Rachel Lee: With Malice

Detective Karen Sweeney recognized him the minute he climbed out of the cab in front of the crime scene.

Senator Grant Lawrence was sometimes referred to by the media as the next John Kennedy, and Lawrence really did have that magic. Karen, a lifelong Republican, somehow always found herself voting for Grant Lawrence, Democrat. He made sense.

She liked his attitude. And it didn’t hurt that he could give a younger Robert Redford a run for his money.

And that bundle of talent, looks and potentially huge problems was walking her way right now, being passed through the police cordon as if he were king. Nobody even asked him to wait.

This was Lawrence turf, even for the cops.

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Abigail Reese was dreaming of passionate sex. She was not the woman in her dream, however. The woman in her dream was someone else, someone she knew, but whose face she could not quite place. The woman grunted and moaned, making sounds of mock resistance, her body bucking on something hard.

Then the dream shifted, in the way of dreams, and it was no longer passionate sex. It was no longer sex at all, and the woman was struggling, kicking, crying out in a weak, strangled voice. Abigail was paralyzed in her dream, unable to help the woman, nor even to open her eyes to see her face. The woman’s struggles grew more frantic and less controlled, panic and terror in the face of imminent death. Somehow gasping in a ragged breath, the woman’s voice screamed out her name.

“Abby!”

Abigail shuddered awake. For a moment she fought her body’s urge to drift back to sleep, knowing the nightmare would return. Her thin cotton nightgown clung to her damp skin like a shroud. She threw the covers off as the woman tried to call her name again.

“Ab—”

The sound died away in a gurgle.

It was not a dream.

Had she been fully awake, Abigail might have done the smart thing. She would have remembered that the children were with their father this weekend, locked her door and dialed 9-1-1. But in the manner of a woman who had cared for children for sixty of her seventy-five years, her first thoughts were not for self-protection. Adrenaline surged into her system, and she bolted out of bed with a fluid strength that would have surprised someone who looked upon her wiry, slightly bowed frame.

The horrible sounds continued, not at all passion but stark terror, and she grabbed for the first thing she could find, a heavy glass ashtray, the last remnant of a long-dead habit, before opening the door and moving toward the screams that were growing fainter by the moment.

Bile rose in her throat as she came to the bottom of the stairs and rounded the corner into the living room. The sounds from the woman reached a new if almost silent intensity, the nylon stocking—nearly invisible in the flesh of her neck—choking off all sound. But her eyes…

Abigail had seen a lot in her three score and fifteen years of life. She had watched a young boy scream as the doctors tried to reset the shattered bones in his lower leg, ending his dreams of college football. She had seen the boy grow into a man and the pallor in his face as he asked her whether he should propose to the woman he loved. She had watched him nearly faint at the news that his new wife was pregnant, and beam at the birth of their first child. She had watched his face, his entire countenance, sink like a gutted ship when he heard that his wife had been killed. She had seen children quiver in fear of punishment, in fear of shots, in fear of first haircuts. But she had never seen eyes like this.

They bulged from the sockets, blotched with red from burst capillaries, and they were looking into the face of eternity. The bloodied lips beneath them mouthed a word: “Abby.”

It was only then that Abigail noticed that the woman was naked, her shredded nightgown protruding from beneath her back, apparently wrapped around her wrists. Her legs, though free, made only futile kicks, easily resisted by the man who was bent over her breast. With an ugly, wet, ripping sound, his face rose from her chest. He spat, and a chunk of flesh landed on the woman’s face. Then he seemed to see through her eyes and turn to Abigail.

His was the face of a monster, smeared with the woman’s blood, white teeth and eyes glistening in a red mask of rage and fury.

Abigail’s nostrils flared with the fight or flight response. She should have flown. Instead she charged him, the ashtray raised high in her hand, the lioness protecting her pride. She closed the distance between them in four steps, swinging the ashtray down at his head with all her still considerable strength. But she was an old lioness, and her reflexes were not those of the younger woman who had snatched children from the throes of danger for decade upon decade.

He turned and caught the blow on his shoulder, grunting in pain, and then his arm flashed up. It was only then, in that last instant, that she saw the gleaming blade in his gloved hand, in the last instant before it plunged into her throat and savagely ripped across.

For a moment she thought he had missed, for there was no pain. But then she saw the pulsing explosion of red splash over his face, and in the fast-dimming light she realized it was her own blood.

She dimly heard a voice. “I’ll get him, too!”

Abigail Reese was once again dreaming, running through a tunnel, trying to escape the gurgling, wet sound that propelled her. The light at the tunnel seemed to dim, then exploded into brightness and swallowed her.

Senator Grant Lawrence grunted in disgust as he paged through the proposed amendments to Senate Resolution Fifty-Two. Whenever he thought about the bill he’d sponsored, he forced himself to think: clams have lips.

That reminded him of the first time he’d snorkeled in the Florida Keys, as a teenager, and had seen the beautiful coral through water so crystal-clear that he’d felt he could see forever. On that bright April day, during Easter vacation, he’d been gliding through the water when he’d seen a squiggly, bright red line in the sand beneath him. He’d reached down toward it, and the line had split down the middle, the clam opening its shell to test the disturbances around it. Apparently deciding his finger was not appetizing, it had closed its shell again, leaving only that squiggly, bright red line.

Clams have lips. And, Grant had decided, they wore lipstick.

He forced himself to remember that day because he could not repeat it. The water of the upper Keys was now cloudy and thick with sea grass, choking out the coral, hiding or chasing away the clams. The grass was the product of nitrogen in the water, the runoff from fertilizers used by sugar growers in the Everglades. The problem was not limited to his native state, of course. All along the eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast, nitrogen-laden runoff was feeding sea grasses that had replaced the native underwater flora and displaced fisheries.

S.R. 52 was an attempt—a feeble attempt, his critics said—to slow the damage. It wasn’t perfect, but it was based on the best scientific evidence and advice his staff could assemble. And it would be reasonably cost-effective to implement. Many of his colleagues in the Senate agreed, and his staff had negotiated with, cajoled and arm-twisted enough of the others that the bill seemed likely to pass.