by Dana Moss
Anya threw her head back and laughed. “No. She hates men as much as I do.”
Taffy thought back to her entourage at the gala. “I disagree. She seems able to wrap them around her seductive pinky finger.”
Anya’s lips flattened into a sharp line. “She only pretends. For the money.”
“And she was married to Blake, who had… issues.”
Anya’s cheeks flushed. She tried to circle the cake to get to Taffy. “You really are a dog with the wrong bone.”
“And you’re Mary Ann, aren’t you? The seemingly innocent one, while Veronica is Ginger, the one everyone is trying to sleep with—”
Anya cried out and lunged for her.
Taffy nearly slipped moving quickly the other way. She reached out to the counter for balance and her hand clasped on the tiara. Anya readjusted and came at her from the other side.
“You seem to know too much.” She switched the knife from the right hand to the left.
They danced around the cake, getting closer to its base.
“What happened to Lorne, Anya?”
“He was depressed. He killed himself in his bathtub.”
“If Veronica is to blame, help me lock her up, and I’ll ask Maria to go lightly with you.”
“Like she did with your friends?”
Taffy brushed against the bottom of the cake. It wobbled. She got icing on her jeans.
Anya laughed. “You’re such a fool. It wasn’t her; it was me. I sent him the emails. I convinced him they would kill him when they found him. But that wasn’t enough to shut him up. He was ready to run away. Had the nerve to tell me to confess to planning to murder his best friend. He was going to tell you the truth as soon as you got back from your little trip. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“You killed him?”
She swung the knife back and forth. “But not the way I wanted to.”
Taffy held her hands out in front of her. Still they circled the cake.
“You poisoned him like you poisoned Blake?”
She nodded, a devil’s gleam in her eye. She drew closer to Taffy, who’d been backed into a corner.
Taffy gulped. “No one else needs to get hurt here, Anya.”
The gleam faded, and she blinked. And then all of a sudden, she stopped. She set the knife down on the counter. “You’re right,” she said.
Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a syringe. “This can be nearly painless.”
Three syringes, Maria had said. Blake, Lorne, and…
Anya lunged for Taffy.
Taffy pivoted to the side and shoved the cake at Anya.
It toppled over and smashed to the floor.
Anya slipped, and the syringe went flying.
She grabbed for the knife again.
Taffy tried to run, but she slipped too. The tiara clanged against the floor. Taffy held onto it. It was her only weapon. She scrambled awkwardly to her feet. Anya was right behind her. She grabbed Taffy. The knife flashed in the corner of her eye.
Taffy tried to twist away, to get away. In the tussle, Anya slipped on the icing and took Taffy down with her. Her grip loosened on the knife, and it clanged against the floor. Taffy grabbed it. She held it over Anya’s neck.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“That won’t be necessary. One slit throat is enough for this town, don’t you think?” Veronica stepped through the kitchen doors holding a gun with an elongated muzzle. Taffy dropped the knife.
Anya cried out, “Ronnie! I told you I’d take care of this.”
“The way you’ve taken such good care of everything else, darling? No, I think you need a little help.”
Anya got to her feet, looking crestfallen, and then angry, but Veronica was still focused on Taffy, who had also slowly risen to her feet.
“I really don’t want to have to use this,” Veronica said, looking around the kitchen. Using the tip of the gun, she gestured to the walk-in freezer door. “That will do.”
Anya pushed Taffy toward the freezer, saying, with a catlike grin, “She thinks you did it, Ronnie. Thinks you killed Blake and Lorne.”
Veronica looked down her nose at Taffy. “What she’s sorely lacking is proof.”
Anya pushed Taffy across the threshold of the freezer. A cold blast of air enveloped her ankles.
“It was you too.” Taffy pointed an accusing finger at Veronica. “You couldn’t be in two places at once, but you were that night. Or it seemed so. I saw your tattoo at the gala, when you fell… You both have the same tattoo in the same place.” She looked at the both of them. “That’s how you fooled the masseuse and confirmed Anya’s alibi.”
