name. With Mackay, they used dental records. A third person was thrown from the car, a woman who called herself Mary Jackson. She was badly injured—almost didn’t make it. It was two months before she could talk with the police. She said she didn’t know Brumley and Mackay, that she was hitchhiking and they gave her a ride.”
Ben laid a printout of Brumley’s driver’s license on the desk between them. He was an average-looking guy: slight, five nine, 150 pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes, big smile, but there was something off about him. Even without the information Sam had, something about Brumley—aka Joshua—would have roused his suspicions.
“Okay, so David Brumley didn’t exist before he came to Arizona to live. His driver’s license was a good-quality fake. Social Security number was, too. He rented a house out in the country, him and his wife, and had been there about three months. Landlord ID’d him from the driver’s license but had only ever seen him the time he showed them the house. They paid the rent on time in cash, never asked for anything.”
Ben handed over another driver’s license photo, a pretty blonde. Just on sight, Sam would plug her as married, kids, soccer mom, cheer mom, as busy in the kids’ activities as her own.
“Teresa Mackay was a dental hygienist in Phoenix. She went shopping for her niece’s birthday present the day before the crash and never came home. Surveillance footage from the mall showed her leaving with David Brumley.”
A series of grainy photos showed the two coming out of a service entrance at the mall and getting into a white midsize sedan. David pushed Teresa into the back seat, then slid in beside her, and the driver, unseen on the footage, drove away. One thing Sam did see in the final picture: a small, slim figure in the front passenger seat. She huddled against the door, head bent so her black hair covered her face, and her shoulders were rounded as if she didn’t have far to go to disappear into a ball of arms and legs.
Nausea rose in his gut as he raised his gaze from the photos to the detectives. “Mila’s father and mother went to the mall to kidnap this woman, and they took her with them?”
Ben’s nod was sour. “Makes sense that they were just body parts to her, doesn’t it?”
More than he wanted. “So Teresa Mackay was real. David Brumley was a phony. I’m guessing Mary Jackson is also a phony.”
Another nod from Ben. “She claimed when she realized they were going to crash, she jumped out of the car and lost everything she owned, including her ID. Hitting the ground at that speed, she broke half the bones in her body. The doctors were amazed she survived.”
Sam tilted his head back to study the ceiling. He was ignoring the single most important part of what Ben had discovered. He needed a moment to make sense of the lesser stuff first.
Like the fact that Mila’s father had kidnapped a woman, and his wife had helped him, and they’d taken their eleven-year-old daughter along for the ride. What had been the point of that? Had he planned to rape Teresa Mackay? Had he intended to kill her? Was his mistreatment of Mila just a warm-up for his real pleasure in life—kidnapping, abusing and killing a strange woman for the fun of it?
A strange woman? Or women?
For an instant, Sam thought he might lean over and puke into the trash can. Whatever Joshua/David’s intentions had been toward Teresa Mackay, he’d caused her death, and he’d done at least part of it in front of his little girl.
Jessica’s words whispered menacingly in his head: They were disturbed...their own little world...fed off each other.
“So the person who tried to kill Mila Saturday is most likely her mother,” he said, unable to leave it unsaid any longer.
Ben nodded, but Daniel frowned. “Mila said it was a man. And don’t you think she would have recognized her own mother?”
Ben pulled out two more photos, a copy of a driver’s license identified as Traci Brumley and a photo of a woman in a hospital bed. The one was a bright-eyed, attractive black-haired woman, easy to believe as anyone’s mother. The other...
She hadn’t just jumped out of a speeding car. She’d landed close enough to the vehicle to suffer the agony of the flames, her body too broken to scoot, crawl or claw away from them. The doctors were amazed she’d survived. In this photo, she looked as if she hadn’t.
God help her. Even knowing what he did, Sam couldn’t squelch his sympathetic wince as he passed it on to Daniel.
“Damn.” After studying it a moment, Daniel thumbed through his own file folder for a picture. “This was taken off a surveillance camera at the feed store two blocks down from where the driver put Poppy out of the car. Seems the owner’s got a problem with kids tipping over that giant cow out front, so he put in a camera. The license tag was stolen in Arizona, the car in Texas, and the driver...”
Very easily could be Mary Jackson, aka Traci Brumley, aka Lindy whatever the hell her name was. Sam was pretty sure right now neither Jessica nor Mila had come by their names by marriage or birth. Upon escaping her parents, they’d probably thought changing their own names was necessary for their survival.
“So Mila’s mother survived this horrific crash. After a long recuperation, she tracked down her mother and her daughter. She killed Mila’s two clients to send her a message, then went after her personally. Does that sound reasonable to you guys?”
Killer Secrets Page 21