Killer Secrets

by Marilyn Pappano

  Because the Greeley yard was large and had thirty-eight trees to trim around—Mario had counted them—Mila started out on the stand-on mower. It beat walking behind a push mower, like Ruben, but by the time she finished her portion of the lawn, her shoulders and upper back were aching and sweat drenched her T-shirt and overshirt. She was happy to escape to the back of the house with her gardening tools, this time including—God save her—a ruler. Mr. Greeley wanted the mulch exactly three and a half inches deep in every bed and on every path, so every week, she measured, raked and leveled them.

  In businesses like theirs, Gramma said, quirky people paid the bills. Don’t grouse about them. Celebrate them.

  Of course, a lot of people thought Gramma was quirky. Mila, on the other hand, they considered just plain odd.

  The housekeeper came out of the kitchen while Mila was finishing one of the beds. She smiled, nodded and proceeded to the pots on the patios that were lush with herbs. With a pair of small shears, she snipped stalks and stems into the small basket she carried, then turned toward the vegetable garden at the back edge. “I just get some tomatoes,” she said with another smile and a heavy South Asian accent.

  Mila nodded and continued to her own destination, the shrubs that marched across the back edge of the yard. She passed the garden, its tall fence intended to protect it from wildlife. She had watched quietly last week as a deer gracefully leaped in, snacked to her heart’s content, then leaped out again and disappeared into the trees. Mr. Greeley might be able to control the rest of the world with his demands, but the deer wasn’t impressed by how much money he had.

  She approached the line of blue junipers, far too uniform for her tastes. She liked freedom, flow and movement, not the unnatural precision of too much pruning. And that was why she had her own garden: most customers didn’t care what she liked. They paid her boss so she would do what they liked.

  She was inspecting the junipers when she heard the first sound: a sharp intake of breath from the garden area. Turning, she looked for the housekeeper, who might reach five foot two on tiptoe, but saw no sign of her behind the plentiful tomato, corn and okra plants.

  Then came a bloodcurdling scream, a rustle of plants swaying, small feet pounding on the path. Mila, her own feet frozen to the ground, followed the woman’s progress by the plants she bumped or mowed over on her way to the gate. Wild-eyed, she burst through the gate, looked frantically around, then ran to Mila, grabbing her arms, speaking rapidly in a language Mila didn’t understand.

  Mario came running from around front, followed by Ruben. An instant later, the powerful roar of Alejandro’s mower shut off, and he joined the men. Ruben’s gaze met Mila’s as he handed the hysterical housekeeper to Mario, then beckoned Mila to go with him.

  I don’t want to. Please don’t make me. I don’t want to see, I’ll do anything you say, I’ll be good, just please don’t make me look. The little-girl whimper was sharp and raw, echoing in her brain even as she forced herself to take the first step, then the next.

  Ruben went first, around the fence, through the gate, along the main path where rows branched off to the left. Corn, okra, cucumbers, lettuce, bell peppers and, last, tomatoes, planted where the taller plants helped protect them from the midday sun. She counted six, seven varieties—heirloom, hybrid, giant beefsteaks to tiny grapes, red, yellow, green and striped.

  Finally she had no choice but to look at the cause of the housekeeper’s scream. Mr. Greeley lay on his back across the path, tomatoes spilled from a trug that lay on its side and red stains, too many of them, marking his shirt. Still sticking out of the center of his chest was the source of those stains: a wicked sharp pair of pruning shears, the pivot and a portion of the shank buried in his flesh.

  Mila couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t run far, far away and hide. She could only stare, could only feel the vicious ache in her own chest, could only remember...too much, too much, just too damn much.

  God help me, why is this happening again?

  Chapter 4

  It was raining the night my parents died. Dark clouds threatened all day, but the storm had held off until the skies were black. I stood at a side window, unable to see anything, but my skin prickled, and every breath I took was an effort. As lightning flashed a brilliant warning in the night, thunder erupted, vibrating through the ground and the floor and right up into my body.

