Though Nash’s annoying phone calls were becoming tedious, of the two, Cost concerned Edward the most. He knew all the right buttons to push. He would play upon CJ’s sympathies, urge her to continue helping at the clinic. As if he cared. Edward’s lips curled in disgust. The man did nothing for anyone but himself.

  Edward would need to intercede.

  Soon.

  For now, he needed to relax. To release the rage and frustration that tormented him. CJ would be here soon and he did not wish to convey his tension to her.

  He crossed the grand parlor, the one his mother had so meticulously decorated for entertaining, and lowered himself onto the gleaming bench nestled before the Steinway. A true concert grand, a full nine feet of polished wood, intricate brasswork, and glorious magical strings. Edward closed his eyes and allowed his fingers to caress the pristine keys.

  “Fur Elise.” A simple piece by his favorite composer. The music flowed around him, cloaked him in its beauty. One day he would play for CJ...when he’d found the perfect arrangement. One just for her.

  Edward Abbott!

  His fingers stilled on the sleek keys. Tension rippled through his body. Suddenly he was twelve years old again with his mother standing over him as he rehearsed.

  Again! This time play the piece properly. Your timing was off ever so slightly. That won’t do. It simply won’t do.

  He played the piece again.

  And again.

  Each time his mother’s voice rang in his ears.

  A Beethoven you will never be! Now; sit up straight. Play it again.

  His hands dropped to his lap. Practice truly was the essential element in perfecting any piece. He turned from the piano and stood. He would try again another time. He wasn’t himself tonight. Perhaps that was the reason his timing was a bit off.

  His mother was always right.

  He checked the street once more. Sighed. Where was CJ at such a late hour?

  It was best, he supposed, that she had not arrived as of yet. He really did need to see to the mess he’d made in the fireplace. He stirred the ashes, ensuring they had cooled sufficiently.

  Making quick work of the task, he scooped the ashes into a container, then meticulously swept the firebox. His housekeeper would happily take care of the cleanup in the morning, but Edward had learned well from his mother. One did not leave such a mess overnight. Pride would not permit such a lackadaisical attitude.

  Appearances were, after all, everything.

  He surveyed the street once more. Disappointment began to pulse inside him. CJ would be here soon. She had never once let him down.

  He carried the container through the kitchen and out the back door. The ashes would combine well with the compost his gardener maintained. Another enormously useful lesson his mother had taught him. Fire cleansed and purified. Many times as a young man he had made poor choices. Her prompt correction of the matter had helped to mold him into the man he was today. No matter how vile or evil, fire rendered any earthly matter impotent...harmless.

  He poured the ashes into the compost container with the grass and shrub clippings.

  There was a use for all things. Some simply did not find their true potential until they were dead.

  After putting the container away in the garage, he returned to the kitchen and washed up before taking up his position at the parlor window once more.

  He felt great relief at having taken care of that task. His retirement had allowed him to focus more fully on his goals. Every minute of life was precious. He did not want to waste even a second.

  A smile touched his lips when CJ’s rented car rolled to a stop on the street. She was home.

  The smile faded as an SUV parked close behind hers.

  Detective Braddock.

  Irritation swelled inside him. If the detective spent as much time attempting to solve his cases as he did following CJ around, perhaps he would be a bit more effective.

  The two talked for a moment. Edward started to turn away, but then the detective reached out and pulled CJ into an embrace.

  Uneasiness settled deep in Edward’s bones. This would never do.

  You see! One should staunchly avoid the lower class, Edward. They simply cannot rise to our standard. She is beneath you...unless, of course, you’re like your father. Are you going to fail as he did, Edward? Be like him?

  “This time you are wrong, Mother.”

  CJ pulled away and hurried up the walk to safety.

  “You’ll see.” Edward would not fail.

  CJ would not fail him. She was coming along exactly as planned.

  Though his innocent CJ truly had no idea how many enemies were closing in on her. Circling like buzzards, threatening her future. He would guide her through this as he always did.

  The doorbell chimed and Edward’s spirits lifted.

  She was here now, and that was all that mattered.

  He would keep her safe.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Village Clinic

  Friday, August 6, 6:30 a.m.

  What the hell had she done with it?

  Juanita looked around the office one more time. Every chart she’d viewed in the past two months was piled on her desk. She’d gone through every damned one.

  Why the hell hadn’t she just shredded the lab results?

  No, she’d foolishly thought she might need it in the future. Maybe when Cost forced Shelley to take a home pregnancy test or when her period came. If things had gotten hot enough, she always could have told him it had been a joke to get back at him for being a bastard. Otherwise he might have called the lab and thrown his granddaddy’s prestigious name around.

  But Juanita had known it would never come to that. A few days would pass and Shelley would get her period. No big deal. Cost would breathe a sigh of relief and Juanita would have gloated about how she’d gotten him good. She’d waited a long time for the opportunity.

  But then things had changed. Shelley had gotten murdered before her period came, so Cost had never found out it was all one big fat joke.

