Deadly Desperados (19 page)

“You seem to be missing part of the puzzle,” Mark said. “You overlooked one little thing.”

“And what is that?” James asked.

“Well, I’ll just tell you.”

“I’M
glad we got another chance to ride horses without James hanging around like a Nervous Nellie,” Ally said, following Mandy toward her cabin. “It was nice to be able to relax for a change.”

“It was,” Mandy agreed.

“Are you still going home tomorrow no matter what?”

Mandy smiled ruefully. “I don’t have much of a choice,” she said. “I have to be back for work on Monday.”

“Not for long,” Ally shot back, grinning. “James told Jake you finally agreed to leave the courthouse in September. How come you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Mandy replied, hopping the steps to the cabin. “It’s still months away.”

“It’s a big deal for James,” Ally said. “He’s thrilled.”

“I know. I’m glad I made the deal with him. He’s been so much more … relaxed … since I told him.”

“What about you? Are you more relaxed?”

“I am,” Mandy said, her blond ponytail bobbing. “It’s nice to know there’s an end in sight. I may not be able to make painting my job, but I will be able to keep James happy and let go of a job I hate.

“I’ve decided that you can’t have everything you want in life at the exact time you want it,” she continued, reaching for the door handle. “This is the best thing for everyone, though. James deserves some peace.”

“Oh, you two are so adorable,” Ally said, mimicking Mary’s voice. “I just want to eat you up.”

Mandy rolled her eyes and pushed open the door, pulling up short when she realized they weren’t alone. The figure sitting in the chair in the middle of the room didn’t look happy. The gun pointed in their direction was a second clue on that front.

“I think it’s time we had a talk.”

“What are you doing here, Nadine?” Mandy asked, licking her lips and glancing around the tiny cabin. There was only one exit, and unfortunately if either Mandy or Ally tried to use it, the angry woman in the chair would have a clear shot.

“I came to see the two of you,” Nadine replied, her tone grim. “Shut the door and have a seat.”

“But … .”

“Do it!”

Mandy and Ally exchanged a worried look. They didn’t have a lot of options. Ally reluctantly followed Nadine’s instructions and then joined Mandy at the small kitchen table to the left of the room.

“Thank you for being so accommodating,” Nadine said.

“I don’t understand,” Mandy said, rubbing her sweaty palms against her jeans. “Why are you doing this?”

“Well, after you two did your Nancy Drew bit yesterday, I realized that you knew a lot more than you were letting on,” Nadine replied. “I couldn’t very well just sit around and let you two ruin everything, could I?”

“I still don’t understand,” Mandy pressed. “Why are you doing Mark’s dirty work?”

Nadine snorted. “Mark’s dirty work? Oh, honey, are you so blind that you don’t realize he’s been doing my dirty work?”

Mandy stilled. “What?”

“Yeah, you’re not as smart as you thought, are you?” Nadine pressed. “Do you want to hear a little story? Good. I’ve been dying to tell it to someone.”

“I’M
not a murderer,” Mark repeated, his face ashen. “I do know someone who is, though.”

“And who is that?” James asked, internally rolling his eyes. He had no idea what angle Mark was about to play, but it was bound to be absurd. He could feel it.

“It’s Nadine.”

James tilted his neck, cracking it. “You really expect me to believe that your lush of a wife is a murderer?”

“That’s the part she plays for everyone so they think she’s harmless,” Mark countered. “She’s not harmless. She’s … diabolical.”

“Okay,” James gave in. “Tell me about your diabolical wife.”

“I’m sure you were wondering why Nadine married me in the first place,” Mark said, wringing his hands as he paced back and forth in front of the bed. “The thing is, I figured out that Nadine killed her father to get his money. She was playing the debutante, but I saw her slip something into his drink at a party.

“I had been watching them for some time,” he continued. “I thought Nadine was pretty and I was hoping to make a move on her. That’s when I saw her slip something into her father’s drink. I didn’t think anything of it until the next day when I heard through the grapevine that he died.

“It took me a few days to figure out what happened, and when I did I decided that the best way to play it was to tell Nadine what I knew and offer her the option of coming clean or marrying me,” Mark said.

“You blackmailed a murderer into marrying you?” James was dumbfounded.

“You have to understand,” he said. “I grew up poor. I thought money was going to fix everything. Obviously I was wrong.

