Red Blooded Murder

www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Amy Moore-Benson and Maureen Walters. Thanks also to everyone at MIRA Books, including Valerie Gray, Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Pete McMahon, Stacy Widdrington, Andrew Wright, Pamela Laycock, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Alex Osuszek, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Ken Foy, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Andi Richman, Reka Rubin, Margie Mullin, Sam Smith, Kathy Lodge, Carolyn Flear, Maureen Stead, Emily Ohanjanians, Michelle Renaud, Linda McFall, Stephen Miles, Jennifer Watters, Amy Jones, Malle Vallik, Tracey Langmuir and Anne Fontanesi.

Thanks to all the TV and broadcast people who offered their insights, especially Jeff Flock and everyone at Fox Business News, as well as Steve Cochran, Anna Devlantes, Amy Jacobson, Elizabeth Flock, Jim Lichtenstein, Pamela Jones and Bond Lee.

Much gratitude to my experts—Detective Peter Koconis and Chicago Police Officer Jeremy Schultz; Janet Girtsen, Deputy Laboratory Director of the Forensic Science Center at Chicago; criminal defence lawyers Catharine O’Daniel and Sarah Toney; private investigators Paul Ciolino and Sam Andreano; and physicians Dr Richard Feely, Dr Roman Voytsek-hovskiy and Dr Doug Lyle. Thanks also to everyone who read the book or offered advice or suggestions, especially Dustin O’Regan, Jason Billups, Liza Jaine, Rob Kovell, Beth Kaveny, Pam Carroll, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Margaret Caldwell, Christi Smith, William Caldwell and Les Klinger.

The hands that grabbed her were greedy. They shoved her, pushed her, not caring when she cried out. And although she wanted more—more now, more later—she felt the need, even in this faraway moment, to say the truth. “We shouldn’t be doing this again. At least I shouldn’t. This is the last time, just so you know.”

“Shut up,” came the reply.

“I’m not kidding. I want you to know that this is it. It’s over after today.”

“Shut up.”

Those hands moved lower, clawing and probing as though they’d been waiting for this, lying in wait until she was vulnerable, when they could strip her bare and plunge her into oblivion.

She threw her head back and clutched at the bed sheets, holding herself down until the moment when she would step into the void that she so craved.

A breeze trickled in the window, enticing after the biting winds that had battered Chicago for months. Yet nothing could touch the heat that boiled inside, carried her in small but growing crests, reaching her in places she always forgot until moments like this.

The hands stopped suddenly, startling her.

“Why?” she said, desperate.

A mouth crushed against hers, bit her. “I said shut up.” And she did.

Later, when she was alone, she slipped into her clothes for the evening—white, ironically. Tonight, she would smile, and she would be engaging. After all these years, she knew how to do that—how to shine her eyes at someone, how to direct her energy so they felt seen and heard and touched. No one at this event would know what she’d just done. She would carry the last two hours in her head, like little packages whose pretty wrappings hid the shame and the pleasure. Those thoughts would please her when she mentally unwrapped them; they would send pangs of delight throughout her body. But they would remove her from everyone, too. Secrets were always like that. They put a film between you and the rest of the world, so that you could see everyone else, but no one could see the whole of you.

Searching for her bag, she walked through her place and found it by the door. She remembered now that she’d dropped it there in the heat of that first moment, when she had let herself be devoured by her wants.

She sighed and picked up the bag. She took it into her bedroom, where she transferred a few essential items into a smaller bag more appropriate for the evening. She brushed her hair.

For a second, she studied herself in the mirror. She didn’t look any different than she had that afternoon. There wasn’t a blush to her cheeks or a shine to her eyes. She’d gotten so good at hiding the evidence.

Her gaze dropped. It was hard to look at herself these days. She walked to the front door, trying to clear her mind of the last few hours, of everything.

She stretched out her arm for the doorknob, but suddenly it turned on its own, surprising her, making her gasp.

The door opened.

“You scared the hell out of me,” she said, when she saw who was there.

She stopped short, looking into those eyes—eyes that saw her, knew what she was really like. She opened her mouth to say something sexy, but when she looked again, she saw those eyes shift into an expression of cold anger. She turned away for a moment while she collected words in her head and shaped them so that they would be earnest, pacifying.

