A Neighbor’s Lie

BEFORE HE TAKES (Book #4)

BEFORE HE NEEDS (Book #5)

BEFORE HE FEELS (Book #6)

BEFORE HE SINS (Book #7)

BEFORE HE HUNTS (Book #8)

BEFORE HE PREYS (Book #9)

BEFORE HE LONGS (Book #10)

BEFORE HE LAPSES (Book #11)

AVERY BLACK MYSTERY SERIES

CAUSE TO KILL (Book #1)

CAUSE TO RUN (Book #2)

CAUSE TO HIDE (Book #3)

CAUSE TO FEAR (Book #4)

CAUSE TO SAVE (Book #5)

CAUSE TO DREAD (Book #6)

KERI LOCKE MYSTERY SERIES

A TRACE OF DEATH (Book #1)

A TRACE OF MUDER (Book #2)

A TRACE OF VICE (Book #3)

A TRACE OF CRIME (Book #4)

A TRACE OF HOPE (Book #5)

PROLOGUE

Working as a nanny was not the life that Kim Wielding had envisioned for herself, but it was actually quite enjoyable. Which was a little surprising, considering in her early twenties she’d had a career she wanted to pursue in Washington, DC, firing along the campaign trails and writing speeches for underdog candidates. And she’d almost landed it.

Almost.

Life just worked out in funny ways sometimes.

Now, at the age of thirty-six, those dreams of working in DC were long gone. She’d replaced them with another dream: of writing the great American novel in her downtime as a nanny. She’d sort of fallen into the job after a promising candidate she had worked for had been miserably defeated. That was all it had taken for her to sit on the sidelines for a while. And while on those sidelines, a very easy means of employment had landed in her lap. She hadn’t even considered watching kids in any capacity, but it had fit.

Kim reflected back on her first job as a nanny as she sat at the kitchen island inside the home of Bill and Sandra Carver. It was hard to believe it had been a little over ten years ago. It was a stretch of time that had somehow blurred those memories of working in DC, of writing speeches with hope and just a smidge on untruth.

Her laptop sat in front of her. She had hit the forty-thousand-word mark on her book. She figured she was about halfway through it. Maybe she’d finish it up in another six months or so. It all depended on the direction the lives of the three Carver children took. The oldest child, Zack, was in ninth grade this year and seriously eyeing football as a pastime. The middle child, Declan, played soccer. And if the youngest, Madeline, stuck with gymnastics, Kim was going to be running around in a frenzy for the next few months.

She closed the lid of her laptop and looked around the kitchen. She was thawing chicken for dinner. The counters had already been wiped down, the dishes were done, and the fourth load of laundry was currently churning away in the washing machine. Until the kids got home, her day was done. It was how she’d been able to work on her book for the last forty-five minutes.

She glanced at the clock and saw that the day had managed to sneak away from her—something that she was starting to understand happened to nannies quite a bit. She’d need to leave to pick the kids up from school in fifteen minutes…and that was no small feat, seeing as how the Carver kids were aged in crude stairstep fashion, the youngest in elementary school, the middle child in middle school, and the oldest in high school. All told, it was just over an hour’s worth of travel and traffic time to pick them all up from school and return home with them. It sounded worse than it was, though, as Kim had recently discovered how wonderful audiobooks could be to kill time in the car.

She got up and checked the chicken, nearly defrosted in the sink. She then swapped the laundry into the dryer and got all of the spices out that she would need to complete dinner. As she was setting the paprika down on the counter, someone knocked on the front door.

It was a fairly common occurrence in the Carver household. Sandra Carver was an Amazon junkie and Bill Carver always had schematics and blueprints being FedEx’d to their home. Kim grabbed her purse, figuring she’d go ahead and leave for school pick-ups after bringing the packages inside.

She opened the door, her eyes instantly going to the floor of the porch in search of an Amazon box. That’s why it took her brain a full second to understand that there was the shape of a person standing in front of her. When she looked up to see their face, her line of sight was blocked by—something.

Whatever it was, it smashed into her head. It connected right between her eyes, along the top of the bridge of her nose. The cracking noise inside of her head was deafening but she barely had time to register it before the sensation of falling overruled everything.

