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  Kit was so overjoyed that she hadn’t actually had to speak to her, she could have danced. And didn’t that just sum up nicely her entire relationship with Alana?

  Afterwards, she’d had no problem picking up the phone and talking for almost an hour to Gloria about everything from recipes to life in general.

  It wasn’t her fault she had more in common with her aunt than she’d ever had with Alana, the woman who’d given her life. As Kit saw it, Alana was the one with the problem and always had been.

  Kit’s first taste of normal and belonging hadn’t come along until Gloria and Morty had moved from Maine to L.A., opening up a whole new world every time they had praised her or showed her affection. Both had given her a taste of self-worth for the first time in her life. And whenever she was around them, she had noticed how they took pleasure in the small things of everyday living. Like cooking.

  Like so many rooms in that Beverly Hills mausoleum that passed for a house, Alana’s kitchen had been off limits. No exceptions. No daughter of hers would spend time in the kitchen doing something as lowly as cooking. To Alana, the only people who cooked were, well, cooks. Kit winced, remembering the ugly screaming-match between the two sisters the day Alana had walked into Gloria’s kitchen and found Kit making a hearty Bolognese from scratch. Kit had been fourteen.

  But time spent with Gloria meant she got to do normal stuff.

  With her aunt’s encouragement, the reserved, shy girl had made the most of it. With the freedom to cook and bake at Gloria’s, Kit found she not only liked it but that she was good at it. Gloria had pushed her to experiment with recipes and try her hand at spicing up some of the age-old favorites and creating her own dishes, such as the chocolate pecan tart, a velvety saucy chocolate version of her own making, a dish so rich her customers hounded her to make it. And every time she did, it sold out before noon.

  “Well, come and get them, folks. I baked enough for the whole town,” she said to herself as she walked into the kitchen, mechanically turning the oven to preheat. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the fresh steaming pot, already brewed thanks to the automatic timer she’d set the night before. After feeding Pepper, she started digging in the pantry, assembling the ingredients she needed to make fresh orange-cranberry muffins to offset all the chocolate goodies she’d made.

  When she’d poured the last of the batter into the muffin pans, she realized she had an excess of fresh orange juice and rind leftover. She wondered if she had enough time to roll out dough for orange cinnamon rolls. One glance at the clock told her she needed to get moving. Maybe tomorrow, she thought, and started clean-up detail.

  By the time she reached the store, carrying the first tray of baked goods, the sun was just creeping up, turning the horizon into brilliant shades of orange—the sun’s first appearance in days.

  After starting several different flavors of coffee including regular brew, she went to the front door and flipped the sign around to Open.

  Thrilled with the prospect of a sunny day, she stood at the window with a smile on her face and watched as the little fishing village she called home slowly came to life.

  At about the same time Kit opened her store, a maid used her key to unlock the back door at 15222 Bel Green Drive and made her way into the kitchen to start breakfast. When she’d finished preparing the meal, she started a load of laundry, and then waited patiently until seven-thirty or so before going upstairs to check on why her employer hadn’t come down for breakfast.

  When she got to the master bedroom, she noticed the door stood slightly ajar, which was a rarity. Not wanting to spy on her employer, but curious as to why she’d left the door cracked, she peeked inside…and froze.

  Blood was—everywhere. A scream hung in the back of her throat as she backed out of the room and ran down the hallway until she tripped on her own two feet. Picking herself up, she fled down the stairs two at a time and ran screaming out the front door to the nearest neighbor.

  By eleven o’clock that morning, veteran homicide detective Max St. John and his younger counterpart Dan Holloway had identified their victim as Alana Stevens, a former actress and owner of a real estate company. Her nude body had been left on the floor of her bedroom, cut up like a piece of meat with at least twenty stab wounds―and the coroner was still in the process of counting. They’d also found the murder weapon, a nine-inch butcher knife from the kitchen, dropped in the bathroom sink with no apparent effort to conceal it.

