Linda Lael - Deadly Deceptions

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought about you, and here I was.”

I stopped. I’d meant to look Justin up on Google, find out how he’d died, but I’d been too busy. No time like the present, I thought. Greer wasn’t home, the police hadn’t arrived and Jolie was still thirty minutes out. I went to the computer, a laptop I’d borrowed from Jolie since my desktop was still at the apartment, and logged on. There was the daily threatening e-mail from my ex-husband’s girlfriend, Tiffany, who had been riding with Nick the night he died. She’d been thrown through the windshield and permanently maimed, and for some mysterious Tiffany reason, she blamed me for her disfigurement.

I tucked the message into the Death Threat file and forgot about it.

“My mom isn’t doing too well,” Justin said.

I looked back at him over one shoulder. “Are there any other kids in the family?” I asked hopefully.

Justin shook his head. “Just me and old Pepper,” he said sadly, “and he’s about on his last legs. Poor old dog. If I died six years ago, that means he’s almost fourteen. When he goes, I don’t know what Mom will do.”

I went to the Google page and typed Justin’s full name into the search line. “Does she have a job? Hobbies?” The Damn Fool’s Guide to Insensitivity, page forty-three. But I was trying.

Justin didn’t seem offended. He simply sighed and said, “She works at home, doing billing for a credit card company in a back bedroom. And her hobby is ordering stuff off QVC.”

There were something like seven thousand references to Justin on the Web, according to Google, but I wasn’t going to have to wade through them. The first one told the story.

“You were killed in a drive-by shooting,” I said.

There it was again, that ole sensitivity o’ mine.

Justin winced. “What was I doing at the time?”

“Waiting for a streetlight to change after a concert,” I answered, turning in my chair. “If it’s any comfort, they caught the perp. He’s doing life in the state pen.”

Justin absorbed the news with admirable ease. “Then I guess I’m not hanging around here waiting for my killer to be caught, like Gillian is.”

My heart seized. “Did she tell you that’s why she’s here? In sign language or something?”

“No,” Justin said. Then he reached for the TV remote, lowered the screen expertly and flipped to a rock-video channel. “You had me ask her if she knew who killed her. It was no great leap to guess why she’s still around. The question is, why am I still around?”

I thought I knew the answer to that one, though I wasn’t about to say so.

I do have some sensitivity, after all. There are moments when I positively exude it.

Justin hadn’t gone into the Light, if there was such a thing, because his mother couldn’t—or wouldn’t—let go.

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