

Destroyed by Malice

By Robert Trainor

Copyright 2014

By Robert Trainor

Smashwords Edition

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# PREFACE: MONDAY, AUGUST 18th, 2014

About forty-five minutes after dusk had fallen, the car turned up the long driveway and parked a few feet in front of the garage, while the person standing behind a nearby tree watched it carefully. Perfect—everything was going exactly according to plan. The sweat on the palms of the hands and the pounding of the heart weren't part of the plan, but that was probably a natural thing to experience when one was about to murder two people.

The door on the driver's side of the car opened and Barker Drule stepped out. The man was so famous it was ridiculous, and what had he ever done to merit all the attention that had been showered on him for the last twenty years? Thirty-six novels—that's what he had done, and every one of them was a piece of disgusting commercial trash, even if he had sold almost five hundred million books. However, in just a few seconds, the tables were about to turn on this pathetic creature--instead of writing about murders, he was going to participate in one; instead of being the recipient of one idiotic reward after another, he was going to be the recipient of four bullets. That was the amount that had been calculated upon—that was the amount that should be enough to permanently put an end to his writing career.

From behind the large oak tree, the shadow emerged. Barker turned—he had heard something. "Who's there?" he said. For an answer, there was the nearly silent sound of three gunshots—that's what the silencer was good for. Barker staggered backwards two steps and crumpled to the pavement.

The next one to deal with was his wife—the one who knew everything about everything. Stepping around Barker, the shadow—dressed in black and wearing a black hood--yanked open the passenger-side door and leveled the gun at Gertrude Drule. She had no idea who it was and put her hands up as if to surrender. Tonight, however, there would be no prisoners; tonight, it would be death by the firing squad.

Three more shots—one of them went right through her heart. But the shadow didn't know whether she was alive or dead, and since she had collapsed backwards and her head was dangling off the seat near the steering wheel, the shadow walked around to the driver's-side door, opened it, put the gun two inches from her temple, and pulled the trigger. That ought to do the trick.

And then, finally, it was time to do the honors with the world-famous novelist. He hadn't moved since he had been shot, but this murderer wasn't one to take chances. Reaching down, the shadow put the gun to Barker's temple and squeezed the trigger.

End of story. 

# CHAPTER ONE: SEPTEMBER 28th, 1999

1

Raylene Drule was only twelve years old back then, but it was still easy to tell that she would grow up to be a very attractive woman. She had such beautiful blue eyes, such sensuous dark blond hair, such an engaging, seductive face. Her parents were trying to shield her from the boys and all the pressures and decisions that a teenage girl would have to face. By now, courtesy of her mother, she kind of knew what the boys were after, but it was all a little hard to comprehend because the details were enough to make someone of her age cringe. She couldn't quite picture it; couldn't quite imagine it; couldn't really see herself doing what her mother was so afraid that she might do before she reached the age where it was OK to do what everyone had spent years telling you what you shouldn't do.

Raylene liked Kenny Harrison well enough, and she knew that they had come awfully close to kissing when they were walking through the small woods on the way back from school. They had stopped to look at a frog that had jumped across their path, and once the frog had disappeared behind a tree, Kenny put his arm around her waist and began to draw her closer to him. He'd never done anything like that before and she was surprised—didn't know what to do. But as his face began to come closer to hers, she instinctively twisted away from him, and without looking around, she began to walk down the path.

"You're not mad at me, are you?" said Kenny, who was still a few feet behind her.

Without turning around, Raylene said, "No, it's just that I have to be getting home, or my mother will start worrying about me."

2

Nothing could have prepared Raylene for what happened when she got home. Neither her mother or brother or father were around, which was odd. In the kitchen, however, she found a note from her mother saying that she and her brother Ricky, who was ten years old, had gone to the mall to look for sneakers. Raylene decided that since there was nothing better to do, she might as well start in on her homework—that way, she'd have more time for TV and all her favorite programs.

Upstairs, she walked down the corridor towards her room, but as she passed her sister Lenore's room, she could hear the sound of someone sobbing. The door was open an inch or two, and Raylene went inside the room and saw that Lenore was lying face down on her bed—besides the constant sobbing, she seemed to be shaking uncontrollably. Lenore was thirteen, with dark curly hair, but even then, she was slightly overweight and somewhat moody.

Lenore didn't seem to know that anyone else was in the room, and Raylene stood by her bed indecisively. What had happened? Lenore wasn't one to cry unless something really bad had happened—like that time a couple of years ago when she fell off the swing and broke her wrist.

"Lenore," said Raylene softly, "what's the matter?"

The only answer Raylene received was more tears, and since the rest of the house was so quiet, the sound of Lenore crying began to seem much louder than it actually was.

Thoughts raced through Raylene's mind. Were her sister's tears the result of something that had happened at school? Lenore was hypersensitive about her weight—had somebody made fun of her? Maybe that new boy she had been talking about all the time had rejected her.

She sat down on the edge of Lenore's bed and stroked her hair. "What's wrong, Lenore?"

Lenore looked up at her with tears streaming down her face and said, "He...he...Oh my God! My whole life is ruined—I might as well die right now and get it over with."

"Who? What are you talking about, Lenore?"

"I think I'm going to throw up," said Lenore. "Get me that wastebasket by the desk, will you?"

Raylene brought the wastebasket to her, and Lenore threw up into it. Again...and again...and again. "Do you have to go to a doctor, Lenore? Mom and Dad aren't home, but I saw the Webster's car when I was walking home—they can take you to a doctor."

"No," said Lenore, "I'm not sick." She sat up and put her feet over the edge of the bed, but instead of saying anything, she put her head in her hands and started weeping. Raylene had never heard anyone cry like that before, and it frightened her. Something awful must have happened to Lenore, but she couldn't imagine what it was.

"Tell me what happened to you," said Raylene as she put her hand on her sister's arm.

Although Lenore still had her hands over her face, Raylene heard her say, "It's something that...Dear God, what am I going to do?"

It was only then that Raylene noticed that Lenore's dress had a big rip from the center of her neck down to her waist. And that her lip was swollen and had a few drops of blood on it. Touching the top of Lenore's dress where the rip started, Raylene said, "How did this happen, Lenore?"

"It was...I didn't mean for anything to happen, Raylene. I swear to God that I didn't mean for anything to happen."

"But something did happen. Who ripped your dress?"

"It was...I know you won't believe me, but it was Dad."

"Dad?" said Raylene.

"I don't think I should talk about this with you, Raylene. Why don't you go to your room and leave me alone."

"Why would Dad rip your dress?"

"Because...because...we were just fooling around and wrestling like we sometimes do and...but something happened...something really bad, something really awful."

Slowly, Raylene was beginning to understand, and a terrible fear swept over her. Lenore had begun crying again, but in between the sobs, she blurted out, "And he forced me onto the bed and ripped all my clothes off except what's left of my dress...and he...he got on top of me...and he just..."

Raylene couldn't move at all, and she could hardly breathe. Suddenly, the door opened, and her mother came into the room. "Ricky and I finally found what we were—" Gertrude Drule looked at her two daughters and ran over to Lenore. "What's happened to you, Lenore?"

Raylene stood up and began to walk out of the room. "Raylene!" said her mother. "Tell me what's going on."

Raylene waited until she was near the door, and then she turned around and faced her mother. In a quiet voice, she said, "Dad raped Lenore—that's what happened."

Before her mother could say anything, Raylene left the room, ran down the stairs to the first floor, and fled from the house. And once she was out of the house, she kept running until she didn't have the strength to run anymore.

3

"Raylene! Raylene!" She could hear her mother calling her as she sat on a bench in a park that was about a quarter of a mile from her house. Twilight was beginning to fall, and it was turning uncomfortably cool. Raylene had left without her jacket and wasn't even wearing a long-sleeved blouse.

"Raylene! Raylene!" She was also hungry and thirsty, but how could she go back home? She knew she was much prettier than Lenore—was she going to be next? What kind of thoughts had been going through Lenore's mind when it happened? What had she felt when he was ripping off her undergarments? And most of all, what had it felt like when he did that awful thing to her?

"Raylene! Raylene!" The only thing she could think of was to go over to the Websters and ask them if she could stay the night. They were friends of her parents and had a daughter about her age, so they might let her stay. But what was she going to tell them? It was definitely going to be strange to arrive on their doorstep at 6:30 P.M. with nothing on but her jeans and a short-sleeved blouse. They'd probably just call her parents, and then she'd have to go back home, back to _that_!

But with no other choices, Raylene reluctantly made her way to the Websters who lived almost a half mile away from her house.

"Well, hello, Raylene," said Eleanor Webster. "It must have been two weeks since we last saw you. Come on in and have a seat—we're just about to start dinner."

Raylene took a seat on a large sofa in the Webster's living room, and Eleanor said, "Isn't it rather cool not to be wearing a jacket?"

"Is that Andrea Phillips?" said a voice from the kitchen.

"No, it's Raylene Drule," said Eleanor to her husband.

"Hi, Raylene," said Gregory Webster as he came in from the kitchen.

There was a curious silence in the room—no one quite knew what to make of Raylene's sudden appearance. "Did you come to see Cora?" said Eleanor. "I think she's upstairs doing her homework."

"No...I don't know how to say this, Mrs. Webster, but I think I need a place to sleep tonight."

Eleanor looked at Gregory, but he was looking at Raylene. "Did something happen at home?" he said to Raylene.

"Sort of, but I can't really talk about it. It's just that I can't go back there anymore."

Eleanor left her chair and sat next to Raylene on the couch. "Honey," she said in a sympathetic voice, "I think we need to call your parents and—"

"No, no, no! You don't understand—I can't go home anymore. Don't ask me why—I just can't."

"Did you have some kind of fight with your parents?" said Eleanor.

"No, but..."

"Raylene, I'm going to have to call your mother, and after I'm finished talking with her, I'll let you talk to her."

Eleanor dialed the number. "Gertrude, this is Eleanor Webster...I'm fine--listen, the reason I called is that Raylene is here and...yes, she's OK, but she says that she doesn't want to go home...no, she didn't say why...alright, I'll see you in a few minutes."

4

When Gertrude arrived, she asked if she could speak to Raylene privately. The Websters left the room and closed the door behind them while Raylene sat sullenly on the couch with her eyes down and her hands clenched beside her.

"Raylene," said Gertrude, "I'm not here to defend your father, and I'm not going to tell you that this isn't the most horrible thing that has happened in our lives. Both of us know that your father has done something terrible, something that no father should ever do to one of his children. There are a lot of decisions that are going to have to be made in the next couple of days, but I need to think things through and do what's best for everyone. For the time being, your father has gone to stay in a hotel downtown, so you have nothing to be afraid of by coming home tonight."

"But is he...is he coming back?" said Raylene.

"That hasn't been decided yet, but regardless of what happens, I will see to it that neither you nor Lenore are left alone with him again."

"Shouldn't he be arrested?"

"Perhaps, but there are many things that have to be considered. There's a lot at stake here, and it wouldn't be wise to act impulsively."

"I really don't want to go home, Mom—please don't make me go back."

"Raylene, there's really no other choice. Now listen to me: If your father ever lives with us again, he will not do so until both you and Lenore are comfortable with that."

"How is Lenore ever going to accept living with him?"

"I don't know that she ever will, and if that's the case, then he'll have to find some other place to live. So there's nothing to be frightened about—I understand that this is the worst night of your life, but we have to begin to deal with this. You can't stay here at the Webster's, and I'm going to do everything in my power to see that nothing like this ever happens to you or Lenore again. That's a promise, and I won't forget it." 

# CHAPTER TWO: SEPTEMBER 29th, 1999--APRIL 16th, 2000

1

Even though her father wasn't living in the house anymore, Raylene had nightmares about him. In one of them, she was alone in her room when she thought she heard footsteps stopping outside her door. "Raylene," said her father, "let me come into your room. I need to talk to you." Frantically, she began to shove her desk in front of the door, but it was too late, and her father came bursting into the room.

In the dream, his face wasn't like his normal face—his eyes were much bigger, and his lips were full and protruding. And most of all, there was just no doubt what he intended to do to her. "Afterwards," he said to her in a whisper that was filled with an evil that she had never heard before, "you'll know what it means to be a woman." There was nowhere to run; she was trapped; he was advancing on her; those hands—so very rough and cruel; the way he tore her blouse off; the way she was forced onto the bed; the way—

It was then that she awoke with a silent scream, with her heart pounding and sweat rolling down her face, while her mind played and replayed all the images in the dream. Her nakedness, her helplessness, her total violation. Everything.

2

The night after Lenore had been raped, Gertrude talked with her two daughters about how they should deal with what had happened.

"This is going to be a difficult time for all of us," she said. "I want to emphasize one thing in particular to both of you—your father will not be entering this house until I feel that he poses no threat to either one of you."

"Don't tell me that he might come back," said Raylene.

"I don't know, but—"

"You don't know? How can Lenore and I live here if he's living here?"

"Raylene, try to calm down. Please don't make it worse than it is because it's plenty bad enough already. The reason I wanted to talk to both of you tonight is because we have a difficult choice to make. This is something that you might have to think about for a couple of days because the decision we come to will affect us for the rest of our lives. The basic choice is this: Do we keep what your father did between ourselves, or do we notify the police and let them decide what to do with your father? First of all, though, there is a question that I'd like to ask both of you. At any time in the past has your father ever tried to force himself upon you sexually?"

"No, except for yesterday," said Lenore, who seemed disinterested in the conversation.

"And you, Raylene?" said Gertrude.

"No, but I don't see what difference that makes."

"OK," said Gertrude, "here's what I think we should do. I would rather not bring the police into this because once that happens, the press will turn this into a circus. They will literally be camped out on our doorstep for weeks, and every time we open the door, we'll be bombarded with questions. That's the drawback that comes with your father being a very famous man. We will have absolutely no privacy, and people will make all sorts of accusations against your father. Most, if not all, of these accusations will come from women that he has never met, and we will probably have to deal with one lawsuit after another. This could actually bankrupt us—your father has assured me that outside of the incident with Lenore, he has never committed a criminal act, and I believe him, but that doesn't mean that there won't be women with high-priced lawyers who will be banging on our door and demanding money.

"But if you think all I'm concerned with is myself and whether I—and we—have enough money to buy things and live comfortably, you couldn't be more wrong. What I'm talking about is especially true for you Lenore because if what your father did becomes public knowledge, all eyes will be on you, and you'll be hounded by the press from dawn to dusk to dawn again. So—"

"Mom," said Raylene, "couldn't Dad just admit to it, and then there wouldn't be a trial or anything?"

"That's not what I'm talking about, Raylene. The fact is that if others become aware of what your father has done, our world will be turned upside down."

"I understand what you're saying, Mom," said Lenore. "And the kids in school and everything—I'd never have a moment's peace."

"I just don't think that he should get away with it," said Raylene.

"He isn't getting away with it, Raylene, and he is going to pay a price. Believe me, he is going to pay a very heavy price for what he's done."

"I should hope so," said Raylene.

"Your father knows that he made a terrible mistake, and he knows that he has to make amends. Today, I talked with him for almost two hours, and he has agreed to seek counseling. I'm sure it's no consolation to either of you, and indeed, it shouldn't be, but he has expressed to me a great deal of remorse for what he's done. I am actually somewhat fearful that he may be suicidal, but there is only so much I can do to help him right now."

"Mom," said Lenore, "I agree with you--I'd rather not have everybody in town talking about me."

"It wouldn't just be in this town, Lenore—it would be all over the world. But my basic point is this: No matter what we do, we're going to have to try and recover from what your father has done, and it isn't going to help if millions of eyes are prying into our private lives. So let's keep everything that's happened between us because if we don't, we're going to jump from the frying pan right into the fire."

3

An uneasy and persistent gloom settled over the household for the next few months. Lenore walked around in a permanent daze and couldn't seem to focus on anything, especially her schoolwork; Raylene was still nervous that her father was about to reappear and that she'd end up being trapped in the same room with him; and Gertrude vacillated between fury and depression.

Gertrude had met Barker during her senior year at college, and although he wasn't the most charming man in the world, he had always been a good provider. At the beginning of their relationship, they had very little money to spare and Barker had worked twelve hours a day as a manager at a fulfillment warehouse while he spent the rest of his time writing his first novel. That book, _The Blood of the Phantom_ , had only sold a thousand copies during its first three years of publication, although once Barker became famous, it became one of his most sought after books. It's amazing what fame, notoriety, and a few well-placed reviews can do, because by 2014, _The Blood of the Phantom_ had sold over seven million copies and was now regarded as a "masterpiece."

His second book, _The Assassination Game_ , had done considerably better, but it was his third book that propelled him into the stratosphere of the literary world. Entitled _The_ _Bloodletting_ , it described two charming, well-dressed college students who wanted to see how many people they could murder in a year. This novel received virtually universal acclaim and was described by one enthusiastic reviewer as a "terrifying descent into the minds of two psychopaths."

Once Barker had been thrust into the orbit of national consciousness, he did not fail to deliver, and he began to produce three novels a year. There was, to be frank, a certain obvious similarity among all his books, and this similarity became more pronounced as time went on. There were always a few murders in his novels, and he seemed to favor decapitations for his victims. Someone would walk into a room, and there it was—there'd be a head on the floor. And those bulging eyes! It was enough to make most readers squirm in their seats and wonder if someone was sneaking up behind them with that long and very sharp machete that Barker worked into so many of his stories.

The naysayers, and there weren't all that many, decried the "cheap, bloody sensationalism" of his novels, but when you're selling twenty to thirty million copies a year, no one is going to pay much attention to critical reviews. And why should they? Fame is a kind of irrefutable type of success—it's there, and it can't be denied. You can rant and rave all you want about the "destruction of literature" and "the cult of blood," but at the end of the day, the number of copies sold will dwarf into oblivion all the trivial little rants of the backstabbers who have become jealous because their feeble attempts to write an elegant novel have been laughed into non-existence.

For Gertrude, there was a certain allure to Barker. One can criticize her because she was seemingly rather tolerant of her husband's flagrant transgression, but she enjoyed the cachet that came with Barker's fame. It wasn't just the money and all the material possessions and the vacations they took to exotic places. Those things had a lot to do with her reluctance to leave him, of course, but there were other, more subtle things: For instance, the way that people would look at her when she walked into a room—she could almost hear them whispering, "That's Barker Drule's wife." Or the way that certain magazines and newspapers sought her ought for interviews so that they could gain some insight into the world's most famous novelist.

Also, there was no doubt that Barker loved her—she had never had any doubts about that. Perhaps she should have, but there were certain things that Gertrude had learned to ignore—especially the young women who seemed to cling to Barker when they were around him at a party for the literary elite.

It was, in short, a life that she had become attached to, and how many of us are willing to freely give up our attachments?

4

Ricky was only ten when Barker violated Lenore, and he didn't quite realize what was going on. Dad had mysteriously disappeared, and Ricky had been told that his father had needed a vacation. Too much stress! Too much writing! So Dad was off recovering and would be back by-and-by. "He loves us all and misses you as much as you miss him" was the way that Gertrude phrased it.

Naturally, the girls couldn't be fed that kind of malarkey, so Gertrude was working on a plan. As the bleak Christmas holidays descended into the endless drear of January, she began to long for her previous life. Granted, Barker had made a catastrophic mistake, but should he be exiled forever? If only the girls were grown up and out of the house, she would have taken him back provided he remained under a kind of virtual house arrest. No going to parties alone! No going anywhere alone!

But the girls did exist, and it was natural that they had strong feelings of revulsion for their father. Especially Lenore, who seemed to be in a gloomy, self-destructive mood most of the time. To try to cheer them up, Gertrude took Raylene and Lenore to the Caribbean during their February break from school—Ricky, after a little convincing, was sent off to the Websters for the week.

The sun and the sand and the surf...the pleasant strolls through resort towns...TV and snuggling at night. Nothing had been forgotten from the past, but perhaps the talons weren't digging in quite so deep. Lenore actually smiled! It was like a newsworthy event. And then she smiled again! Twice in one day—will miracles never cease? Meanwhile, the accusing stares from Raylene seemed to be flickering out. God, for a while, Raylene had been nothing but Gertrude's guilty conscience as she constantly insinuated that Dad ought to be strapped into the electric chair for some quick remedial action that would end the problem once and for all.

5

A month and a half later, on April 16th, Gertrude explained her carefully thought out plan to her two daughters. Dad was going to be let back into the house, but there would be the strictest safeguards put in place to ensure that Raylene and Lenore would never have to endure the ultimate indignity.

First, Dad was never going to be allowed onto the second floor, which was where the two girls' bedrooms were. Gertrude and Barker's bedroom had also been upstairs, but they would now be sleeping in the extra bedroom downstairs. There were bathrooms with showers on both floors, and Gertrude made it absolutely clear to Raylene and Lenore that her husband had been told explicitly that as long as the girls lived in the house, he could never go upstairs—if he did, no matter what the reason, he would be thrown out of the house, and she would file for divorce.

Second, Gertrude would never leave the girls alone with their father except for very short periods of time—such as a trip to the bathroom. It was true that she couldn't be awake for twenty-four hours a day, and it was at least theoretically possible that her husband could sneak out of bed, climb the forbidden stairs, and attempt to enter one of their rooms. But this wouldn't do him any good because Gertrude was having strong locks installed on each of the girl's bedroom doors.

Third, Gertrude had talked to Barker's father, whose name was Dalton. He was sixty-seven years old and had lost his wife to cancer a year previously, and Gertrude had asked him if he would like to move into the vacated bedroom on the second floor—the bedroom that Barker and Gertrude had used. Dalton was amenable to the idea and agreed to move in at the beginning of April. It was then that Gertrude told him what his son had done to Lenore. Dalton was rather old-school in his approach to life—black was black and white was white. He had always seemed to be fond of Lenore, and he was outraged by what his daughter-in-law told him. Gertrude had been expecting this reaction, and she suggested to Dalton that he have a talk with Barker on the day he moved back into the house so that he could make it clear to his son that there would be very serious consequences if he did anything inappropriate with one of his daughters.

6

The girls were not enthusiastic about their mother's plan. "Are we going to sit at the same table with him when we eat?" asked Lenore.

"I'd rather you did," said Gertrude; "however, he will be at one end, and you and Raylene will be at the other, while Gramps and I will sit between you. I have also instructed your father that he is not to talk to either one of you—not unless you say something to him first. None of us want to hear an apology because what he did can never be covered by an apology."

Raylene had developed a sarcastic wit and said, "No, it just doesn't cut it when someone tells you, 'I'm so sorry I raped you.'"

"Raylene," said Gertrude, "all I'm asking you to do is give this new living situation a chance. If it really bothers you or Lenore to sit at the table, then you can eat in the living room."

"What about breakfast?" said Lenore.

"Since your father usually doesn't get up until ten, I doubt that you'll see him when you're eating breakfast."

"But what if I'm in the kitchen and he comes into the room?"

"He's not going to do that, Lenore, because he knows that if he makes one wrong move, he's done. Over--finished."

"OK, but you haven't answered my question—what if I'm sitting there alone eating breakfast and he comes into the room?"

"Ignore him! Or you can always go into the TV room, and if you still feel uncomfortable, then take your breakfast upstairs and eat in your room."

"So I have to drag my breakfast all around the house because I can't stand to be in the same room as my father?"

"Listen, Lenore, I'll talk to him and tell him that if you're in the kitchen, he should wait for you to leave before he enters the room."

