by Jan Coffey
She wanted a baby. She wanted Ron’s baby.
But that spoiled bitch Veronica was in the way. She wouldn’t divorce him. He’d told her that himself. So Donna had taken things into her own hands. She’d met with her, woman to woman. She’d told Veronica that she was already carrying Ron’s child.
“Ron, I love you. We’re so good together. You don’t need her. You should be with me. And she was fine with everything. She didn’t cry or say anything. She’ll divorce you. I know she will.”
He shook his head in disgust and turned toward the door.
“Wait! Where are you going?” She cried out. “Wait!”
He stopped and looked back at her. “You should have kept your mouth shut and listened to me.”
Then he was gone. Donna couldn’t believe her eyes. He walked out the door and was gone. She started after him.
Before she reached the door, another man appeared in the doorway. She didn’t understand.
“Where’s Ron going? I need to talk to him.”
Without a word, he raised a pistol and pointed it at her face.
CHAPTER 54
Her eyes followed Lacey’s steps into the kitchen.
Amy could see.
The realization was sudden and should have frightened Lacey. No one lied like this unless there was an ulterior motive involved. Instead, she tamped down her fear, pushed aside her questions, and tried to figure out her next step.
A dish towel lay on the table in front of Amy, covering her hand. Lacey guessed that she was holding a gun or a knife under the towel.
She was too far into the kitchen to back up.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Lacey asked calmly. “Want some coffee?”
She walked to the counter where she kept the coffee pot. The backdoor of the kitchen was partially open. She usually kept it locked. Amy had a key and had used it to get inside after the trooper had left the house. There was a pantry right next to the back door. Lacey reached into the cabinet where she kept the coffee. The can was half full.
“Well, this one is all used up.” She tossed it in the trash. “Good thing I always keep an extra in the closet.”
She started toward the door.
“Stop.” The command was sharp.
Lacey looked over her shoulder. Amy was standing, holding a gun and pointing it at her.
“You are self-centered and arrogant, but you’re not stupid,” she said tensely. “The only reason you know I can see is because I wanted you to know.”
The cell phone in Lacey’s pocket started ringing. She reached for it.
“Don’t,” Amy ordered.
A couple of seconds later, the phone started ringing again. Lacey guessed it was Gavin. If she didn’t answer, he’d be calling the trooper in front of her house.
“We’re taking a walk,” Amy told her, motioning to the back door. “Leave your cell phone on the counter.”
As she put the phone down, Lacey saw the text message on the screen.
Amy is Denise Geller. Michael Phoenix’s girlfriend. Go to the trooper.
Concrete stairs led from the kitchen door to the backyard. A soft drizzle had begun to fall, making the ground slippery. There was no way the trooper would see them leaving, but she knew Gavin would get hold of her.
She didn’t know Denise Geller. Lacey didn’t recall any mention of the name at the trials. She didn’t even know Michael Phoenix had had a girlfriend.
This all made Amy a very dangerous person.
“Where are we going?” Lacey asked, looking behind her, gauging the distance. They were the same height, though Amy was thinner. She could knock her down if there wasn’t a gun between them.
“To the lake. Seems right. You ruined my life at a lake.”
“I don’t have a car. Isn’t it a little too far to walk?”
“Black Rock will do.”
Lacey thought walking into the woods was good. There she would have a better chance of hiding behind trees. Her limp was a huge disadvantage, but she still might be able to get away. The path to the cemetery split off to another trail that led toward the lake. The distance was probably a couple of miles.
Her mind teemed with thoughts of how little she’d known about Amy during the few months she’d been her receptionist. She’d trusted her completely.
Lacey had accepted Amy or Denise (or whatever her real name was) at face value. She’d never doubted anything she’d told her about her other jobs or her family or where she went on certain days. Lacey wondered now how much Nick had been part of this ruse. But knowing how his family was woven into the fabric of Westbury, her guess was that he was as clueless as she had been.
“Why are you doing this? Why all these lies about being blind?”
“Do you really have to ask that?” she asked in an amused tone. “Do you know your sister rented me that apartment without ever checking any of my references or ordering a credit report? She didn’t even ask for a photo ID.”
Amy had preyed on them, somehow knowing that the two sisters would be sympathetic to any woman who was trying to make a new start. Even more so in this case because of the disability.
Lacey led the way through the dense woods. Wet leaves covered the narrow path. A couple of times, if she looked around for a place to make a break for it, a sharp poke in her back warned her that Amy was keeping a close watch on her.
“What did I ever do to you? Why are you doing this?”
“You didn’t keep quiet. You ratted them out. All of my friends. Even Michael. You ruined the well-planned execution of a slut who deserved to die. Stephanie Green was supposed to die; she was supposed to be buried right in that lake. No corpse, no crime. There was nothing that would have tied her to Michael and the rest of us. Nothing…except you.”
“But you weren’t there that night. How do you know what was supposed to happen?”
