Lesser Crimes

by Aitana Moore

  License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please delete it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2018 by Aitana Moore

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright(s) 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, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright

  Table of Contents

  CRIMES OF LOVE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  LESSER CRIMES

  This is the third and last volume in the Deadly Lies trilogy.

  Some parts of this story were inspired by real events.

  I hope you enjoy the end of the trilogy!

  ~ Aitana

  ONE

  When the police came, James was asleep.

  Lee watched him as he lay next to her on the hospital bed; the staff would have found it impossible to separate them, and six days after her surgeries she had developed no infections.

  He, on the other hand, had finally allowed his body and mind to rest after the almost super human effort he had made in the desert, and after the nights of vigil by her side at the ICU.

  It was too bad they wouldn’t have more time together, Lee thought as she watched the uniformed officers walking their way. The officers were followed by two men in ill-fitting suits.

  "They're fast," she said in a small voice. Her fingerprints had only been taken an hour ago. Perhaps, who knew, they were slow; in any case, she couldn’t run anymore.

  And James hadn’t been sleeping so deeply after all. His eyes flew open and he turned to follow her gaze.

  She pressed his hand with urgency. "Please believe me, this time I wouldn't have run. All I wanted was to stay with you."

  He sat up. “You said it wasn’t serious.”

  “I had to say that.”

  Getting out of bed, he ran a hand through his disheveled hair and looked at her again just before the police came in. “Lee …”

  The men knocked before entering, although they could see the room through the glass wall. One of the suits stepped inside, followed by the other, and addressed Lee. "Are you Lynette Annamae Miller?"

  Lee nodded.

  "Then we have come to arrest you for the murder of your stepfather, Joseph Warren Keane."

  "Lee?"

  Her eyes switched from the policemen to James, and she gave a small shrug. “Now you know everything. You know what I'm meant to have done — and I don't think we can make this one go away."

  TWO

  "We can get out of this together," James said again. "Just trust me — just talk to me."

  Lee had been under arrest at the hospital for three days. The lead detective in Joseph Keane's case had arrived to take her to Greensboro, although he had to wait until the doctors discharged her. Detective Cecil Putney was a lean black man of about forty, with a slow, measured way of speaking that gave him a dignified air.

  At first he had kept James away and spent time inside the room trying to get Lee to confess — but James had already hired one of the best attorneys in North Carolina, who had forbidden her to talk unless he were present. She hadn't said anything to Putney.

  Realizing that he wouldn’t get a confession, the detective had shown a grudging respect for what they had just gone through.

  "You really carried her all that way?" he asked James. "How did you do that?"

  James shrugged, and Putney nodded.

  "Well, doesn't love just perform some crazy stunts?" He glanced inside the room. "I'm not from her town, you know. It's so small it barely has a police force. They had to call us from Greensboro to investigate this. I tell you, it doesn't look good for her."

  He motioned James inside, but he was never too far away — or there would be another police officer sitting right outside the room. James wasn’t allowed to close the shades over the glass, but he sat in front of Lee, who was in an armchair wearing a blue nightgown he had bought for her. It touched him to see how young she looked, how frail and innocent, but the feeling didn't last long.

  “I understand why you lied about your name,” he said. “It’s appalling.”

  She gave a small smile. “Thought you’d think so.”

  "We’ll keep to Lee.” She said nothing. “You're not going to talk to me? Not going to tell me what this is about?"

  Lee shook her head. "I can't."

  Taking a deep breath, James counted till twenty and said, "You didn't do it."

  "How do you know?"

  Without raising his eyes from his own shoes, he warned her, "Don't start. I know you didn't, you're protecting someone."

  Her voice was still hoarse: "You can't know that."

  Damn. Furniture was about to start flying out the window — and then Putney would never let him into the room again. James pinched the bridge of his nose. "Why do you do this?"

  "James."

  Lee’s tone made him look at her. Her knees were between his, their chairs almost touching, and he didn't know whether he wanted to hold her hands or leave her sitting there while he cooled off somewhere else.

  What an impossible woman.

  "Everything I've done, the good and the bad, was so I would never have to speak about this,” she said. “You must know how much it costs me not to talk to you, after all we’ve been through. After what you did for me."

  He wished he could stop the muscle on his jaw from clenching. "That's where you're mistaken. I didn't do anything for you, I did it for me. Because I couldn't stand to let you die. Just as I won't stand by watching you go to jail for something you didn't do. And if there is anything you should trust, Lee, it's people's selfish motives." James leaned forward. "I'm not going to let it happen."

