Trick Me, Treat Me

Rosario eventually picked the crumbs off, popping each one into her mouth with her fingertip. They were Lay’s, after all.

Grabbing the remote, she glanced around and cringed. The penthouse looked like it had been the scene of a huge party. Probably because it had. Last month. The night Manuel Diaz had dumped her for that bitch Angel. “Puta,” she said aloud this time.

She’d have to clean the place eventually. But not for a while. Her mother trusted her enough never to check anymore to make sure Rosario was performing her after-school dusting, watering and mail sorting duties at the penthouse. It wasn’t like it needed real cleaning with it having been empty so long. The owner wasn’t due back until late January—three months. She had time.

Grabbing the remote, she settled in for an hour of soap watching. Before she could even turn on her favorite show, however, she heard the door open. And nearly wet her pants.

Mr. Winchester is home early!

“Rosario?”

Worse. “Mama?” She groaned, a long, low sound holding both terror and dismay. This was definitely worse than the owner coming home. He, at least, wouldn’t smack her in the head with a purse the size of a suitcase, like the one Mama carried.

A long stream of invective—all in Spanish—spewed from her mother’s mouth. Rosario knew enough of the language to pick out several words, the kindest of which were lazy and useless.

Then the door opened again and her grandmother walked in. From worse to catastrophic.

“Mr. Winchester comes home tomorrow! What do we do?” Her mother sobbed in what Rosario considered pure melodrama.

Grandmama glared. “We get to work now.”

Rosario did. Thankfully, her mother soon got too wrapped in getting beer stains out of the living room carpet to yell at her anymore. She’d escaped, at least temporarily, into another room.

It was while halfheartedly scrubbing the office floor that Rosario found a pile of dusty-looking envelopes against a wall. Several pieces of unopened mail had fallen from the desk. Mail Rosario was supposed to deliver to Mr. Winchester’s secretarial company. She’d forgotten. For…uh…weeks…surely no more.

The postmarks said the items were a year old.

As she rifled through them, she thought quickly, fighting back panic. “Sales circulars…that’s okay…oh no, bills. Paid now,” she muttered and thrust them into a garbage bag. That left a few personal-looking items, including a thick manila envelope with a jack-o’-lantern sticker on it. “Maybe he’ll think it’s for this Halloween.” Her voice held a pathetic note of hope.

“What you are doing?”

Caught! “Some mail fell back here,” she whispered.

Grandmama muttered a wicked-sounding curse that would likely result in black hairs sprouting out of Rosario’s back. Or warts on her chin. Again. Then she stalked over and seized the mail. Sighing, she shook her head and raised her eyes heavenward, a picture of visual piety. “We leave it in God’s hands.”

Grandmama, however, apparently thought God’s hands were full enough with piddling issues like world peace, the stock market and the prayers of hopeful lottery players. She seemed to want to help him out. Reaching into the bucket Rosario had been using to wash the floor, she retrieved a sponge full of dirty water. Rosario watched, shocked, as her grandmother smeared the sponge over the exterior of the remaining envelopes.

“No telling when they came,” the old woman said. “Lost. Ruined by bad weather. He throws them out himself. No blame.”

Her grandmama was helping her? Not calling to Mama to come and deliver more shouts or bruising swings of her handbag? Rosario clutched her grandmother’s skirt. “Thank you.”

In response, she got a smack in the head with a wet sponge.

“You’re fired.”

1

A few days later

JARED WINCHESTER wished the weather was warm enough to merit the brilliant blue of the autumn sky. But in spite of the clear day—such a change from the dark Russian skies he’d seen for the past year—the temperature was brutal. Too bad. He’d have loved to put down the top on his convertible for the drive to Derryville.

He settled back in his leather seat, one hand on the steering wheel. God, he’d missed his car. Almost as much as he’d missed the sunshine.

His trip to research the Glanovsky serial killer case had come to an end a few months early due to interference from the government. But not early enough. He’d returned a couple of days ago just in time to go from freezing cold Russian autumn right into freezing cold Chicago winter. It’d been more than a year since he’d felt warm.

Perhaps it was appropriate, considering he’d soon be writing a book about one of the coldest crime sprees the former Soviet Union had ever seen. The Soviets hadn’t liked to admit to such western aberrations as serial killers, so they’d done some covering up over the years. Jared had uncovered a lot. Enough that the present officials had gotten antsy and stopped cooperating. “Let it go,” he murmured, not wanting to let frustration over bureaucracy affect his drive to his cousin’s party.

