Daddy's Little Killer

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

 

My feet pounded on the packed earth, its contrast stark to the dense foliage crowding around it. The sprays of wildflowers strangling their way through the underbrush would've been pretty under other circumstances. Today, they were blurs of yellow, pink and lavender while I rushed by.

Rivers of sweat soaked my shirt in a wide V that yoked front and back. Half-moons bled into full under my arms. My eyes stung with the beads of salty condensation dripping from my brow. My heart punctuated the thuds between footfalls with a mantra: look upset; look upset.

Breath sucked into my lungs like the baleen of a whale. Through my glazed vision I could see it ahead, the area along the path cordoned off by too familiar yellow tape. The crime scene had been plotted. The body found. Law enforcement collected clues that would be analyzed, dissected, assembled to bring into focus the portrait of a killer.

Running was necessary. A certain response would be expected in a matter of seconds. Lessons learned swirled in my brain. Could I pull it off? 

I knew what it was supposed to look like, the horror, the shock, the grief. How could I contain the urge to smirk? Would I successfully quell the drive for a fist pump and a loud screech of victory?

David Levine saw me rushing headlong for the crime scene border. I wasn't close enough to hear his voice, but I'm a very good lip-reader. Sometimes you have to be in my line of work.

Who the hell told her to come out here? Jesus!

Obviously, David is Jewish. Yet he has no qualms about using certain religiously oriented epithets. Anything in the Common Era is fair game. He didn't want me here for obvious reasons. I had to show up for only one. 

Rick Hamilton used to be my husband. Now, he was dead.

Oh, he was also under the microscope of a certain organized crime investigation being conducted by the FBI. Hence our divorce. Appearances are important, and I had to maintain mine. So here I am.

David's arm restrained me. "Helen, no. You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't see him like this."

Sweat served two purposes. It's virtually impossible to tell the difference between it and tears, particularly when the mineralized moisture stings the eyes and burns them red and raw. I shoved his hand away from me. "I have to see."

Under the yellow tape, I saw something familiar. Rick's face lay side-down in the dirt. The earth around his head was brown-black, soaked with the blood that sprayed from the insult and oozed out with the aid of gravity. 

I stopped, hesitated for a beat too long (maybe it looked like shock, at least I hope it did), and tried to crumble to his side where I planned to commit the first unforgivable sin of crime scene processing. Touching the body. 

David grabbed me. "No, Helen. You can't touch him."

Dozens of chary eyes pinned me. I clung to David in a measure of self-protection. Surely they didn't suspect...

"It's obvious what happened here, Helen," David's low voice shrouded me in an impenetrable armor, shielded me from the skepticism of my peers. "They were afraid he would tell us what he knew, so they had him assassinated."

Yes. That's exactly what it looked like. It was precisely what it was designed to look like. 

Assassins are supposed to be sociopathic monsters. They stay off the radar easier that way. Forget the grid. They're ghosts. That's what we're taught to believe. Police. Television. Books. Assassins are boogeymen, not quite urban legends, but certainly not your next-door neighbors, your friends, your coworkers. They don't have regular lives. They don't have wives, and they certainly don't have children.