“Michael and I planned it step by step,” Amy told her. “We had everything figured out. Even what to do with you. I mean you or whoever Michael found to help get Stephanie out of her house. Oh, yeah, you should have worked out fine. You would have ended up dying that night of an overdose of some bad shit. Instead, you have been living for the past sixteen years on borrowed time. You’re already dead.”
Lacey could only recall bits and pieces of everything that had taken place at Sherman Pond. She’d been stoned. She would have taken anything Michael had handed her, even wondering if it would kill her. Eternity in a void with no memories of the past would have appealed to her then.
It would have been so easy for them to get rid of her that night.
“If you hated me so much for all these years, why didn’t you just take care of it right after you found me?”
“Because I wanted you to feel pain the way I have been feeling pain.”
Lacey stopped and turned around to face Amy. The path had widened and the lake was not far away. The rain was falling harder now.
“Terri’s hit-and-run. Was it you?”
Amy nodded. “Road Kill. Wasn’t it clever leaving reminders of that around the property? On your front step?”
“But how did you do it?”
“Nick’s truck. Another trusting moron, like you and your sister. I took it. Killed your sister. Used one of your cameras to take the pictures. By the way, that will be the next thing. The police will find that camera, with pictures of Terri and Fay Stone still on the memory card. I would have loved to see how you’d sweat through that one. But you won’t be around, unfortunately.”
Somebody else was here. Lacey sensed it. She glanced around, but she couldn’t see anyone.
“Why Fay?”
Amy shrugged. “We had some history between us. And then one day she called you. She was coming over to have some holiday pictures taken. She would have recognized me. I wasn’t about to let the fat bitch ruin my plans.”
She looked into Amy’s face and motioned to the gun. “You kill people. You cover your tracks. You try to set me up. So why all of a sudden now?
Why the change of plans?”
“Because Michael is dead. He died last night. He…he couldn’t do it anymore. He broke his promise to me. He killed himself.” Her voice shook. The hand holding the gun came up. “You killed him.”
Lacey knew she had to stall her. She searched desperately for something to say. “Why didn’t you kill me at the house? Why here? We’re not even at the lake.”
Amy laughed. “That’s the only good part of this. I’m going to get away with punishing you. I’m walking away from your dead body and from your miserable life. I never saw you. I never came to your house today. I don’t have to kill you. He will.”
Lacey saw him, the old man from the cemetery. He’d stepped out of the woods. He was walking slowly toward them. He was carrying a gun, and he raised it, pointing it at Lacey as he came closer.
Amy kept talking. She was enjoying this. “You stole their innocent daughter out of their house. It was because of you that Stephanie died. You are the liar. You are the evil…”
Lacey stopped listening to Amy. Instead, she focused on the old man. Now she knew who he was. He was Judge Green, Stephanie’s father. During the trials, she’d felt sorry for him and his wife. At that moment, she realized that she still felt sorry for him. The tortured expression of his face belonged to a father who loved his daughter. And all these years later, he was still suffering.
No one had ever loved her and Terri like that.
“You’re finally getting what you deserve.” Amy lowered her gun and stepped back.
Time slowed to a crawl. Lacey watched the old man take another step closer and stop. She was staring into the muzzle of the gun, unable to move her feet.
At that moment, she realized she wasn’t mourning the loss of her own life. She was sad about what was going to happen to Gavin. How was he going to take the news? It wasn’t his fault, but he would blame himself. There was nothing he could have done that would have changed this.
Lacey wished that she had told him that she loved him.
Then, something in Judge Green’s face changed. The gun swung in a short arc until it was pointing at Amy’s head.
And he fired.
“Thank you, Lord, for bringing Denise Geller to me.”
CHAPTER 55
Sitting on her front steps, a blanket draped over her shoulders, a coffee cup in her hands, Lacey absently watched the movements of the law enforcement types doing their jobs inside her house and around the property.
After the shooting, Judge Green had disappeared into the woods. He hadn’t uttered another word. Lacey hurried back to the house. There was already a fleet of police cars there. Bringing them back to where the body lay in the woods, she could see that Denise Geller was dead. Minutes later, the Judge was picked up by police by the lake near his cottage.
Lacey should have felt safe. The nightmare was over. But she was far from being able to shake off the sadness.
Thankfully, Gavin was here. He answered questions, directed people, showed them the way, filled in the many blanks that were necessary for the investigations. Afternoon was folding into evening when he finally came and sat next to her on the steps.
“They’re done inside your house. But they still have some work to do in Amy’s apartment.” Gavin rubbed her back, placed a kiss on her forehead. “You’re cold. Why don’t we go in?”
She nodded, leaning against him as they walked into the house. She turned toward the living room, not ready to face the kitchen and the memory of Amy holding a gun on her there. Not yet. She curled up in a corner of the sofa, wrapping the blanket around herself.
Gavin locked up. Taking her coffee mug away, he disappeared and brought back a cup of hot chocolate a few minutes later. Then he sat down and gathered her into his arms.