  As St. John and Holloway stood in the hallway directly outside the bedroom, waiting for the crime scene unit to finish up, Max said flatly, “Whoever did this was pissed.”

  “Overkill, pure hate, pure rage. No forced entry, Max. I’d say she knew her killer.”

  “Yeah, which means we start with family, friends, boyfriends, and acquaintances right up front. I didn’t eyeball a single print on the knife, but you never know. You canvassed the neighbors, right? Did they hear or see anything?”

  Dan shook his head and stifled a low chuckle. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Now you’ve piqued my interest.”

  “Okay, but you asked for it. The neighbors are so damned scared they think Manson might’ve made parole or one of his followers did and came back after all these years, killed her like this to make a statement; another actress, butchered, murdered.”

  “Manson? You’re kidding.” St. John drifted back inside the bedroom, and Holloway was forced to follow.

  “Nope. A couple of the neighbors still remember the Manson family slayings up in the hills not far from here.” Eyeing the uncertainty on his partner’s face, he went on to clarify. “A lot of the same neighbors still live here. They remember the Manson murders in ’69. For years afterward they were scared, thought Charlie pulled some kind of bad mojo strings from his cell in San Quentin. Now they think he somehow made parole, started his killing spree all over again not far from the original murders.”

  Dan watched Max roll his eyes. “Hey, you asked. I’m just repeating what they said. Old people believe wild conspiracies. The way they see it—a former actress, a mother, killed on Mother’s Day, their imaginations kick into overdrive.” He flipped through his notes. “I did find out the victim has a kid. A daughter, an estranged daughter, so say the neighbors. And there’s an odd message on the answering machine from her that came in Sunday night around six. Sounds kind of…weird. You might want to take a listen. Could be she staged the call to throw us off. According to the neighbors mother and daughter had issues. Since the murder occurred on Mother’s Day, the daughter might be our starting point, and we spread out from there.”

  Looking at the bloody, lifeless body still on the carpet, Max agreed, “When you think about it, it makes sense: wealthy woman with a fat bank account, greedy relative like the daughter wants her dead for the insurance and the money, chops her up like meat on Mother’s Day. Doesn’t take a genius to imagine greed as a motive, but why kill her like that?”

  “Obvious rage,” Dan said, glancing again at his notes. “A murder with so many stab wounds, you figure it was either a crime of passion or pure hate. We’ll know more details after the autopsy, of course.”

  And even as he said it, Holloway winced as he watched one of the crime scene technicians scrape at blood splatter from the wall then slip the evidence into a plastic baggie. After only three years in Homicide it still made Dan cringe a little. He remembered why he’d wanted to remain outside in the hallway. So when the M.E. spoke it caught him off guard. “Got something here, found something foreign in the mouth.”

  Holloway watched as the portly medical examiner pulled a shiny, metallic object from the mouth of the victim and dropped it into another evidence bag.

  “Define foreign,” St. John demanded.

  The M.E. held up the bag. “Looks like it’s about the size of a toy soldier, only it looks like,” he squinted, before adding, “a gold something, maybe a cowboy. It doesn’t belong in the mouth, that’s for sure.”

  Holding up t
he bag himself, St. John remarked, “What the hell? What’s that doing in the mouth?”

  “More like stuffed down her throat. Hey, you guys are the detectives, you tell me.”

  “Can you give me a time of death?”

  The M.E. shook his head. “Too early, but I’m guessing more than twenty four. My best guess is sometime after midnight Saturday night, maybe early Sunday morning.”

  St. John pressed, “When will you have more?”

  “Don’t get pushy, Max. Tomorrow morning tops.”

  Settling for that, Max and Dan returned to the hallway and stood at the top of the stairs, where both men paused long enough to formulate their next move. It was Dan who wanted clarification. “Okay, we check out the next of kin starting with the daughter. Did she benefit from her death and so forth? If so, how much does she gain? Find out if the victim had any enemies. If so, who hated her enough to slice her up like that?” He went through his notes once more. “There’s a sister in Agoura Hills.”