“After we got married I started doing some business with local real estate groups,” Mark explained. “Nadine knew people in the trade and she got tips that she passed along to me. She wanted to build me up and still maintain her façade of being a brainless party girl. I have no idea why it was so important to her, but it was.

“After a few years she’s the one who brought up the government contract deal in North Dakota,” he continued. “When Garvey turned up dead, I knew it was Nadine. She got away with killing her father. Killing Garvey was nothing to her. She didn’t even deny it when I accused her of doing it.”

“Why would you stay with her?”

“I had no choice,” Mark answered. “She had all of the money. If I left her, I would literally have nothing. I was fifty. I couldn’t start over again. Nadine is the one who suggested changing my name after the police questioned me. She wasn’t worried in the least they would pin the murder on her.

“We cut our losses and took a profit on the North Dakota investment and then spent a year coming up with a new plan,” he continued. “I had to reestablish myself under a new name and that took time. In the meantime, Nadine and I came to an understanding about women.

“I was allowed to sleep with anyone I wanted as long as I never got them pregnant,” Mark said. “She liked the idea of people knowing that I was cheating on her because she’s got a martyr complex. She gets off on all the ‘poor her’ looks and sympathy.”

“Let’s say I believe that, why would you play that game?” James asked.

“Do you know how lonely it is to be married to a sociopath?”

“No. I married for love, not money,” James replied. “Still, you could’ve left at any time. You could’ve gone to the police.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Mark said. “By the time I got up the courage to even think about leaving her I was in love with Jessica. Nadine knew it. She paid a private investigator to follow us and threatened to kill Jessica if I didn’t hang around long enough to get the government contract out here. Not only that, but she made me take out other women because she was hoping it would bother Jessica. She’s nasty when she wants to be.

“I told Jessica what was going on and she agreed to help,” he continued. “She came out here first. We pegged Dawkins as the hardest mark so she went to work on him. He was a nice guy and she didn’t like using him, but we didn’t have any other options.”

“You had options,” James countered. “You might not have liked any of the options in front of you, but you still had them.”

“When Jessica found out Charlie was going to change his will and leave the farm to her, she got cold feet,” Mark said. “I told her she had to marry him because it would keep her safe. That’s when she told me she was pregnant.”

“Whose baby was it?”

“Mine,” Mark said. “She pretended to be a virgin and told Charlie she was waiting for their wedding night. He was old fashioned. He liked that.”

“She wasn’t going to be able to hide the conception date,” Jake pointed out.

“We hadn’t gotten that far yet,” Mark replied. “Somehow Nadine found out about the baby and she decided to go after Charlie as payback. I was hoping that Jessica and our baby would be safe with Charlie. Nadine took that option away when she killed him.”

“Did she admit that to you?” James asked.

Mark nodded. “She’s cold and evil. You have no idea what she’s capable of.”

“She’s still a drunk,” Jake said. “You could’ve easily overpowered her when she was unconscious.”

“First off, we never sleep in the same room because she doesn’t trust me,” Mark said. “We’ve never even had sex. Second of all, that whole drunk thing is an act. She never actually gets drunk. She pretends she’s throwing down at bars, but when no one is looking she empties the glasses into plants … or on the floor … or switches out her full glass with someone’s empty glass.”

Something occurred to James. “She was drinking wine at the spa yesterday,” he said. “She got hammered and told Mandy and Ally a bunch of stuff.”

“That means she knows that you were sniffing around me,” Mark said. “She was probably drinking grape juice … or at least mixing it in with the wine so she wasn’t really drunk. Whatever happened yesterday put her in a really foul mood.”

“And where is she now?”

Mark shrugged. “I have no idea. I didn’t see her this morning. She told me last night she had something to take care of today and we would catch up later.”

Jake pushed himself up from his chair. “You don’t suppose the thing she had to take care of today was Mandy and Ally, do you?”

“Son of a … .” James hopped to his feet and dug into his pocket looking for his phone. “Nadine probably already has them.”

“I’ll call Uncle Ben,” Jake said, pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“When you’re done with that, call the police,” James instructed. “This is too much for us to handle on our own.”

“IT’S
James,” Mandy said, biting her lip as her cell phone buzzed on top of the table. “If I don’t answer it he’ll get suspicious.”

“If you answer that phone I’ll shoot your right now,” Nadine threatened, her hand steady. Mandy couldn’t help but wonder how a notorious drunk had such steady hands.

“But … .”

“I said no!”

