CHAPTER THREE

The murder had gone so badly it was a miracle she'd gotten away with it. She hadn't planned, hadn't thought anything beyond how Kenny had hurt Lisa-Beth and was going to pay. She'd never even contemplated killing anyone before and expected it would be like in the movies.

It wasn't anything like the movies.

In the movies, she could have simply walked up behind him as he bent into the engine of his hotrod, punched her cousin's old pocket knife into his back, and Kenny would have arched his spine and gone, "Aargh!" and collapsed and died.

No such luck in real life. The tip skidded off his shoulderblade, snagged in his sweater, and clattered to the oil-stained garage floor. Kenny let out a holler, more of surprise than pain – though it had to have hurt; there was blood – and started to turn and straighten up.

Panicked, Jeanette had done the only thing she could think of. She seized the raised hood of his car and knocked the support away with her elbow. Then, using all of her strength, she'd slammed the hood down on Kenny. The edge cut into the back of his scalp, shedding a spray of blood. He went face-first into the engine with a grunt, trying and failing to get his right hand up in time to defend himself.

She'd raised the hood and slammed it again, totally beyond thought. The underside met the rounded back of Kenny's skull with a hollow k-ponk! sound, denting the metal and pile-driving his forehead into the engine block. Dazed, he slumped there with his left hand dangling and twitching.

The knife had been within sight, but Jeanette didn't try to reach for it. The moment she did, she knew that this would turn out to be like the movies after all. No matter how out of it Kenny seemed, he would spring up and lunge at her. She must have looked like a crazywoman trying to … to clap him to death as she repeatedly raised and slammed the hood on Kenny's head, shoulders, and upper torso.

Eventually, she stopped, arms aching, chest heaving, and watched him to see if he moved. Kenny only hung there, slack, his knees buckled and his one visible arm as limp as that of a drowning victim.

The noise had been horrendous. Wiping sweat from her brow despite the chill in the air, Jeanette turned, expecting to see the entire neighborhood gathered in the open garage door and staring in at her in openmouthed shock. But the driveway and the street at the end of it had been empty of everything but a few spinning flakes of falling snow.

"Kenny?" she had said, barely recognizing herself in the panting, uncertain voice.

He hadn't stirred. As her ears quit ringing, she heard the slow, syrupy patter of blood draining through the engine. When she crouched – carefully, still thinking he might suddenly revive – she had seen a spreading puddle that was not an oil leak.

Jeanette raised the hood one final time, saw what was left of Kenny Murphy's head, and barely made it outside in a stumbling, staggering run before throwing up into Mrs. Murphy's snow-covered flowerbed.

Only then, as she'd been hunched and shaking in the aftermath, had she realized what she had done. He was dead. He was dead and she had killed him.

She'd done it for Lisa-Beth, but some cold and rational inner voice spoke up and told her that she had to think of herself now. Even if one of her best friends was worth going to jail for, Kenny certainly wasn't.

So, though the last thing in the world she had wanted to do was to go back into that garage, she had done it. She'd picked up the knife – the only reason she'd had the forethought to wear gloves had nothing to do with fingerprints and everything to do with it being December – and searched around for a way to cover up her crime.

The garage itself provided the answer. Its ceiling was crisscrossed with old rafters crammed to capacity with generations of Murphy family leftovers. She saw old footlockers, crates that might've held dishes or pots and pans, a metal ice chest that had to date back to the 1960's, the poles and chains of a disassembled porch swing, all kinds of stuff.

All kinds of heavy stuff.

With the long wooden handle of a snow shovel, Jeanette jabbed and poked up into the rafters. She felt absurdly like someone trying to squish a bug in a high corner.

But at last, she'd found a good spot and given a big push. The piles shifted, started to slide, and then she had leaped backward as the contents of the rafters came down in a crashing avalanche on top of the car, on top of Kenny.

She had seen – she would never forget it, not if she lived to be a hundred and fifty – his legs give one boneless, convulsive flailing kick and his left arm fly upward as if in surprise. Then she couldn't bear to see any more, and had run back down the driveway and all the way home.

Some devil's luck must have been with her that night. The snow had continued falling steadily for hours, so that by the time Kenny's parents and younger brother and sister came home from a holiday party, the smooth white fall had blanketed away her tracks.

The Murphys made an extremely gruesome discovery in the garage that night. The police came and determined that something in the rafters must have shifted and brought the rest down, crushing Kenny as he bent under the hood to work on the car.

He might even, they'd theorized, have been trapped alive in the wreckage for a while, judging by the scrapes on his face from struggling against unyielding metal.