"Make sure you include me in that," said Raylene. "One thing's for sure—I'll never wear my bathrobe downstairs again. If he's going to do it to me, I at least want to make it as difficult as possible for him."

"Raylene," said her mother, "please don't talk that way. I know this is difficult, but I'm doing everything I can to make this as easy as possible on you. I'm not asking you to meet me halfway, but please try and take one small step in my direction."

7

On the first night that Barker came home, Dalton took him aside and had a little "chat" with him. Although Gertrude had been hoping that Gramps, as she called him, would be able to strike the fear of God into his son, she was totally appalled by the manner in which the fear of God had been applied.

According to what Barker told her the next day, Gramps had begun by telling his son that in this day and age, too many crimes went unpunished. In his opinion, people who committed criminal acts needed a lot more than counseling and an all-expenses-paid trip to the state penitentiary where they could lounge around in their cells like kings on holiday as they watched their favorite programs on TV and whined about the living conditions and the meals.

Spare the rod and spoil the child—it was an old adage, but Gramps thought it was the only way to bring up children. However, he'd never had to punish anyone for the rape of a thirteen-year-old, and it was difficult to find anything that was severe enough to fit the crime. Nevertheless, he told his son, he had figured out a solution. Here, he pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket and pointed it directly at Barker.

He then had his son kneel down on the floor and explained to him that they would be playing Russian roulette. Naturally, Barker was terrified, and he begged his father to show him some mercy, but Dalton wasn't the kind of man who had sympathy for beggars or any use for mercy, and within a few seconds, the barrel of the gun was about an inch from Barker's temple. Gramps then asked his son if he had any last words, and when Barker began to plead for his life, Gramps said, "How much mercy did you show Lenore?" With that, Gramps pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. "You lucked out this time," said Dalton, "but let that be a lesson to you, sonny boy. If I ever hear that you've been fooling around with Lenore or Raylene, I'll shoot you on sight—no questions asked, no explanations accepted." (Later, when Gertrude began to scold her father-in-law for putting Barker's life in jeopardy, Dalton told her that there had been no bullets in the gun, but she only believed him when he showed her the gun, which was a Glock. This type of gun was clip loaded and didn't have the old fashioned cylinder that could be spun around by hand. This meant that Barker, who was knowledgeable about guns, probably assumed that he was about to have his head blown off when his father had put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.)

After thinking it over for a couple of days, Gertrude gave Lenore and Raylene a watered-down version of what had happened. Skipping over the fake Russian roulette game, she said that Gramps had made it known to their father that if he stepped out of line, he would be shot to death.

"You're kidding," said Raylene. "Does Gramps even own a gun?"

"If you don't believe me, go and talk to him."

Later, both of them did talk to their grandfather, and when they saw the gun and heard Gramps repeat his threats of what he would do to his son if he stepped out of line, they both felt much relieved and weren't nearly so afraid of their father as they had been before. He was still a repulsive monster, of course, but it now seemed that his fangs had been removed and for that, they were grateful. 

# CHAPTER THREE: 2000-2006

1

Gradually, life returned to normal at the Drule residence. At least, to be droll about it, there were no more rapes, and just as encouraging, everyone began to believe that there would be no more rapes. There was, however, the long shadow that the evil incident from the past cast over the house. It might be gone, but it certainly wasn't forgotten. This was not only true with the girls but also with both Gertrude and Barker who lived in dread that Lenore might one day decide to go public with what had happened to her.

Barker was a man who believed that his reputation was his calling card. From a Machiavellian point of view, it might be assumed that when a novelist writes about rapes frequently, it isn't so bad to have a rape on his resume. But Barker was a shrewd businessman, and he could easily foresee the calamity that would befall him if the sordid secret from his past became known. Fame definitely has its perks, but you'd better not be caught with your pants down because it will be blown up into something so colossal that no one could possibly survive it intact. And was there anything worse than being caught with your pants down as you lay on top of your daughter? Barker knew that his publishers would desert him; the bookstores would frantically pull his books off their shelves; and his rabid horde of fans would evaporate within days as the awful news of what he had done sank into their minds.

From a monetary point of view, all this wouldn't matter because Barker had millions upon millions stashed away in various stocks and bonds. Of course, if Lenore ever sued him, his net worth could take an ugly plummet, but the thing that really concerned Barker was that his career would be finished. He would be so despised and reviled that there wouldn't be a person on the planet willing to buy one of his books, and the only thing that he'd be able to write would be a diary that no one would ever read.

Barker still wanted to write; he still had the thirst and the hunger in him; and he didn't want all that derailed because he had lost control of himself for ten minutes. Not only that, he was considering turning over a new leaf. Perhaps it was time to move away from all the blood, dismemberments, and decapitations and write a novel that would endure the test of time. He didn't have all that many critics because when you had sold almost a half billion novels, there were very few book reviewers who wanted to take you on, but every once in a while, some dimwit from the elitist fringe of the literary establishment would come out with a nasty review that would leave him seething.

2

For instance, after the publication of his twenty-second novel, _The Curse of the_ _Decapitated Zombie_ , a well-respected reviewer for a national magazine had written:

Barker Drule has done it again. Once more we are being treated to a lurid succession of grisly murders, and as is often the case with Mr. Drule, the victims are all decapitated. Let's forget the fact that the book is based on a premise so absurd that it makes one wonder about the sanity of the author: A son is molested by his father, who covers up his guilt by decapitating the boy with a chain saw; and then, after that transpires, the zombie ghost of the son prowls through the world seeking revenge by arranging car accidents where the victims are all decapitated.

No, let's move beyond that and examine the writing itself—let's pretend, hard though it may be, that Mr. Drule's novels were about something that had some passing relevance to reality and contained some deeper meaning than the cheap thrill of another dead body that has been mutilated by a sadist who is fulfilling some ancient blood lust on the night of the full moon. If we can ever get beyond that, what do we find?

This is what we find, and I assure you that I have not changed a word--this comes from page 77 of _The Curse of the Decapitated Zombie_.

It must have been the blood. The sight of it was terrible. Everywhere he looked it was there. Bodies that had been bled dry. Hearts that could no longer beat. Eyes that could no longer see. So what was he to do? Stand there and soak up the horror? Refill his memory for another endless nightmare? If only he could decapitate himself. Was there no end to his misery? Could he ever escape from hell? Or did he have to suffer forever?

The careful reader may have noticed a pattern in the above paragraph: Every sentence is either six or seven words long, and the whole thing reads like something that was designed for third graders—except for, obviously, the subject matter, which isn't really suitable for anyone, regardless of their grade level. Besides Mr. Drule's obsession with stale, moronic sentences, he has also been able to render grammar obsolete. Mr. Drule has frequently bragged that one won't find a comma or semi-colon in any of his books. However, to be fair, we do have two marks of punctuation that show up habitually—the ad nauseam use of the period and the question mark.

One can only wonder what the world would be like if Barker Drule hadn't graced us with his presence. Let's suppose, for a moment, that his five hundred million books of bloody deaths, grisly themes, and inept writing were swept aside. What would take their place? For the first time, I can now understand why the ancient Chinese kings had a great book burning. I hate to admit it, but if such a thing were to be proposed now, I would have to give serious consideration to it. But I would happily accept a compromise solution: We shall spare all books from death by fire except the five hundred million that were written by this wretched soul who goes by the name Barker Drule.

3

After reading things like this, Barker would be in a very bad mood for a couple of days. Usually, he would fire off a letter to the offending newspaper where he would offer a scathing rebuttal to all the idiocies that the reviewer had come out with. From Barker's point of view, there seemed to be this idea going around that just because a person paid money for a book, it gave him or her the right to slander and insult the writer with a lot of ridiculous criticisms.

But what if these self-appointed experts actually sat down and attempted to write a novel? Worked and sweated and slaved over it; wrote pages upon pages of notes and character descriptions before they set the first word to paper; delved into the plot to make sure there were no holes in it; and then, after doing all that, spent hours and hours of writing and revising and editing.

Not that Barker did much revising or editing or any planning for his books anymore because what was the point? No matter what he wrote, he'd always have his critics who would mock him with vicious personal attacks as they wrote reviews that tried to prove he had the writing IQ of a simpleton. But five hundred million books had a way of negating all that criticism. The proof was in the pudding, and in this case, the pudding was money, gobs of money. And why shouldn't he get rich? After all, he was the one who had unlocked the code and figured out how to write a best-selling novel.

At the beginning, when he was still in college, he'd tried to follow what his writing instructors kept harping on—polish your prose! Write sentences that conveyed the rich texture of the English language! Great books, he was told, were built on the subtle, shifting dynamics of _nuanced_ characters. But you know what? People, the ones who actually paid money to buy books, didn't want to read any of that effeminate, self-indulgent nonsense. They wanted bodies! And the more bodies the better. He was the living proof of that maxim.

In reality, he was, at a minimum, a relatively great writer because he was writing what people wanted to read. It was just the height of snobbery to try to feed the public some fine-tuned prose that meandered around for a hundred pages while it described the flowers in a field and the restless torment that some depressed person felt because he had been jilted by his girlfriend. It was back in 1990, with the publication of his sixth novel, _The Walking Corpse_ , that Barker had given up on all these literary pretensions. As an experiment, he produced a novel of three hundred and twenty pages where the longest sentence was nine words, and even better than that, as least as far as he was concerned, there wasn't a single comma or semi-colon in the book. And what do you suppose happened? Within ten days of its release, _The_ _Walking Corpse_ became the number-one best seller, and Barker, who didn't really have much of a sense of humor, had laughed for days on end at the little prank that he had played on everyone.

From this point on, Barker realized that it was much more effective to write simple sentences and not take on a whole freight train of observations and what-nots. However, he did agree with the academics on one key point—adjectives and adverbs were a waste of printer's ink and were just attempts by amateur writers to cover up the fact that they didn't have much of a plot. Nobody cared whether the house that the rape occurred in was red or purple; nobody cared what the weather was like when someone was decapitated. It was enough to say, "The machete came down and sliced through his neck." There was no need to get out the trumpet and blow your own horn with absurd sentences like "The shadow crept up from behind, and in the silver moonlight, one could see the cruel outline of a machete, a machete that now followed the lethal orders of its psychotic master as it came swooping down and chopped through the neck of the hapless victim."

And so, after giving it a couple days of consideration, Barker decided that it was silly to write a novel that had literary pretensions. Nobody would want to read it, and he wasn't in the business of trying to please reviewers who always expected you to send them your book for free. No, those who paid for his books deserved what they desired, and he would continue to do what he had always done, which was to fulfill those desires.

4

As far as his family went, Barker remained on his best behavior. He avoided Lenore completely and only made the meekest attempts to converse with Raylene, who seemed to despise him. Outside of Gertrude, that only left Ricky, and since Ricky apparently had no knowledge of what he had done to Lenore, he would sometimes take him on fishing trips where they would converse in a phony man-to-man way.

Ricky wasn't doing well at school because he considered the whole scene to be a waste of time, or maybe the real reason was that he had fallen in love with drugs. In his junior year of high school, he had been suspended for smoking marijuana on the school grounds, and in his senior year, he was expelled because he was caught with cocaine in his backpack.

By the time of the cocaine bust, Ricky had become a major headache for everyone in his family. He flaunted all of Gertrude's rules and liked to stay up until four in the morning listening to grunge and gothic music. He ate when he felt like it, and he left a mess at the table that someone else had to clean up. Gertrude tried screaming at him and grounding him and cutting off his allowance and not allowing him to watch TV, but it didn't do the least bit of good.

Finally, Barker hit upon the idea of setting his son up in his own little apartment about two miles from the house in the downtown area of Boulevard Hills. Since Barker was footing the bill, he wasn't about to pay for a castle, so he'd found Ricky a place in a rundown area of town and told him that if he found a job and made some money, he'd help him find a better place. The incentive plan! But it didn't seem to make an impact on Ricky whose general attitude seemed to be that his family was a sorry collection of losers.

Lenore spent her high school years descending in a slow downward spiral. She put on a considerable amount of weight and often seemed depressed. Every time Barker caught a glimpse of her, his somewhat lackadaisical conscience would suddenly overwhelm his mind with a collection of guilty thoughts and terrible accusations. So far, he had escaped any real punishment for his awful deed, but as the days passed and Lenore walked around like one of the zombies that he was so often writing about, Barker was constantly filled with remorse. Naturally, he and Gertrude pampered Lenore in all sorts of imaginable ways. If she wanted something, she received it almost immediately, with no complaints from her parents. When Lenore talked about a certain college that she was interested in, Gertrude sent Raylene to the Websters where she would be safe from her depraved father and then chauffeured Lenore to the campus, which was four hundred miles away. When Lenore wanted a desktop computer, it was given to her the next day; the same with the camera; the same with the designer clothes, which cost a fortune; the same with the new thirty-thousand-dollar car that she was given when she graduated from high school.

Just before she left for college, Lenore finally had her first conversation with her father. Gertrude was, of course, also in the room and did her best to facilitate what was a very awkward discussion. In a halting voice and with downcast eyes, Lenore thanked both of them for paying her college tuition and buying her the car, but she just couldn't bring herself to look at her father, and when she did raise her eyes, it was only to look at her mother.

College seemed to produce some positive changes in Lenore. It probably helped that she was away from home so much and didn't have the constant reminder of the past hovering around her. When she returned home during the Christmas holidays during her freshman year, it seemed that she was somewhat happier. She said that she liked school and the courses that she was enrolled in, but when her first-semester grades were mailed out to her father in early January—a requirement since he was paying the entire bill—Gertrude and Barker were shocked to find that she had received failing grades in four of her five courses and had therefore been expelled from the college.

Hurried consultations ensued as the parent figures wondered what to do about Lenore. Unspoken, of course, was the dreaded cloud from the past and how that was probably affecting the situation. Barker began to realize that he might have to support Lenore for the rest of his life, and he couldn't help but feel that Lenore's failure to cope with life was a perpetual accusation that would haunt him until the day he died. "Hello, here is my daughter, Lenore. She's a total failure—ever since the day I raped her."

With a good deal more sympathy than might ordinarily be the case, Gertrude sat down with Lenore and asked her what the trouble was—with the general understanding that the rape could not be used as an excuse. Any other excuse was acceptable, but the rape excuse could not be mentioned. Lenore told her mother that she found it hard to be away from her high school friends (of which she had but two) and that she now thought she'd be more successful if she attended the local community college. However, she said that she had enjoyed not living at home during her semester at college and wanted to get an apartment if she went to the community college. Gertrude knew that was just a polite way of saying that she didn't want to live under the same roof with the man who had raped her.

As a result, Barker was forced to find another apartment for one of his children, but unlike the situation with Ricky, Lenore would not be living in a tiny apartment on the fringe of respectability but would be given a condominium. Barker paid the two-hundred-grand asking price in cash, and he would also, of course, be paying for the condo association fees, the city taxes, the utilities, and the insurance on the condo, along with anything else that happened to come along. As for food and living expenses, Barker opened up a bank account for Lenore and deposited two thousand dollars in it every month. That's what you get for raping your daughter!

Lenore settled into her new environment, and depending on your point of view and expectations, she did either reasonably well or not so well at all. At least she was surviving, even if she was totally propped up by Barker's money, but her efforts at school left something to be desired. Sometimes, she would skip a semester altogether; sometimes, she would sign up for two courses and flunk one; sometimes, she would sign up for three courses and pass all three. She had no real major and no real plan and just drifted along—it was obvious that the only reason she attended college was that it gave her a legitimate excuse not to work.

As for part-time jobs, she would occasionally make an attempt, but they were all of the menial variety, and she had never lasted more than a month at any of them. The month-long one was at an ice cream parlor where she was a scooper, but that came to an abrupt halt when it was discovered that she was stealing money from the register. Quite a bit of money—just over a thousand dollars, which Barker was forced to repay (plus another thousand to cover lawyer expenses) in order to keep his daughter from being arrested.

Lenore went on antidepressants around the time she started at the community college, but it wasn't likely that she'd be appearing in those anti-depressant commercials where some extremely attractive woman goes waltzing around in the sunshine with a big smile on her face. Lenore continued to put on weight, began to neglect her appearance, and the depression she suffered from soon became contagious—whenever Gertrude or Barker were around her, the depression would also sweep over them.

5

Raylene was an entirely different story. By her junior year in high school, she was an exceptionally beautiful young woman, with dazzling blue eyes, blond hair, and a figure that made boys follow her around in a compulsive, sex-crazed way. She also did really well at school, and nobody in her sphere would ever have called her a dumb blond. She took her studies as a challenge and would show some real flashes of anger when somebody else received higher marks on a test than she did. In her English class, she was famous for staying after school and arguing with her teacher if he took any points off one of her essays. Raylene could be quite logical when the occasion demanded, and although her teachers would sometimes become a little annoyed with her constant obsession to receive an A plus, they had to admit that they loved her because she was, in every sense of the word, a student who wanted to learn.

She was also a cheerleader on the football team, but much to her parents' delight, she was careful when it came to making any romantic commitments. She had talked to her mother about it a couple of times and was terrified that she might become pregnant. "Not that I've done anything that would make me pregnant, Mom, but I just can't see how I would enjoy having a baby and taking care of it for twenty years. Do you think it's wrong to live a life where you don't have any children? It seems so selfish in a way—I'm glad you weren't like that!"

Gertrude was relieved that Raylene seemed to be much more interested in a career than finding a man, and she did nothing to discourage her daughter's sentiments. But the boys sure did chase Raylene, and Gertrude couldn't help but worry that something unpleasant might happen. So one day, when Raylene was in her senior year, Gertrude casually brought up the subject of birth control and asked Raylene whether she had considered it. "Mom! What are you talking about? No way! Once I finish college, I'll deal with the man thing, but until then, I'm not doing anything with anybody." 

# CHAPTER FOUR: 2008-MARCH, 2012

1

By June of 2008, Raylene had graduated from college, and within two weeks, she was hired as a receptionist at a local law firm, Blanchard and Scully. While there, she began to take night courses to become a legal aide, and within two years, she had moved from the receptionist's desk to an office of her own where her primary job was to assist the twelve lawyers in the firm. With her keen intelligence and eye for detail, she was well-respected and received frequent raises and bonuses.

Within a couple of months of finding the job at Blanchard and Scully, she moved into an apartment, but Barker didn't have to shell out any money for Raylene. He had asked her if she needed money for the rent or deposit, but she had refused in a curt, dismissive tone because she didn't want to become entangled with him financially. It didn't matter in the least to her that she would never have to pay the money back because accepting any money from him seemed like emotional blackmail. Her feelings didn't stem entirely from the rape of Lenore, although that was certainly a major factor. However, as she grew older, she also made a conscious decision that she didn't want to be connected with the man whose fortune had been built on the sale of blood, gore, rapes, murders, and endless decapitations.

Along with being a highly competitive person, Raylene was determined to be successful, and when she was twenty-four, she began to consider writing a novel of her own. Maybe she could, just like her father, make a living off something that didn't require a person to work a forty-hour week.

What, she wondered, would be a captivating story? And was there any possibility of being commercially successful if her book lacked a dead body? Her father had gone a long ways toward proving that the murdered body or bodies on page one were almost a necessity in today's market, but she was reluctant to copy her father and wanted to go in a different direction.

Naturally, there had to be some kind of dramatic problem. Nobody was going to read a book where there was no tension and everyone lived happily ever after. Yawn! Maybe she could use something from her own personal experience...maybe a young woman who had been molested by...she'd have to change the details because the intention behind this novel was not to humiliate or expose her father. So the woman, whose name would be Elena, would be visiting her mother's brother and his wife, and it would be her uncle who would rape her. Raylene's mother didn't have a brother, and her father had one brother, but he had died when Raylene was five. Also, Elena would be a different age than when Lenore was raped—maybe fifteen, instead of thirteen.

Raylene saw that as far as her family went, her novel could even be a healing book because the central theme would be how Elena successfully recovers from the trauma of rape and goes on to lead a productive life. And so, as time permitted, Raylene began to work on her novel, which she titled _The Secret Within,_ and it wasn't long before she became obsessed and enthralled with her characters—she had never suspected that writing a book could be such a thrilling experience.

Except for the central episode in the book, Raylene had started off with only a vague idea of the details of the plot, but it was amazing to her how it all began to fit together into a coherent whole. Unlike her father, her book was quite atmospheric, and where her father tried to appall readers with shocking murders, Raylene used a more subtle approach. Particularly interesting was the beginning of Chapter Seven:

The End of the Dream

Elena couldn't go to sleep and spent hours tossing and turning as she tried to adjust to a room that she had never slept in before. After a while, it was hard for her to tell whether she had been dreaming or whether her thoughts were wandering around in an endless kind of exhaustion.

What was it about her uncle that bothered her? It must have been his large dark eyes, which seemed to peer into her soul as he spoke to her. It wasn't a normal look like people give each other when they're having a pleasant conversation. It was _intense_. Elena found it hard to break her gaze from his eyes, and there were times at the dinner table when her eyes would cling desperately to her aunt as if she were a life raft in the middle of the ocean. But even then, she could feel those dark eyes of his boring into her—it must be her imagination, but it seemed like those eyes were projecting heat, and the heat was piercing into her clothes and penetrating all the way to her skin.

Why was he doing that? What did he want from her? The window in the room was open a couple of inches, and Elena heard the rustling of the curtains—it almost sounded as if someone was in the room. She reached over and turned on the light, but there was no one there, so she shut the light off and tried to fall asleep.

"You must be tired now, Elena," said her uncle, after they had finished dinner. "I'll show you to your bedroom." She wished that her aunt would walk with her up the stairs, but she was busy in the kitchen, so Elena followed her uncle obediently. Why was she so frightened? She'd been with her uncle before, and he had never done anything to make her afraid.

He was leading the way down a long corridor that seemed to go on and on. It was dark except that the corridor was lined with oil paintings, and on top of each painting, there was a light that illuminated the picture below.

"Isn't this an interesting painting?" said her uncle, as he stopped before a large canvas that must have been five feet wide and four feet high. Elena stood beside her uncle and gazed at the painting and blushed. In the painting, which seemed to be done in an old-fashioned, artistic way, there was a young woman, probably in her early twenties, who was lying on a large sofa with her head propped up by a few ornate pillows. But what was she wearing? Almost nothing. The only thing that covered her body was a flimsy piece of lace that extended from her stomach to her thighs. "Isn't she a beautiful woman?" said her uncle.

Just then, with a jolt, Elena woke up. It had all been nothing but a dream—her uncle hadn't led her up to the bedroom, and there were no paintings on the walls. But it had all seemed so real. She could still see the painting of the naked woman in her mind, could still see her pointed breasts, could still see the strange, enigmatic look on her face. And all the while her uncle had been standing next to her.

She was never coming to this house again—she didn't care if her fears were imaginary. It was just too scary to be here. Elena took one of the extra pillows on the bed and put it over her eyes so that the beams of a streetlight that were coming in through the window wouldn't bother her. That seemed to help, seemed to make her feel drowsy.

"We're almost there now, Elena," said her uncle. "There's just one more painting that I'd like to show you."

"I'd rather not look at any more paintings, Uncle Dave,"

"No? Well, then, I'll just show you to your room." He opened a door and pointed inside. "This is your room--you should be comfortable here. I'll just lower the window for you so that you won't catch cold."

