Cruel Intent

by J. A. Jance

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “Just out for a burger with the guys.” His response seemed a trifle too casual.

  “Not with Athena?” Ali asked.

  Chris shook his head. “She has papers to grade.”

  The answer was so quick that Ali wondered if it was true. Was the fact that Chris was on his own for the evening some kind of carryover from the previous night’s engagement-party fiasco?

  “Want me to bring you something?” Chris added. “I think Mr. Brooks pretty much emptied all the leftovers out of the fridge.”

  “And probably saved us both from dying of food poisoning,” Ali said with a laugh. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  And she was. She turned on her music and fixed herself a container of microwave soup. As she cleared the kitchen, she was careful to dispose of the plastic container in a fashion that would be invisible to her mother, if not to Leland Brooks. As far as Edie Larson was concerned, soup that came in plastic containers wasn’t fit to eat.

  Ali had just started the dishwasher when the doorbell rang. She went to answer it, expecting to find B. Simpson outside, bringing her a substitute computer. Instead, Athena stood waiting on her doorstep.

  “Chris isn’t here,” Ali said, letting her visitor inside.

  “I know,” Athena said. “I came to talk to you.”

  “About last night, I assume,” Ali said without enthusiasm.

  “Yes,” Athena agreed. “It is about last night.”

  By the time Athena made her way to the couch, Sam was there waiting. As soon as Athena settled down, Sam snuggled up beside her. There was something touching in the way the normally unsociable cat had taken to Athena—as though there was some special connection between these two disfigured beings.

  “Look,” Ali said. “I’m really sorry about what happened at the party. My mother adores Chris, and she thinks you’re terrific. I’m sure she let her natural enthusiasm get a little out of hand, but—”

  “I know Chris already bitched Edie out about that,” Athena interrupted. “The last thing I want to do is to cause hard feelings between Chris and his grandparents. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t that big a deal—well, maybe it was a little bit of a big deal, but I didn’t want him to go to Bob and Edie and make it that much worse.”

  Time to fess up, Ali thought. “He spoke to my mother at my suggestion,” she said. “He told me you were upset, and I thought he needed to get my parents to back off. He may have been less diplomatic than he could have been, but I had said that the two of you should get to do things your way, with nobody else interfering. That goes double for me.”

  Suddenly, with no warning, Athena burst into tears. “You don’t understand,” she managed. “Nobody does, not even Chris.”

  In order to sit next down next to Athena, Ali had to pry Sam loose and shoo her out of the way. “What is it?” Ali asked, wrapping a comforting arm around the young woman’s heaving shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  “How can I explain it to you when I don’t really understand it myself?”

  “Try me,” Ali said.

  “You know about Kenny?”

  Ali knew a little about Kenneth Carlson, the man who had been Athena’s husband. He was also the jerk who had dumped her, filing for a divorce while she had been recuperating from her injuries.

  “Some,” Ali said, keeping her voice noncommital.

  “We started dating in high school,” Athena said. “From our sophomore year on. Our senior year, we were voted most likely to become Ken and Barbie. My folks loved him and still do. As far as they were concerned, Ken was the son they’d never had. His folks loved me the same way, like a daughter. But as we got older, things changed. Or maybe I changed. Ken’s a farmer, like his dad. I wanted more than that. I was interested in other stuff, but by then things were already in motion. Both our families—both sides—got all caught up in planning this huge wedding. It was like a moving freight train—the dress, the invitations, the flowers, the whole bit. I knew I was getting cold feet. I wanted to get off the train, to stop it somehow, but I didn’t have the nerve. So I went through with the wedding, even though I knew it was wrong. Even though I knew, walking down the aisle, that I didn’t really love him the same way he loved me.”

  Athena paused. Ali, sitting beside her, said nothing. This story was one she recognized all too well. She had allowed herself to be talked into marrying Paul Grayson in much the same way—allowed herself to be persuaded, even though she’d known at the time she was settling for something less than what she’d had with her first husband. Paul had money, position, looks, everything she should have wanted, except for one critical deficit—Paul Grayson wasn’t Dean Reynolds. Ali worried that Athena was feeling the same kind of reluctance about her engagement to Chris.

  “So I can’t really blame Kenny for dumping me,” Athena continued finally. “The timing sucked. But he found someone who worships him, someone who’s thrilled to be living the farm life the way her mother and grandmother did. I heard a couple of weeks ago that they’re expecting a baby. The real problem is, my parents still blame me for everything that happened, including the divorce. They were both dead set against my joining the National Guard, even though that’s what paid most of my way through school. My father’s old-fashioned. He doesn’t think girls should go to war. As far as he’s concerned, what happened to me in Iraq is all my own fault. Mom and Dad are both convinced that if I hadn’t lost my arm and my leg, Kenny never would have left me for a ‘whole woman.’”

  “None of us has a problem seeing you as a whole woman,” Ali said quietly.

  Athena nodded. “I know. Thank you.”

  “So the only member of your family who’s still in your corner is your grandmother?” Ali asked. “The one who flew to D.C. to visit you when you were in the hospital?”