But before she could form the sentences, she felt something strike her on the back of the head. She heard herself cry out—a cry so different from those she’d made earlier, a cry of shock and of pain. Instinctively, she began to raise her hands to her head, but then she felt another blow. Her mind splintered into shards of light, the pain searing into pink streaks. She felt her knees buckle, her body hit the floor.

Something tightened around her neck, squeezing her larynx with more and more force, stealing the breath from her. The light in her brain exploded then, filling it with tiny spots. Strangely, it seemed as if each of those spots encased the different moments of her life. She could see all of them at once, feel all of them. It was a beautiful trick of the mind, a state of enlightenment the likes of which she hadn’t known possible. She felt more alive than she ever had before.

1

Three days earlier

The bar, on the seventh floor of the Park Hyatt hotel, had its doors propped wide, as if boasting about the suddenly dazzling April weather.

We stepped onto the bar’s patio—an urban garden illuminated by the surrounding city lights.

“Spring is officially here,” I said. “And God, am I ready for it.”

The thing about spring in Chicago is that it’s fast and fickle. A balmy, sixty-eight-degree Friday like tonight could easily turn into a brittle, thirty-five-degree Saturday. Which is why Chicagoans always clutch at those spring nights. Which is why a night like that can make you do crazy things.

The maître d’, a European type in a slim black suit, spotted the woman I was with, Jane Augustine, and came hustling over. “Ms. Augustine,” he said, “welcome.” He looked at me. “And Miss …”

“Miss Izzy McNeil,” Jane said, beaming her perfect newscaster smile. “The best entertainment lawyer in the city.”

The maître d’ laughed, gave me a quick once-over. A little smile played at the corner of his mouth. “A lawyer. So you’re smart, too?”

“If so, I’m a smart person who’s out of a job.” I’d been looking for six months.

“Maybe not for long,” Jane said.

“Meaning?”

Jane shrugged coquettishly as the maître d’ led us over the slate floor to a table at the edge of the patio.

“Our best spot,” he said, “for the best.” He put two leather-bound menus on the table and left.

We sat. “Do you always get this kind of treatment?” I asked.

Jane swung her shiny black hair over her shoulder and looked at me with her famous mauve-blue eyes. “The treatment was all about Izzy McNeil. He’s hot for you.”

I turned and glanced. The maître d’ was watching us. Okay, I admit, he did seem to be watching me. “I think I’m giving off some sort of scent now that I’m single again.”

Jane scoffed. “I can’t stop giving off that scent, and I’m married.”

I studied Jane as the waiter took our drink orders. With her long, perfect body tucked into her perfect red suit, she looked every inch the tough journalist she was, but the more I got to know her, the more I listened to her, the more I was intrigued by the many facets of Jane. When I was lead counsel for Pickett Enterprises, the Midwest media conglomerate that owned the station where Jane worked, I’d negotiated her contract. And while she was definitely the wisecracking, tough-talking, shoot-straight journalist I’d heard about, I had also seen some surprising cracks in the veneer of her confidence. And on top of that was the sexiness. The more I knew her, the more I noticed she simply steeped in it.

“Seriously,” Jane said. “I know you’re bummed that you and Sam had that little problem—”

“Yeah, that little problem,” I interrupted her. “We’re seeing each other occasionally, but it’s just not the same.”

Six months ago, my fiancé, Sam, disappeared with thirty million dollars’ worth of property owned by my client, Forester Pickett, the CEO of Pickett Enterprises, and it happened on precisely the same night Forester suddenly died. After nearly two agonizing weeks that seemed like two years—weeks in which my world had not only been turned upside down, but also shaken and twisted and battered and bruised; weeks during which I learned so many secrets about the people in my life I thought I’d been dropped into someone else’s life—the matter had been resolved and Sam was back in town. But I’d lost all my legal work in the process and essentially had been ushered out the back door of my law firm. As for Sam and me, the wedding was off, and we weren’t exactly back together.

“Whatever,” Jane said. “You should enjoy being single. You’re dating other people, right?”

“A little.” I rubbed the spot on my left hand where my engagement ring used to rest. It felt as if the skin were slightly dented, holding a spot in case I decided to put it on again. “There’s a guy named Grady, who I’m friends with, and we go out occasionally, but he wants to get serious, and I really don’t. So mostly, I’ve been licking my wounds.”