Fatal Game

by Linda Ladd

  Cover Copy

  ONE WRONG MOVE

  Private detective Claire Morgan has come home from her honeymoon just in time for Christmas at Lake of the Ozarks. And for the sheriff’s department, laid low with flu, to hand her a case guaranteed to chill her to the bone.

  ONE CHANCE TO DIE

  One of the homes in the local Christmas On the Lake House tour—the mansion of an aging rock star trying to turn his life around—has been “decorated” with the body of a young woman, arranged as a bloody angel on the balcony above his Christmas tree. There’s a piece from a board game, gift wrapped and left under the tree, a hint that connects this murder to other deaths. With evidence of a gruesome pattern appearing, Claire suspects she’s on the hunt for a serial killer.

  IN A GAME WITH NO RULES

  But the closer she comes, the more certain she is that the killer is playing his game with her, just waiting his turn. The next move might be on Claire herself—or worse, the people she loves . . .

  FATAL GAME

  Claire Morgan Investigations

  Linda Ladd

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Lyrical Press books are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Linda Ladd

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  First Electronic Edition: December 2017

  eISBN-13: 978-1-60183-860-5

  eISBN-10: 1-60183-860-3

  First Print Edition: December 2017

  ISBN-13: 978-1-60183-861-2

  ISBN-10: 1-60183-861-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Books by Linda Ladd

  Claire Morgan Homicide Thrillers

  Head to Head

  Dark Places

  Die Smiling

  Enter Evil

  Remember Murder

  Mostly Murder

  Bad Bones

  Claire Morgan Investigations Series

  Devil Dead

  Gone Black

  Fatal Game

  Will Novak Novels

  Bad Road to Nowhere

  Say Your Goodbyes

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  Prologue

  Play Time

  The weather was absolute perfection. The sun blazed high in the sky, a bright fiery disk in an otherwise vast, cloudless blue dome that stretched up and down the coast from Malibu to Santa Barbara. California—the land of plenty, the land of movie stars, the land of milk and honey. Unfortunately for Junior, it was also the land of hell. Heaving a gigantic sigh, he dropped his head back against the red cushion of the double chaise longue and stared at his swimming pool. The azure water looked like a super clear blue mirror. After that, he shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the woman who was floating in the shallow end. Living the good life in Beverly Hills wasn’t all that good, of course. At least, not for him. Other than his mom, Junior loved almost everything about it. She scored at the low end of his things-to-enjoy ladder; in fact, she dropped off the bottom rung into his very own black pool of abject hatred.

  Even worse, she was planning to stay home all day, no doubt in order to enjoy making his life super-duper miserable. He supposed that her endless charity affairs were not being offered today, ritzy venues in which she could show off her five-million-plus Botox injections, annual face-lifts, and liposuction procedures. When he heard water sloshing, he opened his eyes and lifted his new Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. Mommy dearest was splashing water over her bare legs, immersed in her usual despicable display of female vanity. She had turned over onto her back now, naked but for the itty-bitty bikini bottom, just out there displaying her reconstructed body on a blue raft. No ugly tan lines to mar her ultra-short, low-cut dresses. She was topless, and boozing it up big time. You name it, she slurped it down: beer, whiskey, vodka, gin, vermouth. Anything and everything. But her poison of choice had always been a martini on the rocks, with a twist of lemon and three olives speared onto one of her designer toothpicks, the ones she ordered out of Monaco that sported a tiny yellow tassel on the end. That’s what she was guzzling today. A whole pitcher full so far, in fact. She was pretty much as lit as a Hollywood marquee, but she could hold her booze with the best of them. Junior would give her that much credit.

  Good old mom had a cocktail glass in her hand right now. She considered the olives her brunch, lunch, and dinner and the lemon her vitamin C. Yep, Mom was now in her mid-fifties, a freakin’ lush, for damn sure, but she didn’t look near that old. Basically, she was a carbon copy of all the other divorced Beverly Hills first wives, whose husbands had left them for twenty-something lovers or more beautiful and conniving gold-digging second wives. Mom took good care of her body, yes she did, which was her only ambition of late, and her whiz-bang plastic surgeon made lots of money turning her into a fake and forever thirty-something. Her skin was every bit as smooth as the Chinese silk in her movie premiere gowns, glistening with sunblock that smelled like coconuts and lime. Another deep desire of mommy: acquire the best spray-on tan in her exclusive country club and tennis club and book club and French cuisine class and pseudo charity, aka look-at-me-everybody L.A. havens of big money.

  While she bobbed around for useless hours in the pool, she hummed and sang along with her favorite music, which she listened to through white earbuds. It was turned up loud enough for Junior to hear faint strains of Maroon 5 singing “She Will Be Loved.” But that was a laugh. She wasn’t loved. Not by anybody, not even him, and he was her only child. Her money was loved, though, that was for damn sure, and there was plenty of it to covet, mainly by Junior and all the young, buff lovers she picked up in bars and brought home for one-night stands. Nope, not only did Junior not love her, he had graduated to sheer abhorrence. She just looked so utterly content out there on that float, well into drunken oblivion. There was just a little bit of booze left in the pitcher that sat on the round, glass-topped table shaded by three towering palm trees.