As she stood beside the bed, he lowered the window, but instead of leaving the room, he walked towards her, and she became transfixed by terror. "You're so beautiful, Elena—wouldn't you like to show me your body?"

"Uncle Dave—"

But he had put her hand over her mouth and pushed her back onto the bed. And as young and innocent as she was, she knew what was going to happen next. His hand had slid down to her knees and was pushing her dress up, and then--

Elena awoke with a start. Why had the covers been pulled back? And then she felt the hand, the hand that had pushed her nightgown up. This time, she knew that she wasn't dreaming, this time she knew it was for real, this time she tried to scream, but before any sound came out of her mouth, he had placed his hand over it.

And what happened next was far worse than any dream could ever have been. This time, the horror was real.

2

Raylene finished _The Secret Within_ in January of 2012. She felt it was an excellent novel, but she knew enough about the literary market to know that an unknown writer had almost no chance of breaking into the big time. Agents and publishers had little to no time to waste on neophytes who were gushing about their wonderful first novel. However, Raylene was hardly a fool, and she knew that she had an excellent chance of being published because she was Barker Drule's daughter. She was convinced that her name would be enough to get her through the door and into the halls of the literary establishment, and even if these people only tolerated her as an amusement, the quality of the writing and the themes in her book should be enough to propel it out of the twilight of obscurity and into the public consciousness. In fact, her novel was so much better than anything her father had written that she was worried he might be jealous, but that was something that came with the territory. If you wanted to write cheesy novels, you might succeed for a decade or two, but the day of reckoning would surely come, and when it did, you would be tossed aside like all the other fads in history.

The day after finishing the novel, she wrote a friendly letter to her father's literary agent, Jason Bell, in which she described, in some detail, _The Secret With_ in. Within a week, she had received a reply from Jason who said that he would be delighted to read her novel, and in another two weeks, Jason phoned her and told her that _The Secret Within_ was a remarkable tour de force and that he would be happy to represent her.

He also mentioned how much respect he had for her father.

3

However, on the following Monday, just five days after the glowing phone call from Jason, she received a letter from him, and it was certainly not what Raylene was expecting.

Dear Ms. Drule,

I am sorry to inform you that I cannot represent your book. I have made inquiries with three different publishers who I felt might be willing to publish your book, but because of the current difficulties new authors are experiencing in the marketplace, they do not feel that your novel would be commercially successful.

Also, after rereading parts of your manuscript, I do not feel it would be something that I would be comfortable representing. I am sorry for any inconvenience that this might cause you, and I wish you luck in your attempts to find someone who can successfully represent _The_ _Secret Within._

Jason Bell

Raylene stared at the letter in disbelief. When she had talked to Jason on the phone, he had been more than enthusiastic, and now, within a matter of days, she had been dismissed with something that was close to a form letter. That night, she lay awake for hours as she thought about what might have happened, and gradually, a suspicion began to enter her mind: Her father, the almighty king of the literary universe, had been contacted by Jason, and for some reason, her father had persuaded him to reject her manuscript.

4

After work the next day, Raylene dropped by her parents' house. On the drive there, she had decided to be nonchalant about the whole thing, but by the time she arrived, Raylene was in an angry mood. The one thing that she didn't want to hear from her father was lies—she wanted to know the truth, and she thought the best hope of discovering the truth was to be direct with him.

Barker was in his study working on his new book, _The Eyes of the Corpse_ , but he switched off his computer when Raylene knocked on the door. Because Raylene rarely showed any interest in him, he felt fairly certain as to why she was here, and he wasn't looking forward to the conversation.

"Dad," said Raylene, as she took a seat in a small wooden chair next to his desk, "I would like to know whether you had something to do with my novel being rejected by Jason Bell."

Raylene had never told him that she was writing a novel. Maybe, thought Barker, the best thing would be to feign ignorance.

"I see that you're hesitant to answer my question," said Raylene, "so that must mean you know what I'm talking about."

"To some extent," said Barker in a cautious tone. "You have to realize, however, that agents are their own bosses and make their own decisions."

"Yes, well he had made a decision, and the decision he had made was to represent my novel. And now, as I guess you know, he's changed his mind, and I can't help but think that you had something to do with it."

"Raylene, I would like to have your mother take part in this discussion, so let's go into the other room and talk about it there."

Once they were in the living room and Gertrude had joined them, Barker said, "Gertrude, Raylene has some concerns about the novel she recently wrote and sent to Jason Bell. I was wondering if you could explain to her our feelings about this."

"Raylene," said Gertrude, who appeared to be annoyed, "your father and I obviously have no problem with you writing a novel, but the subject matter you chose for your book leaves a little bit to be desired."

"What are you talking about?" said Raylene.

"Isn't it obvious, Raylene?"

"No, it is not obvious, so you'll have to explain it to me."

"Alright," said Gertrude, "I will. The problem is that certain incidents you describe in your novel will only serve to open up old wounds. Lenore, for instance, was particularly upset when I told her about the subject matter of your book."

"Has she read it?"

"No," said Gertrude, "I would hardly want her to read something like that. She's had a difficult time adjusting to life over the last few years, and—"

"What does my novel have to do with Lenore? If you're hinting that my book is somehow a replay of Dad's rape of Lenore—"

"Raylene!" said Gertrude in a sharp tone of voice. "Please, if we're going to talk about this, I must insist that you be respectful. Your father has paid dearly for his previous conduct, and he has done—and is doing--everything he can to make amends. It does not help anyone to start throwing around inflammatory words."

"I don't get what this is all about," said Raylene. "I was very careful in my novel to construct a plot that had no similarities to what happened here."

"Yes, I understand that," said Gertrude, "and I realize you made the attempt. But put yourself in Lenore's shoes for a moment. Do you really think she's going to feel that what you wrote isn't about her?"

"Even if that were true, what difference does it make? No one else but Lenore and the three of us in this room know what happened, so—"

"You're forgetting about my father," said Barker.

"What has he got to do with it?" said Raylene, in exasperation.

"Raylene," said Gertrude, "people may well draw inferences from your book. You have to remember that you're the daughter of a famous person, and there is nothing that reporters love to do more than kick up dirt. I know your uncle died when you were five, but your father and I are worried that people may feel or suspect that what you wrote is a true story. And if they do, Lenore may well be asked about it. As you know, she's not in a good place right now, and I think the ending of your book, although it was certainly well-intentioned, will not do Lenore the least bit of good."

"What in the world is wrong with the ending? I thought it was very positive."

"It is," said Gertrude, "but it paints a stark contrast to the condition that Lenore is in right now. She's having a lot of trouble dealing with life, and it's only going to cause her more problems if she reads some sermon about how a person in her position was able to overcome her past and lead a successful life."

Besides being angry, Raylene was absolutely dumbfounded. To think that her parents would do this to her! Finally, she said, "And you actually talked to Lenore about this? You're not just making that up, are you?"

"Raylene," said Gertrude, "as I asked you once before, please be respectful. I certainly did talk to Lenore about this, and she literally begged me to do everything I could to prevent your book from being published."

"OK," said Raylene, "I'm going over to talk to Lenore right now because I have a hard time believing anything you say."

"Raylene—"

"And speaking of respect," said Raylene as she headed for the front door, "I don't think you've shown much respect to me. For Dad to destroy my book because of his dirty past is about as disrespectful as it gets."

"Raylene—"

5

Lenore was home when Raylene arrived. The two sisters spent very little time together nowadays—they had, in a sense, taken different career paths. Raylene was the successful one who wasn't afraid of challenges, and Lenore was the one who led an unwholesome life that featured anti-depressants, along with bouts of binge eating. The previous year, things had been looking up for Lenore when she formed a relationship with a guy, but it had only lasted a couple of months before her attitude proved too much for him to handle. Most days, she was depressed; some days, she was angry; and then there was the occasional day when she seemed relatively normal.

Raylene, the competitive, highly motivated one, was in a fierce mood when she entered Lenore's condo. To have come so close to having a book published and then have it all blow up because her father, the rapist, was afraid of the effect that her novel would have on Lenore. And all this was coming from the man who wrote about fictional rapes in many of his books. It was such a hypocritical position for him to take that Raylene thought there must be some other reason for her father's opposition to _The Secret Within_. Maybe he thought that if his daughter became a successful novelist, she would eventually reveal the horrible secret that he was so desperate to keep hidden.

There was, of course, the possibility that some other agent might like _The Secret_ _Within_ , but Raylene thought the chances of that happening were slim. The reason for this went beyond the difficulties involved in finding another agent, which might not be an insurmountable obstacle. The real problem was that beyond the agents were the publishers, and Raylene knew that her father had spread his books out among a number of different publishing houses. That way, he was able to involve them in bidding wars for his new books, which meant that his royalties were consistently higher than the usual fifteen per cent. Thus, with her father having his fingers in all the major publishing pies, there was only a slim chance of her being published if he vetoed _The Secret Within_. And even if some publisher accepted her novel, it would only be a small press with little to no marketing connections and no money to spend on an advertising campaign, which was virtually a necessity with a first-time novelist. Raylene had counted on the Drule name to carry her forward, but it now appeared that because of the malicious intervention of her father, the Drule name was going to destroy her literary ambitions.

6

Lenore was watching a true-crime program on TV. "These shows are so intense," she said to Raylene. "Some days, I just sit here and watch them for hours."

"Lenore, I need to talk to you about something."

Lenore yawned. "You must be talking about that book of yours."

"As a matter of fact, I am."

Lenore turned the volume on the TV down. "It doesn't matter," she said to no one in particular, "because I've seen this show before—it's the one where the boyfriend murders the woman, but everyone thinks that the husband did it."

"Mom and Dad told me that you didn't like my novel," said Raylene.

"Raylene, I hate to be honest, but I thought it was a stupid story."

"You read it?" said Raylene.

"Parts of it—Mom sent me an e-mail that included the chapter where the woman got raped."

So her mother had been lying when she said that Lenore hadn't read the book. "So why did you think it was a stupid story?"

"Raylene, I know you were trying to look at things through my eyes, but that's something you'll never be able to do."

"Why does everyone think the book is about you?" said Raylene.

"Of course it's about me—that's as obvious as the nose on the end of my face. Teenage girl gets raped by her father—don't tell me that you've forgotten that happened to me?"

"Of course I haven't forgotten, but in the book, it's the girl's uncle, not her father, who rapes her."

"And that's supposed to be a big difference? How could you possibly expect me not to take that book personally?"

Raylene was finding it difficult to control her temper. "Lenore, I don't know how many times I have to say this, but I was not trying to depict you in my book. The character I created was not intended to resemble you at all."

Lenore yawned again. "Sometimes, Raylene, I don't care whether I live or die. My life has been ruined, and that's all there is to it. However, I don't need any more reminders of what Dad did to me, and I certainly don't need books written about it by my sister. I wish to God that he would just drop dead because then I think I might be able to get over it, but as long as he's alive, it's going to be difficult for me. I know I should think positive things and all that, but there's a lot that you'll never be able to understand."

"Like what?" said Raylene.

"I think I suffer from the same thing that those guys who go to war suffer from—I don't remember what they call it."

"Post-traumatic stress disorder?"

"I guess so—I still have flashbacks and everything. And then, all of a sudden, you come out with this weird, sappy book where the heroine just rises above her rape and practically turns it into a religious experience. That's the part that really turned me off, Raylene. I don't need my own sister preaching to me over my raped body."

"So Mom sent you that part too?"

"Actually, she sent me the whole book, and I just kind of flipped through the pages."

# CHAPTER FIVE: NOVEMBER 2012—August 17th, 2014

1

After living in the house for thirteen years, Gramps had worn out his welcome. Barker had never had much respect for his father, and as far as Gertrude was concerned, Dalton's only real contribution to the household had been to protect Lenore, but with Lenore no longer living there, the downside to Gramps was becoming intolerable.

Gertrude probably could have tolerated, on humanitarian grounds, the way Gramps would sometimes wander aimlessly through the house in his ratty old bathrobe that looked like it had been bought twenty years ago at a garage sale. She had twice given him new bathrobes as Christmas presents, but he had disdainfully tossed them aside as "itchers," and he had also informed her in a caustic tone that he wasn't about to wear a product that came from either the far east or America. "Outside of guns, the only people who know how to make things are the Japanese." The only item Gertrude could find from Japan that resembled a bathrobe was a kimono, and she knew Gramps well enough to know that he wouldn't be caught dead in the same room as a kimono.

Dalton's recent habit of drooling at the dinner table also didn't hit the right buttons with Gertrude. Unfortunately, these weren't minor drools but came out as long, sticky, oozing trails of phlegm and God knows what else as the poor old boy stared vacantly into space. It had reached the point that whenever they had guests, Gramps had to be fed first, and he wasn't at all happy about being banished because of his table manners. "So now I'm not good enough for you and all your fashion-plate friends—I might have known! Here I went to all the trouble of bringing up some ill-tempered brat like Barker so that he could live in this rotten world, and now I'm sent to my room like a two-year-old. What's next? A highchair? Just wait until you reach eighty, Gertrude—assuming you get there, which given your general attitude about life and your lousy eating habits isn't very likely. I'd sooner live with monkeys than people who think that because they're fifty and make fifty million dollars a year, they're fifty times better than me."

Yes, probably Gertrude could have tolerated all that. But the thing she couldn't tolerate any longer was Gramps's gun. She could still remember the first time when he had shot it off inside the house. It was shortly after he had moved in, and she had caught him shooting it out a kitchen window into the back yard. "What do you think you're doing?" she yelled at him.

"I'm shooting my gun—what does it look like?"

"Gramps, you are not to shoot your gun in this house."

"And who do you think you are? Queen Victoria?"

Barker had been summoned, and a long disputatious conversation ensued during which the old boy had the gun in his lap and would sometimes pick it up, hold it vertically in front of his face, and blow appreciatively into the barrel of the gun. "This is my baby," he said to his two overseers, "and I'm not giving it up because my son's mistress is throwing another one of her hissy fits."

Finally, a compromise was reached. Gramps could fire his gun out the window of his own bedroom, but this activity was specifically prohibited in all other areas of the house. During these difficult negotiations, Gramps had also told them that he had a silencer for the gun, and it was agreed that when he fired the gun from his bedroom window, he would use the silencer. It was an unusual arrangement, to say the least, but the inhabitants of the house almost never went into the back yard, which had been turned into a no man's land because Barker wasn't the kind of guy who spent any time on yard work. Authors really don't like to deal with lawn mowers, rakes, and all the rest of that nonsense. Neither did Barker enjoy paying the local landscaping company a fortune for the upkeep of his relatively enormous back yard, which stretched back for ten acres. The front yard was only three acres and that was costing him twelve grand a year—chump change for a guy like him, but it was still very annoying.

Fortunately, there was a rather large hill near the end of the ten acres, and the whole area had been fenced off years ago by Barker to keep perverts and autograph seekers (same thing) off his property, so there wasn't any real danger if Gramps shot off his gun once in a while. Naturally, the girls and Ricky were informed of the situation and told that they were never to set foot in the back yard, but except for Ricky, none of them had been out there in years. However, once Ricky heard that Gramps might be firing his gun out into the ten acres, he didn't need any persuasion about the advisability of avoiding the area.

Right around the time that Gramps reached the drooling stage, his bouts with the gun began to become much more frequent. Or maybe it wasn't so much that the frequency increased as it was that Gramps often forgot to use the silencer. It was, as it would be for many people, very unnerving for Gertrude to hear all the bang, bang, bangs coming from upstairs. "How much as I supposed to take?" she said to Barker. "Enough is enough! It's time we reclaimed the back yard."

And so, without any real reluctance, Barker agreed that Gramps should be put into a nursing home. "Good!" said Gertrude. "They can deal with the gun—I bet they'll be a lot stricter than we are. My God, our back yard is nothing but a firing range for a senile old man who's lost about nine-tenths of his marbles."

2

So one day, about a week before Thanksgiving in 2012, Gertrude had sat Gramps down for a little chat.

"Granddad," she said to him, "how are you feeling today?"

Dalton knew that when Gertrude asked him this question, it was the beginning of a lecture about something he was doing that didn't measure up to her almighty standards.

"Great!" said Dalton, who figured this conversation would probably have something to do with him throwing up at the table during last Sunday's dinner.

"I'm worried about you, Gramps." Gertrude cleared her throat, and in a cold officious tone, she said, "I know you're having your troubles lately, but yesterday, I found a pair of your socks in the refrigerator, and let me tell you, these were not clean socks. Also, to be frank with you, vomiting all over the dinner table is just not acceptable behavior. I know you're getting along in years and have trouble controlling your bodily functions from time to time. I'm sympathetic to that, but at the same time, you have to consider my position. What if you lose control at the other end? Have you considered that? Vomit is one thing, but what comes out the other end is something entirely different, so I do think we need to begin to consider making some adjustments to your situation. I'm certainly not bringing this up because of myself. As you well know, I can deal with just about anything, but Barker is really busy right now and doesn't have the time to cater to your needs. So--"

"Gertrude—"

"Do you mind not interrupting me, Gramps? I think I at least deserve that small courtesy. I know you like to hear yourself talk, but there are times when you need to learn to listen. I don't know how many times you've put Barker and me into a living coma while you rambled on about your glory days when you worked in the sawmill and fired everyone who didn't agree with your political opinions. Are you listening to me, Gramps?"

"Yes, of course," said Dalton obediently.

"The problem is this," said Gertrude. "We all know that at a certain point in life, things don't get any better. And you're beginning to reach that point, Granddad. You've certainly lived a long life, and for that we can all be more than grateful, but it appears that time is beginning to catch up to you. I certainly don't enjoy talking to you about things like this because I understand better than anyone that you're rather sensitive and touchy about your age, but facts are facts. You have the trick knee, the cranky back, the achy joints, upchuck problems, and I think we all realize that you're beginning to lose your faculties somewhat. Leaving your dirty socks in the refrigerator was really the last straw for Barker, and who can blame him?

"So we're going to have to make some hard choices, Granddad. Unfortunately, I'm not a registered nurse, and even if I was, I wouldn't want to be the one changing your bedpan when it came down to the bitter end and you couldn't make it out of your bed to attend to your daily needs. Do you understand what I'm driving at, Granddad?"

Dalton had a surly look on his face, and Gertrude had the impression that he wanted to spit at her. Finally, he said, "It sounds like you're about to evict me."

"That's just such an ungrateful remark, Granddad. Barker and I discussed this last night, and we were able to come up with something that is really in the best interests of everyone—yourself included. I know that you find the restrictions around here to be difficult, but there's nothing I can do about it. We simply can't have you sitting at the dinner table when Barker is talking to his literary agent or all the publishers who are continually coming here to proposition him. So what we're thinking is that the best thing for you is to make a clean break of it."

"What does that mean?" said Dalton. Besides being eighty years old, Dalton had no money of his own, so he knew there wasn't much likelihood that he could start anew in a different environment. Perhaps his son was going to do what he had done with Ricky and Lenore—set him up in a place of his own.

"What it means, Granddad, is that we've filled out an application for you at the Happy Light Nursing Home, which is, by far, the best nursing home in the area."

"Suppose I don't want to go?"

"That kind of talk is really not helpful, Granddad, but I can tell you that if push comes to shove, we will have you hauled out of here."

3

For Raylene, the memory of the injustice that had been done to her by her father would occasionally cause her to suffer from a sudden but intense grief. But before long, she was able to put the past behind her because, for the first time in her life, she had fallen in love. His name was Jed Ayres, and she had met him when he came into the office to fill out a deposition. He was five years older than Raylene and had recently divorced his wife, and they were now having a custody battle over their two children.

Besides being charming and self-effacing, Jed was handsome, as in movie-star handsome, and he had an excellent job as a computer programmer that paid him over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Raylene had quickly fallen head over heels in love with him, and it wasn't long before they were trying to decide whether to move into his condo or the condo that Raylene had recently bought. After discussing it for almost an hour, they still hadn't come to any consensus—deep down, both of them were afraid that if the relationship didn't work out, they would be left without a place to live.

"I have an idea," said Jed. "Let's flip a coin!"

"And that's how we'll decide this?" said Raylene.

"Sure—what could be fairer? It won't be my decision or your decision—it will be the coin's decision."

Raylene laughed. "I wouldn't mind deciding it that way, but I'm afraid I might lose."

"Me too."

"But I can see that flipping a coin is kind of a fair and practical way to decide things," said Raylene. "Because if I win and you move in here, I won't have to feel guilty about being the one who got her way."

"Exactly—it will be the coin's way. No muss, no fuss, no emotional baggage."

"Whose coin are we going to use?" said Raylene.

"You can choose any coin you like, Raylene, but I want to look at it first. I wouldn't want my future decided by a rigged coin."

"Yes," said Raylene, in an amused voice, "I keep weighted coins on hand for occasions like this." She dug through her purse and found a quarter, and after handing it to Jed, he pronounced it to be suitable for the occasion.

"OK," said Raylene, "I'll give you a choice—you can either flip the coin and I'll call it, or I'll flip the coin and you can call it."

"I'll flip," said Jed, "but you have to call it while it's in the air."

They went over to where there was a thin rug, and Jed was about to flip the coin, when Raylene said, "Wait! I need to focus my psychic powers." She closed her eyes tightly for almost thirty seconds, and when she opened them, she said, "OK, I'm ready. Let's find out where we're going to live."

Jed flipped the coin into the air, and a half second later, Raylene said, in a very confident voice, "Heads."

Tails it was. "I guess my psychic powers aren't very good," said Raylene.

4

Jed was not a big fan of Barker Drule's novels, and after he met the rest of the clan, Gramps included, his opinion of the Drules was that the less seen, the better. By now, Raylene was totally fed up with her family, so one night, while the two of them were lying in bed after a little extracurricular activity, she told him about all the sordid stories that ran rampant through the Drule universe. Ricky was now on probation for selling cocaine; it didn't look like Lenore was ever going to recover from being raped by her father; and Gramps was still shooting his Glock out the back window.

Jed thought about this for some moments before he said, "I only read one Barker Drule novel, but it sounds somewhat similar to the real-life history of your family."

"Which book was it?" said Raylene.

"It was called _The Castle of Death_. Did you ever read it?'

"No, I've only read a couple of his books; personally, I think they're nothing but garbage. What was _The Castle of Death_ about?"

"It was this far-fetched story about a guy who had three daughters, and after he had murdered his wife by burying her alive, he went through all his daughters—one by one."

"You mean he raped them?" said Raylene.

"Yes--to tell you the truth, I gave up after the second rape. It was probably the most repulsive book I've ever read. Why do you suppose he's so successful?"

"It's just the momentum of success and fame, Jed. Once you hit the big time, you can write anything and people will swallow it up."

Later, after Jed fell asleep, Raylene lay awake thinking about what Jed had told her. She hadn't known about _The Castle of Death_ , but after listening to Jed's description of it, she realized for a fact what she had always suspected after her father had pushed her book into oblivion. He hadn't done it because he cared about Lenore's feelings--all he cared about was himself, and so he wasn't about to let his daughter upstage him with a novel of her own.

5

Ricky Drule needed money, and he needed it bad. It hadn't been smart to rip off those two drug dealers from New York City, and for the last couple of days, he had been looking over his shoulder wherever he went. How much money did he owe them anyways? Twenty grand? Thirty grand? Whatever it was, it was a lot. Even so, he had to admit that it had been a lot of fun to party for ten days with all that cocaine. He hadn't really meant to blow it all on himself and the crowd that hung around him constantly, but he couldn't help trying to live up to their expectations as a guy who was almost always willing to lay a line of the white stuff in front of you. And Ricky, who had never had to worry about material things would say, "Don't worry about the money—you can pay me back later."