  "It will happen," she said almost tenderly, "whatever has to, whether you want it or not."

  "Wrong again."

  "James—"

  He interrupted her. "Lee, if you want something covered up, someone not involved in this, someone who might even be guilty, I can accept that. I can help you."

  "And become an accessory …"

  Grabbing her chair by the arms, he gave it a shake. "I don't give a fuck!"

  She made a small grimace; of course, she still had stitc
hes in places where the smallest movement would hurt her. James leaned back, placing his hands on his own chair. "I’m sorry. But I don't give a fuck about becoming an accessory," he repeated more calmly. "I actually don't care if you killed the man, because if you did, I know you had good reason. I don't care about lying, if someone else killed him and you want to protect that person. What I want is for you to include me. For you to tell me and trust me."

  "You just said you'll never allow me to go to jail. That means you'd use what I tell you, if it came to that."

  "So, you admit you didn't kill him."

  She shook her head, almost like a child, and James stood abruptly, his chair flying to the floor. The policewoman outside looked in and opened the door, frowning.

  James smiled. "Just a chair that tipped over."

  The woman nodded and closed the door, although she watched them for a moment.

  "Being with you is like playing a stupid board game for children," James said in a low voice as he walked to the window. "I take a card and it's back to square one, like nothing ever happened." He turned toward her and let his eyes show the fury he felt. "I'd have died by your side and you think I wouldn't keep a secret, if it was this important to you?"

  "It's not my secret to give away!" she cried, locking hands on her lap.

  "OK, you didn't do it, but — I know! It’s been a couple of weeks! Must be sacrifice time again."

  She only shook her head until he wanted to wrench it off.

  "Don't make me—"

  "Don’t say anything else then.” He leaned over her. "Not to me."

  Lee knew him well enough. She knew he was going to lose it in a second, and she said nothing. He opened the door so suddenly that the policewoman gasped. Nodding at her, at the doctors, at Putney who was by the coffee machine, he kept walking until he was outside; until he had put some distance between himself and Lee.

  Five days later, he was sitting in a diner, across from the attorney he had hired. Luckily, Carter D. Paxton practiced in Greensboro, where Lee's preliminary hearing would take place.

  "To claim self-defense for hitting a man on the head with a fire poker, from behind ..." Paxton sat back on the red upholstery of their booth and stretched his legs. "It's tricky."

  James managed to tear his eyes away from the man's tie, which depicted black ostriches over a white background. Despite his choice of attire, Paxton was at the top of his profession.

  "Honey," Paxton said in his soft voice as the waitress went by, "Susan, honey, you know I’m dying for the blueberry pancakes. Will you have some, James?"

  Smiling, James shook his head. Paxton had offered him extravagant amounts of sugar every time they had met, and James’ refusal always made Paxton pout a little, his round face taking on the look of a puzzled baby's. The attorney also called everyone honey, sweetheart and dear — even other men, although he was a conservative husband and father.

  James rather liked it. He nearly always liked eccentrics.

  "That's one of the main reasons I know she didn't do it," James said, returning to Paxton's statement about the murder. "Lee almost died because a man attacked her and she couldn't accept that she needed to hurt him."

  "That was an old man. Joe Keane was forty-five and able-bodied. She might not have wanted to risk a confrontation with him. Maybe she preferred to get rid of him when his back was turned. If he had been beating her or her mother — or her sister — that might be self-defense, in a way. Whack him when he can't do anything about it so that he stops forever. But that's not how it's going to play out in court."

  "You think it will go to trial, then?"

  "She does a run and leaves her fingerprints on the crime weapon? And leaves Keane dead at the foot of the stairs after she threatened to kill him in front of several witnesses?" Paxton raised fair, bushy eyebrows. “The DA has plenty of probable cause, and Lee hasn’t really given me much to go with so far. But the thing is still to avoid a trial, of course.”

  James toyed with his coffee spoon. "It would be a bloody waste of time. She didn't do it."

  “We can't be that sure of people, you know. I have seen angels turn out to be devils more often than I'd care to recall."

  "She is neither angel nor devil. But hers are lesser crimes than murder, and she has a lot of courage. I have no doubt that she would hit a man facing her, not one walking away."

  "Well, maybe she has changed. Besides, she isn't denying that she did it."

  It's what I am meant to have done, Lee had said. She had phrased it that way because she hadn't done it. She was protecting someone else. And she was now at a detention center, awaiting the preliminary hearing which would take place in another week.

  "She has asked about you," Paxton said, as he studied the pancakes that had been set before him. "You won't be visiting her?”