  Athena nodded again and wiped her eyes. “Grandma Betsy is my dad’s mother, and she’s a hoot. You’d really like her.”

  “What about last night?” Ali prodded gently.

  Athena sighed. “That’s the thing. I felt like I was back on that same train, the speeding wedding train. Like they say in that old joke, ‘Déjà vu all over again.’ Chris is great. Your folks are great. So are you, for that matter, but when I saw the food, all I could think about was that huge wedding. My parents were so excited to do it, and they spent money they couldn’t afford, because they wanted to do it right. And that’s why I wanted the party to be small—why I needed it to be small.”

  “In case you needed to pull the emergency brake and stop the train, you could,” Ali said.

  Athena sniffed, blew her nose, and nodded again. “But I didn’t mean to make it Chris’s problem, and I certainly didn’t mean for him to have a big falling-out with his grandparents over it. I mean, the party was more than I wanted, but I know Bob and Edie were only trying to help.”

  “Don’t worry about them,” Ali said, patting the back of Athena’s hand. “They’ve had some dealings with temperamental brides in their time. When Chris’s father and I were getting married, I was a lot like you. The last thing I wanted was a big wedding. At the time, my mother was determined to ‘do the whole thing up brown,’ as my father would say. Dean and I responded to all the parental pressure by eloping to Vegas. It wasn’t one of those drive-through ceremonies, but close.

  “So all these years later, my mother’s still walking around singing those ‘I missed the big wedding’ blues. As soon as Chris admitted popping the question to you, she went off the deep end. She figured this was her last chance at a big production-number wedding. But that’s her problem, Athena, not yours. If Edie Larson wants a big wedding, maybe she and Dad should plan a whole formal renewal-of-vows hoopla for their fiftieth—which isn’t all that far off, by the way. But for right now, as I told Mom this afternoon, we all need to back off. We’re doing things your way. Period.”

  “You told her that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Is she ups
et?”

  “She was upset,” Ali replied. “Maybe still is, but she’ll get over it.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “What about him? If Mom is over it, Dad is over it,” Ali answered. “That’s how they work.”

  For a moment Athena said nothing. “What about Chris’s other grandparents?” she asked. “He never mentions them. What happened to them?”

  That was the other problem with our wedding, Ali thought. My parents wanted a huge wedding. Dean’s didn’t want any wedding at all—at least not to me.

  “Dean’s parents disowned him,” she said. “They wanted him to come into the family business. He wasn’t interested. My family didn’t have any money. His did, and they thought that’s what I was after—his money—so they opted out of their son’s life completely. That’s the other reason we eloped.”

  “And they never came back?” Athena asked.

  Ali shook her head. “Even though Dean asked me not to, I tried getting in touch with them once after he got sick. They never returned my call. I’ve never forgiven them for it.”

  “They don’t know Chris?”

  “No,” Ali said. “Not at all.”

  Athena gave her a wry and still slightly tearful smile. “So at least I’m not the only one with a screwy family.”

  The doorbell rang again. Athena leaped off the couch. “Sorry,” she said. “How rude. You were expecting company, and here I am, messing things up. I need to go.”

  “Believe me, you’re not messing anything up,” Ali began, but Athena wasn’t listening. She hurried to the front door and flung it open. With a mumbled apology, she hustled past the visitor waiting outside on Ali’s front porch.

  “That was Athena, my son’s fiancée,” Ali explained to B. Simpson, who stood there with a roll-aboard computer case stationed behind him. “They had a bit of a disagreement.”

  “Nothing too serious, I hope,” he said.

  “No,” Ali said. “I think Athena and Chris both have a case of new-engagement jitters.”

  “If this is a bad time and I’m interrupting, I could always come back later.”

  This whole encounter was one Ali dreaded, but it had to be done. “No,” she said. “Come on in. Let’s get this over with.”

  One by one, the last few stragglers left the building. Finally, there was no one left but Matt, who sat there agonizing about Detective Holman’s phone call and struggling to understand how this unforeseen disaster had come to pass.

  In the movies, earth-shattering events happened with the hero stranded on steep, rocky cliffs overlooking roiling seas. Matt had always loved those black-and-white romances from the thirties in which star-crossed lovers would dine together in high-class restaurants where they could say their bittersweet goodbyes, all the while sipping high-toned cocktails or champagne. But Matthew Morrison was no movie-worthy hero. He was just a regular Joe whose downfall had started months earlier in the checkout line at his neighborhood Lowe’s.

  He had gone there after work with Jenny to pick up some gardening supplies and flats of annuals, mostly petunias and snapdragons, for the pots she liked to keep blooming out on the back patio. As they left the store, Matt did what he usually did: He scanned through the receipt. When he spotted the error—an eighty-seven-cent overcharge on the bottle of slug bait—he had turned on his heel and marched back into the store and back to the cash wrap to have the clerk set it right. It was an error; it needed to be fixed.

  As per usual, Jenny was in a hurry. She had been for as long as Matt had known her and for all of the eighteen years they’d been married. She had followed him back into the store, berating him all the way. Despite the long line of strangers at the checkout, she had kept after him the whole time, bitching him out, screeching at him that “only an anal-retentive auditor would waste his precious time and mine for eighty-seven goddamn cents!”

