Writing on the Wall Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Copyright © 2012 by Jenna Rae

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  First published 2012

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59493-290-8

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you seems like a small phrase for the love, support, and encouragement I have been offered by my family and friends. I especially want to thank Ben, Josh, Lee, Morgan, Dan, Gracie, and Pumpkin.

  I have been the fortunate recipient of help, guidance, and insight offered by the brilliant Kathalina Chandler, Morgan Curtis, Karin Kallmaker, and Katherine V. Forrest. Many thanks, also, to the dedicated staff at Bella Books for all that you do.

  About the Author

  Jenna Rae is a California native who grew up in and around San Francisco and lives in northern California. She teaches English, mostly as an excuse to talk about books and writing and reading. When she’s not writing, teaching, or reading, Jenna likes to garden, crochet, and try out new vegetarian recipes. She is the devoted servant of two occasionally affectionate and frequently sleepy cats.

  Chapter One

  “Your front porch makes you look like trailer trash.”

  Toxic words presented with a wink and a kiss—classic Janet.

  They hurt, more maybe than they should have. More than police Inspector Del Mason cared to show, anyway. So she’d ignored the comment and pretended not to believe it.

  But neither Janet nor any other woman had crossed Del’s threshold in months, and it was time to make it more inviting, if she wanted one crossing it again. So, nearly six months after Janet’s caustic comment, Del tore out the whole thing—an easy task, given the state of the wood—and started over from scratch.

  Now she was almost finished and feeling pretty good about the new porch and its sturdiness. It was plain, functional and solid. She was stomping back and forth across it to make sure it was sound when a flash of glare off a windshield caught her eye. That was the first time Del saw her new neighbor, a little brunette who was chugging along in a battered old Buick. She slowed in the driveway of the empty house only long enough to reach down and fumble for something, the remote to the garage door opener, maybe. Then she trundled right in without a single glance around. It was surreptitious. To Del’s mind, surreptitious was a fancy word for sneaky. She didn’t like the woman’s behavior.

  Del had decided long before to turn a blind eye to any activities of her neighbors that were not heinous and was pretty good about sticking to that. So if she’d seen a moving van or the new homeowner looking around to get a feel for the neighborhood, she’d have gone back to work without a moment’s thought. But in this case Del watched the wheezy old car and its driver disappear into the mouth of the garage three doors down and across the street. And then, nothing. That was what got her speculating.

  Del had toured the pretty yellow Edwardian a few weeks before, knowing that it wouldn’t be on the market for more than a month or two—homes in the heart of the Castro never sat empty for long. Del had been lucky enough to buy many years earlier, during a period of flat home values, and she’d still only barely been able to afford the smallest and most rundown house, one that had been through a plumbing disaster and a kitchen fire.

  Sneaky Buick chick must be loaded. Software guru? Venture capitalist? Tort lawyer? But if she could afford that house, why was she driving a rusted beater? Hipster affectation? That seemed unlikely. The woman wasn’t young enough to think the battered brown beater was ironic. So, what was the deal?

  Not knowing made Del irritable. She tried to dismiss her unfounded pique and went back to work, keeping an eye out for the inevitable truckload of furniture. But as the afternoon wore on and no truck appeared, Del found excuses to stay out front. She tried to talk herself out of loitering in wait. But it was odd for an owner to sneak in like that without even looking around. And who moves in with nothing at all? And who in San Francisco drives a ratty, old car, unless it’s by necessity? There hadn’t even been a pile of stuff in the backseat.

  She finally gave up and went inside her own house. She’d restored her creaking Victorian to a livable state, but it still needed more lighting and new windows and doors. She definitely needed to finish the walls in the garage and get her junk organized down there. Unlike most of the neighbors’ homes, hers boasted no granite counters or stainless steel appliances or fancy woodwork. She’d done one project at a time, always on a tight budget, and the house looked like it. But she had learned how to do wiring and plumbing and how to refinish the floors and how to put up drywall, and every time something worked right, a little part of her thought, I did that. The neighbors might live in fancier digs, but most of them probably didn’t know how to wire a house to code.

  She snuck a peek out her front window. What was the story? Had she moved from overseas? Was she an eccentric millionaire? A flipper? A spoiled, erratic heiress? She for sure wasn’t a poor cousin who’d inherited the house. Jerry Tartan had sold it to finance his retirement on Maui.

  Washing up and building a salad to go with the steak she’d left marinating all afternoon, Del shook her head at her own idle curiosity.

  The shrilling cell phone broke into her thoughts, and she wiped her hands on her jeans, reaching for the call that meant some family was about to get bad news.

