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  A KILLER’S CALLING CARD

  The entertainment center opposite the bed was closed. The TV dialogue was coming from the bathroom. Fantastic, Amy thought. The lawyer and her husband would arrive just in time to join the home’s owner in the master bath.

  “Meredith?” she called, expecting the woman to step out the door screaming about invasion of privacy. Only she didn’t. “Meredith,” she called loudly, one last time before pushing open the bathroom door.

  RED. This was the first thing she registered followed immediately by BODY, then BLOOD. The words screamed through her head as she stared at what had been Meredith Chomsky. She was hanging by her hands and her hair from the back wall. Her lower body was sprawled, legs akimbo, in the water, which was red.

  It looked as if nails had been driven through her palms, which were shredding from the weight of her body. Her long blonde hair had been yanked up and also nailed, holding her head forward so that Amy could see the sightless red sockets where her eyes had been....

  DON’T BE AFRAID

  REBECCA DRAKE

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  A KILLER’S CALLING CARD

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  To Joe

  F + 1

  Prologue

  She would be dead in less than a day. This knowledge gave him power and he was content to watch her, as he’d watched her for weeks, knowing that everything she did that day would be her last. Like most pleasures, the joy in killing was heightened by the delay.

  He followed her as she wound her way to the office down tree-lined streets and through the center of town. An artists’ seaside refuge growing mainstream. A Starbucks next to the old gallery, a Talbots edging out the dusty five-and-dime. Old money rubbing shoulders with new. He wedged his forgettable sedan between a boxy Volvo and a new Mercedes and watched her laughing with a friend over lunch at the newest little bistro on main street. She shook her head at the metal dessert cart, smiling regretfully at the young waiter, fighting the eternal battle to lose weight. It was her last chance for the chocolate cheesecake. She should have said yes.

  She didn’t notice him when she strolled back to the office, pausing to chat with people she passed on the way. Everyone noticed her. Kisses exchanged in the air, flirty little waves. Nobody noticed him.

  If anyone saw him walking half a block behind her, they wouldn’t remember. He had a gift for becoming invisible. Later, after he’d killed her, the town would ask who had done it and why, but no one would remember the man trailing behind.

  Even if they did, he’d mastered the art of appearing harmless. A handsome face. A charming manner. No threat to anyone. Don’t be afraid.

  Chapter 1

  Empty houses scared Amy Moran. They seemed to hold the lives and secrets in their walls of all the families who’d ever lived in them and there was something otherworldly, almost ghostly about that. Houses needed people in them to come alive. They needed voices and laughter and light, otherwise they were a shell of something and that something wasn’t pleasant.

  It was ironic that she’d become a real estate agent, spending her workdays traipsing through the echoing hallways of vacant homes. Sometimes she wondered if their very walls could sense her desperation.

  The farmhouse sat back from the road, hidden from the probing eyes of motorists by a grove of hemlocks. Amy turned into the gravel drive and sped up the wide lane, her Camry crunching along beneath the trees, until the house came into view. A classic New England colonial, originally as plain and spare on the outside as its Congregationalist builders. The years and increasingly affluent owners had not been kind. It was now a mishmash of architectural styles. Federalist fanlights, Greek Revival columns, and Victorian gingerbread, all unified by sunflower yellow paint and black trim, gave it the appearance of a giant bumblebee. Strangely enough, it was always featured on design shows about the area.

  The buyer, a hale-and-hearty banker with too much money and far too little time to enjoy any of it, hadn’t wanted to do the walk-through. “That’s what I’m paying you for,” he’d told Amy and Sheila. His third wife enjoyed it, though. She wanted the house for weekend parties, though she complained about the location as if Sheila and Amy had done wrong by her.

  “I really wanted something on the water,” she’d remind them every chance she got. She conveniently forgot that she hadn’t wanted the half-a-billion-dollar price tag that went along with property fronting Long Island Sound.

  Sheila’s large, silver Range Rover wasn’t on the drive. Had she gone on to the closing? Why hadn’t she called?

  Amy picked her cell phone off the passenger seat where she’d tossed it after trying Sheila at the last traffic light. At the same time she had been applying makeup and attempting to get her hair to stay in a hastily formed French twist.

  She’d formed the apology in her mind, trying to reduce a chaotic morning and the demands of an asthmatic five-year-old into a simple explanation of how she could possibly be late for this, her first big closing. Not that she’d anticipated any sympathy. Sheila was a single mother, too, though her boys were older now.

  Four rings, five, and still there’d been no answer. The light turned green and Amy had tossed the lipstick aside and accelerated with the phone still to her ear.

  Seven rings, eight. Finally she’d hung up. Maybe Sheila had her phone off. Maybe she’d be waiting outside the house for Amy.