  Okay, now the sun was really broiling. Junior loved the burn of it on his bare skin. He had dark skin, anyway, and had always tanned easily. Now eighteen, he could drink legally at home, and his mom sure as hell didn’t care if he imbibed or not. But he didn’t. Well, not much, anyway. He was too intelligent to turn himself into some kind of stinking sot. He didn’t like feeling out of control of his mind, unsure of what he did or didn’t do. He watched his mother drain her glass, then pull the olives off the toothpick with
her teeth. After that, she carelessly tossed the stemmed Waterford glass out into the water, lemon twist, toothpick, and all. No telling how much of that crap his mom’s pool boy/lover had to fish out at the end of the day. Probably enough to clog the drain. Then her phone buzzed, yet again, and she quickly jerked out the earbuds and picked up the phone off her flat belly. God, he really did despise her. More anger built up inside him every day, each time he saw her floating around out there, completely ignoring him, as she’d done since he was a little kid.

  Disgusted by her, Junior took off his sunglasses, grabbed a towel, and scrubbed sweat off his face and chest, getting pretty riled up inside, pulse racing, but trying not to let his mom see his inner turmoil. If she detected how much he resented her power over him, she’d cut off his allowance again. Sometimes she did it just for spite. No reason. Just to teach him a lesson about nothing. Now she was getting one phone call after another. All probably about some stupid Hollywood gossip that didn’t amount to a hill of beans to anybody except her rich, shallow, and self-centered girlfriends.

  Junior closed his eyes again. She had to be the biggest bitch in a town full of selfish bitches. She treated him, her only son, her only child, like dog crap on the bottoms of her Christian Louboutin heels, which she even wore at the pool with her bikini. Hell, she treated the damn pool boy ten times better than him. But that was because he was the fabled L.A. pool boy with benefits, and he followed her around like a puppy, besotted with her cash and an easy lay.

  Shielding his eyes with the flat of his hand, Junior searched the shady depths of the patio for the pool kid. For obvious reasons, he didn’t particularly like the guy. Yep, old Lucky was a real jerk. Junior supposed he did get lucky, at least with Junior’s mom, and nearly every day. Junior and Lucky were seniors at the same private school, but they rarely ran into each other. They moved in totally different cliques. Junior was the smartest kid in the school, a real nerd. He was proud of that. He wore the egghead badge with honor, because he was intelligent enough to see how stupid all the other kids were, and that knowledge came in handy in a myriad of ways.

  Most of the other teenagers had little clue about anything, other than how to screw each other and screw each other over. He liked to study their habits, as if they were his lab specimens that belonged to a lower and rather ignorant species. That way, he knew pretty much everything about everybody, including what made them tick. That gave him leverage if he should ever want or need it, and Junior did like to wield power over the other kids at school. Didn’t matter who. Anybody, really.

  On the other hand, Lucky was the best jock in school, a total chick magnet. His tuition was paid with a walk-on football scholarship. Nobody knew much about him, other than the fact that his parents were dead. Brains didn’t make an appearance much where he was concerned, but that was to be expected. He was a moronic jock. They had never spoken a single word to each other, not even when they passed each other in the hall outside his mom’s bedroom. Distaste, disrespect, and a mutual disgust. They were not two peas in a pod.

  Today, Lucky, aka Mom’s gigolo, had pulled off his T-shirt, a move most likely designed to titillate good old, sex-starved Momma. It didn’t take much, especially when she was soused. Lucky had on long red surfer shorts, the kind that hung just below his knees, and a pair of ridiculous brown leather Jesus sandals. He was really tall, well over six feet, super athletic, and tanned to a beautiful bronze. Strong as a bull, or so it appeared. He had penetrating eyes, a sculpted, muscular body, and a molded six-pack that Junior envied. Junior was in fairly good shape himself, but he was shorter and certainly didn’t look like a Greek god when he took off his shirt. Not that he was jealous of anything else about Lucky. The other guy might be a sports star and a lover boy, but Junior didn’t give a rip about that. It was rather astonishing, though, that Lucky really was so lucky.

  Yes, sir, when said Superman played basketball, he racked up the most points and looked great doing it. Graceful, even. Probably didn’t even sweat. When he ran track or jumped hurdles, he won all the medals and ribbons. No problemo, simply observe featured game and proceed to conquer. Like when he wanted the most gorgeous, sexiest girl in school; well, shit, easy pickings for a guy like Lucky. All the girls fell at his feet and kissed his dumbass sandals he wore everywhere. Lucky was the high school cock of the walk, all right. Junior pretty much ignored him as a mental peon until he walked right into Junior’s house and had sex with Junior’s drunken mother.