When she hit the Carvers’ hardwood floors, the back of her head struck hard. She felt blood rushing out of her nose as she tried scrambling backward.

The person from the porch came inside. They shut the door causally behind them. Kim tried to scream but there was too much blood in her nose, cascading down into her throat and mouth. She coughed, almost gagging, as the person took one large step forward.

They lifted that blunt object again—a pipe, Kim thought vaguely as pain swept through her mind like a hurricane—and that was the last thing she saw.

Before that final blow, her mind went to a strange place indeed. Kim Wielding died wondering what would happen to that chicken, still defrosting in the Carvers’ sink.

CHAPTER ONE

Because of the way her life had started—a dead mother, an incarcerated father, and grandparents who were always hovering over her—Chloe Fine often preferred to do things on her own. People sometimes referred to her as a severe introvert and as far as she was concerned, that was fine with her. It was this personality that had driven her toward getting exceptional grades in school and had helped her to blast through her studies and training at the FBI academy.

But it was also that personality that had caused her to end up moving into her new apartment without a single person to help her. Sure, she could have hired a moving company, but her grandparents had taught her the value of a dollar. And since she had strong arms, a strong back, and a stubborn mindset, she’d elected to move in by herself. After all, she only had two heavy pieces of furniture. Everything else should be a cakewalk.

This was proven to not be the case when she finally managed to lug her dresser up the stairs—with the assistance of a dolly, several ratchet straps, and a thankfully wide stairwell leading to her second-floor apartment. Yes, she’d managed to do it but she was pretty sure she had pulled a thing or two in her back along the way.

She’d saved the dresser for last, knowing it would be the hardest part of the move. She’d intentionally packed the boxes light, knowing it would be a one-woman job. She supposed she could have called Danielle and she would have helped but Chloe had never been the type to ask family for favors.

Chloe sidestepped a few boxes of her books and notebooks and collapsed in the recliner she’d had since her sophomore year of college. The thought of Danielle being here with her to sort through all of her stuff and start to set the place up was appealing. Things had been not quite as strained between the two of them since Chloe had uncovered the truth about what had occurred between their parents when they’d been young girls, but there was definitely something different. They were both very aware of the weight of their father hanging over their heads—the truth of what he had done and the secrets he had been keeping. Chloe felt that they were both dealing with those secrets in their own ways and they knew their opinions differed in some nearly psychic way that only close sibling are capable of.

What she had never dared express to Danielle was just how much she missed their father. Danielle had pretty much always resented him after he had been taken to jail. But Chloe had been the one who had missed that father figure in her life. She had been the one who had always dared to hope that maybe the cops had gotten it wrong—that there was no way her father had killed their mother.

And it had been that hope and belief that had resulted in the little adventure they’d taken together that had culminated in the arrest of Ruthanne Carwile and an entirely new viewpoint on the case of Aiden Fine. The thing that had sort of backfired on Chloe, though, was that in uncovering those little secrets, she had started to miss him even more. And she knew that Danielle would find this horrifying and maybe even masochistic in a way.

Still, despite all that, she wanted to call Danielle over to celebrate the small albeit hard-earned victory of moving into her new place. It was just a small two-bedroom apartment in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC—small, barely affordable, but exactly what she had been looking for. It had been about two months since they’d hung out—which seemed odd, given everything they had gone through the last time they’d been together. They’d spoken on the phone a few times and while it had been pleasant enough, it had also been very surface level. And Chloe wasn’t good at doing surface level.

Screw it, she thought, reaching for her phone. What could it hurt?

As she pulled up Danielle’s number, the reality of the situation sank in. Sure, it had only been two months since everything had happened, but they were different people now. Danielle had started to pick up the pieces of her life. She had a job that could potentially start paying quite well—a bartender and assistant manager at an upscale bar in Reston, Virginia. As for Chloe, she was still figuring out how to go from having been recently engaged to now being single and apparently not able to remember how to go about finding a date.

You can’t force something like this, she thought. Especially not with Danielle.