  "No."

  Paxton looked up from his dish. "Not at all?"

  "No, but you need to tell her that she shouldn't worry about any legal fees. It would be hard for her to get hold of her money, and I will take care of things, no matter what."

  "Anything else?" Paxton asked, a fork poised above the stack of pancakes.

  "Yes." James placed his elbows on the table, nodding slowly. "There is something else I want you to tell her …"

  THREE

  Today, Paxton wore a bow tie with multi-colored polka dots and a navy-blue suit — but like James, Lee wasn’t concerned about his clothes. Paxton belonged to a type she knew well: the scion of a ruined patrician clan. His family had once been rich, but their fortune had followed the fall of tobacco, or something like it, until they had been left with crumbling mansions, debts and good antiques.

  Many families would then sell their heirlooms or part of their land to ensure a good education for a promising boy such as Paxton must have been. Half those boys would amount to nothing, too used to thinking of hard work as something beneath them. Others would triumph, as Paxton had. And then people, at least in the good old Tar Heel State, would recognize and accept their eccentricities. Their eccentricities would, in fact, advertise their qualities.

  I’m so good at this that I can dress funny, talk funny and act funny.

  James had gotten her the very best attorney money could hire. Paxton’s eyes could go from vague to suddenly keen, showing that he was very much on the ball; he had been idly asking her questions for half an hour, but his expression became sharp now.

  “I’ll need help from you if I’m to help you,” he said. “We need to present an alternative to the judge, to get rid of probable cause.”

  “There isn’t much more I can say,” Lee told him.

  Paxton glanced at his partner, Ava Cuthrell. She was in her early thirties and smelled of hair spray and of a soft, floral perfume that was nevertheless expensive, as was her dark pink dress. Despite her large blonde curls and gentle voice, Lee knew that no one should make the mistake of underestimating Ava either.

  “You need to give us something, honey,” Ava said kindly. “Just a little something to go with.”

  Lee would have liked to help them do their job, but instead she shrugged. “What can I give you?”

  “The DA will come with photos of a man bludgeoned to death, with a weapon that has your fingerprints on it and with your priors.” Paxton pulled several sheets and turned them toward Lee. There was her photo at seventeen, the only time she had been arrested. “What can we go with?”

  “Any mitigating factors, honey?” Ava asked, her forehead crumpling in sympathy. “Did your stepfather beat you? Did he try to rape you?”

  “No. And I don’t think he’d be capable of that — the rape or molestation thing.”

  “Did he threaten your little sister?” Ava pursued.

  “The day before he was killed, he pushed her inside her room, locked the door and kept her without food.”

  The two attorneys exchanged a look.

  “Is that all?” Paxton asked.

  “Well, that’s why I went to the bar and told him tha
t if he touched her, I would kill him. That’s the reason.”

  “And he had never touched her before, and he didn’t beat her or threaten her?”

  “No.”

  “But we know that he beat your mother, because we have the 911 calls.”

  “He pushed her around. But I think she beat him worse than he beat her.”

  Paxton threw his hands in the air. “Sweetheart, are you going to defend the man you’re supposed to have killed?”

  Lee tore a paper napkin into small strips. “I didn’t love Joe, but I didn’t hate him. He wasn’t the worst man — the worst person I’ve ever met.”

  Ava softly tapped the table, her hand close to Lee’s. “Are you saying you didn’t kill him? Because it looks to all the world as if you did.”

  “That doesn’t really matter now,” Paxton said, leaning back in his chair as he stroked his chin and looked outside. It was December, but the weather was mild. Crazy Piedmont weather that could go from mild to snow in a space of a few days. The snow would never stay on the ground for long.

  “We won’t escape a trial, in any case,” Lee said.

  “Not like this, we won’t,” Paxton agreed. The front legs of his chair hit the ground again. “All right, you don’t have an alibi. But who can we call on your behalf? Your mother?”

  Lee wished she could help her bitter, lopsided smile, but she couldn’t.

  “Your grandmother?”

  Laughing out loud, Lee motioned toward her seventeen-year-old self. “That rap sheet was her doing.”

  “You stole a valuable ring from her,” Paxton pointed out.

  “It’s what she says.”

  Lee sounded stubborn and rebellious — as if she had never grown beyond seventeen or left that place. It made Paxton gaze at her thoughtfully.

  “If she says you stole it, it’s your word against hers,” he remarked.

  “Her word will win every time, too.”

  Ava was patient. “If we can show that you didn’t steal the ring, then we can show that you hadn’t really embarked in a life of crime before the murder.”