  Alas, Junior had no such good fortune in Lucky’s areas of expertise. But he still came out on top of their dual equation, because he had an absolutely brilliant mind. His strengths were cerebral logic, ingenuity, and photographic memory. In fact, he was a damn near genius. His teachers and counselors praised him regularly and acted all awestruck and impressed by his superb intellect, especially with math and physics. And well they should. They were all a bit on the stupid side, truth be told. He had tons of trivia and scholastic team trophies down in the basement, where he lived inside his own personal and giant domain, a spectacular bedroom/library/game room. His mom allowed him lone access down there, his private area that opened up with his one key, but she didn’t fool him, not one bit. She didn’t want him upstairs, where she entertained her influx of lovers. More likely, they entertained her for the wad of cash she stuck down their pants on their way out of her bedroom.

  Lucky the Unlucky Lover was how Junior liked to think of the pool boy. He was busy flirting with Junior’s mom at the moment, and was she ever lapping up his cloying and clumsy amorous attentions. Almost as much as she lapped up her pitchers of martinis. She made no secret of the fact that she preferred Lucky’s company to Junior’s, and she was doing the same thing now, laughing and flirting with him as he cleaned the pool, one tiny scrap from naked, with no shame. She usually tipped him big time for pulling a palm frond out of the water, and then invited him for dinner as if he wasn’t a servant. On those nights, Junior retreated to his basement sanctuary and left them to their romantic tryst, or whatever the hell they liked to call it. Blind animal copulation was what Junior called it. Sickening, but run of the mill for mom. She slept with every Tom, Dick, and tennis instructor in L.A. County. It was a mental illness with her, or a million-man march.

  Lucky stood over in the shade of a palm tree and pretended to dip debris out of the pool with a long-handled net. What he really was doing was lusting after Junior’s mom. His eyes lingered on her body the entire time. He was salivating. Man, get a room already. Jerk. Mom knew what he was doing, too. She bent her knees and opened her legs so he could better see what he wanted. Typical slut behavior. Might as well walk the stroll down on Hollywood Boulevard. Not that she needed money. When his famous dad had walked out on them when Junior was six, he gave her their huge estate and an ultra-generous divorce settlement. Sole custody of his son, too. Junior had never seen him again. Not on his birthdays, not on a single Christmas, never had laid eyes on the man again, and never had forgiven him for that. Oh yeah, Junior had hit the grand jackpot when it came to lousy parents.

  Clamping his jaw, Junior poked his sunglasses back on and tried not to look at his mom and Lucky. Let them ogle each other. Do what they would. But he was going to stay right there so they couldn’t get it on in the pool the way they wanted. He’d already caught Lucky inside his mom’s bedroom a couple of times. The guy had just grinned at Junior and shut the door in his face.

  Out in the pool, he heard one of his dad’s songs come on his mom’s earphones. She still played his music, probably because she knew half the royalties were trickling down to her. His dad was famous, a legendary rock star, but also a crazy, tattooed, womanizing, drug-addled disgrace of a human being. But those songs he wrote, the ones about death and destruction and doom, brought in tons of money, each and every day, just like clockwork. Junior assumed his mom’s divorce lawyer had been better than his dad’s back then, so there was a never-ending stream of cash to replenish his mom’s bulging
bank accounts.

  Hell, his runaway dad was more famous than Ozzy Osbourne and Mick Jagger put together. Better singer, too. A wasted drug addict, for sure, but even he’d had the sense to see his first wife for a whoring gold digger. But hey, no problem. He had paid her off and then shrugged Junior off like a coat that was too small. All the hell Junior wanted now was a decent allowance like all the other kids at school got from their rich showbiz parents. But his mom eked out the dough as if they lived in a slum. He had to do chores to get his weekly money. Imagine that.

  Man alive, he really did hate her guts.

  Chapter 1

  Beautiful snowflakes were fluttering down all around Detective Claire Morgan Black as she walked up the sidewalk toward the rear entrance of Cedar Bend Lodge. It still seemed strange to have tied the marital knot with Nicholas Black, something she’d sworn she’d never do. But the die was cast and turning out to be one of the best moves she’d ever made. So far, anyway. She walked slowly along, enjoying the magical winter wonderland into which Black had transformed his luxury resort on the Lake of the Ozarks. Her former partner, Bud Davis, had only just now dropped her off behind the hotel after they’d spent a long day working homicide together at the Canton County Sheriff’s Department.

  The flu bug had slammed the lake environs big time this year, and Claire had agreed to temporarily fill in at Homicide. Even Sheriff Charlie Ramsay had been laid low with the illness, along with a good portion of his staff. Schools had been shut down because of illness in some communities. Good thing Black had insisted on giving Claire her flu shot early. Although work today hadn’t been particularly eventful, she felt tired. No homicides turned up, thank goodness, so they had mainly rifled through dusty cold cases from days gone by, murders committed long before either of them knew Canton County existed. Not many incoming calls, either. It appeared that most people at the lake were too busy Christmas shopping to whack anybody.