  Matt had prided himself on being a good husband. For the whole time they’d been married, he had been unfailingly faithful to Jenny, even though she’d made it clear from the beginning that no matter what Matt did, he would never measure up to her sainted and mercifully deceased father. Matt liked going to work. Compared to what went on at home, work was peaceful and quiet. He had hired on with the state auditor three years after they married. For fifteen years Matt had kept his nose to the grindstone, doing his important but unheralded work in a quietly efficient manner. It bothered him that when it came time for promotions, he was always pushed aside for someone younger—often someone Matt himself had trained—but he never made a fuss about it. That was something Matthew Morrison didn’t do: make a fuss.

  In all those years and in all situations, he’d kept a mild-mannered smile plastered on his face and done his best to get along. With everyone. Without realizing it, though, he must have been moving ever closer to the edge. And that fateful night, as the clerk counted out Matt’s eighty-seven cents’ worth of change and with the people in line snickering at him behind his back, something had snapped. After emptying the trunk and carrying Jenny’s flats of annuals out to the back patio, he had locked himself in his home office and gone shopping at Singleatheart, a site for “married singles,” which, Matt decided, was what he was.

  A month or so later, he had found Suzie Q, also a married single, separated from her husband, not interested in a divorce, but wanting to put some fun and joy back into her life. That was what Matt wanted, too—some fun in his life, although for him, it wasn’t so much putting it back in as it was having fun for the first time. Ever.

  It hadn’t worked. He had never actually seen Susan Callison, had never, as they say, laid a glove on her. But as of this afternoon, his whole nonaffair with her had blown up in his face. He was convinced that Suzie Q was dead, and he seemed to be the prime suspect. Tomorrow morning the detective would be here at his office. Would that be for questioning, or would it be worse than that? Was Holman planning to place him under arrest? Right there? In the office? With everyone around them looking on? Matt’s insides squirmed at the very idea.

  The janitorial crew swept through the floor. Ignoring Matt completely, they emptied trash cans, vacuumed a little, and then went away. Matt knew what he needed to do, but only when he was left alone once more, only when there was no one left to see, did Matt Morrison reach for his keyboard.

  CHAPTER 10

  In talking to B. Simpson on the phone, Ali had forgotten how tall he was—six feet five, at least. He wasn’t particularly good-looking. His most outstanding feature was a pair of gray-green eyes that seemed to change color depending on the lighting. There was a hint of natural curl in his short brown hair, and the smile he offered was engagingly shy.

  “Can I get you something?” Ali asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I find it’s best not to eat or drink around computers.” Rather than stopping off in the living room, he headed straight for the dining room table, where he deposited the computer bag. “Mind if we set up shop here?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Ali said. “Go ahead.”

  He opened the case and began hauling out two separate laptops as well as a whole series of cables and power cords, which he began connecting.

  “Why so many computers?” Ali asked.

  “Since we have to assume our friend is monitoring your computer at all times, we’ll have to do our own file sharing via cables rather than over the Internet. Oh, and I’ll need your computer.”

  With a nod, Ali went to fetch it. When she came back, she couldn’t help noticing that a subtle hint of aftershave had permeated the room. Good stuff, she thought. I wonder what it is?

  B. took the laptop from her. After removing her air card, he placed it on the table, where he began connecting the computer into what was by then an impressive tangle of computer cables.

  “So here’s the thing,” he continued, talking as he worked. “High Noon has been looking after your system for over three months now. Until today, other than some relatively harmless adware programs and cookies, there hasn’t
been anything out of the ordinary. The Trojan horse wasn’t there last night during our midnight scan, but it was there today at noon. So I have to ask you the usual clichéd computer troubleshooting question: What were you doing just before that happened? Had you visited any unusual websites, for example, or did you open any attachments this morning, even an attachment from a regular correspondent, from someone you know?”

  “I logged on to something called Singleatheart,” Ali said.

  “What’s that?” B. asked.

  “An Internet dating site,” she replied.

  B. stopped what he was doing long enough to give her an appraising look. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it doesn’t seem to me that you’d have any reason to go looking at one of those.”

  To her consternation, Ali found herself blushing at his unexpected compliment. “Thank you,” she said. “But it wasn’t for me. I was doing it for a friend of mine.”

  That sounded lame, she thought. Totally and completely lame.

  “Right,” he said, then returned to his cables.

  Bob and Edie had left Ali with the impression that B. Simpson was something of a recluse. She wondered if that was true or if it was simply what he wanted people to believe.

  “How much do you know about what goes on in town?” Ali asked.

  “Not very much,” he admitted with a shrug. “I’m more in tune with what’s out there on the Web than I am with what’s going on down the street. Why?”

  “I have a contractor who’s working on my house,” Ali said. “My new house. His wife, Morgan, was murdered earlier this week, and now Bryan’s fallen under suspicion. I learned that his wife had been involved with this Singleatheart website. That made me curious. I logged on because I was trying to find out why a happily married woman would have signed up on a dating service to begin with. The problem is, you can’t go there and look around for free. You have to sign up and log on.”