With a tap of a button, the car filled with a blast of good old head-banging hard rock from the good old U.S. of A. His favorite music, though few would believe it. Damn, home felt good. Put a six-pack of real beer in the trunk, and a fast-food burger made of real beef in his hand, and he’d be set. It was time to reclaim his normal life. Get out of the world of a serial killer, at least until he had to begin writing the book he was contracted to deliver next spring. Beer and burgers would help.

“Some mind-blowing sex wouldn’t hurt, either.”

Not that he’d been celibate in Russia. He’d had a little fling with a detective who had a thing for cowboys. It had been fun, though she’d been disappointed that he’d refused to have sex while wearing boots and a ten-gallon hat. Not to mention spurs.

But it had been too long since he’d enjoyed slow, sensual sex with someone who liked to curl up together afterward. Martina, the cowboy groupie, had preferred to go arrest people after a hot romp. Jared was out of the arresting people business. Way out. And he had no interest in returning to it.

Since he had no serious woman in his life, and hadn’t kept in touch with any of the less serious ones, that need would have to wait. The difficulty with relationships was one of the toughest parts of his job. Not just because of the travel, but because most women couldn’t take what he did. The crimes he researched, his ability to reconstruct horrific events…well, he hadn’t met a woman yet who’d even tried to understand. And the fact that he tended to be a pretty introverted guy could throw a woman off. He spent nearly all his time doing research and writing. His social skills were pretty rusty.

Sure, women understood the paycheck, the penthouse, the cars, the cash. But not the man. Never the man.

That probably wasn’t too surprising. His own family had a tough time understanding the way his mind worked sometimes. When his parents had asked why he was leaving the bureau a few years back, he’d tried to explain. Being raised in a family of cops had made him develop a fascination with crime from a young age, even though Derryville hadn’t exactly been crime central.

The fascination, however, wasn’t so much in solving crimes, but rather in understanding the psychology behind them, in putting the pieces together to figure out not only what had happened, but why it had happened. And, perhaps, in preventing something similar from happening again.

That pretty much summed up why the FBI hadn’t been for him, while writing true crime novels was.

Glancing at his open briefcase, he ignored the stack of files and photos from the Russian case, which he should have left at home. Instead he focused on the smeary padded envelope—the reason for this trip. “Mick, you are one crazy son of a bitch.”

Leave it to his cousin to plan an outrageous Halloween party. A murder weekend. Complete with thrills and chills at a bona fide haunted house. Right up Jared’s alley. Time had, after all, recently called him the Stephen King of the nonfiction world. As a big fan of King for years, he’d taken it as a huge compliment.

The key wasn’t the murder, thrills and chills. Knowing Mick, this weekend would be pure fun. Low stress. And with Mick’s love for practical jokes, a lot of laughs. Just what he needed.

The plans for the party were intricate. The envelope contained realistic-looking fake ID, and a dossier on his character. There were maps, coded messages, even a photo of the bad guy—an international arms dealer—he was allegedly pursuing.

Jared looked the part, too. He’d dressed all in black. And he’d found props, including a small, fake handgun that was really a cigarette lighter, and some stuff he’d gotten when researching a book on old Chicago organized crime—a side interest he dabbled in when he got the chance.

He kept thinking of his destination. The Marsden Place.

Mick had set up a scenario with a group trapped at a spooky inn for a weekend…in the old Marsden house, the scariest building in their hometown. He couldn’t imagine a less inviting inn. Except on Halloween. Tonight it would be just about perfect.

Mick was a real estate agent. He’d been trying to sell the house for two years, since the former owner had died. But nobody with any common sense would want it. Talk about white elephants. It had needed tons of work a decade ago…he couldn’t imagine how the house looked now. “Probably just right for a murder party.”

Mick might be the theatrical one, but Jared was up for a challenge. His cousin’s invitation had been a thinly disguised gauntlet. Since he’d known Jared was supposed to be gone until January, he was daring him to come home to Derryville early.

Derryville. Funny, he’d once considered his hometown a two-stoplight dump, from which he’d longed to escape. Somehow, his feelings had mellowed once he’d built a new life elsewhere. He’d enjoyed his few trips home over the years, even if he hadn’t been able to resolve a few longstanding family issues.

A trill of his cell phone interrupted his thoughts. “Hello?”

“Jared! I didn’t wake you, did I? Not sure what time zone you were in. Moscow—is that ahead of us or behind?”