  Only she wasn’t.

  Amy put the car in park and ran as quickly as her heels allowed up the short flight of wide steps to the large black door. The lock box was still attached to the brass knob, but it was open and the door stood slightly ajar.

  Amy pushed it open and stepped inside calling, “Sheila? Are you here?”

  There was no answering shout. Amy’s shoes clicked loudly on the vast flagstone floor. The curtains were drawn in the large barren rooms adjoining the front hall and the foyer itself was gloomy. She turned on the light switch for the chandelier overhead, but nothing happened.

  Swallowing hard, Amy moved forward, trying not to think about how dark it was, taking deep breaths to calm nerves already frazzled by being late.

  “Sheila?”

  Her voice seemed to echo in the empty hall and then it was swallowed
up as she sank into the plush carpeting of the family room that adjoined the kitchen. The rooms were empty of furniture, devoid of everything but the sheer draperies blanketing the windows left by the soon-to-be previous owners.

  There were tracks in the carpeting from the vacuuming done by the professional cleaning service, but a thin film of dust had already settled on the bare mantel sunk in the fieldstone fireplace.

  The lights were on in the kitchen, a blazing swath across black granite countertops and a gleaming Viking range. Sheila must have been here, Amy thought, looking around for some sign of the older woman. Only there wasn’t one. A single drip of water came from the tap and splashed far below in the old-fashioned soapstone sink. The repetitive plink was the only sound.

  She must have given up on Amy and headed for the office, but would she really have forgotten to close the door on her way out? That wasn’t like her. Amy pulled out her cell phone again and dialed Sheila’s number, walking out of the kitchen as she did so and back toward the front of the house.

  She checked the front door and the floor, looking for a note, but didn’t find one. There was a short gap between punching in the number and the dull ring as it connected. A split second later, a muffled ringing echoed within the house.

  Startled, Amy almost dropped the phone. It rang again and again and the ringing echoed back. Only it wasn’t the same ring at all. Amy moved toward the sound. It was coming from upstairs.

  “Sheila?” she called again, mounting the carpeted steps. The ringing was louder once she was on the second floor. She tried to follow the sound, peering into open bedrooms. From one of the windows she caught a glimpse of something silver. It was Sheila’s Range Rover parked behind the house.

  Amy stared down at it in shock for a moment while the phone continued its shrill beckoning. Then she tore herself away, following the sound. Not the next bedroom nor the one after that. It was coming from the room at the end of the hall. The one with the closed door.

  The knob slipped in her palm, which was suddenly clammy, but the door swung open and there was the phone, practically vibrating on the windowsill. But Sheila hadn’t left it behind, because Sheila hadn’t left.

  She was lying in the center of the floor where a bed had been, her arms stretched out to the sides, with her palms facing the ceiling as if they were catching the small pools of blood they held. Her legs were bound with what looked like her own nylons. Her eyes, or what had been her eyes, stared blankly at the ceiling as if looking for answers.

  Amy stumbled backward, her mouth opening in a scream that came out like a siren, gathering momentum. She tripped in the doorway, struggled up and ran, hurling down the stairs and across the hallway, racing from the house as if she were being chased, the ringing of the phone echoing behind her. She didn’t stop running until she’d gotten out the front door and made it across the driveway and then she fell to her knees in the clean, sweet grass and threw up her breakfast.

  Chapter 2

  Detective Mark Juarez was getting his second cup of coffee in the squad room when the call came. The throbbing in his head had reduced itself to a dull roar and with this cup, he hoped to banish it at least until the afternoon.

  If anyone had asked him if he’d had too much to drink the night before, he would have answered honestly: yes. Nobody did ask him, though, and nobody would because he was clean-shaven, his shirt was pressed and none of these officers knew the difference between this man and his less hungover self.

  “Hey, Juarez,” his partner called to him, drawing the name out as if it was unfamiliar to him, and hadn’t been the name of the desk sergeant, Mark’s father, who’d sat downstairs for more than twenty years running the front show.

  Mark turned to look inquiringly at Detective Emmett Black, stirring the coffee with a calmness that he knew irritated the older man. They looked like a study in contrasts, or as another detective had commented, like the before and after on one of those extreme makeover shows. Emmett Black was forty-two and five feet, nine inches, if he stood up straight. Paunchy around the middle and jowly around the face, he tried to comb the remaining strands of his thin blond hair to cover as much of his dome-shaped head as he could. His surname belied the color of his skin, which was a pasty white, and he hid his small, watery-blue eyes behind glasses frames that had gone out of style ten years before.

  Mark was twenty-six and six foot, three inches, and hard-muscled from hitting the department gym at the end of every shift. His skin was olive-colored, his jaw was firm, his eyes were a large, dark brown and he was convinced that he could have earned his partner’s animosity solely because of his full head of dark brown hair.