Jeanette had always wondered about the shallow wound in his back, where she had initially stuck him with the knife. Had it been explained away as having been caused by some of the falling debris? A pole from the porch swing, perhaps, striking him in the shoulder? Or had it been overlooked entirely in the face of his other, more overwhelming injuries?

She'd never found out, and of course there was no good way to ask. The ugly incident had been categorized as a terrible accident. It even made the 'tragic irony' section of the local news.

The ones she'd really felt bad for in the whole mess were Kenny's younger brother and sister, who'd had to witness their father hurling aside footlockers like a madman, and heard their mother's screams as she saw what was left of her oldest child.

With a start, Jeanette realized that she had been sitting for several minutes without saying a word, poking at the half-eaten fish and chips that no longer held any temptation to her appetite.

Rayburn was regarding her quizzically across the table. "Jade? Are you all right?"

"Sorry," she said, and cleared her throat. "Sorry. I was … thinking."

"Not about anything good, I'm guessing," he said. "You're white as a sheet, and your hands are shaking."

"My hands don't shake," she said, though as she looked down at them she saw they were making a liar of her. She set down her fork and folded her hands together. They felt as icy as they had, gloves or no gloves, on that long-ago December night.

To her astonishment, Rayburn reached across the table and covered her small, cold, trembling hands with one of his. It was the first time he had ever purposefully touched her, and she was startled at how warm and strong his grip felt.

"Why not think about something else?" he suggested in a low voice that had the texture of rough velvet.

"Like what?" she asked.

"Like dinner some time." His gaze, direct and deep blue, held hers.

"Dinner?"

"Not a meeting. Not business. Very personal."

"I … I don't think that would be a very good idea."

"Hell," Rayburn said, with a slanted grin more Harrison Ford than Pierce Brosnan, "I know it isn't. But think about it anyway."

With that, he got up while she was still trying to shift gears in her startled mind. He left enough cash on the table to cover the check and a generous tip, and then he was gone.

Jeanette gave her head a quick shake, not quite able to believe what had just happened. Had Rayburn touched her? Asked her to have dinner with him? She didn't even know his first name.

Though, she supposed with an inner chuckle, she knew what he did for a living, and what kind of money he made.

A glance at her watch showed her that it was almost one-thirty. The lunch-lemmings would be already back in their offices or headed that way. She smiled at the waitress and the hostess as she left the Stag and Hound, and joined the last few stragglers bound for Century Plaza.

Although she did not have what anyone could call a nine-to-five job, she kept an office in the Jensen Building for days such as this when work and meetings brought her into the heart of the city. It was helpful, too, to have an address and phone number she could put on her bogus business cards – J. Kurrell, Consulting, the cards read – along with an e-mail address. Any infrequent phone calls were routed to voice mail.

She liked having the office. It wasn't much, just two rooms, a reception area and an inner sanctum, but she'd had it nicely decorated and it was comfortable. She enjoyed being in there, knowing that the building all around her was full of workaday drones while she surfed the Internet on her laptop computer, browsing the online auction sites for things she would never buy.

Today, the office might be a good place to sit and think about what Rayburn had said, there at the end of lunch. She could listen to him again on tape, and determine whether or not she had read too much – or too little – into his words and the tone of his voice.

The skateboard kids were still in the Plaza, careening around, risking life and limb with their wheeled acrobatics. One, on a black skateboard with electric-blue wheels, shot past Jeanette so fast she felt the breeze. She jerked back, a sharp retort rising to her lips, but caught herself before she said anything.

The kid sped onward, baggy many-pocketed cargo pants drooping, scarlet nylon windbreaker rippling. Jeanette turned to watch, hoping to see a headlong collision with a raised marble bench around a fountain that cascaded water from three bronze bowls into a basin full of pitched good-luck pennies. In her mind's eye, she saw the kid hit the bench, flip end over end into the hard bronze edges of the bowls, and go splash into the water with a skull fracture or broken neck.

No such luck. The kid, who looked about thirteen in a baseball cap with the brim turned backwards, stuck one foot out almost casually, pivoted on it, hopped the skateboard up onto the marble, slid along it for a good six or seven feet, and dropped back down, now facing in Jeanette's direction again. Propelling along, one leg going push-push-push, the kid rocketed toward her.

Jeanette stepped back, but not far enough. Before she knew it, she was knocked on her butt in the middle of Century Plaza. Her right arm felt yanked out of its socket, and a split second later she realized why.

The skateboard kid had grabbed her purse. Had snatched her purse, and was even now speeding away with the prize.

Her purse … and everything in it.

**