Dark Paradise Read Free

of the moonshadowed ranch
    yard and the hills beyond. The place was in the middle of nowhere. She
    had driven through the small town of New Eden and gone miles into the
    wilderness, seeing no more than two other houses on the way - and those
    from a great distance.
     
    She knocked again, but didn't wait for an answer before trying the door.
    Lucy had mentioned wildlife in her few letters. The four-legged,
    flea-scratching kind.
     
    "Bears. I remember something about bears," she muttered, the nerves at
    the base of her neck wriggling at the possibility that there were a
    dozen watching her from the cover of darkness, sizing her up with their
    beady little eyes while their stomachs growled. "If it's all the same to
    you, Luce, I'd rather not meet one up close and personal while you're
    off doing the boot-scootin' boogie with some cowboy."
     
    Stepping inside, she fumbled along the wall for a light switch, then
    blinked against the glare of a dozen small bulbs artfully arranged in a
    chandelier of antlers. Her first thought was that Lucy's abysmal
    housekeeping talents had deteriorated to a shocking new low. The place
    was a disaster area, strewn with books, newspapers, notepaper, clothing.
     
    She drifted away from the door and into the large room that encompassed
    most of the first floor of the house, her brain stumbling to make sense
    of the contradictory information it was getting. The house was barely a
    year old, a blend of western tradition and contemporary architectural
    touches. Lucy had hired a decorator to capture those intertwined
    feelings in the interior. But the western watercolor prints on the walls
    hung at drunken angles. The cushions had been torn from the heavy,
    overstuffed chairs. The seat of the red leather sofa had been slit from
    end to end. Stuffing rose up from the wound in ragged tufts. Broken
    lamps and shattered pottery littered the expensive Berber rug. An
    overgrown pothos had been ripped from its planter and shredded, and was
    strung across the carpet like strips of tattered green ribbon.
     
    Not even Lucy was this big a slob.
     
    Marilee's pulse picked up the rhythm of fear. "Lucy?" she called, the
    tremor in her voice a vocal extension of the goose bumps that were
    pebbling her arms. The only answer was an ominous silence that pressed
    in on her eardrums until they were pounding.
     
    She stepped over a gutted throw pillow, picked her way around a smashed
    terra-cotta urn, and peered into the darkened kitchen area. The
    refrigerator door was ajar, the light within glowing like the promise of
    gold inside a treasure chest. The smell, however, promised something
    less pleasant.
     
    She wrinkled her nose and blinked against the sour fumes as she found
    the light switch on the wall and flicked it upward Recessed lighting
    beamed down on a repulsive mess of spoiling food and spilled beer. Milk
    puddled on the Mexican tile in front of the refrigerator.
     
    The carton lay abandoned on its side. Flies hovered over the garbage
    like tiny vultures.
     
    "Jesus, Lucy," she muttered, "what kind of party did you throw here?"
     
    And where the hell are you?
     
    The pine cupboard doors stood open, their contents spewed out of them.
    Stoneware and china and flatware lay broken and scattered, appropriately
    macabre place settings for the gruesome meal that had been laid out on
    the floor.
     
    Marilee backed away slowly, her hand trembling as she reached out to
    steady herself with the one ladder-back chair that remained upright at
    the long pine harvest table. She caught her full lower lip between her
    teeth and stared through the sheen of tears. She had worked too many
    criminal cases not to see this for what it was. The house had been
    ransacked. The motive could have been robbery, or the destruction could
    have been the aftermath of something else, something uglier.
     
    "Lucy?" she called again, her heart sinking like a stone at the sure
    knowledge that she wouldn't get an answer.
     
    Her gaze