  Juanita had realized that she could use this situation to her benefit.

  Now she couldn’t find the real damned lab sheet so she could shred it!

  She slammed the file drawer shut and took a deep, calming breath.

  The autopsy was today, but she shouldn’t worry. It wasn’t going to be a problem.

  Lots of women had spontaneous abortions. The fact that the autopsy wouldn’t discover a pregnancy would be insignificant. CJ would question the results and the ME would say as much. It happened all the time. Women conceived and then abruptly aborted for whatever reason and never even knew it.

  When CJ came to Juanita with that question, she would repeat what the ME would no doubt say.

  All she had to do was calm down and keep her cool. No one could prove anything. Well, maybe they could if CJ pushed the issue and requested a copy of the lab results for closer inspection. But there was no logical or compelling reason for her to do that.

  Shelley Patterson was dead. There were no grounds to pursue the issue of who the father was since she hadn’t been pregnant at the time of death. The idea that the biological father could have been her killer would be irrelevant since there was no zygote for DNA testing.

  Juanita was covered.

  She closed her eyes and shook her head.

  It wasn’t supposed to have gone this far. She’d lied to Shelley about the lab results just to—

  “What the hell are you doing here so early?”

  Juanita whipped around. Carter Cost stood in the door of her office.

  “The better question is,” she said as calmly as her nerves would allow, “what’re you doing here this early?” Her heart bounced around erratically. She shouldn’t have lied to Shelley. But she’d wanted to get back at this son of a bitch so bad she couldn’t help herself.

  And she’d done it. Juanita pinched her lips together to hold back the smile that came each time she considered how he’d suffered at the idea that the whore he was banging had gotten knocked up by him.

  “Most likely for the same reason you’re here.” He stared at the piles of charts on her desk, then moved in on her, trapping her against the file cabinet. “You think this is funny, don’t you?”

  She couldn’t help herself. She smiled. “I think it’s damned hilarious, you egotistical bastard.” The last came out in a snarl.

  “You breathe one word of what you know to anyone and you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it while I raise that little bastard of yours.”

  Fear snaked its way around Juanita’s throat. “You’ve threatened me with that before.” She stared right back into those evil eyes. “I’m not sure I believe you have the balls to tell Mommy and Daddy about your illegitimate son.”

  “Don’t you screw with me,” he warned, “or you’ll see just how big my balls are.”

  “Oh, I know from experience they’re not that big.”

  “If CJ finds out anything about this—”

  “That her sister was pregnant?”

  “No,” he spat, “I know she knows that part. Did she ask you about the father?”

  “Of course she did. I told her it was you and she’s already planning with that detective how to pin the murder on you.” The fleeting instant of fear she saw in his eyes was worth every second of fury that followed.

  “You think you’ve got me right where you want me, don’t you?”

  She smirked. “I know I do. Shelley Patterson was brutally murdered by someone who had a motive to do it up right. Being the father of her unborn child is motive.” Juanita leaned her head toward her shoulder in the hint of a shrug. “A scandal like that could ruin you—or should I say your social status? Not to mention I’m sure Mommy and Daddy would cut you off and send you far away before allowing your unacceptable behavior to reflect badly on them.”

  “What’s it going to take to keep your mouth shut? Permanently.”

  “Well, let’s see.” Juanita pretended to think for a bit. “I have to consider how upset CJ would be if she knew you’d been secretly screwing her sister for months. Using her in all kinds of sadistic ways.”

  “She was a whore. The only difference was she did it with me for free.”

  He was so angry now his nostrils actually flared. Juanita loved this. “Still, I don’t think CJ will take it well. She’ll be convinced that her sister had fallen in love with you, which she had, and that you needed rid of her. Voila—murder motive.”

  “Get to the point,” he warned. “How much?”

  Juanita considered all her son had done without the past nine years, not even counting the fact that she’d had to raise him alone because this bastard wouldn’t acknowledge his existence except to threaten Juanita.

  She worked long hours; most weeks she worked seven days. She’d managed to get a modest house and a decent car. But she and her boy deserved better.

  “One million.”

  “You are out of your mind!” His face reddened, and those blue eyes that had so charmed her as a med school student bulged with fury.

  “I know how much you and your family are worth, Cost. That’s nothing. Your son deserves every penny of it. And,”she folded her arms over her chest, “that’s just for starters.”

  “One hundred thousand,” he offered. “Not a penny more.” She scooted away from him, started straightening the charts on her desk. “In that case, I guess you’ll learn what it’s like to be a murder suspect.”

  He moved in close again, so close she could feel his hot breath on her cheek. “Watch yourself, Lusk. I’d hate to see that boy of yours end up an orphan.”

  She turned her face to his, glared into those furious eyes. “You don’t have the guts to kill anyone.”

  He lifted a brow. “Don’t I?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  815 Wheeler Avenue, HPD, 5:00 p.m.

  CJ waited in a small conference room. Braddock had instructed her to wait here while he and his partner reviewed the autopsy findings. Apparently the ME had only just faxed the report to him and he wanted to be prepared before discussing the findings with CJ.

