I'd Kill For That

by Marcia Talley

  Who the hell did Henry think he was? She had made him rich. She had made him famous—she!—little Vanessa Smart who grew up poor and barefoot on the Chesapeake docks with nobody but her father—a poor fisherman. That bastard!

  Her father that is—not Henry Drysdale.

  Well, yes, Henry too.

  And Lincoln Sinclair.

  And all of them—men! The scumbags!

  She’d loved imagining Lincoln Sinclair fry on his executive toilet! His death was the best of all. She played it over and over in slow motion in her mind—the sounds, the smell of singed hair and burning flesh. However, nothing she’d done to Lincoln, thought Vanessa, would compare with what they would do to him in hell. Especially after what her father had done to all those little girls.

  No! No! Not her father! Her father only did it to her—only to her—because Mummy was dead. And Daddy was very lonely.…

  Vanessa jerked the car back onto the road. Good heavens! This rain was deep!

  Anyway, it all made no difference whatsoever. As long as Vanessa got those papers from the boat—the papers Henry wanted. The papers that proved how brilliant she, Vanessa Smart-Drysdale, really was! The papers that had made Henry rich. The papers that would destroy him completely—if he ever had the guts to cross her. The papers that would destroy that little girl Henry had dumped Vanessa for, the little girl he had spilled his big, fat diamonds on: his cute little trinket fiancée—little “Babs.”

  Vanessa drove the car into the belly of the storm.

  She was ready to kill.

  * * *

  “Follow that car! It’s Vanessa!” Cundy Kaplan cried, grabbing Cindy Silberblatt by the shoulder.

  “Mother, my God!” said Rachel. “Gryphon Gate is being destroyed! There are families—children—trapped out there in the storm! What on earth are you thinking?”

  “Hey,” Tiffany interjected from the backseat, “let’s just regroup for a moment. I mean, ’You take the high road and I’ll…’ etcetera. But unfortunately for us, Mrs. ‘Rachel-the-Jungian-Expert’ Vormeister—there is no high road. I mean, you’ve surely noted that our ‘high road’ here is about as imaginary as the ‘gryphon’ in Gryphon Gate?”

  “Hey, Sis,” Aaron told Rachel. “She’s right, you know. That bitch Vanessa wiped Sigmond—she tried to wipe me too! She wiped a lot of dudes—you know?”

  Rachel knew. She ruffled her fingers in her brother’s wet hair.

  “So let’s go grab the bitch,” said Aaron, “and crunk her entire case. You know?”

  Everybody in the car agreed.

  * * *

  Vanessa seemed to be driving under water. She knew the port must be nearby because she’d passed the clubhouse minutes ago. A big car had pulled out like it was following her. She didn’t give a damn. She had the key to the Satterfields’ boat in her pocket. Nobody could stop her now.

  * * *

  Cindy Silberblatt screeched up to the dock. Actually, it was less a screech than a long, squishy slide. Everyone piled out of the car in the torrential rain. The scene before them was horrifying.

  Boats were smashing against the piers—some had broken loose. As far as Leland could tell, all the residents who’d been trapped in Gryphon Gate were already gathered there. Lydia Upshaw, holding a tarp-covered basket, turned to him.

  “Officer, can I put the twins in your car?” she asked, gesturing to the basket. “And the children—Miranda Sinclair and Samantha Lynch—they’re here, too. Is there any chance that you can at least get the little ones out? Our houses are demolished.”

  Leland felt that sense of futility he had always felt as a cop—that he’d felt when his father died. He grabbed Diane Robards by the arm.

  “I’ll help the dock crew,” he told her. “You get the kids out. And the mothers.”

  “What about Vanessa?” snapped Robards. “Have we completely forgotten why we’re here?”

  “Why don’t you work on that issue with your friend, Cunegonde Kaplan?” Leland said. “I’m a cop. I’m here to save lives, not to take them.”

  He bent down unexpectedly and kissed Diane on the cheek.

  Cindy Silberblatt tossed the car keys to Robards, touched her brow in an informal salute, and headed for the docks.

  Just then—as everyone milled about in the storm in complete confusion—a boat started up. They watched as it pulled out into the harbor at top speed.

  “No!” screamed Cindy Silberblatt. “Not the fuel dock!”

  The Satterfields’ little yacht had been lifted into the air, lifted higher and higher, tucked inside the curl of an enormous wave that was hurtling back toward the shore—right toward the fuel dock with its six high-octane gasoline pumps. They all watched in horror as they heard, over the sound of the storm, the boat’s occupant futilely revving the boat’s engine, trying to escape.

