Bouquet of Lies (25 page)

He grabbed his cell phone again. This time he sent a text.

Standing with Sigmund outside Randy’s apartment, Lacey read the text Dan had sent.
Where RU?

She needed to say something. She texted back.
B there soon. Friend in need.

Sigmund opened the door with a “Ta da! My work here is done.” He bowed and took off down the hall.

Lacey closed the door behind her. If there was anything here worth finding, it wouldn’t be hidden well. At least that was what she hoped. Randy wouldn’t be expecting anyone to break into his apartment. He thought he was smarter than everyone. The police couldn’t truly suspect him of anything. He was a golden boy. She saw it even more now. His arrogance. His conceit.

The apartment was a one bedroom and Randy’s desk and computer were in a corner of the living room. A logical place to start.

It didn’t take long. Drawers weren’t locked, and tucked between the pages of a cheap ninety-nine cent notebook was a handwritten list. ‘Plan B’ was written at the top. Then jotted beneath:

Floor pla
n

Mas
k


Suit/wig
s

Radios/headband
s


Gain her trus
t


Disposable phone
s

Harpe
r

Gun/bullet
s

Plan
t

Valiu
m

Marry Darla

Edward 

Honeymoon, one last message from mother

The talk

Lacey

Her heart was pounding now. It was frightening to see it all in writing. Neither Maggot’s name nor Tiffany’s—or rather Honey’s if Tiffany was part of this scheme—were on the list. They must have been details that had cropped up. Collateral damage, so to speak.

She stared at her name at the bottom of the list and felt a chill. She sat stunned for a couple of seconds. Her name could only mean Randy was planning on killing her. Where? When?

Honeymoon. Talk. Lacey.

The answer was clear: Soon.

She took a deep breath and stuffed the list in her purse. This was no time to be a wuss. At least she was on to him and she had found more than a couple of radio receivers. She had his list in his handwriting. More proof.

But was it enough?

She searched the rest of the desk and found where he kept his receipts. Everything was jumbled together: Grocery receipts. Clothing receipts. Miscellaneous this and that. Too bad there wasn’t a folder that said: Murderous Plan Receipts.

She rifled through the folder and didn’t find anything for the purchase of a mask or wigs. But she did find the receipt for the gun he had given Darla and for bullets. That wouldn’t prove much. It wasn’t a secret he’d bought Darla a gun. She took the receipt anyway.

She found nothing else and neatened the desk so he wouldn’t know she had been there. With any luck, when he discovered the list was gone, he might just think he had misplaced it. That is, if he wasn’t under arrest and was free to notice.

She wondered if there was anything else to find in his apartment. Maybe the gun itself?

She went into the bedroom and rummaged through his bureau. There was no gun. She eyed the closet and searched there. No gun, but she found a box of bullets on the floor in a corner. She took them. If he had to buy ammunition that would at least slow him down.

She looked at his clothes hanging in the closet. There were a number of suits, shirts, ties. Nothing out of the ordinary. She closed the closet door.

That was it. She didn’t know what else to snoop for. Now the question was, should she take the list and receipts to Dan? Dan being Dan, might get excited about the fact that she had committed burglary. Would he arrest her?

Out came that pesky image of him placing her in handcuffs. She didn’t really have a thing for handcuffs, did she? Okay. This was a distraction. She was avoiding making a decision.

She left the apartment and hurried to her car. Dan’s or home? Dan’s.

She was about to pull the Spyder into the street when her chest tightened with fear and beads of sweat broke out on her forehead. The situation hit her for real. Randy-the-monster had made Darla learn how to shoot a gun. Lacey’s name was the last on the list. He meant for Darla to shoot her. That had to be it. He was going to make her sister do the dirty work.

Fear gave way to anger.

How dare he? How dare he wipe out her family? Kill her? And use someone as delicate and precious as Darla to pull the trigger? When Darla realized what she did, it would destroy her. And that had to be what he wanted. He would be the last man standing. Everything would go to him.