  The storm had arrived.

  My mother’s eyes glittered with excitement as she pulled on her slicker. She took hold of my arm and dragged me across the kitchen toward the back door. My terror found its voice as I dug in my heels. “Let go. I don’t want to—”

  “Your father warned you, but you wouldn’t listen. Now you’re going to see just what you’re making him do.” She opened the back door and shoved me to my knees at the bottom of the steps. By the time I stood up, she was beside me again, her nails biting into my skin.

  It was twenty yards to the barn, lit only by the flashes from the sky. I lost my balance, sliding in the mud, but her forward momentum kept me upright. As water soaked my clothes and turned my dingy sneakers brown, I thought, She’ll punish me for this tomorrow. “How did you get your shoes so dirty? You are so stupid. You do it just to cause me trouble.”

  Maybe I was stupid. Just ahead, behind big wooden doors, my father waited with his next victim, and I worried about shoes? He intended to force me to watch his sick game to the end, and all I could think about was my own problems?

  God wasn’t a name heard often in our house, and when it was used, it was a curse rather than a prayer. I didn’t know how to pray, beyond what my grandmother had taught me when I was five. Those were the only words I could put in coherent order. Now I lay me down to sleep.

  The door was just ahead. I wanted to stop. To break and run. To hide under my bed and hope that this time when they moved on—they always moved on after every victim—they would forget to take me with them. If I made myself small enough and quiet enough, if I pretended I was invisible, if I prayed...

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If they made me watch this tonight, I wasn’t sure I would still have a soul come morning. Some things were just too fragile to survive.

  If I should die before I wake...

  My mother had to let go of me to shove open the wide heavy doors, spilling out yellow light into the storm. He was in there, but I didn’t see him right away. I tried not to see anything, but I didn’t have a choice. She was there, hands tied above her head, in the middle of the large space. Her mouth was taped; her eyes were huge and fearful and her breathing was a pained gasp that hurt me to hear. She knew I’d gotten her into this, and she looked at me as if I could save her.

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t save myself. All I could do was pray the Lord my soul to take. And hers. Right now. A lightning strike, a funnel cloud swooping out of the sky to carry us away.

  Because the real storm was yet to come.

  —Excerpt, The Unlucky Ones by Jane Gama

  “Chief, Lois is looking for us.”

  Sam looked up as Ben Little Bear strode out of Judge Watson’s second-floor courtroom. The hearing he’d appeared for had already started; Ben should have been on the stand the past five minutes. Instead, he was heading for the stairs and obviously had no doubt that Sam would follow.

  “What’s up?” Only an emergency could get an officer off Judge Watson’s stand, and the old coot had a different definition of the word than everyone else did.

  Their boots clunked on the marble stairs, the noise bouncing off the high ceiling and echoing off the walls. The Cedar County Courthouse was more than a hundred years old, built at a time when marble and stone and intricate woodwork had been within a small city’s reach. It was one of the beauties of Cedar Creek architecture.

  Ben reached the first floor befo
re glancing back. “We have another murder. That makes three in four years. Two in five days.”

  Sam’s gut tightened. Cedar Creek’s violent crime mostly ran along the lines of burglaries, robberies, drug deals gone bad, assaults and domestic disputes. It was enough to keep the department busy, but not enough to overly worry the town council or the residents.

  “That’s not all.” Ben pushed one of the heavy doors open, then held it for Sam. “Guess who was there when the body was found.”

  Sam hated statements like that. If the answers weren’t obvious, no one would say them in the first place. Adjusting his hat against the glaring sun, he matched his stride to Ben’s as they headed for the police department, a minute’s walk away across the town square.

  “Mila,” he murmured more to himself than Ben. Why? Of the twenty-five thousand people in town, why her?

  “Milagro Ramirez.” Ben’s confirmation was flat. “Quite a coincidence, huh.”