But as Ricky continued to think about it, he realized that he couldn't possibly have blown through all that cocaine in a week—somebody must have ripped him off. Or maybe he had misplaced some of it. Wasn't there another bag of it somewhere? He searched through every inch of his apartment—the trouble was that when Ricky got wasted, he would get paranoid and sometimes hide it in really weird places. Places that he would never think of afterwards—like behind a wall or something. Carefully, he examined the walls. There were a couple of suspicious loose panels, and he pried the panels off the walls, but there was no cocaine behind them. What about under the porcelain part of the toilet? He remembered that he had hid some stuff there once. Nothing.

Maybe it was in the car. Hadn't he stashed some under the front seat when he picked up that hot new chick outside the bar? Man, she was such a turn on, and all it had taken to get her into his bed was three lines. What a body! You couldn't ask for anything better than that. And the next night she was back, and it only took six lines, but then she hadn't shown up when he went to meet her the next day. Hopefully, she hadn't overdosed on some other guy's bad coke or heroin—there was a lot of that going around nowadays.

However, it didn't really matter whether she was alive or dead because it wasn't like he was lacking for action. All he had to do was go into that bar on Dyner Street, and he could pick up somebody. Most of the chicks there knew that he was a major player in the local coke scene and that he would give them line after line if they were willing to reciprocate with the kind of stuff that he wanted. Sometimes, in between the highs, Ricky would think that he should cut down on the nose candy because it turned him into an insatiable sex fiend who could never get enough. Had to have it!

Outside, after a little searching, he found his car—it wasn't where he thought he had left it. No idea how it got there. Must have legs of its own. Strangely, the door was open an inch or two. Not good. Slowly, he opened the door and saw a newspaper clipping that had a small note attached to it. Suddenly terrified, he looked behind him, but there was no one in sight. With his hand trembling, he read the note: Twenty-five grand by the day after tomorrow or you'll look like this.

Underneath the note was a picture in a newspaper of some guy who had been shot to death. Blood all around his head. Now what? Maybe he should just get in his car and head west and try to outrun these lunatics. But for all he knew, they might be tailing him--it sounded absurd, but you never knew what people would do when they were owed twenty-five grand. He never should have got involved with pushers. Huge mistake.

What was he going to do now? Who could he turn to? His father, of course. But what was he going to tell him? The guy wasn't an absolute idiot even if he did write books that were only fit for idiots. "Hey, Dad, I'm a little short this month. How about sending twenty-five grand my way?" His sisters thought his father gave him everything he wanted, but that wasn't true—not by a long shot. He could usually squeeze his father for a couple of grand if he was desperate, but it was a tough squeeze. Lots of begging, along with promises that he would reform and stop wasting his life away. But what right did his father have to boss him around like he was seven years old? In this country, provided you paid your bills, you could live any way you pleased, and if he wanted to feed his nose and go on a sexual rampage, then so be it. And anyways, while his father wrote about sex all the time in his novels, he was the one who was actually living it—the sexual part of it anyway. The murders and decapitations were another story altogether. 

#

#  CHAPTER SIX: AUGUST 19th, 2014

1

"Look at this, Eleanor" said Gregory Webster, as he read aloud from an article in the newspaper. "According to the noted sociologist, Professor William Vance, murder is becoming an old-fashioned way to solve personal problems. Mr. Vance, who is currently vacationing in Boulevard Hills, told this reporter that 'for the most part, the modern animal is losing his inherited inclination to engage openly in violence, but—'"

"I thought he was talking about human beings," said Eleanor.

"My dear," said Gregory, in a condescending voice, "he's simply using the word animal as a metaphor."

"I'm not sure I understand what a metaphor is," said Eleanor.

"It's the substitution of one word or group of words for another—provided there are enough similarities between the two words or phrases to justify the substitution."

"But why do something like that? What's the point? Why not use the correct word?"

"In this case," said Gregory, "the professor picked out an interesting metaphor because it's well known that the human's instinct to murder comes from our more primitive and animalistic instincts."

"I don't agree with that, Gregory. I can't ever remember reading about an animal being charged with murder."

"I can," he said. "Remember that Doberman who mauled the woman tourist to death?"

"The Doberman was just having a bad day, Gregory—he wasn't intending to murder her, so I really don't think your metaphor is a good one."

"Eleanor, forget about the metaphor. The professor's point is that murder is not as common as it once was."

"Really? As far as I can see—"

Just then, the door burst open, and Cora, their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, came running into the room.

"Have you heard?" she said to the two of them, in a breathless voice.

"Heard what?" said Eleanor.

"Mr. and Mrs. Drule were murdered last night."

2

The Drules lived about a half-mile down the street, and the Websters knew them well because they frequently played cards with them on Saturday night.

"What are you talking about, Cora?" said Eleanor.

"I'm talking about murder, Mom. Right now, there are all sorts of police cars over there. Like tons! I was driving by the Drule's house on my way back from taking Janet to school, and I saw about forty people standing around. You know how nosy everyone in this neighborhood is! So I asked someone what had happened, and she said that Mr. and Mrs. Drule had been gunned down in their driveway sometime during the night. Isn't that just the most horrible thing that you've ever heard in your life? I met up with Tom Simmons as I was standing there, and he said he thinks there's a serial killer in the neighborhood. I was like 'No! No way! Not here, not in Boulevard Hills.' I mean when was the last time we ever had a murder around here? Twenty years ago?"

"No," said Gregory, "don't you remember that junkman who was shot to death downtown last year?"

"I thought that was a mob hit," said Eleanor.

"Maybe so, but it's still a murder."

"I don't count mob murders as murders," said Eleanor. "If I were in the mob, I would feel differently, but since I'm not, I don't pay those murders any mind. However, Gertrude and Barker Drule are an entirely different story. That really hits fairly close to home. My God, what if we had been over there playing bridge with them when it happened?"

"Actually, Mom, they were killed in the driveway or maybe it happened on the back steps."

"And they were shot to death?" said Gregory.

"That's what someone told me, but I didn't actually see their bodies or rivers of blood or anything. Anyways, I've got to be going, but I thought you would want to hear the news."

Cora hadn't been gone for more than a minute when there was a loud knock on the door. Both of the Websters felt a surge of alarm—the coincidence of Cora's breathless announcement and the loud knock had them putting two and two together and coming up with a very bad number.

"Who is it?" said Gregory, when he was within a foot of the door.

"It's Inspector Jeff Willard, Mr. Webster. I work for the Boulevard Hills Police Department, and I have a few questions that I'd like to ask you."

3

Inspector Jeff Willard was an imposing man. A former star on the basketball team at the state university, he was six feet seven inches tall and weighed about two hundred and ninety pounds. His voice was loud and gravelly; his hair was dyed jet black; and most of all, one couldn't help but be afraid that when he sat on a piece of furniture, it might collapse under the stress of having to support such an extravagant amount of weight. There goes the couch!

Jeff was actually a detective, but he preferred to be called an inspector. "I don't," he had said to an old college friend when they were out drinking one night, "detect anything—what I do is inspect things. Detection is merely a fancy word for a popular prejudice that is based on narrow deductions gathered from the evidence at the crime scene. I, however, make it a point not to detect anything from the evidence; rather, I inspect it carefully because through the proper use of inspection, the answer to every crime will appear. It will be as if the name of the suspect is written out for me—so why would I need to string clues together and attempt to formulate an analysis of the situation?"

Jeff made himself comfortable on the couch, which was able to survive his rather careless landing. After clearing his throat, he said, "Mr. and Mrs. Webster, I have been informed that you and the Drules were close friends."

"Yes," said Eleanor. "Is it true what we've just heard?"

"I'm not sure what you've just heard," said Jeff.

"Were they...our daughter just told us that they had been shot to death—I guess it was last night."

"That's essentially correct, Mrs. Webster. We haven't been able to determine the exact time of death yet, but it was probably before midnight."

"Who found their bodies?"

"Barker Drule's father—you probably know that he lives in the back of the house."

"Yes, although we never saw him that much," said Eleanor.

"Can you tell me the last time that you saw Barker and Gertrude Drule?"

"It was just three days ago—on Saturday evening. Gregory and I went over there around eight to play bridge with them."

"How long have you known the Drules?" said Jeff.

"It's been almost thirty-five years now," said Gregory. "He and I were in the same class at high school."

"So you knew him before he became famous?"

"Long before he became famous."

"I'm always the first one in line when he comes out with a new novel," said Jeff. "Did you read _The Blood on the River Gore_?"

"No," said Gregory. "To be honest with you, I've never liked his books that much."

"Really? I became hooked on Barker Drule about nine years ago when I read _The Emissions of an Elderly Madman_. What a story! It was about an ax murderer and his faithful dog and all the adventures they went through before age caught up with them and put them out of business. That's the unique thing about Barker—he can write about anything. He's had books about serial killers, rapists, fiends, vampires, disembodied spirits, ghouls, and now, in _The Blood on the_ _River Gore_ , there's just hundreds of bodies. Did you know that within a week of its release, it was the number-one best seller in America? Fantastic book! To watch the murderer plotting out his revenge; to see the people being mowed down by his assault rifle in the mall; to witness the unspeakable horror of having little children gunned down like chickens at a shoot-fest—it's such an accurate description of the modern world. I'd sell my soul to write a novel like that."

"I guess you're a big fan of Barker Drule," said Eleanor.

"I really am, Mrs. Webster, and I can't help but wonder if Barker's death was connected to one of the books he wrote. By the way, did either of you notice anything unusual while you were at the Drule house on Saturday night?"

"No, not really," said Eleanor.

"How long were you there?"

"I'm not very good with times—perhaps Gregory should answer that question. Gregory?"

"I'm sorry—what did you say?" said Gregory. "I was just thinking about how I'll never see Barker again. Although I can't say that I share your enthusiasm for his novels, he was my closest acquaintance—outside of my family, of course."

"I'm surprised that you don't like his novels," said Jeff. "How many of them have you read?"

"Just two—I think they were the first two."

"Maybe that's why you haven't read anything else by him. Those two novels aren't really up to the standard that he set for himself with the things that he's published since then. Did you know that he can write a three-hundred-page book in three weeks? That's a hundred pages in a week! I don't know how he does it—about all I can manage are a few short e-mails in a week. Although, to be fair, I do have about fifty reports to fill out every time a person commits a crime, and those things are no laughing matter."

"Yes," said Eleanor, "bureaucracies are definitely one of the evils of the modern world."

"Getting back to Barker," said Jeff, "you two should read _The Case of the Butchered Orphan_. I don't think there's ever been anything written that I could even begin to compare to that book. Not that I read all that much, but I do have an eye for suspense and terror. I suppose I'm digressing a bit, but I really must tell you about _The Case of the_ _Butchered Orphan_. It begins with the mayor of New York City receiving a large cardboard box, and guess what's in it?"

"I have no idea," said Eleanor.

"A butchered orphan! I think the poor kid's name was Charlie, and he's a distant relative of the mayor. I say 'distant relative' because although he had the same last name as the mayor, it was assumed that he was a second cousin twice removed, but eventually, as events unfold—and they unfold rapidly in a Barker Drule novel—it turns out that Charlie was actually the son of the mayor who was born out of his liaison with a prostitute named Violet Paradise. The mayor had been paying Violet to bring the boy up, but she died of a heroin overdose when Charlie was six, so the mayor drugged him with some oxycodone that he stole from the evidence locker at the police department. I think, if I remember right, the mayor was planning on shipping him by air freight to an orphanage in England, but about an hour after ingesting the oxycodone, the poor kid begins to have seizures and uncontrollable fits of vomiting, and so the mayor, who is now totally desperate, stashes him in a large black garbage bag and dumps him off at the front door of a local orphanage at three in the morning.

"Unfortunately for the mayor, Charlie begins to recover, and it isn't long before he begins to remember things from his past, including the face of the man who stuffed him into the garbage bag. The mayor, of course, now has national ambitions and is being talked about as a possible presidential candidate, and he knows that forcing your six-year-old child to swallow oxycodone and then dumping him off in a plastic garbage bag at an orphanage will be a catastrophe for his political career. Look what happened to Clinton, and all he did was fool around with an intern!

"So the mayor waits outside the orphanage, and when the kids are let out for their little daytime romp through the woods, the mayor kidnaps his child, forces fifty sleeping pills down his throat, and then, after the kid has stopped breathing, the mayor brings him to one of his oldest and most trusted friends—he's a butcher in the garment district. The mayor gives the guy one hundred grand in cold hard cash from his campaign funds and instructs the butcher to hack the kid up and throw his body into the East River.

"But the butcher is no fool, so what he does after he hacks the kid up is that he puts him into a sealed cardboard box and has him delivered to the mayor's head of security, an old no-nonsense type of cop who would nail you for a ticket if you went through a stop sign at one mile per hour. Inside the cardboard box and directly on top of the body parts, the butcher leaves a note that says: Dear Mr. Mayor, I wish you wouldn't leave your butchered bodies at my shop. I've told you many times that people don't like to eat human remains. I know he's your son and some might consider him a delicacy, but you should have thought twice before you cut him up into forty pieces."

"That's certainly an amazing story," said Eleanor.

"I'll say," said Gregory.

"But wait! I'm not even to the best part yet. What happens next demonstrates why Barker Drule is considered the world's leading author. First of all, his characters are three-dimensional and aren't just stage props that were invented to create a sensational plot. _They're real_ _people facing real dilemmas_. And secondly, just as in real life, the unexpected is about the only thing that one can expect in a Barker Drule novel.

"So what happens is that when the mayor's security chief and his associate go to arrest him in his office, the mayor pulls out his semi-automatic pistol and fires two bullets into each of them, killing them instantly. Unfortunately, the mayor was not alone while this was happening but was holding a meeting with legislative leaders that was focusing on gun violence in the city. At that point, he probably could have left well enough alone, but he'd seen enough TV to know that it wouldn't be wise to leave any witnesses around, so he unloaded the remaining bullets in his gun into the four legislators who were there, all of whom would soon die of their wounds.

"Jamming another clip into the gun, the mayor raced out of his office, took the elevator down to the parking garage, and managed to escape from the building before any alarms went off. The first thing he did after leaving the building was to hijack a car that happened to be driven by a woman who was high on amphetamines. Not a good choice! A couple of minutes later, the mayor's car was found, and there was a person at the scene who had taken down the license plate number of the woman's car, and it isn't long before the cops have the mayor in their sights. This is where it begins to get really interesting! However, I don't want to completely spoil the book for you, so I'm going to stop here."

There was a rather long silence in the room as everyone digested the implications, assuming there were any, of Barker's book. Gregory, whose taste in literature tended towards the erudite and philosophical, was left speechless by what he considered to be the stupidest plot he had ever heard in his life. Grasping around for something appropriate to say, he said, "I read the other day that Barker has now sold almost five hundred million books."

"Yes, that's true," said Jeff, "and Stephen King has only sold three hundred and fifty million so that gives you an idea of Barker's stature. And the most amazing thing is that I found a copy of his new book inside the house while we were inspecting it this morning. It was a galley proof from the printer, and according to a typewritten note that lay on top of the book, it's scheduled to be shipped to the book stores two weeks from today. I haven't read it yet, of course, but the title is a doozy: _The Case of the Severed Head."_

"I suppose," said Gregory, in a reflective way, "that with his death, the sales from his books will skyrocket."

"I should say so! My advice would be to get down to the book store immediately and scoop up everything you can by him before everything is ripped off the shelves."

"Yes," said Eleanor, "that sounds like good advice."

"Let's get back to the case for a minute," said Jeff. "Do either of you know whether the two of them were experiencing difficulties in their marriage?"

'No," said Gregory, "I never saw anything that would indicate a problem."

"And you?" said Jeff to Eleanor.

"Actually...I don't know whether I should talk about this, inspector, because I wouldn't want anyone to get in trouble over something that probably doesn't amount to anything."

Gregory looked at his wife in astonishment, while Jeff took out his notebook and flipped through it until he found what he was looking for. Looking up at Eleanor, he said, "You must be referring to the affair Barker had with his intern."

"His intern?" said Gregory to Jeff.

"She was a young woman, no more than twenty, that he employed to prepare his books for the publisher. Do you happen to know anything about this affair, Mrs. Webster?"

"Not specifically, but..."

"Please tell me what you know, Mrs. Webster—otherwise, it will just make my job that much more difficult."

"I'm sure the young woman who was involved with Barker had nothing to do with what happened to him."

"But you know something about her?" said Jeff.

"It was only because Gertrude talked to me about it a couple of months ago."

"And what did she say?" said Jeff.

"We were just talking on the phone like we usually do when she said, 'Eleanor, I think something is going on between Barker and Jeannette Cummings. The other night, he didn't come home until midnight, and when he did, his clothes were all rumpled—it looked like he had been in a wrestling match.' Do you want me to go on, Inspector Willard?"

"Please do."

"I tried to calm Gertrude down, but then she told me something so shocking that I couldn't think of a thing to say. What Gertrude said was that after Barker fell asleep that night, she searched through his pants and briefcase, and in his briefcase, she found some photos of Jeannette. And, well...Jeannette had been posing in the photos."

"Posing?"

"Yes, posing."

"Please explain, Mrs. Webster."

"There were about two dozen photos that were divided into two packets. In the first packet, Jeannette had been wearing a bikini and was standing against a wall in a way that Gertrude described as provocative. Very suggestive, if you follow my meaning."

"What about the second packet?" said Jeff.

"That's the part I really don't like to talk about, inspector. Please remember that this is only what Gertrude told me, but what she said was that Jeannette was topless in most of the photos, and there were even a couple where she was both topless and bottomless, if that's the right word. It was enough to make me almost vomit, and I know that Gertrude was extremely upset by the whole thing."

"What did you advise her to do, Mrs. Webster?"

"I had no idea what to say. What can one say?"

"Did Mrs. Drule say what she intended to do about the situation?"

"She said that she was going to put her foot down."

"Anything else?"

"No, except that about two weeks afterwards, she phoned me and told me that the problem had been resolved. To make a long story short, she said that she had confronted Barker with two of the photos, the bottomless ones, and he had quickly begged for her forgiveness. I know many people would describe Gertrude as a meek woman, but that's not always the case. She can be very determined when she's provoked."

"So she told you that they had reconciled?"

"Oh no—not right away. Before Gertrude would forgive him, she made him go down to his office and confront Jeannette. Only he didn't go alone—she went with him. From what Gertrude told me, it was a really terrible scene because when Jeannette began to protest her innocence, Gertrude took out one of the bottomless photos and showed it to her. Except that it wasn't the original photo—Gertrude had found some photographic shop where she had it blown up into poster size. How would you like to see a life-sized naked picture of yourself? It's such a revolting idea to me. So even though Gertrude had been devastated by the photos, I thought that she was rather cruel about the whole thing. I met Jeannette once, and she didn't seem like a brazen woman to me, so I'm sure she was very embarrassed to be staring at a large picture of her naked body."

"And that was the end of her relationship with Barker?"

"I guess so—Gertrude told me that Jeannette burst into tears and ran out of the office."

"Alright, Mr. and Mrs. Webster, that's all the questions I have for you right now--you've been quite helpful."

# CHAPTER SEVEN: "MY FATHER'S NOVELS WERE SOMEWHAT WORSE THAN REGURGITATED VOMIT."

1

Jeff went back to the police station and reviewed the evidence. On the night of their murder, Gertrude and Barker Drule had gone out to eat at Fallon's, an upper-class restaurant that was located about three miles north of Boulevard Hills. Jeff knew about this because of a quick conversation he had in the morning with the Drule's older daughter, Lenore, who lived slightly less than a half mile away from her parents' house. Lenore had told him that she talked to her mother the previous evening, and she had mentioned that they were planning on dinner at Fallon's and would be leaving the house between seven and eight. Jeff phoned the owner of the restaurant who remembered that the Drules had arrived around seven-thirty and departed around nine. Jeff felt confident in the restaurant owner's time frame because Barker, being world famous, was someone that the owner obviously doted over.

"I brought their wine over to them personally, inspector. If you're interested in the specifics, they ordered a five-hundred-dollar bottle of Merlot. That wasn't unusual because Mr. Drule only drank the very best wines."

"So he came to your restaurant frequently?"

"He certainly did, and he was an honored customer. We had a special table reserved for him—it was in an alcove at the back where he and his wife could have some privacy. The first time he came to Fallon's, he sat at a regular table, and within ten minutes, he was swamped with autograph seekers. Someone inside the restaurant had been rude enough to go outside and tell people on the street that Barker was inside, and it was like a swarm of hungry locusts had invaded my place. It was absolutely terrible—someone bumped into Mr. Drule's table and knocked a full glass of wine into his wife's lap. I suppose I shouldn't tell you this, but I was so infuriated that I pulled my shotgun out from under the bar and told everyone standing around Barker that they had ten seconds to leave."

"I'm surprised Barker ever came back," said Jeff.

"I pacified Mr. Drule by giving him a meal on the house, along with a free bottle of our most expensive wine—a thousand-dollar Cabernet. And also, I showed him the alcove near the back of the restaurant, and after that, he always came at least once a week—usually on Mondays. I had him call ahead so that the alcove would be all set up for him, and what we did was we had him come in through a side door so that the other customers in the restaurant wouldn't see him."

"Did you happen to notice anything unusual about them last night?"

"No, I can't say that I did. Actually, they seemed to be in a pleasant mood and even ordered drinks after they had finished their dinner."

2

At the crime scene, Gertrude's purse had been found on the front seat of the car, and Barker still had his wallet in his pants pocket, so it wasn't likely that robbery had been the motive for the murders. Also, the fact that each victim had been shot four times, with one shot being to their heads, told Jeff that the slaying of the Drules was personal—these murders were more like executions than anything else.

Carefully, Jeff went over the facts from the crime scene. The Drules had left the restaurant somewhere around nine, and if they had returned home without making any stops, they would have arrived around nine-fifteen, perhaps a couple of minutes later. Barker lived well back from the road, and the driveway was almost one hundred and fifty feet long and lined with large oak and maple trees. Since it was August, he hadn't driven the car into the garage but had stopped about fifteen feet in front of it.

Barker's body had been found about three feet behind the car, while his wife's body was sprawled on the front seat of the car. Most likely, Barker had left the car and was walking behind the car when he had been shot. Perhaps he was on his way to open the passenger-side door for Gertrude.

It appeared that the killer had then gone over to the passenger-side door, opened it, and shot Gertrude in the same manner—three shots to the body and one to the head. Gertrude had undoubtedly faced her attacker because she was lying on her back with her head near the steering wheel. An interesting fact was that both the driver's-side door and passenger-side door were open about a half inch. From this, Jeff surmised that the killer, after shooting Gertrude in the body three times while he or she stood on the passenger side of the car, had walked around to the driver's side so that it would be easy to fire a shot into the victim's head.

To Jeff, the head shots meant that the killer was probably motivated by revenge and wanted to be absolutely positive that the Drules were dead. Jeff was puzzled by the fact that Gertrude had apparently not attempted to flee from the car. Wouldn't a person, after hearing the gunshots behind the car, have either tried to make a run for it or at least locked the passenger-side door before attempting to crawl out the driver's-side door?