  Exhaustion clawed at her. Sleep had been impossible last night. Edward had been the perfect host, as always. Usually that was a relaxing retreat. He catered to her every need. But she’d awakened repeatedly after horrific dreams. Expecting a decent night’s sleep under the current circumstances, she supposed, was a little foolish, anyway.

  Evidence technicians had scoured for prints yet again or other elements that might lead to the identity of the intruder who had come into her house and doused her bed in blood, but they’d found nothing useful other than the fact that the blood was indeed human. The blood had been analyzed and wasn’t Ricky’s type, but unless they had a comparison specimen, it was of no use to this investigation or any other.

  CJ already knew who’d come into her room and she was very nearly certain who the blood belonged to.

  Tyrone Nash. Maybe not Tyrone himself but one of his minions.

  While the evidence techs had worked in her bedroom, she and Braddock had changed the locks on the doors. If Edward had his way, she wouldn’t be staying the night there again, but the house needed to be secured as well as possible. Truth was, in the village, nothing was secure unless it was nailed down, and sometimes not even then.

  When this was done, she intended to take the first step in moving forward with her plan. No matter that Braddock had raised almighty hell last night before she’d left his condo and had beaten that same dead horse over and over today. He hadn’t let her out of his sight all day. Still, she would not be deterred.

  She would get this done one way or another. With or without Braddock’s help. And certainly discussing her plan with Edward had been out of the question. He would probably have had her locked away for her own protection.

  And maybe that was what she needed.

  No. What she needed was to find Shelley’s killer. Tyrone had contacts everywhere. He knew every damned body in this town. If he wasn’t the one who killed Shelley, he would make it his business to know who had, since, as Braddock said, he considered her his property. He would want to set an example for anyone else who might decide to come into his territory and mess with his people. CJ wanted to be there when that happened.

  If along the way she learned enough to put Tyrone away, too, that was all the better. Far too many women had suffered at his hand. It was time someone made it stop.

  Braddock could cooperate with her or she would go it on her own.

  Shelley had done it.

  CJ could, too.

  Maybe they had been more alike than CJ had realized.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Dr. Patterson.” Detective Cooper breezed into the room, Braddock close behind her. “Would you like something to drink?”

  CJ shook her head. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  The two detectives settled into chairs on the opposite side of the table from CJ. Both wore those impassive official faces that gave away nothing of their thoughts.

  Braddock opened the file in his hand. “I have the final autopsy report.” He scanned the first page. “Cause of death was asphyxiation. But”—his gaze locked with CJ’s—“the injuries sustained were not consistent with a hanging scenario. This was a far more intimate act. The killer most likely used, according to the bruising on her throat, his gloved hands. She was already dead when he suspended her body in the woods.”

  CJ was thankful for that. A hundred times she’d imagined Shelley fighting her attacker, clawing at the rope to get free those final moments before...CJ shuddered and pushed the thoughts and images away.

  “No additional trace evidence was discovered. Her skin and fingernails had been thoroughly cleaned. The killer took no chances. Finally, the ME concluded that the staging was completed postmortem.”

  CJ thanked God her sister hadn’t suffered those atrocities as well. The bastard had wanted to humiliate her in death. All of it pointed to her drug use and her sexual promiscuity. Had he known about the pregnancy, too? CJ rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. Keep it together. “How far along was the pregnancy?”

  Braddock and his partner shared a look.

  Didn’t they know she could see them? They were sitting right in front of her.

  “Shelley was not pregnant at the time of her murder.” Braddock made the statement as if he were making it for the record.

  “But her lab results at the clinic...” CJ tried to reconcile this new information. Shelley had just gotten the word shortly before she was murdered. Lab results were often a false negative, but false positives rarely occurred.

  “The ME,” Cooper spoke up, “suggested that it was possible she had been pregnant and the pregnancy was spontaneously—”

  CJ held up a hand. “Yes, I know how that works. But this would have been recent. Unless she’d had a full menstrual cycle, there would have been evidence that she had recently lost a pregnancy.” Shelley hadn’t had a period, otherwise she wouldn’t have called CJ the night before she died and left that elated message. If she’d gotten her period, she would have been depressed. Or maybe the opposite was true. Maybe she’d had the pregnancy scare, gotten her period, and been thrilled not to have to face that burden.

  CJ didn’t know. She was guessing. But if the ME didn’t find any indications a pregnancy had existed since the last menstrual cycle, then it didn’t exist. Shelley had obviously gotten her period since taking the pregnancy test at the clinic. There had been no reason for her to call Lusk and tell her.

  But why keep the evidence she had been pregnant hidden? Had she forgotten? This didn’t make sense.

  “Where does this leave us?” CJ’s voice was thin. She was tired. Most of this news she had known was coming. Still, it drained her emotionally, frazzling already raw nerves.

  “Since there was no pregnancy issue,” Braddock offered, “her murder likely wasn’t related to an angry lover who didn’t want the child.”