Dead Lies (2 page)

Silence.

“Serena?” He heard scraping noises on the other end, but he couldn’t make them out. The scraping noises got louder.

“Serena?” he repeated.

A few long seconds dragged by before he finally heard Serena’s voice. It was wet and raspy. “Violent,” she seemed to say. He strained to hear and made out something that sounded like, “Get violent.”

Web’s heart thudded in his chest. “Serena, talk to me.”

He knew his parents and sister were watching him, their faces beginning to register concern, but he instinctively avoided their eyes.

Ten more seconds passed, and he started to sweat. He became hyper-aware of his body. He was breathing raggedly, and his head was throbbing. Another minute passed. There was no response, no sound on the other end.

“Please,” he begged.

Nothing.

Seconds ticked by. His father stepped closer and asked anxiously, “What’s going on, Web?”

Still nothing.

“Serena?” Web’s voice was only a whisper now, but it was deafening against the stillness of the room. A few more seconds passed and then it was there. The
knowing.

His dread must have showed plain on his face because he heard Beth whisper, “Web?” And his mother started to cry.

Finally, through the phone, he heard a hideous crashing noise and then, worse, total silence. The phone had disconnected.

Web couldn’t speak; he couldn’t breathe. The knee he was born with buckled, and he dropped to the floor.

CHAPTER 2

P
OLICE OFFICER ANNA VALENTINE WAS GRATEFUL FOR HER NEW JOB IN
ritzy Avondale. The small-town station was as quiet as a law office.

Back in New York City, where she’d worked until four months ago, police precincts were crowded, dirty and chaotic. Phones rang non-stop, people were constantly slamming drawers, and guys thought nothing of yelling out to each other over their colleagues’ heads so they could be heard over the din. On top of that, there was the noise of the city to contend with. It was an endless assault of cars honking, people shouting, garbage trucks beeping and grinding. The noises seemed to seep through the cracks and the holes of the building, so that you felt that you could never get away from it.

But four months into her new gig, Anna was starting to feel…a little bored with all this serenity. She spent most days writing parking tickets while all too infrequently catching a real case, like the burglary that had occurred two months ago. The perps had busted a back door and taken a few hundred dollars of cash plus some jewelry the owners hadn’t bothered to hide. They’d caught the guys the same night, two scared and gangly nineteen-year-olds on break from college who needed money to score pot.

She also missed the rowdy camaraderie of an urban precinct. Her city colleagues loved nothing better than to trade takedown stories at the water cooler or at the local cop bar. She had tried that with her Avondale colleagues, but she’d learned pretty quickly that most of them weren’t much interested in hearing about the exciting life she used to lead in The Big City. She wasn’t sure if they were jealous or unable to relate, but either way, they seemed content with their mundane responsibilities, so she decided she would try to feel the same way, too. She didn’t want to alienate anybody. She wanted to fit in.

The truth was she needed this job. She’d had a long and terrible year. Her grief was still unbearable, and she had a traumatized four-year-old son at home. There was nothing she prized more at this point than the quiet life that her new position afforded. She hoped it would help her son finally heal
.

She hoped they would
both
be able to heal.

Feeling stiff from sitting too long, Anna abandoned the incident report she was working on and pushed back her chair. She went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, which was cleaned weekly by Ernesto the janitor. Anna had only seen Ernesto around the office a handful of times. He worked the late afternoon shift when she was usually home with her son, and she enjoyed the few conversations they’d had. There was something about life among the privileged Avondale residents that made her want to reach out to other working class folk.

Grabbing a container from the top shelf, she poured herself a small cup of eggnog left over from Friday’s Christmas party. All evening she’d been fighting the urge to have some. It was thick and creamy and sweet. Even without the rum, there were at least 300 calories in that little cup, and all of them knew exactly where her butt was.

She had lost ten pounds in the last year due to the stress, but unfortunately none of them had come off her rear. In fact, it was as if the thinning-out of the rest of her body had actually made her ass look
bigger.
She wasn’t saying she wanted to gain the weight back. She liked the way her clothes fit now; she just wished it was distributed a little better. She needed to start running again. Maybe some toning would help. She should take a run tomorrow. Before work. But that would mean she’d have to set the alarm for five a.m.

