Dying to Please Read online

  Barbara and the rest of the family were convinced the killer was some ex-con from the Judge's past. After her first panicked assumption that her weirdo had done it, she had gone with logic and agreed with the others. Cahill didn't seem to be on the same page, though; he was concentrating more on her and the family. What had the cops found that he hadn't told?

  She knew she was innocent, and she knew the family was innocent. She had observed all of them over the past years, at holidays and on vacation, and one and all they had loved the Judge. He adored his children and grandchildren, and got on well with all of the in-laws. So what did Cahill know that she had missed?

  The room was warmer now, and she got out of bed, grimacing when she caught sight of herself in the dresser mirror. Her face was drawn and colorless, her eyes swollen. She felt weak and shaky, the result of almost twenty-four hours without much food. Four tiny bites of Danish and fruit didn't provide a lot of nourishment. She needed to eat something, even if she had to choke it down. Maybe she would go down to the hotel restaurant, later. For now, though, she put on another pot of coffee and turned on the television, then crawled back into bed. She needed to be distracted by something mindless more than she needed food.

  She had nothing to do. She was accustomed to there always being something to do. Her life was very organized for that reason, so every chore would be accomplished. She should be doing paperwork now, keeping track of the household expenses; she always did that on Thursdays.

  She could go buy some pajamas. She was close to three major shopping centers: Brookwood, the Summit, and the Galleria. But it was still raining, she was exhausted and groggy, and frankly she didn't give a damn whether or not she had pajamas to sleep in.

  She discovered that the Weather Channel was the most interesting program on at three-thirty in the afternoon. She turned off the television, turned off the bedside light, and pulled up the covers. As soon as she closed her eyes, though, she saw the Judge in his recliner, his head lolled to the side—and she smelled the odor. Hastily she sat up again and turned on the lamp.

  What was she thinking? She had just made a pot of coffee. She couldn't believe she'd put on the coffee, then gone back to bed. Nothing drastic would happen, of course, other than the coffee getting old and bitter. Neither she nor the Judge could stand old coffee—

  He always came into the kitchen early in the morning, not waiting for her to bring the coffee to him. They would stand there chatting, leisurely sipping and sharing what they both considered one of life's finest little pleasures.

  They would never share that first blissful cup of coffee again.

  Like a loop of film that never stopped running, she saw him again: his white head tilted to the side, that thin dark streak running down his neck. His hair was a little mussed, but in the dim light that was, at first, the only thing she noted that was different. His hands were relaxed on the arms of the recliner, the footrest was up, as if he had just dozed off.

  His hands were relaxed. The footrest was up.

  Sarah stared across the room, seeing nothing but the awful scene from the night before. She had the feeling of the ground tilting beneath her, as if she had stepped out of reality into quicksand.

  The footrest was up.

  He was in his recliner—actually reclining.

  The front door wasn't locked.

  But the front door was always locked. He locked it himself as soon as he came in from his afternoon walk. In all the time Sarah had worked for him, she couldn't remember him ever leaving the front door unlocked.

  What were the odds that the one time he did leave it unlocked, his killer walked in? Not very likely. Hell, the odds were astronomical against such a thing happening. He was very safety conscious, after the threats against him, and especially after the robbery.

  So he hadn't forgotten to lock the door; he had unlocked it. To let someone in?

  Why would he let a stranger come in? The answer was simple: He wouldn't.

  There was no sign of a struggle. No sign of forced entry—at least, none that Cahill had mentioned to her or the family, and she was certain he would have told them if there had been.

  The bottom dropped out of her stomach. It made sense, in an awful way. The Judge had let someone he knew into the house. They had gone into the library . . . to talk? He'd been sitting in his favorite chair, the big leather recliner; he was relaxed, the footrest in the up position. And this acquaintance had pulled a gun and shot him in the head.

  This was what Cahill had figured out, what he hadn't told them. Whoever the killer was, the Judge hadn't felt threatened. He had known his killer, felt comfortable and relaxed in his presence.

  She almost vomited, because that meant she likely knew him, too.

  CHAPTER 11

  HE FELT GOOD. HE'D FORGOTTEN HOW GOOD IT REALLY DID feel, to hold all that power in his own hands, to take charge of his own destiny. It had been . . . how long? Seven years? That was proof he was in control, that he wasn't one of those maniacs who were slaves to compulsion. In the almost thirty years since he had taken care of the problem of his father, this was only the third time he'd been forced to act. Four times, total, in almost thirty years.

  All in all, he felt justifiably proud of himself. Not many men could control themselves so well, not if they knew the rush, the sheer joy, of the act. Even more important, not many men were intelligent enough to get away with it.

  But the old man was out of the way now, and Sarah was free. Nothing stood in her way; she could come to him now.

  Cahill sat in his cubicle, slowly leafing through the files and bank statements retrieved from the fireproof safe in Sarah's closet. Finally he dumped everything in an oversized padded bag and sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. Holy shit. The woman wasn't hurting for money.

  Not that a hundred grand wasn't a lot of money, but she didn't need it. Must be nice, he thought, to be in a position where you didn't need a hundred grand. Some people would grab for everything they could get, and no amount would ever be enough, but people like that didn't devote themselves to training for a well-paying job, then devote themselves to the job and save like mad. No, people who were just out for the money would steal it, commit fraud, marry old people and then in an effort to kill them, fiddle with the multitude of drugs old people always seemed to take, but they wouldn't work for it.

  Sarah had evidently saved the vast majority of her salary from the time she started work. She'd invested it, and from what he could see she'd been smart about it. She hadn't gone heavily into tech stocks, and those she'd had she'd sold just as they started crashing, while she could still make some profit. She had blue-chip stocks, she had mutual funds, she had some workhorse stocks. She'd salted money away in a retirement fund, planning for the future. She had just turned thirty, and with everything added together she was knocking on the door of the millionaires' club.

  That was one smart woman.

  And being so smart, would she risk everything to add another hundred large to her account? Money was relative. If you were working a minimum-wage job and barely scraping by, with nothing left over for extras, then a hundred thousand was an enormous amount of money. He'd known mothers to kill their kids for a five-thousand-dollar insurance policy. But if you already had way over a hundred thousand, then in comparison it wasn't nearly as impressive. In this case, the risk outweighed the gain.

  So there went her possible motive.

  Good.

  “You got anything?” his lieutenant asked, pausing by his desk.

  “The butler didn't do it.”

  “I thought she was top of your list.”

  “The motive evaporated.”

  “Money? How does money evaporate?”

  “She has plenty of it. You know how much butlers make?”

  The lieutenant scratched his nose. “I gather it's more than we thought.”

  “She makes more than you and me combined.”

  “No shit!”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Cahill