Blake Pierce

Blake Pierce is author of the bestselling RILEY PAGE mystery series, which includes thirteen books (and counting). Blake Pierce is also the author of the MACKENZIE WHITE mystery series, comprising nine books (and counting); of the AVERY BLACK mystery series, comprising six books; of the KERI LOCKE mystery series, comprising five books; of the MAKING OF RILEY PAIGE mystery series, comprising three books (and counting); of the KATE WISE mystery series, comprising two books (and counting); of the CHLOE FINE psychological suspense mystery, comprising three books (and counting); and of the JESSE HUNT psychological suspense thriller series, comprising three books (and counting).

An avid reader and lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Blake loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.blakepierceauthor.com to learn more and stay in touch.

Copyright © 2018 by Blake Pierce. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright  emin kuliyev, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY BLAKE PIERCE

A JESSIE HUNT PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE SERIES

THE PERFECT WIFE (Book #1)

THE PERFECT BLOCK (Book #2)

THE PERFECT HOUSE (Book #3)

CHLOE FINE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE SERIES

NEXT DOOR (Book #1)

A NEIGHBOR’S LIE (Book #2)

CUL DE SAC (Book #3)

KATE WISE MYSTERY SERIES

IF SHE KNEW (Book #1)

IF SHE SAW (Book #2)

THE MAKING OF RILEY PAIGE SERIES

WATCHING (Book #1)

WAITING (Book #2)

LURING (Book #3)

RILEY PAIGE MYSTERY SERIES

ONCE GONE (Book #1)

ONCE TAKEN (Book #2)

ONCE CRAVED (Book #3)

ONCE LURED (Book #4)

ONCE HUNTED (Book #5)

ONCE PINED (Book #6)

ONCE FORSAKEN (Book #7)

ONCE COLD (Book #8)

ONCE STALKED (Book #9)

ONCE LOST (Book #10)

ONCE BURIED (Book #11)

ONCE BOUND (Book #12)

ONCE TRAPPED (Book #13)

ONCE DORMANT (book #14)

MACKENZIE WHITE MYSTERY SERIES

BEFORE HE KILLS (Book #1)

BEFORE HE SEES (Book #2)

BEFORE HE COVETS (Book #3)

BEFORE HE TAKES (Book #4)

BEFORE HE NEEDS (Book #5)

BEFORE HE FEELS (Book #6)

BEFORE HE SINS (Book #7)

BEFORE HE HUNTS (Book #8)

BEFORE HE PREYS (Book #9)

BEFORE HE LONGS (Book #10)

BEFORE HE LAPSES (Book #11)

AVERY BLACK MYSTERY SERIES

CAUSE TO KILL (Book #1)

CAUSE TO RUN (Book #2)

CAUSE TO HIDE (Book #3)

CAUSE TO FEAR (Book #4)

CAUSE TO SAVE (Book #5)

CAUSE TO DREAD (Book #6)

KERI LOCKE MYSTERY SERIES

A TRACE OF DEATH (Book #1)

A TRACE OF MUDER (Book #2)

A TRACE OF VICE (Book #3)

A TRACE OF CRIME (Book #4)

A TRACE OF HOPE (Book #5)

PROLOGUE

Working as a nanny was not the life that Kim Wielding had envisioned for herself, but it was actually quite enjoyable. Which was a little surprising, considering in her early twenties she’d had a career she wanted to pursue in Washington, DC, firing along the campaign trails and writing speeches for underdog candidates. And she’d almost landed it.

Almost.

Life just worked out in funny ways sometimes.

Now, at the age of thirty-six, those dreams of working in DC were long gone. She’d replaced them with another dream: of writing the great American novel in her downtime as a nanny. She’d sort of fallen into the job after a promising candidate she had worked for had been miserably defeated. That was all it had taken for her to sit on the sidelines for a while. And while on those sidelines, a very easy means of employment had landed in her lap. She hadn’t even considered watching kids in any capacity, but it had fit.