“Screw it,” she thought, taking a gulp.

Ever since the accident, guilt had been ever-present. No reason not to heap a little more onto the pile.

Finishing the treat in a few quick swallows, she ambled back to the spacious bull-pen, where all the officers except the Chief sat. He had his own office with a door.

She fished around her desk for a hair tie and pulled her curly hair into a pony tail. She looked around the room again. The bull-pen was so quiet tonight, most of the desks empty. There was a feeling of desolation the merry Christmas lights couldn’t mask.

She took the hair tie out and let her hair down again, feeling the familiar urge. Isolating a strand of hair from the top of her head between her thumb and forefinger, she gave it a quick yank. There was a sharp pinch of pain as the follicle broke loose and then…relief. Then she gave another hair a yank and started thinking that the quiet around the office wasn’t so bad. There was no boss to tell her what to do, no fellow officers making boring chit chat.

She wasn’t even sorry to be working on Christmas Day.

Yank.

She was glad she had something to do other than sit in her empty house, alone, while her son spent the holiday with his father.

Yank.

Anna sighed with satisfaction. She knew it was a disgusting habit, but she couldn’t help herself. She craved the release.

She picked up the hair tie and put her hair back into a pony tail. She had always resented the mass of thick dark hair she’d inherited from her Greek mother. Like many teenage girls she’d longed for the sleek, straight,
blond
strands the pretty, popular girls always seemed to be blessed with. But now she was actually grateful for its fullness. It hid her sins.

She felt calmer again. It was time to get back to work. She would finish the incident report then tackle some of the filing she’d been putting off. But just as she picked up her pen she heard Brenda’s voice on the other side of the room and realized a 9-1-1 call had come in. She grabbed her note pad, jumped from her chair and made a bee-line for the woman who manned the dispatch desk.

Anna was half the dispatcher’s age, but from their first handshake she’d immediately felt a kinship with her. She appreciated her colleague’s discretion—how she never pressed her about the reasons she’d moved here or about the trouble she was having with her son Max. It was nobody’s business, and she wasn’t ready to share. Brenda instinctively seemed to know that.

Brenda spoke calmly but rapidly into her headset, like the seasoned emergency worker she was. When a small frown appeared on her forehead, Anna’s cop antennae shot up.

In the five seconds it took Anna to cross the room Brenda had radioed the patrol car on duty and was feeding Captain Frank Fazio details of the emergency call. “…Unknown condition at 275 Pepper Crescent. The caller believes the residents may have been hurt.”

Anna listened and jotted the information down on her note pad. Unknown situation could mean anything from a possible B & E in progress to an elderly homeowner’s slip in the shower. The more she heard the more she suspected it was a break-in.

She felt the familiar rush.

“We’re on the other side of town,” she heard the captain respond through the radio. “E.T.A. five minutes.”

Anna leaned over and whispered to Brenda, “I’m going over there.”

“Take Paul,” Brenda mouthed then addressing the headset, “Frank, I’m sending Anna and Paul, too.”

There was a pause on the other end, and then Frank replied, “Ten-four.”

Anna jogged back to her desk feeling like she’d just scored a small victory against her captain, even though she wasn’t sure she was even engaged in a battle with him at all. She hadn’t been able to figure out if Frank was just standoffish or he didn’t like her. Beyond “hello” and “goodbye,” the captain had hardly said a word to her during the few overlapping shifts they’d shared, and more than once she’d caught him studying her while he stroked his salt-and-peppered mustache with his thumb and forefinger. Maybe she rubbed him the wrong way because she was the first female cop the Avondale P.D. had ever had. He could very well be one of those old-school cops who didn’t think women belonged on the force. She’d run across enough men like that during her tenure.

Paul exited the men’s room just as Anna was retrieving the car keys from her desk drawer.

“Let’s go,” she said, tossing him the keys and pulling her nylon police jacket over her blue sweater.