  Lois was waiting at the foot of the broad steps that led into police headquarters. She looked as grim on the outside as Sam felt inside. “Victim is Curt Greeley. Lives out at the old Burnett place set back off Highway 66. Remember, he fought the extension of the city limits out there. Said if he’d wanted to be in the city, he would have bought in the city.”

  And had been pretty pissed off about losing the fight. “I remember. He said he’d have the council’s jobs and mine, too.”

  Ben snorted derisively. “If we had a dollar for every time someone’s told us that...”

  “Hell, no one wants our job,” Lois said, covering the ground to the parking lot with long strides. “Not for what they pay us. Tucker and Simpson were first on the scene, Sam, and Fire Rescue’s out there, too, though there’s no one to resuscitate except maybe the woman. She was awfully shaken.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “Maybe.”

  Sam cast him a look before angling off to his truck, parked in his reserved space. He didn’t wait to get his seat belt fastened before flipping on the lights and siren and shifting into gear.

  It was Ben’s job to be suspicious, he reminded himself as he headed west down a side street with less traffic than First Street. It was his job, too, but Mila wasn’t the cold-blooded killer type. She’d had no motive to kill Evan Carlyle, and even though Curt Greeley was one of the meanest SOBs in town, people managed to deal with him every day without resorting to murder. He was sure Mila gritted her teeth, made an effort not to offend him and escaped his company as quickly as possible. Just like everyone else did.

  Sam’s phone rang, and he glanced at caller ID before answering. “Yeah, Ben.” The car radios were handy, as were the microphones clipped onto their uniforms, but cells were great for convenience and privacy.

  “What do you know about Greeley?”

  “He was buddies with my uncle Hank and my cousin Zee back in the day. He was arrogant and obnoxious, and the more money he made, the worse he got. Even Zee wouldn’t have anything to do with him after a while.”

  Ben’s grunt was simple but enough. Zee was a well-known waste of space who would hang out with a rabid skunk if the skunk could put up with him. Zee had no standards. When he dropped a person, that person had no hope. He’d become the lowest of the low.

  “Family?” Ben asked.

  “Used to be. Wife left him about eight years ago and took the kids. Very ugly, very public. Rumor said it was a huge blow to his ego because he’d never lost anything before, and it left him a little unhinged.”

  “Enemies?”

  “Everyone who ever met the man.”

  “Great. No one with an obvious grudge against the first victim, everyone with a grudge against the second.”

  “Better start making those lists, Ben,” Sam teased before disconnecting. The Greeley house was little more than a mile past the edge of town, barely a quarter mile inside the new city limits. He shut off the siren but kept the lights on as he turned into the long drive.

  The house was a bona fide Southern mansion, rescued from a hundred years’ neglect on the banks of the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana and moved to its current location. Even back in the ’50s, the move had cost a fortune, but the doctor behind it had spared no expense. His beloved wife had had a thing for the Deep South, and he’d been happy to bring a small portion of it to Oklahoma for her.

  Sam’s mom had called the doctor and his wife a true love story. After their deaths, Curt and Charlaine Greeley had bought the place. He seriously doubted the story they’d lived out had had much love in it. Curt had been all about power and control and humiliating the people around him.

  Sam pulled off the driveway and parked in the grass next to the Fire Rescue truck, giving them room to leave if they got a call. The familiar Happy Grass pickup was parked closest to the garage, a fire engine behind them, an ambulance to the side. Its rear doors were open, and the paramedics were fussing over a dark-haired woman wrapped in a cotton blanket. Mila?

  No. The instant the thought occurred to him, she stepped into view, with her coworkers beside the pickup truck. Her expression was troubled, her shoulders rounded, but truthfully, she looked no worse than the three men with her. No more invested.

  As Sam approached the ambulance, Cullen Simpson met him. He looked sweaty, pale and green around the gills. The kid had gone off and seen his first dead body. It had to happen sometime, but Sam wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten more experience first.

  “Where’s Tucker?”

  Simpson’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Out back with the body.”