Kim reflected back on her first job as a nanny as she sat at the kitchen island inside the home of Bill and Sandra Carver. It was hard to believe it had been a little over ten years ago. It was a stretch of time that had somehow blurred those memories of working in DC, of writing speeches with hope and just a smidge on untruth.

Her laptop sat in front of her. She had hit the forty-thousand-word mark on her book. She figured she was about halfway through it. Maybe she’d finish it up in another six months or so. It all depended on the direction the lives of the three Carver children took. The oldest child, Zack, was in ninth grade this year and seriously eyeing football as a pastime. The middle child, Declan, played soccer. And if the youngest, Madeline, stuck with gymnastics, Kim was going to be running around in a frenzy for the next few months.

She closed the lid of her laptop and looked around the kitchen. She was thawing chicken for dinner. The counters had already been wiped down, the dishes were done, and the fourth load of laundry was currently churning away in the washing machine. Until the kids got home, her day was done. It was how she’d been able to work on her book for the last forty-five minutes.

She glanced at the clock and saw that the day had managed to sneak away from her—something that she was starting to understand happened to nannies quite a bit. She’d need to leave to pick the kids up from school in fifteen minutes…and that was no small feat, seeing as how the Carver kids were aged in crude stairstep fashion, the youngest in elementary school, the middle child in middle school, and the oldest in high school. All told, it was just over an hour’s worth of travel and traffic time to pick them all up from school and return home with them. It sounded worse than it was, though, as Kim had recently discovered how wonderful audiobooks could be to kill time in the car.

She got up and checked the chicken, nearly defrosted in the sink. She then swapped the laundry into the dryer and got all of the spices out that she would need to complete dinner. As she was setting the paprika down on the counter, someone knocked on the front door.

It was a fairly common occurrence in the Carver household. Sandra Carver was an Amazon junkie and Bill Carver always had schematics and blueprints being FedEx’d to their home. Kim grabbed her purse, figuring she’d go ahead and leave for school pick-ups after bringing the packages inside.

She opened the door, her eyes instantly going to the floor of the porch in search of an Amazon box. That’s why it took her brain a full second to understand that there was the shape of a person standing in front of her. When she looked up to see their face, her line of sight was blocked by—something.

Whatever it was, it smashed into her head. It connected right between her eyes, along the top of the bridge of her nose. The cracking noise inside of her head was deafening but she barely had time to register it before the sensation of falling overruled everything.

When she hit the Carvers’ hardwood floors, the back of her head struck hard. She felt blood rushing out of her nose as she tried scrambling backward.

The person from the porch came inside. They shut the door causally behind them. Kim tried to scream but there was too much blood in her nose, cascading down into her throat and mouth. She coughed, almost gagging, as the person took one large step forward.

They lifted that blunt object again—a pipe, Kim thought vaguely as pain swept through her mind like a hurricane—and that was the last thing she saw.

Before that final blow, her mind went to a strange place indeed. Kim Wielding died wondering what would happen to that chicken, still defrosting in the Carvers’ sink.

CHAPTER ONE

Because of the way her life had started—a dead mother, an incarcerated father, and grandparents who were always hovering over her—Chloe Fine often preferred to do things on her own. People sometimes referred to her as a severe introvert and as far as she was concerned, that was fine with her. It was this personality that had driven her toward getting exceptional grades in school and had helped her to blast through her studies and training at the FBI academy.

But it was also that personality that had caused her to end up moving into her new apartment without a single person to help her. Sure, she could have hired a moving company, but her grandparents had taught her the value of a dollar. And since she had strong arms, a strong back, and a stubborn mindset, she’d elected to move in by herself. After all, she only had two heavy pieces of furniture. Everything else should be a cakewalk.

This was proven to not be the case when she finally managed to lug her dresser up the stairs—with the assistance of a dolly, several ratchet straps, and a thankfully wide stairwell leading to her second-floor apartment. Yes, she’d managed to do it but she was pretty sure she had pulled a thing or two in her back along the way.