  ***

  Through most of the next forty hours, Del focused on the latest domestic dispute turned deadly. It was dismayingly familiar: wife tries to leave controlling, violent husband or boyfriend or whatever and gets killed for her trouble.

  The killer was always a likable guy, handsome and charming and successful. The victim had always seemed happy and in love, and no one could believe that this had happened. Except for a sister or cousin or best friend who’d been sure that something was wrong. “I tried to help her. But she kept going back to him!”

  She’d heard the same thing hundreds of times.

  “I know,” Del would murmur, and she did know. She felt compassion for the victims, but she also felt—and fought—disdain for them, especially the ones with kids. How could they put their kids through that? How could th
ey want to be with someone who was usually abusing the kids, too?

  Looking at one of the crime scene photos, Del shook her head... Ana Moreno’s face was gone, replaced by a mash of bone and dried blood and flesh.

  “Fuckin’ hamburger,” muttered Inspector Mark Milner, the lead detective on the case. He pulled the photo out of her hand and stared at it in apparent fascination, then dropped the photo on Del’s desk.

  “Yeah.” Del didn’t know what else to say. Milner had said it like he was impressed by the damage. He’d already commented twice that the murder was “a waste of a perfectly good piece of ass” and stared at Del as if daring her to object.

  Del ignored his baiting. He was a caricature, a bitter, burned-out, alcoholic cop. Arrogant, more than a little sexist and homophobic. He wasn’t her partner, never would be, and she let his comments slide. She focused on solving the murder.

  Not that there was much question who’d done it. Restraining orders, safe houses and social workers notwithstanding, it was very hard to protect a person once someone had decided to kill her. And the victims always knew that. This one had. Ana Moreno had done all the things she should have, once she’d decided to leave. She’d gotten a temporary restraining order, she’d filed for divorce, and she’d documented the abuse and the stalking and the threats. There was a nice thick file on Del’s desk, bulging with pictures and emergency room receipts and transcripts of threatening phone calls. After all of that, the victim was something of a legal expert. She probably could have gotten a job at a law office if she’d survived.

  But she hadn’t stood a chance. Five feet tall, a hundred pounds, against a guy twice her size—Del shook her head, wishing she could really talk to the killer. Did it make you feel like a big man, beating on a woman who barely came up to your chest? That wasn’t something she’d ask, of course. She’d never had a real conversation, an honest conversation, with a killer.

  Despite all of Ana Moreno’s efforts, the ex had barely had to break a sweat to get to her: he just followed her home when she picked up the kids from school. She’d moved out of the shelter into an apartment near her new fast-food job and the kids’ school.

  “She didn’t want to put the kids through a change of schools,” a neighbor said, blowing smoke sideways, away from Del’s face. Middle-aged, bleach blonde, she had that wide-eyed look of shock people always seemed to have around death. And maybe a little hopped-up, guilty glee at not being on the slab. “She was a good mom, you know?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you for your help.”

  Were you home? Del wanted to ask but didn’t. When she was screaming for her life and her bones were breaking and she was gushing blood, were you home? Did you hear it? Did you turn up the TV to drown out the sounds? The apartment complex housed over thirty units, and the walls were almost thin enough to see through, but nobody had heard a thing. There was no point in asking.

  Two days after the phone call that had meant her steak would go uneaten, Del finally returned home, having watched Milner take credit for the arrest of the husband. After last year’s fiasco in the press, she’d be trailing along after one arrogant ass or another and letting him take credit for her work until her reputation recovered. And guys like Milner were more than happy to do so.

  She reviewed the case as she parked her beloved Honda Rebel and tried to ignore the piles of scrap wood and tools and pipes in the garage. She’d been the one to notify the victim’s parents, a baffled, vaguely embarrassed older couple, both tax accountants in Oakland. She’d seen the two kids, both still silent and watchful, sent into the grandparents’ care. The team had collected the evidence that proved that the husband beat his wife with a chair, and then pieces of the chair, until she was dead. It was Del who’d gotten his confession, a gift she hadn’t expected. He’d gotten aroused telling her about it. He’d gone into great detail about the sounds and the feeling of it, gotten flushed and short of breath rhapsodizing about the smell.

  She’d smiled at him, encouraging him, nodding and leaning forward breathlessly, as though he were telling her an exciting, sexy story. He’d kept his hands below the table, and she’d pretended not to know or care that he was getting off on telling her about it. The heavy table had rocked into her chest over and over, and she’d pretended not to notice that or the squealing protests of the chair as the killer raced toward climax and the end of the story.

  She tried to clean off the memory of his excitement by scrubbing her hands. Her face was hot, her stomach sour, and she had to let it go. The woman was dead. There’d be another one tomorrow or the next day or the next, killed for the crime of falling in love with the wrong person. She rolled her eyes. Okay, enough.