Mandy wet her lips and pulled her hand away from the phone, her heart flopping when the ringing stopped. James was probably leaving a message. There was no way he could realize what was happening.

“Where was I in my story?” Nadine asked, as if they were having a normal conversation and she hadn’t just admitted to being a murderer three times over.

“You were about to tell us what you have planned for Mark and Jessica,” Ally prodded. She was oddly calm – especially for her – but Mandy could see her mind working from across the table. She was trying to think of a way out. Mandy could only hope it wasn’t something that would get them both killed.

“Oh, right,” Nadine said, an evil grin moving across her features. “So, after I killed Charlie I realized that Mark and Jessica were in a real pickle. Mark doesn’t want to admit that Jessica is pregnant for obvious reasons and Jessica is too dumb to realize how dangerous I really am.

“I decided that since this land deal was obviously going to fall through again that I was done dealing with Mark and his stupidity,” she continued. “I knew he would be the prime suspect in Charlie’s death after what happened in North Dakota. I figured both he and Jessica would go away on this one because it wouldn’t take the police long to figure out what Jessica was hiding.

“Once Mark is out of my hair and in prison, I can start over again,” Nadine said. “This time I would be the bamboozled and put upon wife whose husband cheated on her and knocked up another woman. Can you imagine all the interviews I will get when I tell my story? I’ll bet Oprah even calls.”

Nadine looked smug.

“How are you going to explain our deaths?” Ally asked. “You can’t pin those on Jessica and Mark, too.”

“Why not?”

“Because Jake and James are at the hotel questioning Mark even as we speak,” Mandy supplied. “It’s going to be hard to pin our murders on Mark when his alibi is the men who love us.”

“Oh, you’re so naïve it makes me sick,” Nadine spat. “Your husband loves you right now. I will give you that. You’re not going to have your looks forever, though. Once you hit a certain age his eye will start to wander and you’ll be put out to pasture.

“And you,” she said, her eyes shifting to Ally. “You can’t even get your man to propose to you. At least the blonde locked in the money when she was still young. What are you going to do when your looks go and you don’t even have a ring on your finger?”

“I don’t care about money,” Ally replied stiffly. “Jake is the love of my life. I don’t need a ring or money to tell me that. We’ll get married eventually. It will happen in time. I have faith. There’s no reason to rush it now.”

“Then you’re as dumb as the blonde,” Nadine said, rolling her eyes.

“You still haven’t told us how you plan to get away with this knowing that James and Jake are with Mark,” Mandy said. “Your plan just went up in smoke.”

“Not if Jessica kills you,” Nadine countered.

“But … how do you know where Jessica is?” Ally asked. “She could be out in public right now.”

“I’ve had private investigators following her for almost a year now,” Nadine answered. “She’s at Charlie’s house playing the mourning fiancée. In actuality she’s trying to hide from me and knows I wouldn’t dare go out to the house.

“Once I kill the two of you I’ll have the investigator call in an anonymous tip from a burner phone and say that Jessica was sighted crossing the fence onto the Harrison farm,” she continued. “Voila. Two murders, one suspect, everything is all wrapped up. They’ll pin Charlie’s murder on her, too, and she’ll roll over on Mark. This actually works out better for me.”

“What is Jessica’s motive for killing us?” Ally asked. “We’ve never even talked to her.”

“No, but you have talked to Mark and your husband and boyfriend figured out that Mark was up to no good,” Nadine replied. “Jessica was trying to help when she came to talk to you and opted to kill you when she realized you knew too much.”

Mandy and Ally exchanged worried looks. Nadine had clearly thought this through.

“You don’t have to kill us,” Ally said, changing tactics. “We won’t say anything. You can leave town and no one will be the wiser. We’ll give you a head start.”

“I don’t need a head start if you’re dead,” Nadine countered. “I don’t want a head start because that’s going to ruin my plan of being a media darling when my story about twenty years of terror is revealed to the world. I just need to get another round of Botox first. I want to be camera ready.”

“I think you’ve had enough Botox,” Ally argued. “Your face is so frozen you look like a mannequin.”

Nadine frowned. “Do you think now is the time to insult me?”

“I don’t really care,” Ally replied, nonplussed. “You’re a sociopath. There’s no negotiating with you. You have delusions of grandeur that will never come true. James and Jake will know what you did. Mark will turn over on you to save himself. If you think he hasn’t amassed evidence against you in twenty years, you’re an idiot.”