  “You okay?”

  This time he bobbed his entire head, but he didn’t look at all convincing. “Mr. Greeley’s body was found by the housekeeper, Luna—Lushan—Lu—”

  With a thin unsteady smile, the woman leaning against the bumper of the ambulance offered her hand. “Lunasha Ajmera.”

  Sam shook hands with her, automatically assessing her. She was short, round, probably in her early to midsixties. She radiated caring and security. She looked motherly. Grandmotherly.

  He introduced Ben and Lois to the woman, then circled the ambulance and headed for the lawn crew. The men instinctively drifted away, moving to the shade provided by the garage overhang, leaving Mila standing in the harsh sun.

  “We’ve got to quit meeting like this,” she said.

  Sam was surprised. He hadn’t been sure she had a sense of humor, especially one that bordered on inappropriate given the circumstances. She seemed to regret the comment quickly enough, pressing her lips into a thin line and directing her gaze off in the distance.

  “Sounds good to me. But then we’ll have to find other places to meet.”

  This time the surprise was hers. She looked at him from the corners of her eyes, her brows arched upward. Thinking his comment was even more inappropriate?

  He gestured toward a grove of crape myrtles on the east side of the lawn, and they began walking that way. Lines showed how far the crew had gotten in cutting the grass before the discovery, and the fresh scents drifted up with every step they took.

  “What happened?” He pulled an ink pen from his shirt pocket and a notebook from his hip pocket, flipping it open to a clean page. While they walked, his notes would be a crappy shorthand that no one but him could read, but it was enough to get the point across.

  Mila removed her ball cap and swiped her sleeve across her face. Her hair was in a braid today that hung between her shoulder blades, the black glossy and glinting in the sun. “I was in the backyard getting ready to trim the junipers. Mr. Greeley likes them to be uniform. The housekeeper—”

  “Lunasha.”

  “She was clipping herbs when I went out back. She said she was going to get some tomatoes from the garden. I heard a gasp, and then she screamed. She came tearing out of the garden, out the gate, and grabbed me. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.”

  H
is first impression had been wrong. Mila was shaken. Her flat narrative was proof of that. The way she stood utterly motionless. The emotional disconnect that wrapped itself around her.

  “Did you know Mr. Greeley was home?”

  “I didn’t think about it. I had my ruler. I was prepared.” She stepped into the grove, weaving around the trees and took a seat on the concrete bench in their shade.

  “Your ruler?”

  She gazed up at him before moving over a few inches on the bench, making room for him. “Did you know him?”

  “I did.”

  “He was...difficult.”

  “He was.” Sam sat down beside her, far enough away that they couldn’t accidentally touch.

  “He wanted us to ‘fix’ all these crapes as soon as they finished blooming this year. There wasn’t enough structure to them. He wanted them pruned to the same size, the same shape. He wanted the blossoms in each group to be identical in color. He wanted strict regimentation in both his yard and his gardens.”

  Bracing his notebook on his knee, Sam glanced around at the trees. The bark peeling from the trunks was his favorite part of the crape myrtle, but their freeform shape and lush flowers made them gorgeous. They belonged here, growing rampant with the Southern mansion, but it didn’t surprise him at all that Greeley had wanted them under tight control or gone. He’d given pretty much the same order to everyone in his life, and everyone had chosen gone.

  But now he was gone. The crapes had been saved.

  “Did you talk with him often?”

  “No. When our crew took on this property, he gave us tutorials on how to do our jobs—how short to cut the grass, how deep the mulch should be, exactly where to make cuts when trimming branches, how far apart to plant this tomato plant from that one. He checked on us about once a month to make sure we haven’t forgotten.”

  Jeez. Sam had just developed a new level of respect for all the service people in the world. He dealt with plenty of demanding, overbearing and just plain mean people himself, but at least he had some measure of protection from the badge he wore and the title he carried. He’d worked for a chief who stood up for his officers, and Sam made sure his officers knew he had their backs.