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The paper kept slipping off the body.
“Damn it,” the shooter snapped, swallowing a more ripe curse. The paper was supposed to stay on Holt’s chest. The chest that was no longer moving, no longer drawing breath.
How the hell—?
And then, just like that, there was an answer.
The shooter rose, picked up a stapler off the victim’s desk and returned to the body. Leaning over the man who could no longer feel anything, the shooter stapled the note to his chest.
“Now it won’t slip off,” the shooter announced in triumph, laughing again, the sound a sharp contrast to the still body on the bloodied sectional next to the coffee table.
Dark brown eyes squinted as a mocking expression slipped over the shooter’s face. “Too bad you can’t put this lesson to any use.”
Standing back, the shooter admired the sign stapled to the victim’s chest. In a flurry of uneven, mismatched letters, the note made a chilling promise: “Only the beginning.”
The shooter paused for a few more seconds to admire the scene. There was an intense, overwhelming desire to smash the victim’s face in, but the shooter refrained from acting on it. Nothing could be allowed to mute the force of the message and if the victim’s face was obliterated, the power of the message might be lost. Because Holt was the first offender—but he was definitely not the last. Not by a very long shot.
“You brought this on yourself” were the last words the shooter uttered before quietly slipping out of the house and into the darkness of a moonless night.
The door was left unlocked, inviting discovery. And soon.
Chapter 1
She did what she could to keep the concern out of her voice, even though it steadily increased with every mile she drove.
“Look, I know that Melissa ripped out your heart, but the best revenge is living well, remember? You taught me that. You said you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again. And if you don’t get your butt in gear, big brother, I will sing the rest of that song and we all know how well I can carry a tune—but if I have to, I will and you’ll only have yourself to blame if your ears fall off.”
Holding her breath, she flew through the intersection, just as the light was turning red. It wasn’t the best way for a police detective to act, but she couldn’t shake the sense of urgency squeezing her chest more and more tightly.
“Seriously, Matt, I’m worried about you. It’s not like you not to show up at work for two days in a row—and not even call with an excuse that a four-year-old could see through. I know the bottle has had a certain anesthetizing allure for you lately, but you’ve been restricting it to nights when you don’t have work the next day. This is a giant leap forward for you and it’s not a good one.”
She sighed, searching for something reassuring to say.
“Look at it this way, at least you found out now, before you married her. What if you had married her? What if there were kids in the mix? ’Member how bad it was for us when the old man split and Mom got all flaky before she cut out on us, too? We survived that, right? We—you,” she corrected herself, “will survive this, too. And this time, you can lean on me. It’s about time that I paid you back for all your support. I know that I owe you big-time.”
Detective Charlotte Randolph—Charley to everyone who knew her—had kept up a steady stream of chatter on her cell phone via the Bluetooth piece attached to her ear for the past fifteen minutes in an attempt to deny that she really was in a high state of agitation. Sergeant Matthew Holt hadn’t shown up for work or called in for the past two days, neither of which were even close to standard behavior for the police officer.
Matt was her older half brother, a fact that they had both kept quiet. Matt’s reason was because he wanted her to succeed on her own, without any possible fallout—good or bad—that might come her way because she was related to him. He wanted there to be no question that any success she achieved was hers alone.
Charley went along with the secrecy only because where Matt was concerned, she had a very soft spot in her heart and he could ask her to do anything.
If not for him putting his life on hold when their mother had taken off like that, Charley was certain things in her life might have turned out very differently. For one thing, she would have been swallowed up by the system for three years. She was fifteen and Matt eighteen when Maura Allen Holt Randolph took off with the latest man in her life, leaving behind two offspring without so much as a goodbye note. Certainly not with any money other than what Matt had in the pocket of his jeans, money he’d earned working part-time in a hardware store after school. Their mother had even taken the small amount Matt had hidden in his shoe in the back of his closet. Maura’s credo was what was hers was hers and what was yours was hers if she could find it. She was very good at finding things, Charley thought.
For the most part, Matt had raised himself and when she had come along three years later, he had raised her, as well. On the whole, he was far more enchanted with the baby sister he was charged with watching than the woman who had given birth to her. Maura made it a point to tell them more than once that there was “always more where you came from,” making sure that neither one of them felt they were special in any way.
But Matt had gone out of his way to make her feel as if she was special, Charley recalled now with a fond smile. It was Matt who remembered her birthday and always found something to give her, no matter how small a gift it might seem. Like the year he found a doll someone had thrown out in the Dumpster in the alley behind their building. He’d spent days cleaning it up, making it into a presentable doll to give her. He even managed to sew up—awkwardly—the rips in Mattie’s dress.
That was what she’d called the doll. Mattie. After her brother.
And she still had it, perched on the upper shelf in her closet. It was a constant tangible reminder of her brother’s love.
Matthew was the reason behind almost everything she did. She’d joined the police force because that was the career that Matt had picked for himself. She would have gladly followed him to hell and back if that was the path he’d settled on, but the Aurora Police Department turned out to be the career choice for him—which was just fine with her.
And then Matt fell for Melissa. Hard. Like the proverbial ton of bricks. When he did, she had psyched herself up to accept second place in her brother’s life, thrilled that he had found someone to love. That he was finally going to have time to do all the normal things: get married, have kids, buy a house and experience the wonderfully mundane life they’d never had while growing up.
Except, Charley now thought bitterly, that the woman her brother had fallen for so terribly hard had an icicle in place of a heart. Once the novelty of their relationship had worn off for her, Melissa thought nothing of stepping out on Matt.
She took everything he had to offer her—gifts, money as well as his undying love—and then broke off their relationship, grinding his feelings into the dust as if they were no more than bothersome gnats.
Matt never knew what hit him, never knew what he had done wrong. And even though she kept trying to make her brother see that the fault was not with him but with Melissa, nothing she could do or say could help her get through to him.
That was when the drinking started.
And apparently, it still hadn’t stopped even though he’d promised her that it had, that he had taken his last drink, wasted his last hour mourning the loss of Melissa.
“I won’t let that little two-bit ruin you,” Charley declared fiercely, her voice echoing back within the white sedan she drove. “You’re too good for her and you know it!” she cried, all but shouting the words into the cell phone that was mounted on her dashboard.
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