There was, however, an obvious possibility that could account for Gertrude's lack of movement as her killer approached. Perhaps she had never heard the shots that killed her husband. Jeff thought it was odd that no one nearby had heard any gunshots around the time of the murder. There had been a canvas done of the neighborhood in the morning, and it turned out that there were a number of people home in the two houses that were closest to the Drule's house. It was true that the houses were a little over a hundred yards away, but still, it was a warm and humid night in the middle of August, so the windows in the houses had been open, and it seemed like someone should have heard the shots.

So had the killer used a silencer? This opened up a sinister array of possibilities because it was rare to find an amateur using a silencer. That's what the pros used. Had Barker been killed because of something that was connected to his writing endeavors? He was a millionaire many times over, and it stood to reason that he might have more than a few enemies. Or perhaps his murder was like the John Lennon murder—some crazy dingbat who had gone off the deep end and wanted to become famous as the man who had killed Barker Drule.

As for Jeannette Cummings, Jeff was able to quickly rule her out as a suspect. About two weeks after Gertrude had confronted Barker in his office, Jeannette had moved to England, where she was now working for a large publishing house. Jeff talked to both her and her supervisor on the phone, and he said that Jeannette had been in the office at 8:30 A.M. Since the murders occurred between 2 A.M. and 3 A.M London time and a flight to London took eight hours, there was no way that Jeannette could have pulled the trigger.

3

Jeff knew that the first people to check out were the obvious ones—the members of Barker's family, including the curious character who had been living upstairs in the Drule house for the last fifteen years. This would be Barker's father, Dalton Drule. Now eighty-two, he had nothing to offer the police when they questioned him in the morning. Cranky and irascible, he said that he had gone to bed at eight, awakened around eleven, and had then taken his night pills and slept until early in the morning without hearing anything unusual. His bedroom faced the back yard of the house, so even if he was awake when the murders happened, he wouldn't have heard anything if the killer had used a silencer. Jeff was shocked by the old man's attitude—he actually seemed to be happy that his son had died. "I couldn't believe it when I came out this morning and saw Barker sprawled on the pavement. And then, when I looked into the car, I saw Gertrude, and she wasn't what anyone would call a pretty sight, not that she ever was. To tell you the truth, inspector, I'm not going to miss them because they lived a ridiculous life that was financed with all the ill-gotten gains my son made off his seedy pulp fiction."

Besides Dalton, there were Barker's three children who were now in their mid-to-late twenties. Lenore lived alone in a condominium that was less than ten minutes walking distance of her parents' house; Raylene lived with her boyfriend in a condo that was about three miles away from the murder scene; and Ricky lived in a rundown apartment in Somerset, a small town that was about ten miles south of Boulevard Hills. Jeff had contacted all three, and within the next twenty-four hours he talked to all of them, along with Barker's father. By the time he was finished with his four conversations, he had come to the very obvious conclusion that the Drules were not a happy family.

First up was Lenore. Considerably overweight, she wasn't the type of woman who paid any attention to her hair or used any makeup, and Jeff summed up the general impression she made on him with the word slovenly. Her clothes were dark and faded, and she spoke in a flat and unenthusiastic tone.

Jeff Willard: "Ms. Drule, do you mind if I call you Lenore?"

Lenore Drule: "Sure—why not? Everyone else does."

Willard: "What we're trying to do today is obtain some background information on your parents. We're particularly interested in anyone who may have disliked them."

Drule: "I'm probably not going to be able to help you much because I wasn't really close to them and only saw them on special occasions."

Willard: "You mentioned to me earlier that your mother had told you that she was planning to go out to dinner with your father last night."

Drule: "Yes, that wasn't unusual. They often went to Fallon's, especially on Monday night."

Willard: "So this was common knowledge?"

Drule: "I couldn't say. The reason I knew about it was because my mother told me one day that they liked to go to Fallon's on Monday night, but I don't know whether she told anyone else. If she did, it would only have been to people that she trusted because my father liked to keep his personal life secret."

Willard: "Yes, I gather he was hounded by autograph seekers."

Drule: "I suppose so. I know when I'm introduced to people and they hear my last name, they'll ask me if I'm related to my father. It gets to be rather tiring, especially since I don't like his books."

Willard: "No? How come?"

Drule: "Mr. Willard, I've attended college for a number of years, and I really have a difficult time coming up with words to describe my father's books, but I'll try. I thought they were cheap, trashy, vulgar, ridiculous, obnoxious, and nauseating. I've read some truly great novels, but I would say that my father's novels were somewhat worse than regurgitated vomit. Not that I've read many of them, thank God. Offhand, the only title I can remember is _Blood Pools and Brain Splatter._ That's the one where the deranged husband threw his wife into a wood chipper and then invited his mother-in-law over for dinner. She was sixty-five, but the husband had some kind of perverted sexual thing going on with her, and that's why he threw his wife into the wood chipper. The book was so bad that when I finished it, which is something that I should never have done, I ripped it up into small pieces and flushed it down the toilet. And then, after that, I washed my hands to get all of my father's literary gunk off me."

Willard: "I think your father was just trying to write books for the market, books that would sell."

Drule: "That's just a fancy way of saying that as a novelist, he was a prostitute who lay down before the god called gold."

Willard: "What did you think of him personally?"

Drule: "Outside of his so-called writing activities?"

Willard: "Yes, outside of that."

Drule: "To be honest, it's hard for me to separate the two. When you have a father who's constantly writing about rape and murder, it's not easy to be objective."

Willard: "I don't believe there were too many rapes in his books, Lenore. To be honest with you, I've read all his books, and I can only remember two."

Drule: "Not too many rapes? I guess you don't know about his pen name."

Willard: "He had a pen name?"

Drule: "Yes—back when he was younger, he published probably at least ten books where he used the name Ripper Boddis. Later on, when he became famous, the back covers on those books would always let you know that Ripper Boddis was a pseudonym for Barker Drule. It was my great misfortune to read one of these books, and it turned out to be just another one of my Dad's sick sexual fantasies. I believe it was called _Virgins No More_ or maybe it was _The_ _Violated Virgins_. This one was about a guy who broke into single women's houses at night and raped them. Very inspiring! Especially when it's your father who's putting all this insane nonsense down on paper. And just to show you how sick my father really was, almost all the women my father's fantasy character raped ended up falling in love with him. I can truthfully say that _Virgins No More_ is the worst book I've ever read in my life. And the ending! In the end, the guy gets murdered by one of the women he raped but not because he had raped her. Oh no! Here we have a plot twist that is worthy of a narcissistic sexual predator. The reason the woman stabs him to death in his sleep is because she found out that he had raped someone else. I can still remember a line from the book when the woman was talking to the guy the night before she murdered him: 'I thought you only liked to rape me.' Well, boo-hoo-hoo. We all do have our problems, don't we?"

Willard: "So, to sum up, I guess it would be fair to say that you didn't like your father?"

Drule: "It was a little more than that, inspector. I thought he was repulsive and then some."

Willard: "How about your mother? Did you like her?"

Drule: "Minimally. At least she wasn't writing books that should cause you to be arrested for inspiring violence towards women, but I can't say that I had much feeling for her, except, perhaps, in a generic way."

Willard: "A generic way?"

Drule: "Since she was my mother, I felt she deserved some respect, but as the years passed by and she made no attempt to divorce my father, my respect for her diminished considerably."

Willard: "What can you tell me about your grandfather?"

Drule: "Basically, he was always...I don't know how to say this exactly, but when I lived at the house with my parents, he was like my protector, so I appreciated that, but he was also a very difficult person to be around, especially in the morning. You certainly didn't want to be anywhere near him before he had his cup of coffee because he was just a total mess as he wandered around in that greasy grey bathrobe that he always wore—it must have been at least twenty years old. I know that a couple of years ago, my mother and father were talking about putting him into a nursing home, but Gramps seemed to have some kind of hold over my father, so nothing ever came of it. Gramps owned a gun, you know."

Willard: "What kind of gun?"

Drule: "I have no idea because I couldn't tell you the difference between one gun and another. I saw it once—it was black, and I know that he also had a silencer for it."

Willard: "How do you know that?"

Drule: "He mentioned it one time when my mother was nagging him for shooting the gun out the kitchen window."

Willard: "He shot the gun out the kitchen window? What was he shooting at?"

Drule: "Squirrels and birds. There's a big woods behind our house, and since there's a cliff about a quarter mile away, it didn't seem like that dangerous a thing for him to do. My father had the whole area fenced off to prevent all the crazy types from coming onto the property, which meant that Gramps could pretty much fire at will."

Willard: "Did he do this often?"

Drule: "Often enough that no one in the family went into the back yard unless they knew where Gramps and his gun were. And the grossest part was when he hit something. That didn't happen very often because he was a terrible shot, but once in a while, he would get a squirrel and then he'd go running out into the yard with that weird cackle of his and pick up the poor thing with a large pair of tongs that he had. Later, after we'd all gone to sleep, he'd come downstairs, cut the head off the squirrel, skin it, and put the rest of it into the oven. 'There's nothing like squirrel meat,' he'd tell me. All I can say is that I'm glad he didn't write any novels because he probably would have come out with something even grosser than my father's lame-brained productions."

Willard: "Were you close to Raylene?"

Drule: "For a while, but that was when we were younger because we drifted apart after she came back from college. Raylene always tended to overdo things, and she became obsessed with a novel that she had begun a couple of years after she graduated from college. I think she assumed that because her last name was Drule, people would be tripping over themselves to buy it, but so far as I know, nothing ever came of it."

Willard: "What was the title?"

Drule: " _The Secret Within_ \--it's about two dysfunctional families where someone's uncle rapes his niece. I guess, for some reason, everyone in my family likes to write about rape."

Willard: "Did your father ever do anything sexually inappropriate with you or Raylene?"

Drule: "No, he pretty much left us alone. What with all his greasy novels, he was a busy man."

# CHAPTER EIGHT: THANKSGIVING DAY DINNER AT THE DRULE HOUSE

Raylene Drule was twenty-seven, and unlike her sister, she was a truly striking woman with a very full but perfect figure, dark blond hair that fell to her shoulders, and a face to die for. She was dressed elegantly in a white silk blouse and a black skirt that stopped about two inches above her knees. To Jeff, she gave off the impression of a competent professional woman who was also both pleasant and sincere. Jeff was married, with two kids, but it was difficult for him to take his eyes off Raylene's face, and when he did, they seemed to wander immediately to her body. Embarrassed by his lack of professionalism, he spent most of the interview pretending to write down relevant notes on a piece of paper that he kept in front of him. It was a needless effort because all the interviews at the station were taped, but at least it served to distract him from a woman who had to be the most beautiful woman in Boulevard Hills.

Raylene had left for a ten-day vacation in the resort town of Eagle Lake three days before the murders and had only heard about them when Lenore contacted her on the phone just after the bodies of her parents had been discovered.

Jeff Willard: "I've never been to Eagle Lake—is this the first time you've vacationed there?"

Raylene Drule: "No, this is the third year in a row that I've gone to Eagle Lake. I can't even begin to tell you how enjoyable it is to get away from Boulevard Hills and relax by the lake for a few days."

Willard: "How many miles is Eagle Lake from Boulevard Hills?"

Drule: "It's quite a ways—probably eighty miles."

Willard: "And you go there alone?"

Drule: "Not until this year—my boyfriend Jed went with me the last two times, but he had a rush order come up at work, so the plan was that we would meet up at Eagle Lake on Thursday, which would at least give us three days together."

Willard: "I'm sure you must have a lot on your mind right now, Raylene, but there are some questions I need to ask you about your parents."

Drule: "It's just such a terrible thing—who could have done something like that to them?"

Willard: "That's what we're trying to find out. When was the last time you saw your mother and father?"

Drule: "It would have been the week before last sometime—I think it was Wednesday night. I stopped by there after work to have dinner with them."

Willard: "Did they seem upset in any way?"

Drule: "No, not that I noticed."

Willard: "What can you tell me about your father?"

Drule: "What would you like to know?"

Willard: "How would you categorize your relationship with him?"

Drule: "Distant but friendly. I wasn't like my sister Lenore—she despised him. Have you talked to her yet?"

Willard: "Yes—about an hour ago."

Drule: "You must have got an earful about dear old Dad from her. She always took his books so personally—as if they were written for her eyes only. And when I say his books, I also mean the ones that were written under his pen name. Ripper...I can't remember the last name."

Willard: "Ripper Boddis."

Drule: "How tacky! But I have to admit that my father really knew how to write for his audience. That's the whole trick with writing—find an audience and then write them a book. When it came to doing that, my father was a genius. He really was."

Willard: "Did you read many of his books?"

Drule: "Three or four of them. Basically, I thought they were so wretched that they were actually kind of funny. The one I remember best was called _The Case of the Butchered Orphan,_ and while I was reading it, I had a hard time believing that anyone could take it seriously. That's the novel where my father, in the final chapter, has the mayor sitting in the front seat of a car that's being driven by a woman who's high on amphetamines, but when she tries to pass a truck loaded with store mannequins that are being taken to the dump, she loses control of the car and flies off the Brooklyn Bridge before crashing onto a ferry packed with drunken tourists from someplace out west. I suppose it would be a fantastic scene in a movie, especially if you were about ten years old."

Willard: "It depends on your point of view, Raylene— _The Case of the Butchered_ _Orphan_ has always been one of my favorite books by your father."

Drule: "I'm sorry, inspector—I didn't know that. It just goes to show that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe I'm just jealous of my father because I wrote a novel a couple of years ago, and it bombed."

Willard: "What was your book about?"

Drule: "It was about a young woman who was raped by her uncle. But alas! No one was murdered; there was no blood pouring out into the hallways; and no decapitated bodies ever showed up on the back porch. Luckily, I've moved on—I've got an excellent job where I make eighty thousand a year, and my literary adventures are now a thing of the past."

Willard: "How about your mother? Did you like her?"

Drule: "Not all that much—actually, my father was more entertaining to be around, although that's not saying much when you're comparing him to my mother. I suppose it's a terrible thing to say, but my mother was kind of pathetic. She never really had any accomplishments to speak of and just rode my father's coattails into that mansion they were living in. Not that I'm blaming her—I'd probably do exactly the same thing if some guy came along who was a multimillionaire. But my mother was rather stuffy, while my father had a fairly good sense of humor, especially when he had a couple of cocktails in him. Plus, he wasn't conceited about his literary accomplishments—I think he knew that his books weren't very good, but I know his attitude was that as long as people bought them, the joke was on the reader."

Willard: "Did you have any dealings with your grandfather?"

Drule: "No thank you! He was too gross for me, and it's been years since I had a conversation with him. Basically, he was a dirty old man who was always staring at me every time I went over there. And he wasn't staring at my face, believe me. He'd just stand there and gawk at my breasts like he was a person in a hypnotic trance. There was even one time when I think he was trying to expose himself to me—imagine the absurdity of a guy his age trying to expose himself to a woman of my age. After that episode, I always found an excuse to leave the room when he came into it."

Willard: "Did you know that he kept a gun in his room?"

Drule: "Sure, we all knew about that—I think I remember him saying that he kept it in a chest that was under his bed. God help you if went waltzing around in the back yard because you were tired of sitting around in that peculiar house. I was always uncomfortable over there—for some reason, my mother kept the temperature at seventy-eight in the winter. And the funny thing was that during the summer, she kept it at sixty-four—it was so cold in there that I'd have shivering attacks. But to get back to Gramps—he mostly stayed in his room, and that was a good thing because nobody really liked him. Probably the reason my mother and father tolerated him shooting his gun out his bedroom window was that it gave him something to do and kept him out of our hair."

Willard: "Do you have any idea what kind of gun your grandfather owned?"

Drule: "I think he said it was a Glock, but I may be wrong because I never really paid much attention to him when he was talking."

Willard: "Do you see much of your brother?"

Drule: "Not that much, especially the last four or five years. When he was in high school, he was fun to be around, but now, unfortunately, he has a lot of problems with drugs. I'm surprised that he hasn't been arrested on a drug charge yet—maybe he's toned it down some since the last time I saw him."

Willard: "Is there anything else that you'd like to tell me?"

Drule: "Yes...I've been debating to myself whether I should mention this to you because it probably has nothing to do with what happened to my parents, but it probably wouldn't be right for me to withhold this information. My mother always called it the dark and dirty secret that could never be told to anyone outside the family. And also, it's unlikely that Lenore would talk to you about this because she's spent years trying to bury the traumatic memories of what happened to her."

Willard: "What was traumatic?"

Drule: "I'm only saying this because I have my suspicions, inspector, but I'm not saying what those suspicions are. What happened—and remember, this was a long time ago—was that my father molested Lenore. Molested is too mild a word—to be blunt about it, he raped her. Did Lenore talk about this with you at all?"

Willard: "No, this is the first that I've heard about it. When did--"

Drule: "Let me just say a few things before you ask me any questions about this. I was only twelve at the time, so Lenore would have been thirteen. That means this happened fifteen years ago, and memories can change over the years. I'm sure they haven't changed for Lenore, but it's not surprising that she didn't mention this to you because the decision was made in my family to bury the whole thing and pretend that it never happened, and I think Lenore has always accepted that decision. She probably figures that if she doesn't talk about what happened to her, then it doesn't exist. Anyways, when all this went down—it would have been in 1999—Lenore and my mother both talked to me about it. Is it worth it for me to talk about this? Now that I think about it, I can't see what connection this has to what happened last night."

Willard: "Raylene, when you say that you have suspicions, that can only mean one thing. Do you suspect Lenore of murdering your parents?"

Drule: "No! Absolutely not—she would never do something like that. Let me repeat that, inspector—she would never have murdered my parents. But since you're taking my comment about suspicion and applying it to Lenore, I had better tell you who I am suspicious of, and that would be my grandfather. I realize that's a serious accusation, and I may be completely off base. Remember, it's only a suspicion and a vague one at that. I...I don't know anything really."

Willard: "Let's step back for a moment, Raylene. You said that both your mother and Lenore talked to you about what your father had done to Lenore. How did you first hear about it?"

Drule: "Lenore told me. It was just after it happened—like maybe a half hour—and she was totally hysterical. Who wouldn't be? She was sobbing and carrying on and talking about how she wanted to end her life. Like I said, I was only twelve, and I barely even knew what sex was about. I knew, but I didn't know, if that makes any sense to you. But...what I can remember now is that when Lenore was telling me about what my father had done to her, I knew that something really awful had happened and that it was going to change all of our lives. And obviously, my biggest fear was that my father might turn on me next, so I spent the next week clinging to my mother."

Willard: "Can you tell me what Lenore said to you about the actual incident?"

Drule: "I'll try, but some parts of this I don't remember all that well. What I do remember most vividly, even to this day, is how afraid I was of my father during this time and how much I did everything I could to avoid him unless there were other people around. As far as what Lenore told me, she said that she had been alone in the house with my father, and he had come up to her bedroom where she had been studying...and...I think it started out like playful wrestling, but then it became something that wasn't playful anymore."

Willard: "So then your mother talked to you?"

Drule: "Yes, she took Lenore and me aside—it was probably a couple of days later. I was still quaking in my boots and couldn't stop thinking about all these horrible things that might be going to happen to me. You have no idea what it's like to be a twelve-year-old girl and have to face something like this. Lenore had told me how he had just ripped her clothes off, and that was the image I couldn't get out of my mind.

"Anyways, my mother took the company line and was in favor of covering the whole incident up. She had, to give her some credit, thrown my father out of the house immediately, but she was already hinting that he might come back. She told Lenore and me that my father had made a terrible mistake but that if he did come back, we would be safe because she would never be leaving us alone with him again. And I have to admit that she did adhere to that promise after she let him return. But still—I'm sure you'd agree with me that it isn't right to let the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl slide."

Willard: "Earlier, you said that you liked your father more than your mother. How could that be?"

Drule: "Inspector, I didn't really like either of them that much, but by the time I was in my mid-twenties, the incident with Lenore had begun to seem like old history. I know that would be hard for an outsider to understand, but since it was a one-time event that was never repeated, I gradually didn't think about it much anymore as other events in my life, like my job and my relationship to Jed, began to occupy my time and emotions. On the other hand, there's no doubt that Lenore was seriously scarred by what my father had done to her and still suffers from the memories of that awful day. For the victim, the pain never really goes away—I know that."

Willard: "So why are you suspicious of your grandfather?"

Drule: "He moved in with us just before my mother let my father back into the house. And right away, he kind of took a liking to Lenore. I don't think it was an entirely healthy liking, but I think after he found out about the rape, he took it upon himself to protect Lenore, and--"

Willard: "How did he find out about it?"

Drule: "Lenore told me that my mother had talked to him and told him everything. My grandfather is not someone that you want to mess around with—he's really old fashioned when it comes to right and wrong, and he believes that people who do wrong should be punished. One of those eye-for-an-eye people. According to what my mother later told me, Gramps had a talk with my father and scared the wits out of him. In fact, she said that Gramps had not only threatened my father with his gun but had also told him that if he ever fooled around with me or Lenore, he would shoot him."

Willard: "But all that happened fifteen years ago. If you're saying that he murdered your father because of what he did to Lenore, then why did your grandfather wait so long to do anything?"

Drule: "Well, that leads me to the other thing, and this has to do with my mother. Back in the fall of 2012, she became fed up with Gramps and began this push to have him placed into a nursing home. She wasn't shy about mentioning it, even when he was around. There was, for instance, the very embarrassing scene at the Thanksgiving Day dinner table that year when she suddenly blurted out, 'We should all do everything we can to enjoy this meal because it's the last one that Gramps will be having with us.' Can you believe it? He was _my_ grandfather, of course, but she always called him Gramps or Granddad—I think she liked to mock him.

"When my mother said this would be his last meal with us, I immediately assumed that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and I began to prepare myself for some awful announcement. Not that I cared about my grandfather, but nobody in their right mind wants to hear that someone has terminal cancer. However, nothing could have prepared me for what my grandfather did next. Getting up from the table, he took a leg of turkey off his plate, walked over to my mother, and began to try and stuff it down her throat. Naturally, my father and Ricky tried to intervene, but in all the commotion, my mother's chair tipped over, and she went flying over backwards with my grandfather right on top of her.

"By the time Ricky and my Dad had pulled him off my mother, there was turkey juice all over her face and dress. 'Go up to your room,' my father shouted at Gramps who said, in a sarcastic voice, 'Can I turn my TV on, Daddy, or do I have to go straight to bed?' My father began to advance on him, so my grandfather retreated, but just when he reached the door, he said, 'We'll see who's here next year and who isn't. There's no way that you're going to stuff me into a nursing home, Gertrude. It isn't going to happen, and if you mention it one more time, I'll do something that none of you will ever forget.'"

Willard: "So is that why you suspect that your grandfather might have shot your parents?"

Drule: "I know all this occurred almost two years ago, but to be frank about it, I think it's a possibility because I'm sure my mother didn't want Gramps living at the house anymore. Of course, for all I know, the murders may have been committed by someone who had no connection to our family. You'd know a lot more about that angle than I would, and if I've falsely accused my grandfather, then I apologize for bringing all this up."

