This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
When the Tiger Kills
by
Vanessa Prelatte
©2015 H&S Underveq, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
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When the tiger kills, the jackal profits. (Afghan proverb)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Prologue: The young man exploded out of the driver's side of the red SUV like a tornado just beginning to hit its rope stage, throwing off sparks of energy in all directions as he shot around the hood toward the passenger side of the vehicle. But it was the girl who emerged next that riveted the spectator. Tall but slender, swathed almost from head to foot in a long black leather coat, she tossed her head as she exited the vehicle, throwing over her shoulder a shower of long blond hair so light it glinted like platinum in the autumn sunlight. Smiling, she linked her hand with the boy's as they sprinted into the store.
The watcher smiled too. He called himself Michelangelo, and he had just found the latest incarnation of his ice goddess.
Chapter 1
"I hated the little creep, but I didn't want him dead. It wouldn't have suited me at all, Officer."
Dawn Cimarron briefly considered reminding the witness that her proper title was Detective, but decided it wasn't worth the extra effort. She had been up since two in the morning, ever since she had received the call that had summoned her to Lewellen Memorial Park, where Cullen Torrense, Gwen Mallinder's late, and – based on her reaction to his death – apparently unlamented stepbrother, had been found lying dead under a cluster of Aspen trees. Lying there clad in his silver jacket, he had reminded Dawn of a huge, elongated Idaho potato, wrapped in foil and ready for the oven. A shower of golden leaves had rained down from above and lay like pats of butter on the body, almost obscuring from view the handle of the lethal switchblade that protruded from his ribcage.
After finishing with the crime scene and breaking the news to the next of kin, Dawn and her partner were now interviewing friends and family members of the deceased. Gwen Mallinder, the stepsister, was turning out to be a fount of information, despite her strained relationship with the victim.
Gwen's hair, a fire engine red with inky black tips, was cropped in a sleek cap that framed her small, gamine face. A gold nose stud, a diamond eyebrow ring, and some sort of weird, geometric tattoo that wound up the left side of her neck made her a dramatic contrast to Dawn, who wore no jewelry but her wedding ring, used minimal make-up, and had her dark brown hair tied up in a knot on the back of her head. It wasn't the most flattering look for her, but that was okay. She didn't want to look like a beauty queen when she was on the job. She wanted to look like a cop.
Within a few moments of meeting Gwen, Dawn had gotten the distinct impression that Ms. Mallinder had little use for her fellow women, and that she would rather focus her attention on the other half of the team – namely, her good looking partner, Sergeant Rafe Melbourne.
"Oh?" Dawn responded to Gwen's comment in a carefully neutral tone of voice. "If you hated him so badly, why wouldn't you want him dead?"
Gwen eyed her scornfully. "Well now, that's easy. I wanted him alive and kicking so that he could go on torturing his ghastly mother and suck all the life out of the witch. Incidentally, how did she take it when you told her that Cullen is dead?"
“She fainted.”
Gwen brightened up at the news. “Really? Did she hurt herself when she fell, I hope?”
“No. She's fine, but we had to call a doctor to treat her when she regained consciousness. She became so hysterical that she had to be sedated.”
“Sounds like Monieque. She's the original drama queen. Anything for attention. And her son? Well, here's what I have to say about him: Good riddance to bad garbage.”
"You don't believe in mincing any words, do you?" said Rafe.
"Why should I? I know you don't seriously suspect me; if you did, you'd have hauled my ass downtown for this interview."
She was wrong about that, he reflected. Probably came from watching too many cop shows on TV. But it wouldn't do to let her in on that. So Rafe decided to string her along.
"Got me there," he said. "So tell me all about your baby brother. Why did you hate him so much?"
"Stepbrother! He was my stepbrother, not my brother!"
"Sorry," Rafe said patiently. "Why did you hate your stepbrother so much?"
Gwen leaned back and took a drag on her cigarette before she answered. "Because he was a monster, that's why. And his mother is the Frankenstein who created him."
She settled herself back in her chair before continuing. "My mother died when I was twelve. A year later, my father met Monieque. Before even a week had passed, she had moved in on us, and brought her obscene little offspring with her. Cullen was eleven at the time. Within a month, she had convinced my dad to marry her. And things started going wrong from then on.”
Gwen stared off into space, as if trying to connect with the ghost of her younger self. “We lived in a nice house with three bedrooms. There was the master bedroom, another nice, big bedroom, which was mine, and a smaller bedroom that Cullen moved into. And right from the get-go, he started whining. 'Why do I have to sleep in the little bedroom? Why can't I have the bigger one?'” As far as Monieque was concerned, what Cullen wanted, Cullen got. At night I'd hear her working on my dad. 'Don't you think that it would be nice if Gwen learned to share a little more? She's had that bedroom for thirteen years. It's selfish of her to expect to have it always. Why don't we let the children take turns? One of them gets the big room for a year, then they swap. Don't you think that would be the fair way to handle things?'”