He halted mid-whistle and caught the keys without missing a beat. “What’s up?” Tall, smooth-faced and bean-pole skinny, Paul Fisher moved like a gangly Golden Retriever puppy that hadn’t yet grown into his limbs. Just twenty-one, he looked like a kid whose mother still called him in to dinner every night. And it seemed he hadn’t yet acquired the mature adult skill of filtering his thoughts. Her first week on the job she’d freed her feet from her sweaty socks and shoes under her desk then rolled around in her desk chair when Paul asked her a question. He’d looked down at her bare feet and blurted, “Wow, look at those bunions! They’re huge!”

Anna’s face had flamed with humiliation. She was extremely sensitive about her feet.

She’d wanted to smack Paul’s pale white face. But she’d kept her anger in check and responded the way she might to a child who didn’t know any better. “Yes, they’re big and sometimes painful,” she’d told him. “But surgery isn’t an option right now, so I don’t really have any choice.”

That had shut him up. Paul had apologized immediately and never mentioned her bunions again.

She handed him his jacket. “Residential burg,” she answered.

Paul’s eyebrow shot up. “You shittin’ me?” he asked, using one of his favorite expressions.

“Nope.”

Then he frowned, as if he realized he shouldn’t be taking perverse delight in someone else’s misfortune. “Where?”

“Pepper Crescent Road.”

“Who called it in? Neighbor?”

“The wife’s brother. Seems the wife and husband never showed up to Christmas dinner.”

Paul nodded knowingly, as if this information explained a lot.

They exited the building and crossed the parking lot, heading for one of the Chevy Impala cruisers lined up against the chain-link fence. As she climbed in Paul fired up the engine and pulled onto the street. Being young and excited, he hit the gas hard, quickly taking the vehicle up to sixty miles an hour. He did not activate the siren or lights. With an unknown situation awaiting them, it was better to arrive in stealth mode.

They blazed through the streets of the commercial area toward the section of town called The Lawns, past all the cars that lined the streets, and whizzing by several groups of party-goers unloading bags of presents from their cars.

“Lotta parties going on tonight,” she said casually, the way cops usually talk on patrol.

“Yeah, my folks are having one,” said Paul.

“You shittin’ me?” she cracked.

Paul grinned. “I’m heading over there after we’re done. You’re welcome to come, you know.”

Anna didn’t acknowledge the invitation. “My folks are having a party, too,” she said, picturing her family—her brothers and their wives and children—gathered in the living room of the Brooklyn brownstone in which she’d grown up. Right about now they’d be standing around the old upright piano singing Christmas carols at the tops of their lungs.

She would have liked to be with her family, but in the end she’d opted to work instead. She told herself she needed the overtime. But the truth was being the only divorced person in a house full of happy couples would just have made her feel more alone.

A moment later, the cruiser turned onto Pepper Crescent and Paul slowed the car so they could scan house numbers. Odd numbers were on the right side of the street, so Anna spotted it first, noticing at the same moment that a car—a dark blue BMW sedan—had pulled into the driveway ahead of them.

She picked up the radio handset and spoke into the device. “Brenda, do you copy?”

“Copy, go ahead.”

“We’re here, and looks like we’ve got company,” she said, rattling off the BMW’s license plate number. “Run it for us?” She would have done it herself on the laptop hooked up to the dashboard, but she didn’t have time. The doors of the vehicle in front of them were opening.

“Copy that,” Brenda replied.

“Could be the 9-1-1 callers,” Anna speculated to Paul, although she couldn’t wait for confirmation from Brenda. The driver was now getting out of the car. Another figure—a woman—was emerging from the passenger side.

Anna tossed the radio receiver in its cradle and jumped out of the car. “You take the woman,” she ordered Paul, as he was closer.

The man began running toward the house. He was big, at least six-foot-three or -four, and broad-shouldered. With blond hair that shone white in the beam of the headlights, he looked like a Viking charging into battle. Even with his speed and the intensity of his movement, Anna detected an awkwardness to his gait, as if one leg was longer than the other. The imbalance was barely noticeable, but it was there.

“Police, freeze!”

He didn’t stop. She repeated her command. The man kept running. Anna chased him.

She was half his size but clearly faster, taking only seconds to catch up with him. One swift kick to the back of his right knee sent him crashing to the ground. He groaned and rolled over, looking up at her with a mixture of outrage and desperation.

“You’ve got to go inside,” he gasped, breathing heavily, his face a mask of pain. “My sister…she’s hurt.”