Anya glanced at Veronica as Taffy spoke.
“Veronica was in Abandon the night Blake died. You drove all day from Monterey in time to get here to take your place on the massage table.”
Veronica glared at Taffy. “You can’t prove I was here. No one will believe you.”
“Your Russian clients might not mind lying for you, but your mileage won’t. I checked with the rental car company. The extra mileage on your car matches a return trip from Monterey to Abandon. It took you all day and all night. Your hotel maid claimed she hadn’t needed to make the bed.”
Veronica’s eyes looked worried, but her voice remained hard and confident. “Such weak proof. I could have spent the night with any one of my clients.”
Anya gaped at her. “You wouldn’t!”
“Of course, I wouldn’t, but she couldn’t prove that.” She gestured with the gun and it got awfully close to Taffy’s face. She gulped but still went on.
“You took Anya’s spot on the massage table so she could sneak down to the boat to poison Blake.”
Veronica laughed at her. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you can’t swim. Anya had to swim out to the boat because there were security cameras on the dock. And when she arrived naked and wet in the stateroom, Blake got the wrong idea, didn’t he, Anya?”
“The pervert!”
“Shhhh!” hissed Veronica to Anya. “Betray nothing! She’s crazy.”
“But it was Anya who went crazy, wasn’t it? It was supposed to be the perfect crime, and it might have been. Your shot of tetrodotoxin would trigger a heart attack, the medical reports would confirm it, the well-placed cocaine would be seen as a trigger, but something went wrong. If only you’d simply administered the shot and slipped back out into the night, Veronica wouldn’t have had to try to clean up after your mess.”
Anya cried out and lunged for Taffy. Veronica held out her arm and said, “Shut and lock the freezer door.”
So Anya shoved Taffy further into the freezer and pushed at the door to close it.
Taffy tossed the tiara. It wedged between the door and its frame.
Veronica cursed at the inconvenience, and the distraction was just what Taffy needed to give a hard push to the nearly closed door and knock Veronica off-balance. Her gun fell and skittered across the slick floor.
Anya bent to help Veronica up as Taffy freed herself from the freezer. A shiver ran down her spine. She spun around looking for the gun. Either she had to find it before Anya or Veronica, or she had to get out of this kitchen fast. She chose the second option. But as she turned to head for the door, she felt a cold object press against her temple.
A quiet voice said, “Don’t move.”
Taffy stilled instantly.
The object trembled but didn’t lift from her skin. Someone else had found the gun.
“Good girl,” said Veronica, finally getting to her feet.
“You said it wouldn’t come to this.”
Taffy recognized the voice. Her eyes slid sideways in an attempt to maximize her peripheral vision. “Cher?”
“Give us the gun, dear.” Veronica’s voice was drenched in syrupy sweetness.
As the gun changed hands, Taffy was able to swivel her head. “You helped them?”
Cher’s eyes were wide and frightened.
“Get out of here, Cher,�
�� barked Anya. “Pretend you never saw anything.”
“You were part of all this? How? Why?”
Veronica brushed icing from her cuff. “She needed money, too, honey, to start her new life with Macy. But she was only paid to look the other way. She didn’t actually do anything.”
Kyla’s voice, distant and echo-y, played out in Taffy’s memory… Don’t you see how Cher follows her like a little lapdog… wouldn’t be surprised if she was actually in love with her… must be maddening since Macy’s so slow on the uptake…
“Did Macy know you—”
“I just wanted to take her away from him! Not kill him. That was their idea.” She pointed an accusing finger at Anya and Veronica.
“Someone has to do the dirty work,” Veronica said. “And you’ve be paid handsomely to look the other way. Now leave, and you won’t be implicated in this messy part of the business.”
Cher nodded, looking helplessly at Taffy.
“Now where were we?” mused Veronica. She held open the freezer door again. Seeing the tiara on the floor, she kicked it toward Cher, who’d started to cry. “Take that as a small bonus.” Cher tried to pick it up but her hands were trembling too much. “Now scram! Unless you’d like to join your friend in there.” Cher gave up on the tiara, spun on her heel, and practically evaporated through the kitchen doors.