Gwen hitched a pillow a little more comfortably behind her back before continuing. “One day a few months later, I came home to find that Cullen had moved into my room. All of my things had been tossed into the little bedroom. And there was Cullen, giving me that sly little grin of his and crooning, 'told you I'd get my way, told you I'd get my way,' the loathsome little toad!”
A tear slid down Gwen's eye and her voice caught as she went on, “I played right into his hands, of course. I grabbed him and tried to force him out of my room. I'd dragged him as far as the doorway when I saw my dad and Monieque come in through the back door. Suddenly, he dropped down hard on the floor and started bawling his head off, screaming that I had hit him, knocked him to the ground, and tried to wrench his arm off. Monieque knocked me aside and started shrieking, 'What have you done to my baby? What have you done to my baby?' Meanwhile, my dad h
ad this shocked expression on his face and was looking at me as if he didn't even know me.”
The tears were trickling down her face now, leaving sooty black tracks as her mascara began to run. “That was just a preview of the hell that I had to live in for the next few years. What I wanted didn't seem to matter anymore; it was all about Cullen. I've never met anyone else so determined to have his own way. And his mother? She was hell-bent on enabling him.”
A smile of malicious satisfaction crossed Gwen's face. “But you know the old expression, 'What goes around, comes around'? Well, I'm happy to say that it all came back to bite Monieque in the butt. As Cullen grew older, he became totally unmanageable. Lying, cheating, skipping school, shoplifting – that's what he started with. Then he graduated on to alcohol and drugs. Of course, Monieque tried to shield him from the consequences. She covered for him, lied for him. And then he started stealing from her. Finally, she tried to rein him in. She waited until Dad was out of town on business, and then she confronted him. Cullen just rolled his eyes and walked out on her. Right after that was the first time he got arrested for possession, but she got him a good lawyer who made sure that all Cullen had to do was go through a drug counseling program. Monieque thought that he was cured when he finished it, but he was arrested again not long after. Sure enough, all they did was send him back to counseling. After that, Monieque tried to restrict his activities, keep him from getting into any more trouble. But he responded by screaming that he didn't have to listen to her and telling her to shut up. Up until then he'd never been anything but apologetic and charming to Monieque, so I could see that she was totally shocked when Cullen started to defy her. However, beyond yelling at him and sending him to his room, she didn't discipline him or impose any other sort of consequences at all, so naturally he just kept getting worse. He was always sneaking off at night, getting into more trouble. When my dad tried to intervene, Monieque would go off on him, telling him that Cullen was her child, and Dad had no right to interfere.”
With a savage motion, Gwen stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. “One night a little over two years ago, my dad was driving home from work. I'd talked to him on the phone just before he left. He'd finally had enough, he said. He was going to divorce Monieque. If she got some of his property and savings in the divorce, that was fine. He just wanted her and Cullen out of his life. I was so happy. I waited and waited, but he never made it home. His car went off the road on a bad corner, flipped over, and crashed into some trees. He was killed immediately.”
Rafe had been listening patiently, but now he interjected, “When did you last see Cullen?”
But Gwen apparently wasn't ready to go back to the subject of Cullen yet. Getting up out of her chair and pacing the room restlessly, she picked up her story where she had left off. “I moved out right after the funeral. I was eighteen by then, just about ready to go off to college. We found out that Dad had changed his will shortly before he died. Originally, Monieque had persuaded him to leave everything to her. But he changed it so that I got half of his estate, and he also made me the sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy. It was a hefty amount, too. I thought Monieque was going to have a stroke when she found out! Anyway, there was more than enough for me to move out, get my own place. I haven't seen much of either of them for a long time, which is fine with me. I ran into someone from the old neighborhood last spring, though, and she told me that Cullen had recently been arrested again. This time the judge gave him a choice: go to jail, or check into a residential rehab facility. Monieque hit the roof because the rehab facility was horribly expensive, and when Cullen was released, she refused to have him back in the house.” Gwen stopped her pacing, shrugged her shoulders, and sat down again. “I thought that maybe being away from Mommy would do him some good, but I doubted it.” Finally, she answered Rafe's question. “Not long before I ran into the neighbor, I saw Cullen while I was running in the park. When I saw him, I turned and went back the way I came. The last thing I wanted to do was to have any sort of conversation with Cullen.”
“Was anybody with him when you saw him in the park?”
Gwen frowned for a minute, as if she was searching her memory, then she said, “Yeah. He was with a guy who used to come over to the house a lot – kid called J.B.”
“Do you know J.B.'s real name?”
Gwen frowned. “His first name is really weird. Jabez? Jabo? No - Jago. That's it. I think his last name is Bolt.”
“What were Cullen and J.B. doing?”
“What they were always doing, I suppose - drugs. Cullen had started out just smoking weed, but as he got older, he developed himself a nice little cocaine habit. J.B. was his supplier. Like I told you – that's why Cullen started stealing: to pay for the drugs.”