  “Turn off that engine!” someone yelled meaninglessly into the wind as dockworkers scurried frantically away from the piers. But dockmaster Cindy Silberblatt, standing in the wind, knew it was too late.

  When the boat smashed into the pilings, the dock collapsed into the water with a crash. The explosion of the Satterfields’ costly boat was deafening. Oil sprayed everywhere, borne on the wild winds. One by one the docks and their valuable yachts were engulfed, swallowed into the violent sea of flame.

  Leland Ford, with Robards and Silberblatt, was grabbing children and hauling parents back from the shore, but the sight of the wall of fire and the burning carcasses of boats, with the stench of gasoline and fire, was riveting.

  It was half an hour before Silberblatt had made sure that all her dockworkers were accounted for and that no one was trapped in the burning boats. She rejoined the detectives, with the Vormeister-Kaplans and the others, where they’d taken refuge high on the hill.

  Henry Drysdale stood with them in the rain, staring dazedly at the burning port, as if he had lost his mind or forgotten who he was.

  Lydia Upshaw came up to the group, still carrying her basket of sleeping babies. Thank God the twins loved a storm! She put her other hand on Henry’s arm, and he looked at her with bleary eyes, as if trying to recall who she was. He smelled as if he’d had a few drinks.

  “That was Vanessa in the boat—wasn’t it?” asked Henry, wiping the rain from his eyes. When Diane Robards nodded in affirmation, Henry added, in a strangely strangled voice, “I should have returned her calls.”

  “We know everything, Mr. Drysdale,” Diane Robards told him. “Except for one thing: Why didn’t you and Senator Ned Carbury come forward with evidence when people were being killed? You both must have understood—knowing what you did about Gryphon Gate, knowing that Vanessa had masterminded the theft of this land—that Vanessa herself would have had the best motive for the murders. Except for the two of you, that is.”

  Henry Drysdale had covered his eyes with his hands. Perhaps those were tears, not rain on his face, Robards thought. She’d have liked to feel sorry for him—after all, the man had lost everything. Sure, the wealthy residents of Gryphon Gate had seen their houses and manicured estates demolished, their costly yachts burned to a crisp—but those were only possessions and were insured. While Mayor Henry Drysdale, by contrast, had burned all his bridges and ruined other lives through his corruption and greed. She’d bet that Vanessa didn’t have to browbeat him very hard to steal that land.

  But Henry had taken his hand from his face, his eyes now riveted on Robards. His next words completely floored her. “These are just surmises,” he announced. “The proof of your allegations—if there ever was any—has vanished in that yacht along with Vanessa!”

  The man actually smiled! Robards felt her blood boiling. There had clearly been one murder too few in this slime bag of snakes!

  “I’m afraid not, Henry,” Lydia Upshaw, still holding her basket of babies, explained to the mayor. “The State of Maryland microfilms all historic documents, including ancient deeds. Early today, when I realized they were absent from the files of our last meeting, I
entered the coordinates of Gryphon Gate into my database. I gave my printout to Mrs. Kaplan. Even if the original records are destroyed, it’s still a matter of public record, Henry—all this land belongs to the Mattaponi Indians!”

  “Mayor Henry Drysdale,” announced Robards with great satisfaction, “you are under arrest as an accessory to the murders of Lincoln Sinclair, Sigmond Vormeister, and Lance McClintock, and as accessory after the fact to the murders of Anka Kovacik and Dr. Charles Jefferson.…”

  Robards was about to rattle off the lesser charges of conspiracy, grand larceny, and such, when Henry shrieked, “What about Carbury!? He’s the one who falsified all the paperwork! He’s the one who was blackmailing Vanessa and me for those goddamned documents!”

  “So you’re offering to work with the State in prosecuting Senator Carbury?” Robards said with a smile, as Leland Ford handcuffed the former mayor of the former Gryphon Gate. “Congratulations! That just might reduce your sentence to sixty years.”

  Leland Ford shoved the babbling Drysdale into the backseat of the Land Rover, then the security officer turned back to Robards, Silberblatt, and the group of homeless residents—all huddled there on the hill in the wind and rain. The raging oil fires on the docks below had almost vanished in a haze of acrid smoke that blanketed the river—all that remained of their magnificent possessions.

  Leland put one arm around the shivering dockmaster and gave her a big hug.

  “You saved our lives,” he told Silberblatt. Then he took Diane Robards’s slender hand in his. Diane looked up at him in surprise.