  “We’ve got a call, let’s go.” Black didn’t give him any information, as usual treating Juarez like he was a raw recruit. And Juarez responded as he usually did, purposely taking an extra sip of coffee, slowing down just to aggravate the older man. Each knew what the other was doing; it was an unspoken standoff they’d been engaged in since Juarez transferred from the NYPD six months ago.

  He grabbed his jacket and followed Black out of the station at a sedate pace, taking the passenger seat in the unmarked because Black needed the testosterone boost that came with being behind the wheel.

  “What’s the call?”

  “Homicide. Out off Tepley Road.”

  “Victim?”

  “White female.”

  “Domestic?”

  “Probably.”

  They drove in silence for several miles, leaving Steerforth’s town center behind them and heading out past the clusters of older frame houses into the Connecticut countryside.

  It was a gray, damp morning and Mark couldn’t help but contrast the rain-soaked rolling lawns and low stone walls with the city neighborhoods he used to travel. He knew that most people would say that this was prettier, but he missed the encompassing feeling of all those tall buildings of concrete and brick and limestone and the way the streetlights would be reflected in puddles on rain-slicked streets.

  Not that there wasn’t a city center in Steerforth. There was, after a fashion. Converted colonial boxes turned into high-end office space sitting next to modern corporate headquarters of brick and steel and a state-of-the-art courthouse. It was a small area. The rest of it was residential housing and countryside swiftly being converted into bigger residential housing.

  “Shit, that’s it.” Black passed a driveway occluded by trees and screeched to a halt, backing up and turning into it. At first there was nothing but a long canopy of green, but then Juarez could see an updated farmhouse ahead. One of the properties that the wealthy seemed to cherish for its historical value, paying fortunes to preserve rotting frames and sinking extra money into securing the foundation so it could hold their whirlpool tubs. A real estate sign was leaning askew on the front lawn, a little swinging SOLD sign attached to it. They parked behind two black-and-whites that were blocking in a small blue Toyota Camry.

  An ashen-faced woman in a black skirt and white blouse was huddled on the front steps talking to one of the uniforms. October wind was whipping strands of her long, black hair around her face. As Juarez and Black approached, she moved one trembling hand from its grip on her waist to push it back.

  Another uniform stopped wrapping yellow tape around the front of the house and intercepted them. He was young, probably no more than twenty, moon-faced and acne-scarred, his gray eyes alight with excitement under the brim of his cap.

  “Body’s on the second floor. Shot. No sign of the weapon or the perp. Victim’s friend found her.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the witness.

  “Her name, Officer Feeney?” Black asked.

  Feeney took a notebook out of his back pocket. “Moran,” he recited. “Amy Moran.”

  “I’ll go on up, you talk to the woman,” Black said, moving up the steps without waiting for an answer. He gave the woman an appraising look as he passed her. Mark introduced himself and she extended a trembling hand to shake and he saw that she was very pretty, eve
n sick to her stomach as she clearly was.

  “You knew the victim, Ms. Moran?”

  The woman nodded, opened her mouth to speak and closed it again, struggling for composure. “Sheila Sylvester,” she managed after a minute. “She’s a real estate agent. Was a real estate agent.” The past tense made tears well in the already red-rimmed blue eyes. “We were supposed to meet here to do a walk-through and I was late—” She stopped and blinked rapidly to hold back the tears.

  Juarez asked if she’d go through the house with him, and show him exactly what had happened. They started with the door and she showed him how it was open, the lock box still there but not closed.

  She walked him through the house, trying to remember what she’d done. But when she got to the part where she described how she’d found her friend by following the ringing of her phone, she hesitated halfway up the stairs and settled for pointing in the direction he should go.

  Every homicide scene required a few seconds for Mark to adjust. Always, there were warring emotions coursing through him of revulsion and excitement. Here was a dead body, someone’s sibling, spouse or child. But here, also, was a puzzle, a set of clues that he had to connect to find the bad guy.

  A woman’s body was lying in the center of an empty bedroom, her skirt hitched up, her panties ripped off and left on one thigh. She’d been arranged face up, her arms carefully out to the sides, her legs tight together, ankles bound by nylons. Her clothes were on, but everything was in disarray: the blouse ripped open, the bra cut open, the breasts spilling out, and the nipples strangely red at the tips.

  Juarez pulled on a pair of latex gloves, took a few deep breaths, and joined Black, squatting on the far side of the body near the woman’s head. The older cop waited until the crime photographer had taken his pictures and then he used one gloved hand and the tip of a capped pen to gently turn the victim’s head to the side.

  “Does this look like a gunshot entry to you?” he asked, nodding at a small dark hole with dark red blood surrounding it.