  She sniffed Sunday’s steak after freeing it from the tinfoil she’d stuck it in two days before and decided to grill it. In the cool of the backyard, she sipped an icy beer and waited for the grill to heat up. I’m drinking alone again. That can’t be good.

  She sighed, settling with care into her one rickety lawn chair. She’d wrestled it out of a pile in the garage after Janet had taken her good patio furniture, the table and chairs set she’d saved up for over a year to buy. God only knew why Janet had even taken it all. She certainly hadn’t needed it. Of course, Janet wasn’t the type to go without whatever her whims demanded.

  Del’s body ached with weariness. She let out a slow breath, trying to let go of the hurt and disappointment that had been her closest companions for months. Janet had loved eating outside, had insisted on it whenever the weather allowed. That was how Del had gotten in the habit of grilling. Janet liked to eat outside, but she hated to cook.

  Well, that’s one thing, anyway. Janet might have destroyed her career, ruined her peace of mind, broken her heart, stolen her good patio furniture, and made her miserable—damned if she didn’t sound like the world’s worst country song—but she did get Del grilling her steaks instead of frying them.

  “What kind of hillbilly fries a steak?” Janet had demanded the first time she saw Del throw a slab of beef in a frying pan. Del scowled in what she pretended was mock outrage and shook a spatula at her. Janet tried to grab it, but Del held it up over her head, laughing at Janet’s expression. They made love then and there, Del reaching out to snap off the gas before smoke could fill the whole house.

  Trailer trash. Hillbilly. Janet had known exactly the buttons to push, hadn’t she?

  Musing about the cost of new patio furniture reminded Del of her new neighbor. Did she have any stuff in that big house yet? Was she sleeping on the floor? That hardly seemed likely. What kind of furniture was she likely to have, this woman in the big, fancy house, driving an ancient boat on wheels? Maybe she was the chintz and lace type. Or the black leather and chrome type. Maybe floor cushions, clay pots, and hand-woven rugs?

  Funny, she thought, how someone can move in right down the street and still be a total stranger. Of course, the whole Welcome Wagon could have come and gone a dozen times. Once a case started, Del tended to get pretty wrapped up in it. The neighbors seemed to accept her as a sometimes presence. She set her steak on the grill, resolving for the umpteenth time to find more balance in her life: less work, more fun.

  ***

  The next few weeks made her forget that resolution. She was stumped on a headache of a cold case, last year’s murder of a young prostitute whom no one seemed to miss or even to know. Her days and nights were tied up with chasing down leads when she connected the girl to a group of street kids who stuck together and subsisted in the Tenderloin and did not cooperate with cops.

  Then she was pulled into a missing persons case. The department scoured the city for a minor who’d disappeared from his exclusive prep school in Sea Cliff. After the city paid dozens of cops overtime for a week, it turned out he’d run away because his daddy wouldn’t buy him a new ride after he totaled his second sports car. By the time Del could get back to the murdered girl, the street kids had moved on. She forgot about patio furniture and the new neighbor and nearly everything. Somet
imes even Janet slipped her mind.

  She came home one evening to find a SAFE flier on her door and made a face in response. She didn’t want to go. She was tired, for one thing. For another, she didn’t want the whole neighborhood to know she was a cop. They’d get squirrelly over their illicit drug use, or, worse, call her every time someone drove by playing loud music. SAFE, the community outreach branch of the department, had a lot of potential upsides. She just didn’t want to be a part of it.

  Phil and Marco, her next-door neighbors, were the organizers of the meeting. Marco had been harassing Del for months about it, knowing she’d eventually cave. He didn’t remind her that she owed him. He didn’t need to. His scrawled “M” on the flier was enough to compel her. A few hours later, Del slipped through the crowd and headed straight toward the food arranged on the dining room table. Marco shadowed her and raised his eyebrows when she dug right in.

  “Really? Not even a hello?” Marco hissed, and Del mumbled an apology.

  “I’m glad you came,” he whispered, his expression softening.

  Del shrugged. “If I’d known there was gonna be food.”

  “Hmmmn.”

  Marco was the only person she’d confided in after the end with Janet. He’d listened to her, commiserated with her, brought her food and liquor. Now, every time she saw him, she thought of that time. She was grateful for his kindness but had to fight the temptation to avoid him. He had seen her at her worst. It was in his eyes, that knowing, and she couldn’t stand to see it.

  She swallowed hard, trying to clear her mouth, wanting to say something like thank you and unable to do so. He patted her arm and murmured something she didn’t quite hear but read as commiseration and encouragement.