A Willing Murder Read online

  I say that it looks like what goes around, comes around.

  When Kate put down the newspaper, her hands were shaking. Sara had moved behind her and she took it.

  “This isn’t true,” Kate said. “Not any of it.”

  Krystal shot a hateful look at Jack. “He’s been sleeping with her.”

  Kate looked at Jack but he didn’t react. “With Cheryl? All that about the child abuse isn’t true. It was made up by—”

  “Not her.” Krystal grabbed the newspaper. “Her!” She was punching it.

  “Elliot Hughes is female,” Jack said but made no expression.

  Kate gave him a narrowed-eye glance. So Elliot was the newscaster she’d heard he was dating? He should have told them of this complication. “That doesn’t mean—”

  Krystal cut her off. She was staring at Jack. “Donna is in tears. She’s had to hear people say that her son is a murderer.” She looked at Sara. “I bet you like anything that causes her pain.”

  “If you think—” Sara began.

  Kate put her hand on her aunt’s arm, then looked at them. For all the softness she saw, their faces might as well be on Mount Rushmore. “Oh, the hell with all this,” Kate said, then turned to Krystal. “You have two choices. You can yell and scream and spit venom at us, or you can help us prove that Roy didn’t do it. Your choice.”

  Kate got up and stalked into her room. She stood in front of the window, her arms crossed over her chest. She had to calm her own anger down. She’d spent a lifetime dealing with relatives who only knew anger. Orders. Decrees. Threats. Never any reasoning about anything.

  After a few minutes, Jack came into her room. “Krystal has some things she wants to say to you.” When Kate didn’t react, he stepped behind her. “Come on,” he said. “She’s calmed down. I think she’ll talk now.”

  Kate still didn’t move.

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “We can stop this anytime you want,” he said softly. “My family is too much for me to handle, much less for an outsider.”

  She rubbed her upper arms. “It’s not them. I think maybe it’s the injustice of it all. That article was truly awful. It condemned innocent people. It assumed guilt of both Cheryl and Verna.”

  “And Roy.”

  “Yes. And him.” She turned to face him. “If we figure this out, can you get that woman to retract what she wrote?”

  “I think she’d love to write an in-depth piece about the truth.”

  “Is she the newscaster Alastair said was your girlfriend?”

  “Probably. I met her when she interviewed me about buying the houses. But it was just a one-night thing. We haven’t gone out since.”

  “Think she had a good time with you?”

  Jack blinked. “This happened before I met you. I didn’t—”

  Kate waved her hand. “A newspaper insider might be useful in helping us. But if you did some quickie that turned her off, she’ll tell us to get lost.”

  Jack’s eyes were wide. “No quickie. An all-nighter. Best she ever had. Her words, not mine.”

  “Good. Unless she was lying. Let’s go talk to your stepmother.”

  Shaking his head, Jack followed her back into the living room. Krystal was still sitting on the couch and she’d poured her drink into a glass with ice in it. Cheese and crackers had been added to the tray.

  Sara was on the opposite sofa but she looked ready to run away if the atmosphere again got angry.

  “I want to help,” Krystal said. “She said you want me to tell my side of what happened.”

  She, Kate thought. Looked like the air hadn’t cleared enough that the names of her enemies were going to be used.

  “I didn’t know about the sex stuff,” Krystal said. “Roy didn’t tell me that part.”

  “There was no ‘sex stuff,’” Jack said. “We didn’t—”

  “What happened?” Kate asked.

  “When we heard about the, uh, tree, I looked back at my old calendars. I used to keep them so I’d know about Evan’s shots. He needs—” She took a breath. “Anyway, I made a note about that house. And I remember it because of the camera.” She looked at Jack. “And your bike.”

  She took a drink. “It was the last weekend before school started, and that Saturday morning we were going to the Sawgrass Mall to buy school clothes for Evan. Roy was in a foul mood, snapping at me, and we were about to get into a fight. I wanted to get there early, but he said he had to make a stop.”

  She looked at Kate. “He drove to the Morris house, parked across the road and told me to wait for him. In the front yard he picked up a bike that had been smashed. I knew it was Jack’s.” She glared at him. “Roy’s first wife married a rich contractor, so Jack didn’t have to take care of his things. If he lost or broke something, his stepfather could just buy him a new one. That bike cost a lot of money, but Jack had destroyed it.”

  Kate looked at Jack, but except for a darkening of his eyes he had no expression.

  “Roy threw the bike down, then went around to the back of the house. I didn’t know those people. I’d heard about Verna, so of course I had nothing to do with her. An old van was parked at the side, and it was packed to the ceiling. There were even things tied onto the back.”

  “What did Roy do?” Kate asked.

  “He was out of sight for a while and later he told me that he went through the house. He said it was a mess inside, like they’d left in a hurry, but nobody was there.

  “I saw Roy open the car door and take out a box.” Krystal looked from Kate to Sara. “I guess he shouldn’t have done that, but he was pretty mad about the bike. Those women shouldn’t have destroyed his son’s property no matter how mad they were at Roy.”

  “What was in the box?” Jack’s teeth were clenched.

  “A video camera and tapes. Roy said they belonged to Henry Lowell and he was going to return them. I never saw them again.”

  She caught her breath. “Wait! That may not be true. I saw a camera just like that one at Donna’s house, but that was at least a year later. I remember thinking that Henry must have recommended it. He was such a nice man.” She looked at Jack. “I don’t know why you couldn’t have been more like him.”

  “Too much of my dad in me, I guess.”

  “Roy tried to make a man of you, but you were always ungrateful.”

  Kate said, “I think—”

  “So how often did you leave him?” Jack asked. “And you got your nose fixed. It looks better than it did in the hospital.”

  Krystal came to her feet. “Everyone knows you killed my son. You were drunk and driving and—”

  Kate put her hand on Krystal’s arm, Sara went to the other side and they managed to get the angry woman to the front door.

  “I’ll talk to you two, but not to him,” she said as they closed the door behind her.

  Kate and Sara leaned against the door and both let out a breath. It felt like they’d just fought a fire-breathing dragon.

  When Sara and Kate finally recovered enough to walk away from the door, they found Jack in the kitchen frying eggs. For all that he’d just been accused of a heinous crime, he didn’t look disturbed.

  “I’m going to go to work today.” He sounded happy. “What are you two doing?”

  The women weren’t fooled. Sara glanced at Kate. “We’re going with you.”

  “I need to—”

  “See the sheriff,” Kate said.

  Jack gave a giant sigh. “Stop trying to read my mind. Flynn shouldn’t have told the reporter all that.”

  “You mean your girlfriend?” Kate said. “Why aren’t you calling her and bawling her out? But then, she’s probably too proud of her own cutesy writing to be upset. What happened to printing the real news? Facts? Not hearsay about bad boys and motorcycles.”

  “Jack has Roy’s Harley