Veronica tilted her head toward Taffy. “She actually didn’t do anything except keep that bimbo of a girlfriend out of the way while Anya snuck on board to give Blake a simple shot.” Her eyes slid to Anya. “It was supposed to be simple, wasn’t it? Elegant even. A simple heart attack. Real medical records to support a precondition… But you had to go and lose your head about it and take out all your aggression against the male species on him.”
“He taunted me. He actually expected me to get down on my knees and…” Anya was shaking. “He said things to me that night. I couldn’t control myself. He thought I wanted him to—He thought I wanted to… to have sex with him.” Her look betrayed disgust and anger. “I wanted him to know I hated him. That I hated all men.”
“He would have been dead in less than an hour, and no one would have been the wiser!”
“It was a mess, I know. I tried to cover it up the best I could.” Anya started to cry, and this time there weren’t any onions around. “Who else do I have to kill? I’ll do it. I don’t care. I’ll do anything for you.”
Veronica shook her head. “Simple. The plan was simple. But you botched it up and put our larger plan at risk. I had to swoop in and clean everything up.” She turned back to Taffy. “Which I thought I’d done until you came along.” Her eyes narrowed coldly.
Taffy said, “What did you have against Blake?”
Veronica blinked. “Nothing personal. Not anymore. I only wanted what he had and wouldn’t give me: his money. And it would have been the perfect plan if he hadn’t triggered Anya’s vengeance. It will take years of therapy for her to overcome it. And she’s had heaps already to get past her earlier trauma.”
“You think the prison psychiatrist will be that good?”
Veronica threw her head back and laughed. “No one’s going to jail, honey. Because one of us is going to have a long, cold, permanent beauty sleep.”
Anya had rearmed herself with a kitchen knife when Cher had retrieved the gun, and now she swooped it through the air one way and then switched hands and arced equally as deftly the other way.
Veronica stopped her. “No more blood, darling. Get the syringe.”
Anya, with a gleam in her eye, retrieved the syringe from the floor.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
With the knife and the syringe, Anya backed Taffy into a corner of the freezer. There was nowhere to run. Anya drew closer.
Taffy appealed to her. “You won’t get away with this. Maria knows everything. She’ll come after you both.”
But she didn’t know all the details that Taffy knew. Not yet. The case, as it stood now, wouldn’t get past Lorne. He’d be the one blamed for buying the tetrodotoxin. Maybe Maria would figure it out after Taffy was dead, if she did an autopsy. Maybe she’d talk to Mitch and figure out the phone call. Maybe she’d put the pieces together, but Taffy had collected her pieces from too many sources. A piece from Alice, one from Mitch, and from Ronald. Even Midnight.
Taffy assessed her situation: Overly confident socialite-would-be-sleuth about to die at the hands of a crazed and murderous Russian would-be caterer.
Anya closed the gap between them. She plunged the syringe into Taffy’s arm. It felt like a bee sting. Taffy cried out in pain.
Anya backed out quickly, a cat-who-ate-the-mouse grin of satisfaction spreading across her lips.
The door slammed. Everything went dark.
Almost immediately, Taffy felt her tongue go dry… and then her fingers started tingling. It was suddenly hard to breathe.
She didn’t even try banging on the thick door. She didn’t have the strength, and no one could hear her anyway.
She began to feel sleepy. Was she going to die here before she had a chance to tell Ethan how much she truly loved him?
Was Maria going to close the case thinking Lorne had been Blake’s killer? Were Anya and Veronica going to start their new life together? And what about Macy and Cher? Would Macy ever know the crazy, dangerous lengths Cher had been willing to go to?