Don’t forget about Crystal.
If she was part of this, then she was worse than Lacey thought. She had deserted her and Darla,
and
was willing to kill them.

Lacey wouldn’t go to Dan’s yet. She decided she needed to find Darla’s gun.

Of course, maybe Randy had taken it with him on the honeymoon.

Look, honey, what I brought along. And I blew up this picture of your sister. Won’t it be fun? You can practice shooting her in the head. Yes, the head. You’ve already pretty much broken her heart.

Lacey succeeded in pulling into the street this time. She was determined. If the gun was in Darla’s room she would find it. She would take it and . . .

A flaw in her plan. Take it and Randy would just get another.

She propped an elbow on the door and leaned her head on her hand. Yeah, he would get another. At least, as things were now, she had an idea when her death was supposed to come down the pike. She could take steps to protect herself. The question was, what steps?

She could get Darla alone and talk to her. She’d tell her everything she knew. Maybe she’d be able to destroy Randy’s brainwashing before it destroyed the both of them. Hopefully.

She took a deep breath. Yeah, hopefully. That’s what she needed now. Hope.

Her phone beeped and she checked it. Another text from Dan. She answered him:
Forgot something.
Have 2 stop by house.

She drove home as fast as she could and immediately headed for Darla’s room.

Randy was a monster. A psychopath. A textbook snake charmer. She had to stop him. She would stop him.

And what about his accomplice? What about their mother?

Jake watched Randy leave the motel room right on schedule. Eleven o’clock. He watched Randy cut across the parking lot in the direction of the swimming pool. When he was out of sight, Jake moved in.

He positioned himself in front of the door to the honeymoon room and took out his cell phone. He pulled up the camera feature and waited.

It seemed like forever and a year, but finally he heard footsteps. They were light and quick. A woman’s. He readied the phone and when she appeared on the walkway he took a picture.

She froze and exclaimed, “What the hell!”

Jake put the phone to his side. She was a petite woman. A blonde. She wasn’t standing near any illumination and it was tough to tell more than that.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. You’re not a ghost, are you? I heard this place was haunted so I thought I’d roam around and take a few pictures. I’m not an actual ghost hunter, per se. You know, not a member of any team or anything like you see on TV.” He looked slightly to the side of her. “Is that an orb?” He raised his phone, but before he could take another shot, she scurried away.

Jake smiled. He kept his voice low. “Run. Scurry. Scamper like a rat, Rat.” He walked to the parking lot and saw her crossing toward the pool. She wouldn’t be back. He moved to his hiding place before Randy showed.

Grinning to himself at the image of the rat running, he put his butt on the ground behind the tree and turned his head. He could see the honeymoon door through the foliage.

Randy soon appeared, frazzled movements saying he was bugged. After looking about for several seconds, he entered the room.

Lacey could have sworn she saw the light beneath the door to Darla’s room switch off. But that was ridiculous. No one else was in the house. Her heart began to pound as she came close and she talked to herself to calm her nerves.

“Get a grip. Boogeyman and conspirator are out of town.”

She pushed the door open, went in, and flipped on the light. No one. She felt her body relax just a little.

Swiftly, she moved to Darla’s dresser and plopped her big purse on top of it.

“Sock or underwear drawer?”

She pawed through both and came up empty.

“Okay, T-shirt and shorts.” She took a deep breath. “Good thing you’re going to Dan’s because I think you’re really a lot more nervous than—”

She opened the drawer and there it was, the gun placidly lying on top of a pristine white T-shirt. She stared at it. A 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol, the weapon of choice for her demise.

No poker for her. No banging her on the head. Wasn’t Randy thoughtful? Quick and easy. Bam. Bam. Good-bye, ma’am. Make that: Bang. Bang. You’re dead, Lacey.

For a second she pictured herself staring down its barrel, Darla on the other end. She fixated on the mental image. Frozen.

She didn’t like guns any more than Darla did. She’d gone shooting a few times. One of her boyfriends had loved guns.