She’d saved the dresser for last, knowing it would be the hardest part of the move. She’d intentionally packed the boxes light, knowing it would be a one-woman job. She supposed she could have called Danielle and she would have helped but Chloe had never been the type to ask family for favors.

Chloe sidestepped a few boxes of her books and notebooks and collapsed in the recliner she’d had since her sophomore year of college. The thought of Danielle being here with her to sort through all of her stuff and start to set the place up was appealing. Things had been not quite as strained between the two of them since Chloe had uncovered the truth about what had occurred between their parents when they’d been young girls, but there was definitely something different. They were both very aware of the weight of their father hanging over their heads—the truth of what he had done and the secrets he had been keeping. Chloe felt that they were both dealing with those secrets in their own ways and they knew their opinions differed in some nearly psychic way that only close sibling are capable of.

What she had never dared express to Danielle was just how much she missed their father. Danielle had pretty much always resented him after he had been taken to jail. But Chloe had been the one who had missed that father figure in her life. She had been the one who had always dared to hope that maybe the cops had gotten it wrong—that there was no way her father had killed their mother.

And it had been that hope and belief that had resulted in the little adventure they’d taken together that had culminated in the arrest of Ruthanne Carwile and an entirely new viewpoint on the case of Aiden Fine. The thing that had sort of backfired on Chloe, though, was that in uncovering those little secrets, she had started to miss him even more. And she knew that Danielle would find this horrifying and maybe even masochistic in a way.

Still, despite all that, she wanted to call Danielle over to celebrate the small albeit hard-earned victory of moving into her new place. It was just a small two-bedroom apartment in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC—small, barely affordable, but exactly what she had been looking for. It had been about two months since they’d hung out—which seemed odd, given everything they had gone through the last time they’d been together. They’d spoken on the phone a few times and while it had been pleasant enough, it had also been very surface level. And Chloe wasn’t good at doing surface level.

Screw it, she thought, reaching for her phone. What could it hurt?

As she pulled up Danielle’s number, the reality of the situation sank in. Sure, it had only been two months since everything had happened, but they were different people now. Danielle had started to pick up the pieces of her life. She had a job that could potentially start paying quite well—a bartender and assistant manager at an upscale bar in Reston, Virginia. As for Chloe, she was still figuring out how to go from having been recently engaged to now being single and apparently not able to remember how to go about finding a date.

You can’t force something like this, she thought. Especially not with Danielle.

With her heart churning over it, Chloe sent the call. She fully expected it to go to voicemail. So when it was answered on the second ring by a chipper-sounding Danielle, it took Chloe a moment to respond.

“Hey, Danielle.”

“Chloe, how are you?” she asked. It was so odd to hear Danielle’s voice with an edge of cheer to it.

“Pretty good. I moved into the apartment today. I thought about how nice it would be to celebrate it by having you come visit and have a bottle of wine and some really unhealthy food. But then I remembered your new job.”

“Yeah, grinding away,” Danielle said with a laugh.

“Are you liking it?”

“Chloe, I’m loving it. I mean, sure, it’s only been three weeks but it’s like I was born for this job. I know it’s only bartending but…”

“Well, you’re assistant manager, too, right?”

“Yeah. A title that still scares me.”

“I’m glad you’re liking it.”

“Well, how about you? How’s the apartment? How was the move?”

She didn’t want Danielle knowing she had moved it all in by herself, so she kept the answer generic—which she hated to do. “Not too bad. I still have to unpack, but I’m just glad to be in, you know?”

“I’ll absolutely come have that wine and greasy food with you soon, though. How is everything else?”

“Honestly?”

Danielle was quiet for a moment before she responded with: “Uh-oh.”

“I’ve been thinking about Dad. I’ve been thinking about going to see him.”

“And why in God’s name would you do that?”

“I wish I had a good answer for you,” Chloe said. “After everything that happened, I just feel like I need to. I have to make sense of it all.”