# CHAPTER NINE: "THOSE TWO GIRLS WOULD NEVER MURDER ANYONE."

1

The interview with Raylene certainly opened up a number of avenues that Jeff would have to investigate, and it also furthered his impression that some member of the Drule family had murdered Barker and Gertrude. Besides all the anecdotal evidence that Raylene and Lenore had provided, there was also the matter of the Drule estate and who would inherit what. He'd had someone in the department working on that since early in the morning, and by three o'clock he had found out that Barker's Drule's will stipulated that ninety percent of his net worth would go to his wife, while Ricky would receive six percent and Lenore and Raylene would each receive two percent. There was, however, a provision in the will that accounted for the fact that Gertrude might predecease him, and although it was unclear who had died first, the provision would undoubtedly be enforced by the probate court, especially since Gertrude hadn't left a will. The provision stipulated that Ricky would receive sixty percent of his father's estate, while Lenore and Raylene would each receive twenty percent. Although the proportions certainly favored Ricky, twenty percent of Barker's estate would hardly be an insubstantial amount—probably as much as twenty million, if not more. On top of that, there would be the continuing royalty stream from his books, so any one of his children had a monetary motive to murder him. There was also a stipulation in the will that Barker's father would receive two hundred thousand dollars a year, but for a man in his position, that didn't seem like a motive for murder. The Drule house was now likely to be sold, and Dalton would be forced to find new lodgings. However, although Dalton had no real financial motive to murder the Drules, it was clear, from what Raylene had told him about the Thanksgiving Day dinner, that Dalton might have been motivated by other, more personal, motives.

Because of the threats that Dalton had made at the dinner table, along with the possibility that he might have hidden his gun somewhere inside the house if he had murdered Barker and Gertrude, a search warrant was obtained for the entire house, and early that evening, Jeff and two other investigators went to the Drule house to begin a thorough search of the premises. To distract Dalton, Jeff took him down to the kitchen, and after setting up his tape recorder, he talked to him about the murder of his son and daughter-in-law.

Jeff Willard: "Mr. Drule, do you have any information that could help us solve this crime?"

Dalton Drule: "I can tell you who did it, if that's any help to you."

Willard: "And who would that be?"

Drule: "I've thought about it all day, and the conclusion I've come to is fairly obvious—it has to be Ricky Drule."

Willard: "Why do you suspect Ricky?"

Drule: "Somebody in the family murdered them, inspector. I may be eighty-two and have one foot in the grave, but I can understand that much. The person who did this was lying in wait for them—he knew the layout of the place, and he knew what time they'd be returning from that swanky, good-for-nothing restaurant they love so much. I went there once with the two of them, and I thought it was a horrible place—everyone was walking around with their noses in the air and pretending that they were members of some superior race. That, of course, was a perfect setting for Barker and Gertrude because they always thought they were superior to everyone else. And the only reason they felt that way was because of all those vicious little books that he wrote. Did you ever read the one about the cannibals? I think it was called _A_ _Feast for Two._ "

Willard: "Yes, I read that one."

Drule: "So you must know what I'm talking about. I don't know about you, but I don't find it very appealing to read about people eating other people, especially when it's part of an experiment to compare how humans taste in relation to animals."

Willard: "Actually, Mr. Drule, that wasn't really the key point of the plot."

Drule: "Pardon me, inspector—perhaps you can enlighten me. I guess I was distracted by the scene at the barbecue where they roasted some poor human critter up. At least he was dead as he turned on the spit, but the whole thing was totally repellant to me."

Willard: "I thought the book was more about—"

Drule: "It wasn't about anything, inspector. It was just another one of Barker's attempts to shock and horrify people. That's the trouble nowadays—everyone's always trying to read some hidden meaning into the latest collection of barbaric hogwash from writers like my son."

Willard: "You've never really said why you think Ricky was involved in the murders."

Drule: "For one thing, he had a lot to gain. Perhaps you don't know the provisions of the will?"

Willard: "Yes, I'm familiar with them—Ricky will receive sixty percent of the estate, but Lenore and Raylene will each receive twenty percent, so—"

Drule: "You're not trying to tell me that Lenore or Raylene were involved in this, are you?"

Willard: "No, but if you're saying that Ricky murdered his parents for financial gain, that could also apply to his sisters because Barker had a huge estate."

Drule: "Take my word for it, inspector--those two girls would never murder anyone. I've known them for a very long time, and they don't have it in them. Lenore has a big fear of guns—I know that because she'd always run out of the room when I brought my gun downstairs. I tried to show her how to use it one day, but she told me that she didn't ever want to touch a gun because she thought they were evil. Lenore has always had this peculiar thought in her mind that if you touch something with your bare hand that's supposedly evil, the energy from the evil thing will run up into your body and eventually destroy you. Believe it or not, she told me that was how people catch certain diseases, and that's also why she frequently wore gloves.

"And Raylene is just far too smart and successful to go around shooting people. She wrote the whole family off years ago, and I can't say that I blame her. I'm sure that if you look at her bank accounts, you'll see that she's loaded—not loaded like her father, but she enjoyed her job and was careful with money.

"That leaves Ricky. I'll bet you anything that he's behind this. He may have hired someone else to pull the trigger, so don't go eliminating him as a suspect if he happens to have an alibi. In fact, I'd be more suspicious of him if he had an alibi than if he didn't have one because he's certainly smart enough to cover his tracks. How much do you know about him, inspector?"

Willard: "Very little."

Drule: "OK, I'll give you a crash course on Ricky Drule. First of all, you're going to find out that he never graduated from high school but was expelled for selling drugs and assaulting a teacher. He was also, about a year after he was expelled, arrested for sexually assaulting a woman, but the charge was eventually dismissed when Barker paid the woman off. Barker told me all this, in case you're wondering how I know.

"Gertrude couldn't tolerate Ricky living in the house, so Barker found an apartment for him in downtown Boulevard Hills. However, the place burned down about two months after Ricky moved in—Barker always thought the fire had been set by Ricky, but since he was totally infatuated with the little jerk, he went out and found another apartment for him. Barker spoiled him rotten, and whenever Ricky did something really bad, like assault, rape, or arson, Barker had an excuse all ready. For the assault, it was the way the teacher had never shown Ricky any respect; for the rape, it was that the woman had led him on; and for the arson, it was just a prank that had gone too far.

"I know you're going to say that these things don't prove he murdered his parents, but a few years ago, when Ricky was about sixteen, he said something to me that I've never forgotten. We were up in my room, and he wanted to see my gun, so I showed it to him. After he asked me some questions about how to reload it, he said, 'How come this gun never makes any noise when you're shooting at the squirrels?' That's when I told him about the silencer I always used, and he was really curious about it and wanted to know where you could buy one and how much it would cost. 'So,' he said, 'if it ever came down to where I was in a desperate situation and had to shoot someone, then the silencer would be perfect, wouldn't it?'"

Willard: "So you're saying that his motive for murdering his parents was to get his hands on their money?"

Drule: "How much more motive do you need, inspector? He'll get a lot more money from Barker and Gertrude being dead than if he had hit the lottery on back-to-back weeks, and Ricky was a kid who was always desperate for money."

Willard: "Let me ask you something about Lenore. To your knowledge, did Barker ever molest her?"

Drule: "That's the first I've ever heard about it, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. One of his better selling novels was about that."

Willard: "Which one?"

Drule: " _The Rape of the King's Daughter_."

Willard: "I don't think I ever read that one."

Drule: "It was one of his Ripper Boddis novels—that was the name he used when he felt like writing a rape fantasy. Lenore was the one who brought that book to my attention. She'd found it in a magazine rack that they kept in the TV room, and after she had read about fifteen pages, she was, of course, totally disgusted."

Willard: "How old was Lenore when this happened?"

Drule: "Sixteen, maybe seventeen."

Willard: "And she showed you the book?"

Drule: "Yes. 'Look at this putrid thing,' she said to me. 'It's just so vile that everything in this house was bought with money from people who like to read about the rape of innocent young girls.'"

2

One of the detectives who had been searching through the house opened the door and beckoned to Jeff. He stepped outside the room, and the detective said, "We've torn the old man's room apart and can't find the gun. Maybe it's under a floorboard or something, but if it is, the floorboard is nailed down tight."

Given what Jeff knew about Dalton, it seemed odd that the gun hadn't been found in his room. Jeff returned to where the old man was sitting and said, "Mr. Drule, you've mentioned that you owned a gun. Can you tell me where it is?"

"What? You think I murdered those two?"

"Mr. Drule, they were murdered with a gun, so we do have to check out your weapon."

Dalton laughed derisively. "Fine—I'll tell you where it is, but you better not mess that gun up while you're doing the ballistic tests. I've had it for twenty years, and it's the best friend I have in this world."

"We'll be careful with it, Mr. Drule. Is the gun in your room?"

"It's in a small chest that's under my bed."

"Can you show it to me?"

"Alright—follow me." Dalton rose from his chair, and they walked out of the room together. Jeff noticed, as they were going up the stairs, that Dalton was rather spry for someone his age. Spry enough, in other words, to commit murder.

Seconds later, they walked into Dalton's room, and he went over to his bed, reached underneath it, and pulled out the chest. There was no lock on it, and after Dalton lifted the wooden top, he began to prowl through the chest. Finally, after almost a half-minute of an increasingly frantic search, he looked up at Jeff and said, "It isn't here." The old man was obviously distraught, and he tipped the chest upside down and emptied its contents on the floor. No gun. Next, Dalton grabbed a flashlight off a nearby table, got down on his knees, and peered under the bed.

Finally, he sat down on the bed and stared at Jeff. "So this is what it's come to...I never thought people in law enforcement would stoop this low."

"What are you talking about, Mr. Drule?"

"You're evil," said Dalton. "And now, I suppose, after stealing my gun, you're going to arrest me. I should have known better than to trust someone like you."

"I did not steal your gun, Mr. Drule."

"Stop quibbling over your words, sonny boy. Obviously, you didn't steal the gun because you were busy distracting me so that those two goons of yours could go through my room. That's just so evil."

"I assure you, Mr. Drule, that they had nothing to do with the theft of your weapon."

"Then who did? One of the bloody ghosts that my half-witted son was always writing about?"

"What makes you so certain that we stole your gun? Why couldn't it have been someone else?"

"Because it was here on Saturday! I know that for a fact because I used it that day. And now it's gone! And the only other people, outside of myself, who have been in this room are those two detectives of yours. So why don't you search them if you're really interested in finding the gun?"

3

Back at the police station, Jeff wrapped up a long day by considering the issue of the gun. Before he left the Drules' house, he had found out from Dalton that his gun was a Glock 17—the cartridge shells from this gun were 9mm, which matched the cartridge shells found at the scene of the murder. There were, of course, many 9mm guns, but given the fact that Dalton's gun was missing, it seemed fairly likely that it was the murder weapon. And obviously, the most logical explanation for the gun's disappearance was that Dalton had simply taken the gun for a walk and buried it somewhere near the house. Dalton didn't have a license to drive a car, and the only other car in the house, outside of the one Barker drove back from the restaurant, was parked in the double garage, directly behind where Barker had parked his car. So if Dalton had buried the gun, it couldn't be far away. Jeff knew they'd have to get out there the next morning and thoroughly search both the house and the surrounding area with metal detectors, and if they were lucky enough to find the gun, the case was as good as solved.

However, Jeff wasn't optimistic that they'd find the gun because of the way that Dalton had responded when he discovered that the gun was missing. He had appeared to be genuinely shocked and outraged, and Dalton certainly didn't seem like the type of man who had any talent for acting. Was it possible that someone had stolen the gun from him? Well, yes, it was possible, but it hardly seemed likely since the only other people living in the house were Barker and Gertrude. But on second thought, any one of the three kids could have entered the house without suspicion, and perhaps they had waited until Dalton had left his room. Jeff made a note to ask each of the Drule children if they had been to the house between Saturday, when Dalton claimed he had last seen the gun, and early Monday evening.

Finally, before he left the office that night, Jeff called Ricky Drule, and they agreed to meet at the police station at two o'clock on the following afternoon.

# CHAPTER TEN: "NOBODY IN THE LITERARY WORLD TAKES E-BOOKS SERIOUSLY.

1

The next morning, while four uniformed cops scoured the grounds around the Drule house, Brad examined Dalton's room. The old boy wasn't happy about it, of course, and for a few seconds, Jeff thought he was going to have to order him out of the room at gunpoint. Such a nasty old critter. "What are you going to do today, inspector?" said Dalton. "Plant some cocaine in my shoes and claim that I shot my son because he discovered I was a drug dealer? Or maybe you've jiggered things around in the evidence room and replaced the shells from the murder scene with shells from my Glock, and now you'll mysteriously find my Glock under the mattress in my bed. And don't tell me that hasn't been done before because my stupid son wrote about that exact same scenario in _The Case of the Armless Woman._ And in that book, an innocent man was convicted of chopping the woman's arms and head off with an ax before he was sent to death row."

Once Dalton was out of the room, Jeff inspected the windows to see if anyone could have entered that way—he was being extremely thorough and wanted to totally eliminate the possibility that an intruder had stolen the gun. There were two windows in the room and both were open a few inches, but it was difficult to move them up and down because the wood was swollen. Jeff looked at the sills, the panes, and the floor beneath the windows carefully and came to the conclusion that it was very unlikely that anyone had entered the room through either of the windows--there was a layer of dust on each window sill that had not been disturbed in weeks, if not months.

Going outside, Jeff checked underneath the windows of Dalton's room to see if he could detect any signs that a ladder had been used recently but couldn't find anything significant. Afterwards, he helped in the search for the gun, but by noon, they hadn't located it, and Jeff didn't think that they ever would. Of course, if the gun was buried a few feet under the earth, the metal detectors wouldn't notice it, but they hadn't found any signs that the earth had been disturbed anywhere near the mansion. Jeff went into the Drule's garage and looked at the two shovels that were there, and they gave no appearance of having been used recently—in fact, just like the windows in Dalton's room, the shovels had a layer of dust on them. So where was the gun?

2

Ricky Drule arrived fifteen minutes late and appeared to be exhausted and somewhat disoriented.

Jeff Willard: "Ricky, can you tell me the last time that you saw your parents?"

Ricky Drule: "It's been a while—maybe two weeks. No, that's not right--I think it was more recent than that."

Willard: "How much more recent?"

Drule: "What's today? Thursday?"

Willard: "No, it's Wednesday."

Drule: "Then it would have been last Sunday when I went to dinner at their house."

Willard: "Who else was at the dinner?"

Drule: "My parents, of course, and Lenore."

Willard: "What about Raylene?"

Drule: "No, she was on vacation—I think she went up to Eagle Lake. Ever since she got that job at the legal place, she likes to live like the rich people do."

Willard: "Was your grandfather there when you ate dinner?"

Drule: "Yes."

Willard: "For the whole meal?"

Drule: "Yes, because I can remember talking to him afterwards."

Willard: "Did you have Thanksgiving dinner with your parents a couple of years ago?"

Drule: "I think so."

Willard: "This would be the dinner where your grandfather tried to stick a leg of turkey down your mother's throat."

Drule: "Oh, I remember that. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. My mother was squirming around on the floor as Gramps leaned over her and tried to cram a turkey leg down her throat. I helped my father pull him off, but it was hard for me not to burst out laughing. My mother always made such a big deal of the holidays and dressed up like she had invited the President, but the only people at the table that day were all the misfits in our family. Maybe I shouldn't call Raylene a misfit, but the rest of us certainly qualify. Actually, my father was probably the biggest misfit of them all. I like decapitations as much as anyone else, but my father really overdid it. I tried to tell him that it was boring when there were more than three grisly murders in a novel, but he said that he'd done some kind of research on his books and found that his sales were directly correlated to the numbers of rapes and murders in them. I guess he had a point because you can't argue with success."

Willard: "Let's go back to when you were younger. Did you ever hear that your father had done something inappropriate with either Lenore or Raylene?"

Drule: "Like sexual?"

Willard: "Yes."

Drule: "No, although if something had happened, I doubt anyone would have said anything to me about it."

Willard: "Do you remember the time when your grandfather showed you how to use his gun?"

Drule: "What are you talking about? He never showed me how to use his gun."

Willard: "You're sure about that?"

Drule: "I'm absolutely positive."

Willard: "Did you go into his bedroom often?"

Drule: "Where are you coming up with these questions? In all the time I lived there, I don't remember ever going into his bedroom. He was really weird about that room—it was like his temple, and no one, not even my mother or father, was allowed in there."

Willard: "Did you know that he had a silencer for his gun?"

Drule: "Yes, I did, but that was because he was shooting the gun out the kitchen window one day, and it wasn't making hardly any noise—just a little zip, zip, zip—and when I asked him why, he told me that he had bought the silencer because my mother always freaked out when she heard the gun go off."

Willard: "How old were you when that happened?"

Drule: "Eleven or twelve—something like that."

Willard: "It couldn't have been when you were sixteen or seventeen?"

Drule: "No! Is that what Gramps told you? I don't know if you're aware of it, but my grandfather's memory is totally shot."

Willard: "Are you aware that your father left a will?"

Drule: "No, but I assumed that he had."

Willard: "So you don't know what the provisions of the will are?"

Drule: "Not a clue."

Willard: "Are you currently employed?"

Drule: "Just odds and ends—I never finished college, so the only jobs around here for people like me aren't even really fit for dogs."

Willard: "How do you support yourself?"

Drule: "By prayer and running drugs for the Mafia. What is this? The inquisition? Don't tell me that you think I killed my father?"

Willard: "You had a lot to gain by his death, Ricky, so unless you have an alibi, we have to look at you as a potential suspect."

Drule: "I can't believe you're saying stuff like this to me. I'll admit that I'm looking forward to spending my father's money, but I didn't murder him."

Willard: "Can you tell me where you were on Monday night?"

Drule: "I think I was hanging out at a bar downtown with some friends of mine."

Willard: "What time did you get there?"

Drule: "I don't really remember. Ten, maybe ten fifteen."

Willard: "And before then?"

Drule: "I guess I was home—I can't imagine where else I would have been."

Willard: "Was anyone with you?"

Drule: "No, I live alone."

Willard: "Let's go back to the dinner that you had at your parents' house on the night before the murder. What time did you get there?"

Drule: "I was late, which annoyed my mother, so it was probably six-fifteen or so."

Willard: "Was this Sunday dinner at your parents' house customary?"

Drule: "No, mostly we had dinner there during the big holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but occasionally, my mother would be in the mood to see all of us, so that was her preferred method for bringing us together."

Willard: "You already mentioned that Raylene wasn't there because she was at Eagle Lake. How about Lenore? What time did she arrive?"

Drule: "I couldn't tell you because she was already there when I showed up."

Willard: "And your grandfather ate with you that day?"

Drule: "Yes—I already told you that."

Willard: "Was your grandfather downstairs when you got there or was he still up in his bedroom?"

Drule: "I think he was downstairs, but I'm not positive. He usually comes down late, but I seem to remember that he was talking with Lenore in the living room when I first got there."

Willard: "What time did dinner begin?"

Drule: "Why are you so interested in this?"

Willard: "Some information has come up that relates to this dinner and what happened the following night. I can understand that these questions might seem irrelevant to you, but I assure you that they're not."

Drule: "OK, it doesn't make any difference to me. So what did you ask me? What time I left?"

Willard: "No—what I want to know is what time dinner began. These are important questions, so please do your best to answer them accurately."

Drule: "I don't wear a watch because I lost it a while ago, so all I can give you is a rough idea. I would say that dinner began around seven or maybe just a little bit later. My mother liked to sit around with us and do her social thing before she served the meal."

Willard: "And how long would you say dinner lasted?"

Drule: "Maybe until eight."

Willard: "And did you leave shortly after that?"

Drule: "Yes, my mother's dinner parties were a big bore to me. That's why Raylene almost never came to them unless it was during the holidays. Unlike Lenore and me, she was successful enough that she could just thumb her nose at my parents, but Lenore and I depended on them for cash from time to time, and I think it's fair to say that both of us were in the business of trying to humor them."

Willard: "Can you remember anything significant in terms of the conversation that evening?"

Drule: "It depends on what you mean by significant. My father was really excited about his new book—I believe he said the title was _The Case of the Severed Head_. He was always coming up with absurd titles like that. I can remember that he seemed particularly enthused by this book and thought that it might sell five million copies within a year. And then, like he always does, my father couldn't resist giving us a sneak preview of the story. It begins with this guy walking up a steep hill in San Francisco, and suddenly, rolling right down towards him is a severed head. Naturally, the guy is all freaked out because he's never seen a severed head before. And since the head is bouncing in this crazy and unpredictable way, the guy tries to avoid it, but the head bounces right into him, and he loses his balance and goes crashing onto the pavement. Just then, a car comes roaring down the hill, and the guy can see that the driver is waving a large machete out of the window. The guy leaps to his feet, but it's too late—the car comes roaring up beside him, and the driver's machete slashes through the air and chops through his neck, so now we have two severed heads rolling down the hill.

"I think," continued Ricky, "that the real reason Raylene never came to dinner was that she'd written a book once, and knowing her, it probably had a touch of class, while all my father ever wrote were these gruesome stories of people being slaughtered and raped. But my parents apparently didn't like Raylene's book, and they had a big fight with her at one of these Sunday dinners, and I can't remember ever seeing her much after that."

Willard: "When was this?"

Drule: "A couple of years ago. The conversation at the table was just going on and on about nothing, like it usually does, when RayIene said, 'So, Dad, I guess you found out that I published my novel as an e-book.' Before my father could say anything, my mother went off on this bizarre rant about how she and my father had already discussed with her the reasons why they didn't think the book should be published and that they had assumed she would comply with their request.

"My father thought that he was the absolute king of the writing world, so he said, 'Unfortunately, Raylene, e-books are just trash and will never amount to anything. Nobody in the literary world takes e-books seriously because everyone knows that they're just cheap imitations.'

"I could tell that Raylene was upset. 'Yes,' she said, 'I guess you would know all about cheap imitations. But what I want to know is why you had all your friends post one-star reviews to my book.'

"My father decided to play dumb, or maybe he didn't have anything to do with the reviews, so he just denied everything. But Raylene kept hammering away at him—I remember her saying that she had gotten about fifteen one-star reviews and not a single good review over a two-week period. I guess these were really insulting reviews—things like people saying that it was the worst book they had ever read and that even though she was the daughter of a famous author, she couldn't even write a coherent sentence.

"Finally, since Raylene wouldn't stop, my mother said, 'What difference does it make who wrote the reviews? Facts are facts, and you should accept the criticisms of others. Your father and I both tried to tell you that your novel wasn't very good, but you wouldn't listen to us, and now you're paying the price.'

"Raylene ignored my mother and kept asking my father if he was behind the reviews. Once again, it was my mother who came to my father's rescue. 'So what if it was?' she said to Raylene. 'It's entirely within our rights to post reviews to your book, especially since you're just trying to make money off your father's name. You have to realize that there aren't that many Drules in the world, and I'm worried that your father's brand will be tarnished by your novel. It takes years, even decades, to build up one's literary brand, and if you're just going to write a slapdash imitation of one of your father's books, then I think we have to take action so that people will be clear that we do not support or recommend your book.'

"With that, Raylene stormed out of the place, and I think, outside of the holiday dinners, she's never been back since."

Willard: "I'd like to ask you a few questions about the dinner on Sunday night. Do you remember, at any time while you were there, if anyone left the ground floor and went up to the second floor?"

Drule: "How should I know? I mostly sat in the living room and watched TV until we ate dinner."

