Thin Blood (32 page)

Not realizing
until it's almost too late what some people will do to cover their tracks,
Desley teams up with private investigator Fergus Coleman to search for the
missing couple.

“In perfect Vicki
Tyley fashion, ‘Sleight Malice’ entertains and stuns its readers.” – Lit Fest
Magazine

CHAPTER 1

Rough hands grabbed her. Clamped
across her waist, his powerful arm squeezed the breath from her lungs. He
hauled her backwards, her thrashing arms and legs no more an inconvenience to
him than if she had been a pinned fly.

She coughed,
her eyes watering as the hot, acrid air seared the inside of her throat. With
both hands, she tried in desperation to prize the immovable weight from her
stomach. “Let me go! Get…”

Her chest
convulsed against the heavy, grit-laden smoke. The man’s hold on her eased. She
seized her chance and wrenched herself from his grip. She stumbled forward,
shielding her face with her arms, but the fire’s intensity drove her back.

Back into the
arms of the firefighter.

“What do you
think you’re doing? You can’t go in there!” shouted the hulking black and
yellow protective-clad figure. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

Desley James
scarcely heard him over the din of the fire trucks, pumps and roar of the
blaze. Her only concern was for Laura. Where was she? Had she been at home? Had
she escaped the inferno? What about Ryan?

She opened her
mouth to speak, inhaling a mouthful of burnt air instead. Spluttering, she bent
her head forward and drew the thin cotton T-shirt she wore over her mouth and
nose.

“Have you got
everyone out?”

The firefighter
leaned down, his ear almost touching her face. “Sorry, what was that?”

She repeated
her question, watching his face as her words, muffled by the fine weave of her
makeshift filter, sunk in. He averted his gaze, but not before she had her
answer.

“Oh dear God, no.
Please tell me it isn’t true. It’s not possible,” she added in a whisper only
audible to herself.

This time when
he lifted her off her feet she didn’t resist; all the fight had left her. A
female police officer joined them, draping a blanket around Desley’s shoulders
as the firefighter set her down beside the open back door of a police car.

She shivered,
pulling the blanket in tighter as she sunk onto the backseat, the wool fibers
bristly against her hot skin. The vehicle’s interior light cast a ghostly pall
over the two faces staring down at her.

When
soon-to-be-wed Tanya Clark is confronted with her fiancé's naked corpse hanging
from a wardrobe rail in the upmarket Melbourne apartment they share, her life
is torn apart. Two months later, distraught and unable to cope, she drowns her
sorrows in a lethal cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs.

On the other side
of Australia, a grieving Jemma Dalton struggles to come to terms with the
suicide of her only sibling. Despite there being no evidence to the contrary,
Jemma refuses to accept Tanya had intended to kill herself. Not her sister.
Then the coroner's report reveals that at the time of her death she had been
six weeks pregnant. The will, too, raises more questions than it answers. How
did a young woman on a personal assistant's wage amass shares worth in excess
of $1,000,000?

In a desperate bid
to uncover the truth, Jemma puts her own life at risk and starts to probe the
shadows of her sister's life. But shadows, like bones, grow brittle with age.
The consequences can be deadly.

PROLOGUE

One foot inside the apartment, the
smell hit her. Sour, like cat pee. Except they didn’t own a cat.

“Sean?” she
called, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. “Sean, honey, are you
home?” Louder this time.

Not a sound.
Only that putrid smell.

She dumped her
heavy satchel on the floor, kicked the door closed, and surveyed the room.

The late
afternoon sun streamed through the balcony-facing floor-to-ceiling windows.
Long shadows from the life-sized, headless bronze nudes standing sentry sliced
the living area.
The Age
newspaper lay open at the business section in
the middle of the narrow glass-topped dining table, Sean’s mobile phone next to
it. Apart from one of the eight chairs sitting askew from the table, she could
have stepped into the pages of
Home Beautiful
.

She crossed the
carpet toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms and stuck her head into
the apartment’s galley-style kitchen. Tomatoes, red onions and a cling-wrapped
tray of meat – the makings of what looked to be one of her fiancé’s
specialties,
Spanish steak – sat on the
stainless steel drainer next to the sink. Further down the bench, she spotted a
bottle of red wine together with two wine glasses, one of which was already
poured. She sniffed the air and moved on.

Usually wide
open, the door to the guest bedroom was half-closed. Hoping Sean hadn’t offered
a bed to one of his boozy mates, she hesitated for a moment and then gave the
door a sharp shove.

The door swung
in, releasing a rush of sour air. Pinching her nostrils together, she leaned
into the room, ready to beat a hasty retreat if anyone was in there. Her gaze
went first to the queen-sized bed. Although the quilt looked rumpled, the bed
itself didn’t appear to have been slept in.

Breathing out
through her mouth, she glanced across the bedroom to where sunlight, filtered
through the window’s upward angled Venetians, striped the ceiling.

She took
another step into the room and turned around. The leather strap of her handbag
slid from her shoulder. She didn’t try to stop it, couldn’t stop it. Unable to
move, all she could do was gape at the open wardrobe, her eyes bulging almost
as much as the vacant ones staring back at her.

A silent scream
blocked her throat. She couldn’t breathe in; she couldn’t breathe out. Her
lungs wanted to burst. The purple, bloated face of the naked man hanging from
the wardrobe’s steel rail on a belt, his swollen tongue protruding from his
mouth, was almost unrecognizable. Almost.

She stumbled
backwards, snaring her handbag as she landed in a heap next to the bed. She
scrambled in the bottom of her bag, her mobile phone eluding her like wet soap
in the bathtub. When she did manage to get hold of it, she struggled to still
her shaking hands. Her fingers felt fat and clumsy, the buttons on her phone
tinier than she remembered.