  “I never knew how rich we really are, people like us,” he told the two women. “No one can ever take away what we’ve accomplished tonight—saving lives and punishing evil, that’s something real. Our lives are important because we give, we don’t take. But you look at people like Drysdale and Carbury—everything they wanted was a mirage that vanished in less than an hour.”

  “A fantasy,” agreed Robards, squeezing Ford’s hand. Leland beamed down at her in the rain. “They must have felt, even from the beginning, that that’s all it was,” Diane added, smiling back at him. “I guess that’s why they called it Gryphon Gate.”

  Also edited by Marcia Talley

  Naked Came the Phoenix

  Available from

  St. Martin’s/Minotaur Paperbacks

  Outstanding Praise for I’d Kill for That

  “A thoroughly enjoyable tale.”

  —Booklist

  “Each contributor plants the seeds of skullduggery and suspicion so generously and harvests the earlier crop so conscientiously that the story miraculously avoids the besetting sin of such productions: contradiction and incoherence.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A diverting tale of murder among the social elite.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “With the seamless way this story melds together, you’d never know more than one author had her hand in this serial novel … This is a great way to catch up with favorite authors and meet some new ones.”

  —Romantic Times

  “It truly is an interesting and imaginative novel that, when you finish with a chapter, you have to keep reading to see what in the world the next writer is going to do … The characters are wonderful and rich (pardon the pun) and when all is said and done I’d Kill for That is a first class mystery that will keep readers guessing.”

  —The Gazette

  “A firmly tongue-in-cheek satirical romp … It’s a true hoot.”

  —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  about the authors

  GAYLE LYNDS is the New York Times bestselling author of The Coil and Masquerade. She also coauthored The Paris Option with Robert Ludlum.

  RITA MAE BROWN, the author of the bestselling Mrs. Murphy mysteries, is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter and poet.

  MARCIA TALLEY is the Agatha and Anthony Award–winning author of the Hannah Ives mysteries, including the most recent, In Death’s Shadow. She is the editor of I’d Kill for That.

  LISA GARDNER is the New York Times bestselling author of multiple suspense novels, including The Survivors Club, soon to be a TV movie on CBS.

  LINDA FAIRSTEIN is the author of the New York Times bestselling Alexandra Cooper series of crime novels, including, most recently, The Kills.

  KAY HOOPER is the New York Times bestselling author of the Noah Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series, the most recent being the hardcover bestseller Sense of Evil.

  KATHY REICHS, a forensic anthropologist, is the author of the New York Times bestselling Temperance Brennan novels, the most recent being Bare Bones and, forthcoming, Monday Mourning.

  JULIE SMITH, a former reporter and Edgar Award–winning novelist, is the author of two mysteries set in New Orleans featuring Detective Skip Langdon and P.I. Talba Wallis.

  HEATHER GRAHAM (pseudonym Shannon Drake) is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than one hundred novels, the latest being Dead on the Dance Floor and Picture Me Dead.

  JENNIFER CRUSIE is the multiaward-winning New York Times bestselling author of Crazy for You, Fast Women, Faking It, and, most recently, Bet Me.

  TINA WAINSCOTT is the award-winning author of Unforgivable, Now You See Me, and I’ll Be Watching You.

  ANNE PERRY is the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Dials, No Graves as Yet, and Death of a Stranger.

  KATHERINE NEVILLE is the USA Today and internationally bestselling author of The Eight and The Magic Circle. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

  I’D KILL FOR THAT

  Copyright © 2004 by Marcia Talley.

  Chapter 1 copyright © 2004 by Gayle Lynds.

  Chapter 2 copyright © 2004 by Rita Mae Brown.

  Chapter 3 copyright © 2004 by Marcia Talley.

  Chapter 4 copyright © 2004 by Lisa Gardner.

  Chapter 5 copyright © 2004 by Linda Fairstein.

  Chapter 6 copyright © 2004 by Kay Hooper.

  Chapter 7 copyright © 2004 by Kathy Reichs.

  Chapter 8 copyright © 2004 by Julie Smith.

  Chapter 9 copyright © 2004 by Heather Graham.

  Chapter 10 copyright © 2004 by Jennifer Crusie.

  Chapter 11 copyright © 2004 by Tina Wainscott.

  Chapter 12 copyright © 2004 by Anne Perry.

  Chapter 13 copyright © 2004 by Katherine Neville.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 0-312-93696-6

  EAN: 9780312-93696-9

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / May 2004

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / August 2005

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  eISBN 9781466835399

  First eBook edition: November 2012