Willard: "There's a set of stairs that lead from the living room to upstairs. Do you recall anyone walking up them while you were there?"

Drule: "No, but since I was watching TV, I would have had my back turned to the stairs."

Willard: "What other ways are there to reach upstairs?"

Drule: "There are the stairs that start in the kitchen, and there's also a flight of stairs that start in the garage. Sometimes, in the winter, my parents would use the stairs in the garage when they came home late at night and wanted to go straight to their bedroom."

Willard: "After dinner on Sunday night, did you leave the house before Lenore did?"

Drule: "Yes, she was out in the kitchen helping my mother when I left."

Willard: "Where was your grandfather?"

Drule: "He and my father were watching TV together. To be polite, I sat with them for ten minutes and then said that I had to be going."

Willard: "So you didn't go upstairs at all that night?"

Drule: "No." 

# CHAPTER ELEVEN: "MY FATHER WAS NUMBER ONE ON MY LIST OF MOST HATED PEOPLE."

1

The next morning, Jeff went over the four interviews that he had conducted with the Drule family, and the thing that really stood out to him was that only Raylene had claimed that Lenore was raped by her father. Both Ricky and Dalton said they had no knowledge of such a thing ever happening, while Lenore said that her father had never acted inappropriately around her. So what was up with that? Obviously, either Raylene or Lenore was lying, and the question was why.

Around noon, he talked to Raylene during her lunch break. It was warm outside, in the mid-eighties, so they sat at a small picnic table that was outside the building where she worked.

"Raylene," said Jeff, "as you may know, I've talked to Lenore, Ricky, and your grandfather. There seems to be a difference of opinion as to a certain incident that you said occurred to Lenore when she was thirteen. I'm speaking, of course, about your claim that she was raped."

"Really?" said Raylene. "You mean even my grandfather denied that it ever happened?"

"Not exactly—what he said was that he had no knowledge of it."

"That's amazing," said Raylene, who seemed genuinely surprised. "I don't understand why he would say that."

"But this incident did happen?"

"Inspector, I'm hardly going to make up a story like that. Do you suspect me of lying?"

"I didn't say that, Raylene, but it's fairly clear that both you and Lenore can't be telling the truth."

Raylene gazed at him calmly—such a sweet face...such beautiful blue eyes. Finally, she said, "I almost didn't mention anything about this to you, and now I wish I hadn't because by doing so, my integrity is being questioned. Furthermore, I doubt very much that what my father did to Lenore fifteen years ago is connected to the murder of my parents, but I have to tell you, inspector, that Lenore was definitely raped. As I mentioned to you two days ago, I talked to her just after it happened."

"How long after?"

"I don't know exactly—no more than an hour, and it was probably closer to twenty or thirty minutes. Lenore was still wearing the dress that my father had ripped when he raped her."

"Is there anything that you could think of that could help me to verify this?" said Jeff.

"A couple of things, perhaps. You might want to twist my grandfather's arm a bit. I don't know why he's reluctant to talk about it because he never liked my father much, but he definitely knows what happened to Lenore."

"How do you know that?"

"My mother told me that she discussed it with him, and also, a few days later, Lenore and I both talked to him, and he told us that he had threatened to shoot my father if he ever tried to molest us."

"Anything else that could help me to verify this?"

"I know all this happened a long time ago, but when Lenore was raped, my mother threw my father out of the house for about six months, and he stayed at a hotel in Boulevard Hills—I think it was the Hotel Lincoln, so you might be able to find some record that showed he stayed there."

"Raylene, I know when we talked before, you said that Lenore could never have murdered your father. Do you still feel that way today?"

"I do."

"But she was very traumatized by the incident with your father—correct?"

"As anyone would be," said Raylene.

"She never expressed any anger towards your father?"

"No more than I did, but I'll admit that she wasn't one to talk about her feelings—especially in regards to the rape. On the day it happened, she talked to me about it, but that was the last time. So I suppose...I'm sure it wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for her to feel a lot of anger towards my father, but it was not something that she ever expressed. There were, if I understand the meaning of your questions correctly, no threats ever expressed to me from Lenore that concerned my father."

"Or your mother?"

"Or my mother."

2

On the way back to the station, Jeff stopped at the Drule mansion and talked to Dalton. "Mr. Drule," he said, "I would—"

"Have you found my gun yet, sonny boy? It wouldn't happen to be at the police station, would it?"

"No, Mr. Drule, your gun is not at the police station."

"Then where is it?"

"I have no idea."

"Inspector, I know that you're trying to protect your own, but the only people who could have stolen that gun were those two detectives you had with you the other day. That's it—there are no other possibilities."

"Mr. Drule, do you remember that the night before the murders, there was a dinner here?"

"It wasn't at night, inspector--it was late in the afternoon."

"Did you came downstairs and eat dinner with the rest of the family?"

"Everyone was there but Raylene—she hardly ever came to the house after she met that guy she's living with now. I'm amazed that she made it so long without latching onto someone—she's such a hot young thing. Makes me wish I was twenty-eight instead of eighty-two."

"How long would you say that you were downstairs while the dinner was going on? An hour? Two hours?"

"I really don't have any idea," said Dalton. "At least an hour, but I don't think it could have been as long as two hours. I can only take listening to Gertrude flap her mouth for so long before I start to drool. She always thought the drooling was because I was losing control of what she would call my functions, but what I was really doing was part of a little game that I enjoyed playing. The game was called Let's Annoy Gertrude Drule, and I was really good at it. That's one of the great things about being in your eighties—you can just drool away and nobody, except people like Gertrude, will tell you to stop."

"Did you ever lock your door when you left your room?" said Jeff.

"Only if I was going downtown with Barker because that meant Gertrude would be here alone, and it was her mission in life to snoop on me. Way back, when I was foolish enough to be a trusting soul, I would always leave my door unlocked, but one day, when I came back from town, I found her going through the drawer where I keep my underwear. She was lucky that I didn't throw her out the window."

"So the door wouldn't have been locked last Sunday night?"

"No--as long as I was in the house, I kept it unlocked. At my age, it's just too hard to be fumbling around with keys all day long."

"I believe you said that the last time you saw the gun was on Saturday—is that correct?"

"Yes, I took it out for a walk in the back yard and shot at some squirrels and chipmunks that were running around. Pests!"

"OK," said Jeff, "during the time you were downstairs on Sunday, did you see anyone go upstairs?"

"What are you driving at, inspector?" said Dalton.

"What I'm asking you is this: Do you think it's possible that someone went upstairs and into your room while you were downstairs?"

Dalton thought about this for some seconds. "I hadn't thought of that—yes, it's possible. And that means...the only possibilities are Ricky and Lenore. Didn't I tell you that Ricky shot them?"

"And he would have known where the gun was kept?" said Jeff.

"Yes, he knew where it was."

"How would Ricky have known?"

"He was in my room one time, and I pulled the gun out from the trunk because he wanted to see it."

"He says that he's never been in your room," said Jeff.

"Then he's lying—just like he always does."

"How about Lenore? Could she have known where the gun was?"

"You're not possibly thinking that Lenore could have stolen the gun, are you?" said Dalton.

"I'm just being thorough and checking out all the possibilities."

"Lenore had no idea where I kept the gun—not unless someone else told her, which doesn't seem very likely to me."

"Ricky could have told her."

"Those two are just barely on speaking terms, so I doubt that very much."

"How about Raylene? Could she have known where you kept the gun?" said Jeff.

"Raylene avoided me like I had the black plague, so if she knew where the gun was, it didn't come from me."

"Mr. Drule, I have a few questions that I need to ask you about Lenore. Two days ago, you told me that you had no knowledge of whether your son might have acted inappropriately around her."

"That's what I said."

"Raylene has told me that you were well aware of a serious incident that occurred between your son and Lenore—this would have been in 1999."

"You're really fishing around, inspector. It sounds to me like you're trying to pin the murders on Lenore."

"I'm not trying to pin them on anybody—I'm just trying to find out the facts."

"If that's really what you're trying to do, inspector, then I suggest you go talk to Lenore about it because all I'm privy to is useless secondhand information that I don't feel like sharing with anyone else."

"Can you at least tell me if this incident happened?" said Jeff.

"No—because it's really none of your business."

3

Jeff sensed that Dalton believed Lenore had murdered her parents, and in an attempt to protect her, he was doing his best to shift the blame to Ricky. Jeff, however, was beginning to look on Lenore as a potential suspect, so he phoned her and asked her to come down to the station around four. This time, instead of talking to her in his office, he would be talking to her in an interrogation room; this time, he would be a little more direct with her. It was true that there was no physical evidence connecting her to the murder of her parents, but he was beginning to view her with suspicion. Jeff was almost certain that her father had raped her—otherwise, Dalton, instead of evading the question, would have strongly denied that it had ever happened. And also, Raylene had seemed quite believable to him. Of course, if Raylene was lying about the whole thing, then that would totally change who his suspicions would fall onto.

However, if Lenore really had been raped by her father, Jeff couldn't understand why she would deny it. What was the point? Her father was dead, so he couldn't be harmed by anything he had done in the past. Maybe Lenore's refusal to acknowledge the incident came from some desire to preserve the family name. This was certainly a possibility, especially since the revenue stream from her father's royalties could be seriously affected if people discovered that he had raped his daughter.

When Lenore appeared, she seemed groggy and began the interview by using the palm of her hand to hold up her head as she answered Jeff's questions. "What is it that you want to know?" she said, in a disinterested tone.

"Lenore, there are a few more questions that I need to ask you. These questions may be difficult for you, but they're necessary for me to complete my investigation. Also, if I discover that you've answered any of my questions dishonestly, I will have to seriously consider you as a possible suspect in the murder of your mother and father."

"Now you're saying that I murdered them?"

"No, I'm not saying that, but I do need some truthful answers from you."

"About what?"

"Lenore, when I interviewed you earlier, you said that your father had never molested you, but Raylene has told me that he did. Is Raylene lying?"

"Raylene is nothing but a blabbermouth," said Lenore.

"Maybe so, but you haven't answered my question."

"I don't see what this has to do with any legitimate investigation into my parents' deaths."

"Lenore, why don't you just tell me the truth? The fact that you haven't denied your father raped you makes me feel almost certain that he did."

"Don't I have any right to privacy? Do you realize what will happen to me if people find out that what you're saying is true? You have no idea what it's like to be the daughter of a famous person."

"I understand your point, but nothing that you say here is going anywhere."

"Tell me another one, inspector, because that's just too unbelievable for me to believe."

"Lenore, perhaps it will be easier for you if I talk about this in a hypothetical way. Let's say that you knew some other woman who had been raped by her father. How would you expect her to feel?"

"Angry—that's what I would expect. The anger might not be obvious until you knew her better, but there would be a lot of anger underneath."

"Anything else?" said Jeff.

"Perhaps she would have a kind of disenchantment with life, as if nothing that she ever did really mattered or would amount to anything."

"Getting back to you, do you take any medicine?"

"I've been taking anti-depressants since I was eighteen, but they don't seem to help much."

"Lenore, perhaps it will be easier for you if we talk about your mother."

"No more hypotheticals—right? It's so obvious what you're doing, inspector. If I had half a brain, I'd go out and find a lawyer. As far as my mother goes, she was not high on my list of favorite persons—not that I have any favorite persons, but if I did, she would be right near the bottom."

"Can you tell me why?"

"She was like my father's little maid. She always ran around after him and attempted to pick up his messes. From the small ones that he left around the house to the large ones that could never be cleaned up. I suppose that's a natural thing to do if you're into the good-little-wife syndrome, but it never appealed to me."

"And your father?" said Jeff.

"What about him?"

"Was he at the bottom of your list of favorite people?"

"No, inspector, my father was number one on my list of most hated people."

"Afterwards, after the incident that occurred when you were thirteen, how were you able to live with him?"

"It wasn't easy," said Lenore. "I became a master of learning how to avoid him. It was another five years or so before I moved out of the house, and during that time, I was never alone with him in the same room or even alone with him in the house. Back then, I only wished that I could never be alone with him in the same universe, and now, due to events beyond my control, that wish has come true."

"So this incident did occur?"

"If you say so, but I'm certainly not admitting to it."

"Lenore, this is a question that I have to ask everyone, so please don't be offended. Can you tell me where you were when your mother and father were murdered?"

"I probably could except that I don't know what time it happened."

"It wouldn't have been before 9 P.M. on Monday night, and it's very unlikely that it occurred after midnight."

"Actually, now that I think about it, I was home all night."

"And by all night, you mean what?" said Jeff.

"I remember I went to the mall early that afternoon, so I probably got home by three and didn't leave until I looked out my window the next morning and saw all the cop cars pulling into my parents' place."

"Was anyone with you between 9 P.M. and midnight?"

"No one is ever with me—that's a slight exaggeration, but it's close to the truth."

"Did you make any phone calls or did anyone call you?" said Jeff.

"My phone is shut off almost all the time because of all the stupid yakety-yak telemarketers who think it's OK to invade your space with one sleazy offer after another. I guess that makes me a perfect suspect, doesn't it?"

# CHAPTER TWELVE: ANOTHER DECAPITATION IN THE DRULE UNIVERSE

1

The funerals for Barker and Gertrude Drule were held on Saturday and attracted over five thousand mourners, a number that completely swamped the relatively small town of Boulevard Hills. Jeff had gone to the funeral to see what the various reactions of the Drule children would be, but he didn't have much to observe because the only one there was Raylene. Also, and not surprisingly, Dalton Drule was a no-show.

The cathedral where the service was held was not a large one, so thousands were turned away from the door and spent their time milling around on the large grounds that surrounded the church. This group contained many best-selling authors, agents, and representatives of various publishing houses, as well as a swarm of aspiring novelists who were hoping to use this opportunity to connect with someone who could propel them into the limelight of the literary world.

"I've brought the first chapter and a synopsis of my new book, Mr. Addison." Apparently, Mr. Addison was an agent from New York City.

"And you are?"

"I'm Jack Thornton—I wrote you a query letter about three weeks ago, and I was hoping—"

"Addison, old boy," said a man who was apparently a friend. "How goes the battle?"

"These e-books are springing up like poisonous mushrooms," said Addison. "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that we're witnessing the death of literature."

"I grasp your point, dear fellow—indeed I do."

"Mr. Addison, if I could just give you the first chapter and—"

Addison swiped the papers out of the supplicant's hand, stuffed them into his suit-coat pocket, and turned his back on him. "Jim," he said to his fellow traveler, "I'm really beginning to think that book stores are a thing of the past."

"Yes, the trend is certainly alarming, if I do say so myself. It's one thing to have a well-respected and recognized author such as Barker Drule offer his book on Kindle, not that he ever would, but to have all these rank neophytes swarming into the market with their tawdry ninety-nine-cent books is a catastrophe."

"Mr. Addison—"

"Not now, if you don't mind, Mr. Thornton. Can't you see that I'm busy?"

Inside the church, the eulogy was given by Raylene. Dressed entirely in black, she walked to the lecturn, adjusted her reading glasses, and gave a short speech.

"Ladies and gentleman, this is certainly a sad occasion. I've never done anything like this before, so I don't really know what to say. I can, however, tell you that the effect of my parents' deaths on our family has been devastating, but rather than dwell on the negative, I thought I would use this opportunity to share some personal anecdotes from my father's life so that you might know him a little bit better. He was, as you all know, quite a famous man, but he rarely made public appearances or gave interviews, so he was a bit of a mystery.

"First of all, my father was a kind and generous man who took his responsibilities as a father very seriously. Despite the fact that he was constantly engaged with his writing activities, he always had time for his children, and I can vividly remember sitting on his lap when I was a child as he read to me from Winnie the Pooh. It was through him that I gained my own love for literature, which exists to this day. He was also always willing to assist me with my homework, and I don't think I would ever have been able to pass my geometry class without his assistance.

"One might think that because of his fame, he had little time to discuss things with his children or listen to their opinions, but nothing could be further from the truth. For instance, when it came time for me to choose a college, he had many suggestions, but he always made it clear to me that the final decision would be mine. And I must say that I put him to the test on this because the college I chose to attend was not even one of his suggestions, but he was very open-minded about my choice and fully accepted my decision.

"It's difficult to talk about a father who was such a good and decent man and yet was murdered in such a cruel and barbaric way. How can I tell you how much I have suffered since that day? It is really a lesson for all of us—be kind to those you love because you never know if you'll ever see them alive again. I will always remember the last time I saw my father—it was about a week and a half before he died, and I had gone over to my parents' house for dinner. He was so happy that night—he had recently finished a new novel and was excited to tell me about it. I'd share that conversation with you, but I don't want to spoil the book for everyone, so I'll just say that if you liked his previous books, you'll really like this book!"

The eulogy continued for another ten minutes, and towards the end, Raylene talked about her mother, who she also described in glowing terms. Afterwards, she mingled with the audience--most of them had never met Raylene and were charmed by her beauty and obvious intelligence.

It wasn't until she had been outside the cathedral for twenty minutes that she ran into Jeff. "Inspector," she said in a friendly tone, "did you happen to hear the eulogy?"

"Yes, I did."

Raylene took him by the arm and led him to a place where they couldn't be overheard. "I suppose," she said, "that you must be wondering whether I was lying to you during our conversations or whether my eulogy was...how shall I put it? A sham?"

"I understand, Raylene. A eulogy is not the place to speak ill of the dead."

"That's the way I've always looked at it. But to tell you the absolute God's honest truth, it was difficult for me to find anything positive to say about my father. All those things I said about him reading me Winnie the Pooh, helping me with my geometry, and letting me choose the college I wanted to attend were complete fabrications."

"I didn't see either Ricky or Lenore," said Jeff.

"No," said Raylene, with a sigh, "I can understand Lenore avoiding the funeral, but it's disappointing that Ricky isn't here, especially given the provisions of the will. I guess you know that my father appointed me as executor of the will."

"Yes, I'm aware of that."

"I wish he hadn't chosen me because I've already been put in the middle. Maybe it doesn't interest you, but yesterday, Ricky phoned me and said that he needed seventy-five thousand dollars immediately. He couldn't seem to understand, even after I explained it to him, that my hands are tied because I can't go disbursing any of my father's money until the courts rule on the legality of the will and all the other paperwork that is required before anything can happen."

"Did he say what he needed the money for?"

"No, and I'd be willing to bet that it wasn't to further his education. I have to confess that I'm only telling you about this because I'm angry at him for not attending the funeral."

"Raylene, do you think Ricky could have murdered your parents? Just your best guess, that's all."

"I really couldn't say, inspector. I wouldn't think so, but nowadays, I don't really know him that well. Unfortunately, he's certainly not the same person he was ten years ago but for him to pick up a gun and murder my parents? I doubt it very much, but I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility."

2

Ricky had a lot on his mind. If only his father had died a few months ago! Because, the way it looked now, he might not live until he collected his inheritance. Raylene had probably been lying to him when she said that it might be months before he saw a penny from his inheritance, but if she was telling him the truth, then he was going to have to make some serious changes in his life if he expected to escape from the nightmare that he had fallen into.

For the last couple of days, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was being followed. They--the gun-toting drug pushers who had left the threatening note in his car--were probably just waiting until he was alone before they sent him the message that would realign his features and break some of his bones. They'd never go all the way and kill him...would they? No, that was too paranoid because if he was six feet under, they'd never get their money. The problem was that with his father's death, they wouldn't understand why he didn't have any money and would probably assume that he was holding out on them.

These guys were bad—real bad. They'd probably torture him—who knew what horrible things they might do to him...maybe break all his fingers one by one...maybe hold him under water until his heart was ready to burst...maybe put a candle under his arm until it had practically burned a hole straight through. Terrible thoughts...what was he going to do?...there was still a little cocaine left, so he did up a couple of lines as he tried to figure something out...what a buzz...if only he could disappear for a while...for inspiration, he snorted up another line...just disappear until he got his hands on his father's money...maybe he could live off the land or something...or maybe go to New York City and work as a bartender in some dive that catered to alcoholics and prostitutes.

He thought he heard noises coming from below....sounded like they were coming up the stairs. Grabbing what was left of the coke, along with his car keys, he ran out the back entrance and down the stairs. Where was the car? How come he could never find it? There it was—why was it over there? Maybe they had rigged it so that when he turned on the ignition, it would explode. But he didn't have any choice and had to take the chance because if he didn't get out of this place, he might be dead in five minutes.

The car started up without an explosion...so far, so good...what he'd do is head west and just keep going until he found something that looked interesting...someplace where he could set up one of his swindles. It was dark out now...funny, the last thing he could remember was four o'clock in the afternoon...what was that car behind him doing? Wasn't that the same car that had been following him ever since he could remember? Had to lose them...bolting through a red light and wheeling onto the expressway, but the entrance ramp was clogged and he had to wait...might as well do some coke because he might be driving for a while and he needed something to keep him awake.

And then, just as the line of cars started up, that same car was behind him again...at least it looked like the same car...out on the expressway, he pushed it up to eighty-five...he'd be able to slow down once he lost them...lots of traffic...idiots weaving from one lane to another like they were race car drivers on cocaine...best thing to do was accelerate away from them all...ninety, ninety-five...hard to do a line when you were going almost a hundred, but it wasn't impossible...traffic starting to thin out...a flashing red light in front of him...the light was coming up fast, real fast...what was it?...some dark shadow across part of the road...a truck!...swerving to the right...swerving a little too far to the right...losing control...plunging down...

3

Coming less than a week after the murder of his parents, the news of Ricky Drule's death spread like wildfire through the local and national press. What gave the story an eerie twist was that Ricky had been decapitated when his car plunged down an embankment and hit a cement wall. There were many who could not accept the fact that Ricky had died in an accident, and some fairly sensible people now began to talk about the possibility that there was some kind of vendetta being waged against the Drule family.

But the facts from the scene of the accident were fairly clear. Numerous eyewitnesses reported that Ricky had been going close to one hundred miles per hour when he had swerved to the right to avoid a truck that was stopped in the breakdown lane. Apparently, from what the eyewitnesses told police, Ricky had been driving in the breakdown lane, which led investigators to conclude that Ricky was seriously impaired on either drugs or alcohol at the time of the accident.

Jeff found out about Ricky's death when he came into the station the next morning. Jeff had wanted to talk to Ricky—in fact, around the time of his fatal accident, he had tried calling his cell phone number, but all he got was voice mail. As he sat at his desk and pulled up information about the accident on his computer, a lab technician handed him a folder containing information that would prove to be a decisive break in the case.

On the floor of the front seat of Barker's car there were a number of items, including a half-filled water bottle, a note pad, a map of the surrounding area, two pens, and a small empty bag of potato chips that had a store receipt from the local supermarket inside. Jeff hadn't expected any of these items to be significant to the investigation, but to be on the safe side, he sent them to the crime lab to have them fingerprinted.

The crime lab that Boulevard Hills used to examine evidence was notoriously slow to respond, and it was only now, seven days after the murders, that they notified Jeff that all the items tested, with two exceptions, were covered with the fingerprints of either Barker or Gertrude Drule. The two exceptions were the empty bag of potato chips and the receipt that was inside the bag. Jeff had already gathered fingerprints from Dalton, Lenore, Raylene, and Ricky—he had explained to them that the prints would be used so that if investigators encountered a family member's prints inside the car, those prints could be excluded from further consideration.