  Just as they started down the staircase, harsh feminine shouting suddenly drew their attention to the open front doorway. An older woman with short black spiky hair, meticulously dressed in a raspberry colored suit, was trying to bully her way past the two patrolmen standing guard. The woman was yelling obscenities, making threats about someone losing their job if they didn’t let her pass. She was also explaining to them in no uncertain terms that they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

  Tired of listening to the woman’s shrill voice, St. John yelled, “Lady, this is a crime scene. Back out of here now or I’ll arrest you for obstruction.”

  “Crime scene? I’m Jessica Boyd.” She pulled out a business card, coolly palmed it into St. John’s hand. “Boyd Boyd Geller & Gatz. No doubt you’ve heard of us. I’m Alana’s attorney and best friend. What the hell is going on here? Where’s Alana?”

  They recognized the law firm and the woman, who was perhaps the most famous female lawyer on the West Coast and the wife of Sumner Boyd. Together the couple made up half of the founding partners. The legal eagle stepped into the entryway as if she owned the place.

  Both men exchanged exasperated looks.

  Not wanting to make a mortal enemy of the high-powered law firm but wanting to keep his dignity intact, St. John simply offered, “Perhaps you’d be good enough to ID the body for us.” It wasn’t one bit necessary, but the lawyer didn’t know that.

  “The body? What are you talking about?”

  “Your friend’s been murdered.”

  “Oh my God. How?”

  With no intent to share specifics, St. John countered, “When’s the last time you saw Ms. Stevens alive?”

  Shaken by the news but not enough to lose her head, Jessica jockeyed from lawyer to concerned best friend with the innate skill of a chameleon. As she calmly searched inside her Louis Vuitton handbag for a tissue to dab at her dry eyes, without missing a beat, she softened her voice and replied, “Saturday night we went out for a girl’s night out―in Beverly Hills, of course. We left around ten, headed to my house for some girl-talk.”

  The cops didn’t have to know they’d ended up having a threesome with a gorgeous hunk they’d picked up at the bar. “She was fine when she left around midnight.”

  “Any idea who might have hated her enough to murder her?”

  Without once considering that maybe a member of their Saturday night tryst had followed her back to Beverly Hills for a private rendezvous, Jessica’s mind began to consider more important objectives. When her brain found one she couldn’t bulldog down, her eyes lit with newfound concern. Deliberately she suggested, “That ungrateful daughter of hers tops my list. Then there’s her Loony Tunes sister, Gloria Gandis. They both hated Alana. And Kit…well, Kit Griffin has a violent streak. I’ve seen it firsthand.”

  St. John’s eyebrows went up. “And when was that?”

  “When she moved out of the house, she went into a violent rage and attacked her mother, slapped Alana right across the mouth. I remember it like it was yesterday. If Alana hadn’t already been kicking her daughter out, she would have called the police.”

  Holloway’s heart raced as he formulated different scenarios. “And how long ago was that? How old is the daughter now?”

  Jessica looked rather annoyed. What possible difference did it make how old Kit was? “She’s twenty-five. I know because she’s the same age as my youngest, Collin.”

  Both detectives wanted specifics, but it was Holloway who insisted, “So she moved out recently?”

  Exasperated now, Jessica put some force behind her argument. “She was sixteen. The point is she’s shown violent tendencies.”

  The lawyer pondered her next comment, before adding, “And Kit spent years under the care of a psychiatrist.”

  Holloway didn’t make much out of a nine-year-old incident, and hell, half of L.A. was seeing a shrink, but he pressed on and asked, “Were there any other more recent violent episodes between mother and daughter that you witnessed personally?”

  “Every time Alana tried with Kit there was always some issue from the past. All I know is that Kit hated her mother. Alana never knew why. Poor woman, it was such an embarrassment and a shame for her to have such a daughter like Kit. From the time she was born, Alana tried to give the girl everything, but she was impossible to deal with from the beginning. Some children are like that, you know. But I was there. I saw what a difficult time Alana had with her.”

