J. Jance - Cruel Intent

Ali doubted that, too.

“Oh,” Leland added, “he wanted me to let you know that he heard from the cabinet company, verifying that the funds had been received and that your order was in process. They told him they have enough material in stock to do your entire order, and they’re getting started on it right away. They’re hoping to ship in two weeks, but that may be pushing it.”

“So much for Thanksgiving,” Ali said.

“What do you mean?” Leland asked.

Now that she had opened her mouth, Ali regretted it. Considering the fact that Bryan’s whole family was coming apart, it seemed incredibly selfish for her to have brought it up. Now that she had started, however, she charged on.

“I was hoping I’d be able to invite people over to the new place for Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. “Even if everything wasn’t quite finished, I figured we’d be able to make do.”

“Does Mr. Forester know about your dinner plans?” Leland asked.

“Not really,” Ali admitted. “I never mentioned it to him. I didn’t want to add any more deadline pressure than there already was. Besides, it’s not that big a deal. I can always invite everyone over to my old house in Skyview. It’s the principle of the thing-and a matter of changing my mind. That’s all.”

“Finished or not, if you’d rather have your guests come here, we’ll have them here,” Leland Brooks declared. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a very capable cook. If I could cook food for the officers’ mess in Korea in the cold and the mud, I’m sure I can manage this. How many people are we talking about?”

“Not that many. My parents, Christopher and Athena, Dave and his three kids, one of my friends from California. Mom probably wouldn’t mind doing the turkey. She usually does, but she and Dad cook every single day of their lives. I wanted to give them a break.”

“Not to worry,” Leland said. “We’ll work it out. You come up with the guest list, and I’ll manage the rest. We’ll make it a memorable occasion. And speaking of occasions, the florist called. They said they tried to deliver your flowers to the gym, but the place was locked up tight. I’m having them deliver them to me here instead. I’ll drop them off a little later myself. That will give me an opportunity to give the lucky couple my own good wishes as well.”

Ali tried to remember if she had mentioned the engagement news to Leland. With everything else that had been happening throughout the day, it didn’t seem likely.

“So you know about that?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Leland Brooks replied. “Mr. Reynolds came to me a couple of weeks ago with some concerns about where to take the ring to have it redesigned and resized. I sent him to see the man who used to handle all of Miss Arabella’s work. I hope he was pleased with the results.”

“I’m sure he was,” Ali said. “And I’m sure Chris appreciated having the benefit of your advice.”

Ali couldn’t help feeling slightly left out. Yes, she knew that Chris and Athena had wanted to surprise her, but her folks had both known about Chris’s engagement well in advance of last night’s ring unveiling. Obviously, the same was true for Leland Brooks.

I always tried to raise him to be independent, Ali thought ruefully. I may have succeeded too well.

When Peter woke up, he needed to pee like a racehorse and was astonished to see that he had slept for the better part of ten hours. When he was younger, he had been able to manage on far less sleep than that. It was, he supposed, part of getting older rather than better. He fixed coffee and some toast. Then he uploaded the memory stick from his camera and, after deleting some of the less-well-thought-out shots, added the remainder to his DVD.

Scrolling through them, he congratulated himself on the fact that the crimes were all different. Morgan, still dressed, lay half in and out of the swing with her face battered and bloodied beyond recognition. He had arranged Candace so she lay on the ground with her various pieces put back together in all the wrong places-like a macabre human picture puzzle gone horribly wrong. He had heard that a novice FBI profiler had claimed this indicated a highly disorganized killer. Peter had laughed outright when he heard that; he was anything but disorganized. Melanie Tyler had been shot to death with her husband’s.38, while Debra Longworth had been stabbed to death before being the victim of a vicious postmortem sexual assault. And that was another part of being smart. Never do it the same way twice.

The pictures were fine, but Peter was feeling vaguely displeased with himself as he stowed the DVD in his safe. He spent some time examining the diamond he had removed from Morgan’s finger. It was large and showy, though Peter understood enough about diamonds to know that it wasn’t as flawless as it should have been. But then Morgan hadn’t been flawless, either. With a sigh, he returned the precious diamond-loaded key ring to its customary hiding place.

After one of his exploits, Peter usually spent the next day patting himself on the back. After all, who else was going to tell him “good job”? This time he couldn’t quite manage it. Yes, by trying to track him down, Morgan Forester had posed a threat to him. As a result, she had gotten exactly what she deserved. But had it been worth it? Usually, he came back from a kill with a euphoric sense of accomplishment. Today he was left with a lingering sense of forboding.

When Rita had fallen off the mountain, he had been right there with her. Naturally, he had been a person of interest in that case, but the cops had never charged him. With the others, he had managed to make sure his name had never surfaced in the resulting investigations, and all those cases had gone cold without ever being solved. This time he worried that he might have made a mistake. He couldn’t get that asshole from Hertz out of his mind.

One of the things Peter counted on in life was that worker bees would function that way-as miserable drones who collected their paltry paychecks without caring that much about doing their job. Peter’s big problem with the guy running the Hertz check-in line was that he hadn’t just been doing his job. He had actually been paying attention. How carefully had he been watching, and if questions were raised, how much would he remember?

For the first time, Peter realized that he might have made a slight miscalculation. He had used Matthew Morrison’s name for car-rental purposes because he could. Because Matthew Morrison was convenient. Because he was as good a fall guy as any.

People said that being a doctor let you play God. That was especially true in the ER. Patients came in. Peter sewed them up and patched them up. Some lived; others died; and after Peter was done with the ones who survived, he turned them over to other doctors who helped them go on with the messy business of living. But what he did and didn’t do with his patients in the ER was nothing compared to the havoc he could wreak in people’s lives when, as Internet puppet master, he could run them up and down a flagpole at will-as he had with Matthew Morrison.

Much as Peter despised cheating women, that was nothing compared to his overriding contempt for weak-willed, pussy-whipped men like Morrison. Peter had created Suzie Q-her name, her profile, her e-mails, her everything. He had penned every word of Susan’s half of the e-mail correspondence, and it had amused him to see how smitten Matt had been, how he had fallen under the faux Susan’s spell. In return, Matt had poured out the details of his miserable, boring life-his deadly dull job and his loveless marriage to the appalling Mrs. Morrison, the loathsome Jenny.

As far as Peter was concerned, Matthew was less than nothing. Peter had used the man’s hijacked identity for the car rental without the smallest concern that anyone would notice. And even if someone did notice, Peter couldn’t help wondering how Matthew would manage to talk his way out of that. The man was utterly petrified of losing his job. It didn’t seem likely that he would have the balls to tell someone that he couldn’t possibly have murdered Morgan in Sedona, since at the time she died, he was down in Red Rock waiting to get it on with some hot-to-trot sexy babe named Susan-who didn’t, in actual fact, exist.