Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

And he was mad too that Mo seemed to put Pete in the middle of things. Sometimes Pete even felt guilty he had a father.

He enjoyed talking but hung up after only five minutes because he felt Mo didn’t want him to be on the phone.

Pete walked out onto the porch. “Saturday. I’ll go visit Doug then.”

Mo said, “I think Saturday’d be fine.”

Fine...

They went inside and watched TV for a while. Then, at eleven, Mo looked at her watch and stretched and said, “It’s getting late. Time for bed.”

And when Mo said it was time for bed, it was definitely time for bed.

Later that night, when she was asleep, Pete walked downstairs into the office. He reached behind a row of books resting on the built-in bookshelves and pulled out a large, sealed envelope.

He carried it down to his workshop in the basement. He opened the envelope and took out a book. It was called Triangle and Pete had found it in the true-crime section of a local used-book shop after flipping through nearly twenty books about real-life murders. Pete had never stolen anything in his life but that day he’d looked around the store and slipped the book inside his windbreaker then strolled casually out of the store. He’d had to steal it; he was afraid that — if everything went as he’d planned — the clerk might remember him buying the book and the police would use it as evidence.

Triangle was the true story of a couple in Colorado Springs. The wife was married to a man named Roy. But she was also seeing another man — Hank, a local carpenter and a friend of the family. Roy found out and waited until Hank was out hiking on a mountain path, then he snuck up and pushed him over a cliff. Hank grabbed on to a tree root but he lost his grip — or Roy smashed his hands; it wasn’t clear — and Hank fell a hundred feet to his death on the rocks in the valley. Roy went back home and had a drink with his wife just to watch her reaction when the call came that Hank was dead.

Pete didn’t know squat about crimes. All he knew was what he’d seen on TV and in the movies. None of the criminals in those shows seemed very smart and they were always getting caught by the good guys, even though they didn’t really seem much smarter than the bad guys. But that crime in Colorado was a smart crime. Because there were no murder weapons and very few clues. The only reason Roy got caught was that he’d forgotten to look for witnesses.

If the killer had only taken the time to look around him, he would have seen the campers, who had a perfect view of Hank Gibson plummeting to his bloody death, screaming as he fell, and of Roy standing on the cliff, watching him...

Triangle became Pete’s Bible. He read it cover to cover — to see how Roy had planned the crime and to find out how the police had investigated it.

Tonight, with Mo asleep, Pete read Triangle once again. Paying particular attention to the parts he’d underlined. Then he walked back upstairs, packed the book in the bottom of his suitcase and lay on the couch in the office, looking out the window at the hazy summer stars and thinking about his trip to Maryland from every angle.

Because he wanted to make sure he got away with the crime. He didn’t want to go to jail for life — like Roy.

Oh, sure there were risks. Pete knew that. But nothing was going to stop him.

Doug had to die.

Pete realized he’d been thinking about the idea, in the back of his mind, for months, not long after Mo met Doug.

She worked for a drug company in Westchester — the same company Doug was a sales manager for, with his office in the company’s headquarters in Baltimore. They met when he came to the branch office in New York for a sales conference. Mo had told Pete that she was having dinner with “somebody” from the company but she didn’t say who. Pete didn’t think anything of it until he overheard her tell one of her girlfriends on the phone about this really interesting guy she was working for. But then she realized Pete was standing near enough to hear and she changed the subject.

Over the next few months Pete noticed that Mo was getting distracted, paying less and less attention to him. And he heard her mention Doug more and more.

One night Pete asked her about him.

“Oh, Doug?” she said, sounding irritated. “Why, he’s my boss. And a friend. That’s all. Can’t I have friends? Aren’t I allowed?”

Pete noticed that Mo was starting to spend a lot of time on the phone and online. He tried to check the phone bills to see if she was calling Baltimore but she hid them or threw them out. He also tried to read her e-mails but found she’d changed her pass code. Pete’s specialty was computers, though, and he easily broke into her account. But when he went to read her e-mails he found she’d deleted them all on the main server.

He was so furious he nearly smashed the computer.

Then, to Pete’s dismay, Mo started inviting Doug to dinner at their house when he was in Westchester on company business. He was older than Mo and sort of heavy. Slick — slimy, in Pete’s opinion. Those dinners were the worst... They’d all three sit at the dinner table and Doug would try to charm Pete and ask him about computers and sports and the things that Mo obviously had told Doug that Pete was into. But it was awkward and you could tell he didn’t give a damn about Pete. He kept glancing at Mo when he thought Pete wasn’t looking.

By then Pete was checking up on Mo all the time. Sometimes he’d pretend to go to a game with some friends but he’d come home early and find that she was gone too. Then she’d get home at eight or nine and look all flustered, not expecting to find him, and she’d say she’d been working late even though she was just an office manager and hardly ever worked later than five before she met Doug. Once, when she claimed she was at the office, Pete called Doug’s number in Baltimore and the message said he’d be out of town for a couple of days.

Everything was changing. Mo and Pete would have dinner together but it wasn’t the same as it used to be. They didn’t have picnics and they didn’t take walks in the evenings. And they hardly ever sat together on the porch anymore and looked out at the fireflies and made plans for trips they’d wanted to take.

“I don’t like him,” Pete said. “Doug, I mean.”

“Oh, quit being so jealous. He’s a good friend, that’s all. He likes both of us.”

“No, he doesn’t like me.”

“Of course he does. You don’t have to worry.”

But Pete did worry and he worried even more when he found a Post-It note in her purse last month. It said, D.G. — Sunday, motel 2 p.m.

Doug’s last name was Grant.

That Sunday morning Pete tried not to react when Mo said, “I’m going out for a while, honey.”

“Where?”

“Shopping. I’ll be back by five.”

He thought about asking her exactly where she was going but he didn’t think that was a good idea. It might make her suspicious. So he said cheerfully, “Okay, see you later.”

As soon as her car had pulled out of the driveway he’d started calling motels in the area and asking for Douglas Grant.

The clerk at the Westchester Motor Inn said, “One minute, please. I’ll connect you.”

Pete hung up fast.

He was at the motel in fifteen minutes and, yep, there was Mo’s car parked in front of one of the doors. Pete snuck up close to the room. The shade was drawn and the lights were out but the window was partly open. Pete could hear bits of the conversation.

“I don’t like that.”

“That...?” she asked.

“That color. I want you to paint your nails red. It’s sexy. I don’t like that color you’re wearing. What is it?”