“Emergency.
What service do you require? Police, Fire, Ambulance?”

She opened her
mouth to answer, but a magazine page stuck to her leg now had her attention
instead. She peeled it off, dangling the magazine at arm’s length as if it were
a dirty sock. She had never seen anything quite like it. Naked flesh. Entwined
bodies. Explicit sex scenes.

If she had
thought things couldn’t get any worse, she had thought wrong. She shook her
head, unable to come to terms with what she was seeing. Her fiancé, her lover,
her partner was dead; dead and surrounded with hard-core homosexual pornography.

“...easy, fluid
readability factor. I didn't want to put the book down, and it was immensely
enjoyable.” -MotherLode blog

The lives of two
strangers, Greg Jenkins and Megan Brighton, become inextricably entangled when
they each sign up for a dinner dating agency. Greg's reason for joining has
nothing to do with looking for love. His recently divorced sister Sam has
disappeared and Greg is convinced that Dinner for Twelve, or at least one of
its clients, may be responsible. Neither is Megan looking for love. Although
single, she only joined at her best friend Brenda De Luca's insistence. When a
client of the dating agency is murdered, suspicion falls on several of the
members. Then Megan's friend Brenda disappears without trace, and Megan and
Greg join forces. Will they find Sam and Brenda, or are they about to step into
the same inescapable snare?

CHAPTER 1

As he listened to the second phone
call from his mother, Greg Jenkins noted the increased tremor in her voice.

“Samantha still hasn’t arrived. And she’s still not answering her
phone. I’m so worried. Should I call the hospitals? What—”

“Whoa. Slow down, Mum. Don’t stress out. Remember what the doctor
said. Don’t worry about Sam. We all know how bad she is with time. She’d be
late for her own funeral.” Greg laughed, hoping to ease his mother’s tension.

“Yes, but—”

“Please, Mum, I’m sure you’re worrying unnecessarily. Sam has—”

“Gregory, dear, I wish you wouldn’t call her that. Sam’s a boy’s
name.”

“Okay, Mum.” He started again, using the name Sam herself loathed.
“Samantha’s a big girl now. I’m sure she’s all right, but just to put your mind
at rest I’ll go and check on her. She’s probably so wrapped up in her new man
she’s forgotten she was supposed to visit you this weekend.” He laughed again.

“What new man?” The pitch of her voice rose.

Greg could almost see her gripping the phone in both hands as she
waited for her eldest child to answer. Silently berating himself for opening
his big mouth, he wrestled with what he could say without digging himself into
a bigger hole.

“Gregory?”

“Sorry, Mum, there’s someone at the door. I’ll have to go, but I
promise I’ll get Sam… Samantha to phone you as soon as I can. Now don’t get all
worked up. There’s nothing to worry about, you’ll see. Bye, Mum.”

He hung up, sucked in a deep breath and slowly released it. There
was no one at the door but at short notice, it was the only thing he could
think of to get out of what would’ve been the inevitable interrogation. His
sister needed her butt kicked for letting down their mother like that. Sam, of
all people, knew how over-protective their mother was, more so since Sam
divorced her no-hoper of a husband and moved to Melbourne.

Greg picked up the phone again, and pressed the two buttons that
would dial his sister’s home phone a suburb away. As he waited for the call to
connect, he wandered through the house into the kitchen. The phone started
ringing. Cradling it between his chin and shoulder, he filled the kettle. The
phone rang out, which was good. It probably meant Sam was en route to their
mother’s place. Maybe she’d been unlucky enough to end up with a flat tire or
broken down. It was bound to be something as simple as that.

The kettle boiled as he tried Sam’s mobile number. It too went
unanswered, but at least this time Greg was able to leave a message. He looked
at his watch. He’d give her half an hour and if she hadn’t called him back by
then, he would have to think of what else he could do to try to track her down.
Younger sisters, who’d have them?

Twenty minutes later, he’d emptied the coffee pot and finished off
the best part of a packet of shortbread biscuits without realizing it. His
mother’s anxiety had started to rub off on him. He didn’t wait the half hour
out. Instead, he reached for the phone and dialed Sam’s mobile first and then
her home again, ending up with exactly the same results as before. No answer at
either.

Had it been a Freudian slip when he’d inadvertently mentioned the
new man in Sam’s life to his mother? Greg knew nothing about the guy except he
was, in Sam’s words, “tall, dark, and drop-dead gorgeous.” He didn’t even know
the guy’s name. What he did know was that Sam had met him through one of those agencies
that specialized in dinner dating. Dinners for the desperate and dateless. He
found the whole concept repugnant, but his sister had assured him that all was civilized
and above board. He’d taken those assurances at face value, happy she was
making an effort to get on with her life.

CHAPTER 2

Megan Brighton peered around the
edge of her menu, flinching as her eyes met the ginger-mustached man’s stare
across the table. What a sad lot her dinner companions were. Even the strained
smiles pasted on the majority of faces at the table did little to lighten the
atmosphere.

“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” asked
the man seated on her right, before laughing.

She groaned inwardly. Why’d she allowed herself to be talked into
this? She didn’t belong there. She was single because she chose to be. A single,
professional career woman. Well, at least that’s what she told anyone who cared
to listen, including herself.

“I’m not sure,” she said, her gaze not shifting from her menu. “It’s
not quite what I’d imagined.” If it hadn’t been for Brenda, Megan knew she
would have scarpered as soon as she caught sight of the ten or so
white-tableclothed tables arranged around the room, each set for a dozen
diners. From the company’s blurb, she’d been expecting to be one of “twelve
carefully matched diners” eating at your standard everyday restaurant with
normal people. Where she’d ended up looked more like a function centre,
reminiscent of a wedding reception. The only difference was a lack of bride and
groom, and the guests weren’t related by blood or marriage. Or at least she
hoped not.