  The whole time she talked, Jessica noticed the younger detective jotted down her every word. As the two detectives escorted her back outside to her car parked in the driveway, they listened as the accusations piled up against the daughter.

  The claims, Holloway noted, were mostly from her teen years. But both men couldn’t dismiss the seriousness of her charges. Jessica, the stubborn litigator in court, took the opportunity to use every bit of Alana’s theatrical influence to make the detectives aware just how dangerous Kit Griffin had been in her youth when she handed them her final parting shot. “The woman not only has a violent streak, there’s multiple personality disorder. And as Alana’s attorney I know she had recently decided to change her will, leaving the little leech nothing, not a red cent. So yes, Kit Griffin would be my best guess.”

  There, she thought, that should give them a nice place to start. She watched as the two detectives exchanged looks, and knew for certain she’d left a mark.

  If she played this right, she’d deflect any suspicion away from the family or the firm. The police would be so busy investigating the little bitch it would give her ample time to take care of any necessary loose ends.

  As she climbed behind the wheel, she considered what she needed to do. She’d have her oldest son, Connor, handle Alana’s probate; that way she wouldn’t actually be the attorney of record. By the time she made the necessary changes it would cement motive. There would be a nice money trail, one significant enough to make any homicide detective with a brain sit up and take notice. Not all of Alana’s money of course, that would be foolish, but enough so no one would question, least of all naïve little Kit.

  Why had she felt such panic earlier when she’d learned Alana had been murdered? This would be so much easier than she’d originally thought.

  As the two detectives watched her drive away, Holloway commented, “That woman is one piece of work. Did you notice her eyes were completely dry the entire time she wanted us to think she was crying?”

  “Oh, I got that. Check out her alibi. Make sure it holds. She admits to being the last one to see the victim alive. Send someone out to that bar in Beverly Hills. And this daughter sounds like a nut case. Where’s she live anyway?”

  “San Madrid.”

  “Shit. Let’s start with the sister in Agoura Hills and work our way out to the boonies.”

  As Jessica pulled away, a wide smile on her lips, she wasted no time hitting the speed dial on her cell phone, giving orders at a rapid pace to her oldest son, Connor. They’d organize a press conference f
or that afternoon. In a matter of days, she’d have the police so convinced of Kit Griffin’s guilt it wouldn’t surprise her one bit if the girl’s ass wasn’t sitting in a jail cell before Alana was firmly in the ground.

  And who knew, Jessica thought, maybe the little mouse had finally found a spine. Maybe she’d finally exacted her revenge after so many years and actually killed Alana. Maybe she was guilty as hell. Either way, it didn’t matter much to Jessica; as long as the police believed Kit capable of Alana’s murder, it would keep them from digging anywhere near her, Sumner, or for that matter, her precious law firm.

  Hours later, after St. John and Holloway left her house, a distraught Gloria Gandis dialed Jake Boston. She’d sensed Kit was in danger, that much was true, but she’d never thought the danger would come from the police. She hadn’t seen that coming.

  And that was unusual for her.

  They’d thought she was crazy, even as a child, especially Alana, and then later, Jessica. Both women had ridiculed her very existence. But she couldn’t help what she was. She’d had the gift all of her life. And she knew now something was very wrong. She felt the wrong. She’d been fighting the feeling since the horrible nightmare had resurfaced Saturday night.

  Gloria did her best to calm down. But after listening to the two detectives for almost forty-five minutes, it was blatantly obvious their investigation was headed straight for Kit. They repeated things to her that Jessica had told them, terrible things that they’d taken completely out of context without knowing all the facts. She’d tried to correct the misunderstanding of what had happened between Alana and Kit years earlier. But nothing she’d said seemed to matter. They’d jumped to a ridiculous assumption. The police thought Kit had murdered Alana. She was their prime suspect. But they didn’t know her. The idea was preposterous. Gloria had tried to convince them of that to no avail.