That had been a shoot-‘em-up summer. Well, a couple of weeks of one summer. All her boyfriend had wanted to do was shoot. Shoot at the firing range. Shoot out in the desert. Shoot soda cans. Shoot road signs. Destroy state property. He couldn’t wait for hunting season. Lacey couldn’t get into shooting defenseless animals for sport, or even defenseless road signs for that matter. She broke up with him pretty quickly.

She took a deep breath and picked up the gun. She checked it. Yep. It was loaded. The safety wasn’t even latched.

“Lacey.”

Gun in hand, Lacey whirled around. Her heart dropped out of her chest.

There in the flesh was the woman who had bore her. The woman who had deserted her. The woman she had searched the house to find any remnant of.

It was also the woman she saw as a child, cuddling Darla in the middle of the night. It was the woman in Maggot’s photo.

It was her mother, there was no mistake. Crystal. Tiffany. Whatever her name was. Here she was alive, standing in the middle of Darla’s bedroom.

Thirty

“I DIDN’T EXPECT open arms, but . . .” Tiffany’s eyes were focused on the gun, her hands in the air up to her shoulders in the classic pose.

“What? This?” Lacey wiggled the gun, but didn’t put it down. “This is what happens to little girls when their mother deserts them and they’re raised in a house by a couple of liars who give them no love.”

“Lacey, please.”

“A man comes along. A real charmer, and he turns one sister against the other. He gives the fragile daughter a dangerous weapon. People get murdered. A father. A maggot. A roommate. A grandfather.” Lacey tapped the butt of the gun against her chest. “With more on the way.”

“What?” Tiffany relaxed her hands, but left them in the air.

“Murder! Lots of it.” Lacey wiggled the gun again.

“I know, but . . . you’re blaming me?”

“Why not? You weren’t here to keep us on the straight and narrow. You weren’t here to intervene with Edward. You weren’t here to love us, protect us, teach us. You weren’t here to change the course of things. Do you hear that operative phrase? You . . . weren’t . . . here.”

“And you think I wanted it that way?”

“How would I know what you wanted? You. Weren’t. Here.”

Lacey’s cell phone beeped. With gun in hand, eyes on Tiffany, she pulled it from her purse and glanced. A text message from Jake: Mission accomplished. See photo.

Lacey pulled it up, copping brief looks at her mother, until the image of a petite blond woman walking toward the camera mesmerized her. Jake had let Randy’s accomplice get close enough so that the flash highlighted the woman’s hair and face. The face was Crystal’s, placidly frozen. But something was “off” about it. Still. There was no doubt. It was her. She lowered the gun without thinking.

“How can you be in two places at once?” She raised her eyes. Tiffany was gone.

She hurried to the open door and saw no one. She could give chase, but probably wouldn’t find her now. And what was she going to do, anyway? Point and shoot? She didn’t have the energy or the inclination.

She sank onto Darla’s bed, reached out her hand and let go of the gun. Then she stared at the picture on the phone and enlarged it. The face looked real, but it didn’t. Especially the eyes. They were . . . staring through slits.

The woman was wearing a mask.

Her mother wasn’t the accomplice. Her mother was here while this look-alike was there. She closed her eyes and let the thought wash over her again and again. Someone else was helping Randy.

Relief was short-lived. Masks were on Randy’s list. He knew enough about their mother to have masks made that looked like her? What else did he know? How much research on the family had he done?

She picked up the gun and moved to the dresser, to the open drawer. So what was the plan? How would she stop Darla from killing her? She stood thoughtful for a while.

Darla. Darla. How do I convince you not to shoot me?

She heard Tiffany’s voice. Her mother was coming back. She didn’t need to be afraid of her. She wasn’t a threat. She wasn’t the accomplice and must have decided Lacey wouldn’t really shoot her. Lacey dropped the gun in the drawer and shut it. She wouldn’t scare her away again.

She turned toward the door. Dan entered with Tiffany, his hand clutching her arm.

“This answers my question,” he said.