“What about girlfriends?” Dawn interposed.
“Cullen was too in love with himself to have time for anyone else. He never had any girls over to the house, as far as I know.”
Rafe caught Dawn's eye and rose from his seat. “Thank you, Ms. Mallinder. We appreciate your willingness to help.”
Gwen Mallinder crossed the length of the room to take the hand that Rafe held out to her. “You're welcome, Sergeant. If I can be of any … assistance in the future, please let me know.”
On their way out to the car, Dawn commented, “Didn't have any trouble remembering your title, did she?”
Rafe grinned and responded, “You're just jealous.”
“Jealous? Oh, please – get real.” She was tempted to add Raphael, but decided that the provocation hadn't been enough to justify calling him by his despised first name. And despite the teasing, they were both perfectly well aware that their own relationship went back too far and verged too close to being family for there ever to be even a remote chance of a romantic relationship between them. She knew, however, that his rugged good looks were extremely attractive to most of the other members of her sex. Rafe was not handsome in the classic sense, but his muscular build, strong, rough-hewn features, black hair, and cobalt-blue eyes had their own type of appeal. The end result was that it was a rare female witness who could resist opening up if Rafe decided to flash his mega-watt smile and pour on the charm.
“Getting back to the subject of the rude Ms. Mallinder, I think that her experience with her stepmother has left her with some definite trust issues when it comes to women. Did you believe her, Rafe?”
“About wishing Cullen was still alive so that he could go on torturing his mother? Maybe. Seems to blame the mother for the situation more than Cullen himself. No, I don't think that Gwen had anything to do with her stepbrother's murder. I'm putting my money on Cullen's buddy, J.B.”
*****
Men were so stupid. At least, that was what Lee was thinking as she strolled down the path from the campsite she and Will had set up. They had been eating food straight out of a can, and she had commented that her roommate had called Jason a pig once when she had caught him doing that. Well, the mention of her ex's name had been enough to make Will blow up. Okay, she had been thoughtless to bring Jason's name up, but after all, they were sooooo over. She hadn't seen or even thought about him for months. And now, here was Will, going all ballistic on her just because she'd happened to mention Jason's name.
As she turned the corner, she caught sight of the artist sitting at his easel. He was sitting at the very edge of the cliff, dabbing oil onto a canvas as he worked on a landscape of the river valley below. As she'd done when she'd first encountered him a little earlier in the day, she sidled up behind him and perused his work. It was good – really good. She'd considered asking him if she could buy it when he finished it, but she was afraid to ask, in case it was outrageously expensive. He was working on the background now, catching the treetops far below, all but the evergreens vivid in shades of orange and yellow and red, now that autumn was at its peak. Without looking up from his work, the artist asked, “What do you think?”
“It's wonderful, Michael.” He'd laughed wh
en he'd seen her reaction to his real name – Michelangelo. “Call me Michael,” he'd said.
After cleaning his paintbrush, he commented, “I'm about ready for a break.” He reached into the cooler beside him, pulled out a beer, and unscrewed the top. Taking a long pull, he pronounced, “Ah, that was good.” With a gesture of good manners that Lee appreciated, he asked politely, “Want one?” At her nod, he reached back into his cooler, pulled out another bottle, twisted off the cap, and handed Lee the bottle with a smile. She thanked him and was taking her first sip just as Will, the scowl on his face signaling trouble, stormed down the path toward them.
*****
Questioning Jago Bolt was not going to be easy, Dawn mused as she drove home that evening. No one had answered when she and Rafe had knocked on the door of his apartment, and they had discovered from a neighbor that J.B. had left early that morning for the airport in order to catch a flight to Florida. Since it was already near end of shift, and they had been up since the wee hours of the morning, they decided to head over to Dawn's house and take a dinner break before tackling the paperwork on the Cullen Torrense case.
A glance in her rear view mirror showed Dawn that Rafe was right behind her, sticking to her rear bumper like an industrial grade swatch of flypaper even through the worst of the traffic. As for the others who were tailing her – they were being discreet tonight. She'd had barely a glimpse of them as she maneuvered through the heavy rush hour traffic.
She smiled a little as she remembered the house she had lived in before she married Ty. A modest one-storey house in a working class neighborhood, it had been only a fifteen-minute drive from work. She didn't regret the decision to relocate to the other side of town after her marriage, though. She needed to keep a distance between the two sides of her life. Most of her fellow cops had no problem with the change in her circumstances after she married Ty. There were a few, however, who couldn't resist making snide comments about it, possibly motivated by jealousy. Or maybe something else. Her father-in-law, Sloan Lewellen, had made more than one enemy as he had built a string of family-owned companies into the entity now known as The Lewellen Group, one of the largest conglomerates in the country.
When the Tiger Kills: A Cimarron/Melbourne Thriller: Book One Page 1