“Nick Reilly was picked up this afternoon, too.”
“Poor Nick,” she said. “He was sideswiped by Amy, too, just like Terri and I were. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to question anything about her. She played a part and I fell for it. Even when my computer was hacked, I defended her.” The woman was dead, and Lacey was still angry.
“Her real name was Denise Geller.”
“So who was Amy? And how was this Denise able to get a job at the health club using that name?”
“The real Amy Powell lives in California. She’s from Fairfield, originally. She was her college roommate before Geller dropped out. She used the woman’s social security number. The rest was just good acting.”
“And I assume she didn’t really have a job at the adult daycare facility?”
“No. Visiting hours at Somers. She saw her boyfriend on Wednesday mornings.”
There were so many questions that she still had about Denise. But Gavin told her that the police were just starting to dig into the layers of lies that the woman had built up over the years. It could be weeks before all the information would be out.
“I’m worried about Judge Green. He saved my life,” she told him. “What now? Murder charges? Will they lock him up?”
“He’s had years of establishing himself as insane. Also, he’s got a lot of money. I wouldn’t count on him serving any time,” he assured her. “Interesting thing I heard from the state troopers…when they went into his cottage, they found a wall covered with information on his daughter’s murder and on everyone involved.”
“He’d been watching me. I saw him before. When I walked in the cemetery, he’d often be there.”
“Actually, the centerpiece on his wall was Denise Geller. He’d been keeping a close eye on her…and probably you, too. But it was her that he was after.”
Lacey put the cup on the table and laid her head on Gavin’s chest. She could hear his heart beating.
“I suppose it would be too much to ask that the Green family could ever forgive me, no matter what comes to the surface now.”
“Kathy Green strikes me as a woman who follows the polls. She’ll forgive you if the media decides to smile on you.” He rubbed her back. “As far as Judge Green goes, I think it’s not about whether he forgives you; it’s about him being able to forgive himself.”
EPILOGUE
Two months later
Bratva’s operations had taken a bump, but the investigative teams had a long road ahead of them before they could put him out of business, never mind behind bars. And Kathy Green lost the election, but her concession speech held all the promise of someone who was already planning a comeback.
Meanwhile, the promotional package Lacey had put together for Gavin was working too well.
Six new cases of missing persons—both in-state and out. The most interesting one involved a client in Cleveland, a guilt-driven millionaire who had winged a Jane Doe with his Mercedes, leaving her with no memory. And Gavin had a dozen other requests for meetings. And this was on top of the security jobs. He was already busy enough to expand his business.
But the first step was to get his top recruit to accept the terms of his offer. Unfortunately, Lacey was playing hardball.
She was against them moving in together. Lacey seemed to have a clock ticking in her head with an alarm that went off any time they spent more than a couple of days in each other’s company.
She admitted they were in love. They said how they felt, showed it, and proved it in a ton of ways. They had amazing sex…and often. But most nights, she packed him off for New Haven or got in her car and drove back to Westbury. She insisted that she was not ready to live together.
And Gavin wasn’t going to screw things up. He’d bide his time for as long as it took to win her over.
For the past couple of months, Lacey had been doing contract work for him. Promotion and advertising, research, and even some client interviews. She was great with all of it, but when it came to dealing with potential clients, she was an ace. Gavin had plenty of law enforcement expertise, but Lacey saw things with an empathy that made people insist that they take their case.
So he offered her a full-time job at his agency. Gavin figured this
had to be the next step in their evolving relationship. With a bit of trepidation at first, she’d finally accepted. But she was putting herself on a probationary trial period, and today was their first day.
Gavin pulled into her driveway at 9:00 a.m. They had an interview with a family in Danbury at 10:00. As he got out of his car, he admired the oversized green wreath sitting on the porch. He thought that she’d want it hung above the garage doors, but he’d been here yesterday, and she hadn’t asked him for help.
There was one week left to Christmas.
This was just one more thing that she would insist on doing all by herself. And it was exactly the kind of thing that he was so impatient for. To be here all the time and to decorate for holidays. To have her give him To-Do lists and order him around.
The front door opened and she stepped out, closing it behind her. He laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You.” He studied her from the bottom step. She was wearing a leather jacket of exactly the same style as his, dark gray pants, black shoes, black scarf and gloves. She had on the same sunglasses. “Well, at least people will know we’re on the same team.”
“That’s kind of nice, don’t you think?” She pushed the glasses on top of her head and took her time coming down the steps.
Before she even reached him, Gavin was beginning to think about postponing this morning’s appointment. He gathered her into his arms and kissed her.
“I’ve missed you,” he told her.
“You only left here seven hours ago.”
“Yeah, but it was seven long hours ago,” he said, kissing her again. His hands found their way under the coat and the soft sweater until he could feel her bare skin. He played with the clasp of her bra.
Her arms were wrapped around his neck. “You can’t undress me on my front steps.”
“Is that a challenge?”