“My God, Chloe. Leave it alone. Isn’t this new job of yours supposed to keep you busy solving other crimes? Man…I thought I was the one who spent all of her time living in the past.”

“Why does it upset you so much?” Chloe asked. “Me going to see him…”

“Because I feel like we’ve both given him enough of our lives. And I know if you see him, my name is going to come out of one of your mouths and I’d rather not have that happen. I’m done with him, Chloe. I wish you could be, too.”

Yeah, I wish the same thing, Chloe said but kept the comment to herself.

“Chloe, I love you, but if you plan on the rest of this conversation being about him I’m going to say goodbye now.”

“When are you working again?” Chloe asked.

“Every night this week, except Saturday.”

“Maybe I’ll come by and see you Friday afternoon. I expect you to serve me whatever drink you consider your specialty.”

“Better not plan on driving home, then,” Danielle said.

“Noted.”

“How about you? When does your new job start?”

“Tomorrow morning, actually.”

“In the middle of the week?” Danielle asked.

“It’s sort of an orientation thing. Mostly meetings and all of that for the first day or so.”

“I’m excited for you,” Danielle said. “I know how much you’ve wanted this.”

It was nice to hear Danielle speaking highly of her work. Not only that, but even pretending to take an interest in it.

There was a heavy silence between them, one that mercifully ended with Danielle saying something that was rather out of character for her. “Be safe, Chloe. With the job…with Dad…with all of it.”

“I will,” Chloe said, the comment taking her off guard.

Danielle ended the call, leaving Chloe to look around the central area of her apartment. It was hard to see the totality of the place because of all of her clutter but she already felt that the place was home.

Nothing like an awkward conversation with Danielle to make a place feel like home, she thought idly.

Slowly, stretching her back, Chloe got out of the recliner and went to the box closest to her. She started to unpack it, getting a sense of what her life would be like if she didn’t figure out how to reconcile relationships. Whether it was with her sister, her father, or her ex-fiancé, she didn’t have the best track record of keeping people close.

At the thought of her ex-fiancé, she came across several framed pictures sitting at the bottom of the first box. There were three pictures in all, photos of her and Steven; two were from their earlier days, when dating had been the only thing on their radar. But the third was a picture of them after he had proposed…after she had said yes and nearly started crying.

She gathered the pictures up out of the box and placed them on the kitchen counter. She rummaged around and found her trashcan sitting on the other side of the room, next to her mattress. She took the pictures to it and dropped them into the trashcan. The sound of the glass breaking in the frames was a little too delightful.

Easy enough, she thought. Can’t wait to move on from that debacle. Now, why can’t you move on from this nonsense with your father just as easily?

She had no answer for that. And the thing that scared her was that she felt the answer might be hiding in a conversation with him.

With that thought, the apartment seemed emptier than before and Chloe felt very much alone. The mere thought of it made her go to the refrigerator and start on the six-pack she’d purchased earlier in the day. She opened the bottle, a little alarmed at just how good that first swallow was.

She did her best to occupy herself that afternoon and well into the night, not by unpacking but by slowly going through the boxes one by one and trying to decide if she needed each and every item. The trophy she’d won for the debate team in high school went the way of the trashcan. The Fiona Apple CD she had been listening to when she lost her virginity as a sophomore in high school, she kept.

Any pictures of her father went into the trash. It hurt to do it at first but by the time she was on the fourth bottle of beer, it was easier.

She made it through two boxes…and would have probably gone through at least one more if she had not gone to the fridge only to find that she had somehow gone through the entire six-pack. She looked at the clock on the stove and let out a little gasp at what she saw.

It was 12:45 at night. So much for getting a good night’s sleep before my first day, she thought.

But what was even more alarming was the fact that she was more upset about the empty six-pack than having a potentially groggy morning on her first day with the bureau. She fell into bed after brushing her teeth, the room spinning a bit, as she realized that what she had really been trying to do that night was make herself not give a care about trying to erase memories of her father.