Taffy felt her jeans pocket for the ring. She slid it onto her finger. It would be her last clue to Maria. She hoped she’d be able to figure it out…
Then her throat started to seize, and her knees grew too weak to hold her up. She clutched at her neck as she slid down the inside of the freezer door. “Just a little nap. Just a little dream…” She slid to the floor and seemed to keep sliding. In her dream she wasn’t as cold, but she was swimming in darkness now. She could breathe a little better. In her dreamy, slow motion imagination she could move, but her body lay rigid on the cold, dark floor.
In her last moment she thought she heard something in that darkness. A voice. “Maria?” But no. It was nothing.
Did she perceive a strip of gray light in all that blackness? No. Maybe something brown, shiny, leather… and navy hems? No…
Someone said, “Taffy?”
Then that voice yelled, “Detective Salinas! She’s in here!”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
She was on the floor. Her chest hurt. Eve, the medical examiner, was hovering over her, a very large needle in one hand. “She’s back!”
Eve closed up Taffy’s blouse. “Sorry about the poke and the buttons. That’ll hurt a bit, but you’ll be fine soon enough.” She helped Taffy to a sitting position. She was woozy. Her throat was tight. Paramedics stood at the ready with a stretcher.
Maria walked over and stared down at Taffy. Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling. With relief, Taffy realized. Maria brushed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“It’s T for trouble isn’t it?”
Taffy smiled weakly.
“Next you’re going to tell me that’s my wedding cake all over the floor. And my dented tiara.”
“Did you stop them?”
Maria nodded. “They’re over there.”
“How did you know to come?”
“Cher called, screaming like a banshee. I could barely understand her.”
“She called you?”
“And the chief. We’re both in a heap of trouble, by the way.” She gave her a crooked smile. “You’re gonna have to survive just so we can both have the dickens beat out of us by Chief Green.”
“Tell him it’s all my fault. You’re not to blame for this.”
“We’re in this together, remember?”
Taffy looked at the smushed cake all over the floor, the walls, and herself. “Maybe we’ll go with Betsy’s fun buns after all.”
Maria smiled. “Including the sprinkles?”
Taffy held up both hands weakly. “I surrender to sprinkles.”
* * *
Maria insisted that the param
edics take Taffy to the hospital. Taffy realized she was still too weak to stand on her own, so she surrendered to the stretcher too.
While the paramedics strapped her in, she listened to Anya ranting to Maria.
“He said cruel, disgusting things to me! He deserved to die a worse death! I wanted him to pay for all the terrible things men do to women!” Her left hand moved through the air as if she were wielding an imaginary knife.
Veronica grabbed her hand and tried to soothe her. She wrapped an arm around Anya’s shoulder. “Shhh…. It’s okay, sweetie. No one understands the horrible things you’ve been through.” She glared at the present company. “This poor girl was adopted from her orphanage by a couple who turned out to be partners in sex trafficking. After using and abusing her in their business, she was finally sold to a man as a wife. The only good thing he did for her was bring her to America, where she eventually was able to get a divorce and start her life over.” She threw daggers of blame at everyone. “You can’t possibly imagine the horrors she’s faced. She deserves a good life now.”
Then she turned her attention back to soothing Anya, who was whimpering and shaking. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you, honey. We’ll still have our house in Carmel and our little baby. A little girl who won’t ever have to suffer as you did.”
Anya looked up at her with wet eyes and angry red cheeks. “You’ll ‘wait for me’?” Anya then steeled her jaw and shook her head. “No. You’ll pay, too, Ronnie, not just me. We were in this together. This was your plan!”
Veronica stiffened and pulled away slightly. “No, darling. We’ll get you a good lawyer. We’ll make a case for temporary insanity, post-traumatic stress disorder—after all you’ve been through—and the judge will be lenient. I’ll take care of everything.”
Anya’s fists clenched. She drew away from Veronica.
“You want throw me away just like everyone else has done… You can’t do that to me! I won’t let you!” She lunged for the kitchen knife that was still on the floor. No one could block her fast enough, but Veronica managed to duck slightly and the blade’s tip only scored her cheek. Blood flowed from the gash. Veronica held her face and started screaming. Her eyes looked as wild and feral as Anya’s.