The empty bag of chips had been found flattened into a small square—whoever had eaten the chips had afterwards folded the bag in half, then folded it in half again, and then folded it in half a third time. Since the bag was small to begin with (it had only cost fifty cents), the constant folding had reduced it to a size of one inch by two-thirds of an inch. Crunched up inside it was the sale's receipt, and it was dated Sunday, August 17th, which was the day before the murders. The crime lab, by using a new technique, had finally been able to identify some of the smudged fingerprints that existed on both the bag of chips and the receipt, and those fingerprints matched Lenore's.

Potentially, this was the piece of evidence that would solve the crime. Unless there was an innocent explanation for Lenore being inside her father's car on Sunday or Monday during the day, then it clearly indicated that she had been the one to shoot her parents. Most likely, the bag of chips had fallen out of one of Lenore's pockets when she opened the car door and shot her mother in the head.

Jeff knew that he couldn't talk to Lenore again without reading her the Miranda warning because she was now the prime suspect. The time on the receipt was 1:06 P.M. on Sunday—this would have been about four hours before the dinner at the Drule house. As Jeff thought about it, he played devil's advocate and wondered if Barker had driven her over to the house for dinner. Lenore had her own car, and it was less than a ten-minute walk from her condo to the Drule house, but it remained a possibility that would have to be checked out.

4

When Jeff arrived at Lenore's around nine-thirty, he couldn't get a response when he knocked on the door. He figured that she was asleep, so he kept knocking in an increasingly loud way until Lenore opened the door. Jeff could see that he had awakened her—Lenore's hair was in a wild tangle of snarls, and she was wearing a bathrobe. At this point, Jeff didn't want to alarm Lenore, so he was taking a very low-key approach.

"Lenore, you'll have to come down to the station—there are a few more questions that I need to ask you."

"At this time in the morning?" said Lenore, in an incredulous tone of voice.

Imagine that! The police are up and about at nine-thirty in the morning. "Yes," said Jeff, "there are a few odds and ends that need to be cleared up."

"I don't suppose you'd mind if I change out of my bathrobe and comb my hair, do you? I wouldn't want to frighten the wits out of the people you work with."

"You can do that—I'll wait out here."

"I should hope so," said Lenore.

Once she was gone, Jeff looked casually around the room to see if he could find anything that looked like a smoking gun, but even if there had been an actual smoking gun in the room, he probably wouldn't have been able to see it because the place was a mess. Books and papers were strewn everywhere, especially the floor, while there was a pile of what looked to be dirty laundry on the dining room table. The dishes and glasses, of course, were waiting patiently everywhere—in the sink, on the counter, on top of a desk, and on the floor. With nothing better to do, Jeff wondered whether murderers were more likely to be neat or messy people—the neat-people murderers would probably be the ritualistic psychopaths, while the messy-people murderers would be more impulsive. And also, the messy ones would undoubtedly be sloppy and might drop something at the murder scene—like an empty bag of potato chips.

Eventually, after a twenty-minute wait, Lenore appeared, and Jeff drove her down to the station. It wasn't a long drive—only three minutes—and Lenore spent the whole time yawning in a loud and obnoxious way. Inside the station, Jeff led her into an interrogation room, and after they were sitting across from each other at a small table, he said, "Lenore, this is a mere formality that we do with everyone who comes in here, but I am now going to read you your rights."

Lenore yawned. And then she yawned again. After Jeff had finished reading the Miranda warning to her, he said, "Are you willing to answer my questions?"

"I suppose so," she said.

"OK," said Jeff, "my first question relates to last Sunday—this would be the day before your mother and father were murdered. Did you, on that day, ride in your father's car?"

"Can you get me a Kleenex, inspector? When I have a yawning attack like this, my eyes begin to water something terrible."

Jeff left the room, found a box of Kleenex, and brought it back to her. After she had dabbed at her eyes a bit, she said, "So you want to know whether I visited my parents on Sunday?"

"No, my question was whether you rode in your father's car on Sunday."

"Inspector, I never went anywhere with my father. No way! Besides, I had my own car."

"So you used your own car to get to the Sunday dinner?"

"Yes."

"How long do you think it's been since you've been in your father's car?"

Lenore let out with a loud, vociferous yawn, and after dabbing at her eyes, she said, "I don't think I've ever been in his car because he bought it after he gave me my car."

Jeff took out a potato chip bag of the same size and brand that had been found on the floor of the front seat of Barker's car—he had also folded it so that it looked exactly like the one that had been found at the crime scene. Handing it to Lenore, he said, "Do you recognize this?"

"Recognize it?" said Lenore. She unfolded the bag, and then with something that was halfway between a sarcastic laugh and a yawn, she said, "To my untrained eye, it looks suspiciously like a potato chip bag."

"Do you eat potato chips much?" said Jeff.

"As a matter of fact, I do," said Lenore. "Such peculiar questions," she said, with a yawn.

"Is that your favorite brand?"

"Are we doing a commercial or something? I'm sorry to disappoint you, inspector, but I don't have a favorite brand. If it's a potato chip and it has salt on it, I'll eat it. Unfortunately, chips and pretzels are two of my biggest vices."

"Do you remember buying this particular brand in this particular size lately?"

"Inspector, can't we talk about something else besides my eating habits? I didn't know you were part of the potato-chip police." Lenore thought that remark was funny and laughed.

"Lenore," said Jeff, "the reason I showed you this empty bag of chips is because it was found on the floor of the front seat of your father's car on the morning after he was murdered."

"So? I guess he liked the same potato chips that I did," said Lenore.

"The problem is that this bag has your fingerprints on it."

"Well of course it does because I just touched it. Gee—what is going on here?"

"Lenore, this bag isn't the exact same bag that was found in your father's car—that one is in the evidence room. The bag I showed you is a replica, and the reason I showed it to you is because I wanted to see if you would recognize it."

"I really don't understand what you're talking about, inspector."

"Lenore, the bag that was found in your father's car has your fingerprints on it, and inside the bag was a sale's receipt that showed it had been bought around 1 P.M. last Sunday."

"I guess," said Lenore, "that somebody must have put it there."

"No doubt, and I don't think there's much question that the person who put it there was you."

"Me? Why would I leave an empty bag of potato chips in my father's car?"

"I don't think you left it there deliberately, Lenore—I think it fell out of one of your pockets when you shot your mother in the head."

Lenore laughed derisively. "You've been watching too much TV, inspector. Is this why you woke me up so early this morning?"

"Lenore, besides having a motive to kill your parents, you have no alibi, and we now have physical evidence that links you to the crime. I'll be blunt with you—unless you can come up with a satisfactory explanation for how that bag of chips ended up in your father's car, I am going to have to arrest you for murder."

Lenore's eyes slowly lost their glazed-over look of indifference, and she stared directly into Jeff's eyes. And then, slowly, she put her head down on the table and began to cry.

5

Jeff and three uniformed cops searched Lenore's condo for something that might connect her to the murders. They had been at it for around ninety minutes, and the only remotely interesting thing they had found was another bag of potato chips that was the same brand as the one found in Barker's car. This bag was much larger, and as a piece of evidence it was useless, but at least it gave them some hope. Because of the colossal mess inside Lenore's condo, it was a difficult place to search, and as Jeff pawed through piles of irrelevant stuff, he wondered what he was hoping to find. The gun, of course, would be the nail in the coffin for Lenore, but Jeff figured that almost anyone in her position would ditch it. Maybe a diary...maybe a piece of clothing that had been hit by blood spatter...maybe—he couldn't think of another maybe.

"Hey," said one of the cops, "what's this?" He was down on his hands and knees inside a closet. Jeff looked over in his direction and saw that he had a black case in his hand that was almost a foot square. On the side of the case, Jeff saw the letters LOCK, and then, as he drew closer to the cop, he saw the letter G, which was much larger than the LOCK letters as it circled around the outside edge of the case. GLOCK!

Everyone stood around the case and stared at it like it was the Holy Grail. Slowly, Jeff opened it and saw that although it was indeed a gun case for a Glock, there was no gun inside. But to offset that disappointment, there was a white sticker that had been attached to one side of the case, and on that white sticker were the handwritten letters: Property of DALTON DRULE. 

#

#  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: "HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE BORN INTO MY NIGHTMARE?"

1

With the arrest of Lenore, the national newspapers, tabloids, magazines, TV news programs, and every imaginable news site on the internet were deluged with stories concerning the Drule family. First, the parents are murdered; second, the son is decapitated under "mysterious circumstances"; and third, the eldest daughter is arrested for the murder of the parents. Without question, it was a banner day for those who made their living by writing headlines. The Horror Comes Full Circle; Blood Lust Inside the Drule Mansion; Who Really Decapitated Ricky Drule?; and so on and on.

As often happens in cases of this nature, factual accuracy was thrown to the winds, and a number of spurious reports arose that only made a rational analysis of the situation more difficult than it already was. One rumor had it that Lenore was high on cocaine when she shot her parents; another had her driving Ricky's car when the fatal accident occurred; another had her suffering from depression because of a (fictional) abortion that had happened a month before the murders. Oddly, the possibility that she had been molested by her father was never mentioned until Raylene, in an exclusive interview with a national magazine, recounted the awful day that her sister had experienced in 1999.

"Yes," she said to the interviewer, "Lenore was raped by my father when she was thirteen, and she has never recovered from it. Because of this, I certainly hope that the prosecutor will take this dreadful incident from the past into account when he makes a decision as to whether the death penalty should be applied to my sister. I understand that two wrongs do not make a right, but there are certainly extenuating factors in this case."

Using a lawyer at the firm where she worked, Raylene was able to petition the probate court to give her a half-million-dollar advance on her inheritance, and she used this money to hire two criminal defense attorneys. She also continued, through both print and TV, to relate the history of her father's relationship to Lenore. The prosecuting attorney, Alec Hamlin, had spoken to her immediately after Lenore's arrest and asked her not to talk about the case, particularly the accusation that Lenore was raped by her father, but Raylene ignored his advice and was obviously conducting a campaign to save her sister's life by influencing public opinion.

2

Lenore had been instructed by her lawyers, Reggie Stone and Curtis Wilkes, not to say a word to anyone, and when she was arraigned, she pled not guilty, but that was a mandatory plea because anytime there was the potential for a person to be sentenced to death, the judge would not accept a guilty plea. The day after the arraignment, Reggie and Curtis had their first real conversation with Lenore. Reggie was a middle-aged black lawyer from out of state who specialized in death penalty cases, while Curtis was well-known locally and had a highly successful practice.

"Lenore," said Curtis, in an amiable but serious tone, "I'm sure you're aware of the gravity of the charges that have been filed against you."

"May I just say one thing?" said Lenore.

"Of course."

"I did not murder my parents. I'm innocent! It's true that I despised my parents, but I did not murder them."

Reggie tapped his fingers on the table nervously. This was not what he or Curtis really wanted to hear—not unless it was the truth. Too often, the accused murderers Reggie had encountered over the years refused to admit their culpability. The problem with this was that unless they changed their minds, it made a plea bargain impossible, and he had lost count of the cases where he had spent many hours of his time convincing an accused murderer that his best hope of survival was to trade in his confession and guilty plea for a sentence of life without parole.

Curtis was also under no illusions as the evidence against Lenore, although entirely circumstantial, was overwhelming. "Alright," he said to Lenore, "but you have to understand that the case against you is very strong."

"I don't understand what evidence they have against me. What is it about this empty potato chip bag that everyone seems to think is so important?"

Curtis explained the significance of it to her, and Lenore said, "I have no idea how that bag got there—I don't think I've ever been inside that car in my life."

"And then," said Reggie, "there's the gun case for the Glock that was found in your closet. You may not be aware of it, but your parents were killed with a Glock gun."

"What case?" said Lenore. "What Glock gun? I don't own a gun."

"You haven't heard about this yet?" said Reggie.

"No, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Lenore," said Reggie, "in the bottom of your closet, underneath some clothes, the police found the case for your grandfather's gun—it even had the name Dalton Drule stamped on it."

Lenore seemed completely stunned by this news. After a long silence, she said, "That's impossible."

"We're not lying to you, Lenore," said Curtis.

"And were my fingerprints also on the gun case?" said Lenore.

"No, the only fingerprints on the case belonged to your grandfather."

Lenore put her head in her hands and stared at the table. Thirty seconds went by, and then another thirty seconds. "Lenore?" said Reggie.

Lenore was shaking her head from side to side. "No, no," she said, "this is too much. But now I know—I know who did this to me."

"Who did what to you?" said Curtis.

"I know who planted all this evidence against me. I have no idea why she did it, but it has to be her."

"Who are you talking about?" said Reggie.

"Raylene—my sister."

"You're saying that...are you also accusing her of murdering your parents?" said Reggie.

"I guess so," said Lenore. "Otherwise, I don't see why she'd plant all this evidence against me."

"So why do you think it was her?" said Curtis.

"Because there aren't any other choices," said Lenore. "I suppose my grandfather could have shot them, but he would never have had Raylene bring the case for the gun over to my condo because I know he likes me a lot more than he likes Raylene. And Ricky! I could maybe see him murdering my parents for the money, but he could never have figured out all this complicated stuff like leaving the empty bag of potato chips in the car."

"Lenore," said Curtis, "do you remember buying that particular brand of chips? According to the sale's receipt it was bought about 1 P.M. on Sunday."

"I've tried to think back, but I can't really remember. Probably...I know I went to that store on Saturday or Sunday, and I often do buy potato chips when I'm there."

"Lenore," said Reggie, "do you keep the door to your condo locked when you go out?"

"I always lock my door when I leave," said Lenore. "But somehow, someway, Raylene got into my condo. I don't understand it--I've never given her, or anybody else, a key, and since the front door can only be reached from the landing on the second floor, I don't see how she could have gotten inside—she would have had to use a ladder to get in through one of the windows. I've always been afraid of prowlers so I installed a strong lock on that door right after I moved in."

"I still don't understand why you think Raylene did this," said Curtis. "She's been your strongest supporter since you've been arrested."

"I have no idea why she's doing this to me," said Lenore, "but it has to be her. She's the only one in our family with enough smarts to pull something like this off."

Afterwards, when Curtis and Reggie were alone, they talked about what Lenore had told them. "Do you believe her?" said Curtis.

"Not really. She seemed fairly believable, but it's so farfetched to think that Raylene was behind this."

"She really doesn't seem like the type, does she?"

"No," said Reggie, "I can't even begin to picture her breaking into Lenore's condo, but even assuming that she did, why would she choose something like the potato chip bag to leave at the scene of the crime?"

"I see your point," said Curtis. "You'd think that she'd choose something that could be directly linked to Lenore."

"It would certainly help our case if we had an alternative suspect, but choosing someone like Raylene will blow up in our faces."

"But if Lenore demands a jury trial," said Curtis, "we're going to have to go with the theory that she was framed by somebody—it doesn't have to be Raylene, but it does have to be somebody, even if we can't put a name to the person."

Reggie laughed. "Trying to convince a jury of that scenario will be like trying to climb barefoot up Mt. Everest."

"Maybe not," said Curtis. "One thing that I was thinking of is this: How likely is it that a potato chip bag would fall out of someone's pocket? I can't see it falling out of a pants pocket, but maybe a jacket pocket is possible. I think we should check out what kind of jackets Lenore has and whether they have any pockets in them."

"But the same problem still remains, Curtis—why would someone choose the potato chip bag to frame Lenore?"

"We'll just have to hope that no one mentions that problem to the jury," said Curtis. "What we'll do is stress the fact that the likelihood of the potato chip bag falling out of one of Lenore's pockets was about zero."

"But what are we going to do if Lenore has a jacket where the probability of a potato chip bag falling out of one of its pockets is about fifty percent?"

"Then we're doomed," said Curtis with a laugh.

The two of them decided to hire an investigator, and he spoke with Lenore who said that although she had a couple of light summer jackets, she hadn't worn them recently and preferred a stylish black vest that she wore whenever she went out at night, which wasn't very often. Without indicating why he was interested in the vest, the investigator asked her where it was, and Lenore, after describing the distinguishing features of the vest, told him that he could find it in her closet—or perhaps it was on top of her bed or maybe it was in the kitchen hanging on a chair. When the vest was located, it was discovered that it had two small pockets that would easily have held the folded-up potato chip bag. Perhaps that's why the bag had been folded into such a small size!

As for the chances that the bag would fall out of a pocket accidentally, that was somewhat problematic. It was by no means impossible, but it didn't seem likely unless it was practically dangling out of the pocket when Lenore had opened the car door and shot her mother in the head. Despite this sliver of good news, it didn't take Reggie and Curtis long to figure out that the prosecutor would have a ready explanation for how the bag had fallen out of Lenore's vest pocket. "Undoubtedly," he would say, "she had reached into her pocket for something, and when she did, the bag fell out."

The jury wouldn't have a hard time believing that, especially since the alternative explanation, the one where some mysterious figure had framed Lenore, seemed absurd. Even so, both Curtis and Reggie wondered what Lenore could have been reaching for in a small vest pocket just before or after she shot her mother. It was hard to think of anything that made sense.

The next day, the two of them went to Lenore's condo and examined her vest, and what they found was quite disappointing. Before looking at the vest, they had gone to a store and bought the same kind of potato chips that Lenore had bought, and after they ate the chips, they folded the bag up and stuck it in one of the pockets of Lenore's vest. The pockets on the vest had no zippers and were quite shallow, so it was easy to imagine that when Lenore was walking and running around as she shot her parents, the bag could easily have fallen out, especially if it hadn't been pushed all the way down into the pocket.

Lenore, while admitting that she had bought the chips, denied that she had ever put an empty potato chip bag in her vest pocket, but by now, Reggie and Curtis were not inclined to grant her story any credence. "Don't you think," said Lenore, when they told her the results of their investigation, "that the potato chips would have left an odor in the pocket?" The two lawyers had already considered that possibility—there was, in fact, no odor of chips in either of the two vest pockets, but that could be accounted for by the fact that the bag had been folded up tightly into such a small size, which would have prevented almost any odor from escaping.

"Not necessarily," said Curtis to Lenore.

3

Reggie felt that he should talk to Raylene and tell her about Lenore's accusations. Since Raylene had been the one to hire Reggie, he was uncomfortable about the possibility of a conflict of interest, so he arranged to meet her at a downtown restaurant for a Saturday afternoon lunch.

Reggie began by discussing Lenore's attitude. "She's quite adamant that she didn't have anything to do with the murders."

"Do you think there's any possibility that might be true?" said Raylene.

"I guess there's a small chance, but there's nothing that we can present to a jury that would support her claim."

"So what are you going to do?"

"I have to be honest with you, Raylene—in my view, her only hope of escaping the death penalty is to plead guilty, and it doesn't appear that she's willing to do that. I also need to tell you about something that could prevent Curtis and me from serving as her lawyers."

"You don't want to take the case?" said Raylene.

"No—the problem is that earlier this week, Lenore told us—and forgive me for saying this—that she thought you were the one who murdered your parents."

"Me? Where did she ever come up with that idea?"

"Apparently, if I understand her right, she feels that you're the only one in the family who's smart enough to do it."

"Well," said Raylene, in an amused tone, "I won't deny that I'm reasonably intelligent, but...how does she explain the fact that my grandfather's gun case was found in her condo?"

"She says that you were the one who put it there."

Raylene laughed. "And here I thought that Lenore and I were on good terms—especially after all I've done for her since her arrest." In a more serious tone, she said, "Just to set the record straight, Reggie, I didn't murder my parents, but perhaps Lenore's idea that someone planted the gun case in her apartment has some merit."

"I wish it did, but nobody, not even Lenore, can figure out how anyone could have entered her condo. She's told us that she never gave the key to anyone, and the door shows no signs of being tampered with."

"This does become rather awkward then, doesn't it?" said Raylene. "I'm now paying for two attorneys who might decide to blame me for the murders. Actually, to be honest, it's a little unclear who's paying for you and Curtis. As I understand it, if Lenore is found innocent, the money will eventually come out of her inheritance, but if she's convicted, then it will come out of my inheritance because with Ricky's death and Lenore's conviction, I would be the only one to receive anything. I certainly don't mind spending what amounts to a very small proportion of my inheritance on Lenore because she is my sister and she's led a very hard life, but I don't know if I'm enough of a saint to financially bankroll someone who's accusing me of a double homicide."

"Yes, it is an unusual problem," said Reggie.

"How does the law view this issue?" said Raylene. "I'm speaking about the ethics of it. Obviously, if I'm writing out checks to you, the general consensus would be that you couldn't represent her fairly—not if she's accusing me of the murders."

"I doubt that we could continue as her lawyers—and it wouldn't just be Curtis and me because anyone you hired would be considered tainted. That means Lenore's only choice would be a public defender or possibly an attorney that was appointed by the court and paid for by funds that were not connected to you."

"Do you think I need a lawyer?" said Raylene.

"Perhaps, but what Curtis and I are going to do is try to persuade Lenore to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. If she won't do that and still persists with her accusations against you, then Curtis and I are going to retire from the case—even if the judge permits us to represent Lenore. It's just too much of a conflict of interest. We will, of course, notify you of this decision, and you can then assume that Lenore's new lawyer may be accusing you of the murders, and I would think that you'd want to hire a lawyer at that time."

4

A couple of hours after Reggie talked with Raylene, Curtis had a productive conversation with the prosecutor, Alec Hamlin. Alec was only thirty-five, but he was already rumored to be a candidate for governor. Flashy and rather debonair, he hadn't, up to this point in his career, shown any inclination to bargain with defense attorneys because he knew that many people were still disgusted by all the plea deals that had been handed down before he became the prosecutor for the Boulevard Hills area. And, really, how many votes were you going to pick up because you were lenient with all the lowlifes who were running around assaulting people because they needed money for their drug habits? In fact, the momentum for his possible political candidacy had begun when he refused to plea bargain with an out-of-state heroin dealer. "I will not support one single day off this man's sentence—I don't care how much money and time it costs to prosecute him. I took an oath to uphold the law, and my interpretation of upholding the law is that the statutes were written for a reason, and because of that, I am not going to kowtow before criminals and beg them to accept a reduced sentence. Let everyone who lives or visits here remember an old saying: If you can't do the time, then don't do the crime because in this county, you will be doing the time."

"Alec," said Curtis, "let's put our cards on the table. I'll admit that you have a strong case, even if it is based entirely on circumstantial evidence. And so I've come here today to see if you would be amenable to a plea deal. I am well aware of your aversion to deals, but this is an extraordinary case, and I hope that you will hear me out."

Alec picked up a water bottle from his desk, and after taking a swig, he said, "I'm listening." Alec had never tried a death penalty case before, and he knew how time-consuming they were, so this was one time when he thought that he might be willing to compromise. He couldn't very well run a campaign for governor if he was embroiled in all the endless appeals that came out of a capital case.

"There are three factors I would like you to consider before—"

"I assume," said Alec, "that if the death penalty is taken off the table, the deal would be for life in prison without parole."

"Yes. The first thing to consider is that no matter how convincing the evidence is in a death penalty case, it takes years before the execution takes place. Usually, in fact, it never takes place. I'm sure you're aware that you or your successor will be dealing with this for the better part of a decade and the cost to the county will be enormous. Listen, Alec, I can see why you would find it repugnant to reduce a murder charge to manslaughter, but this plea deal with Lenore Drule would involve no lessening of the charge—she would be pleading guilty to two counts of first degree murder."

"I think we should remember that it is two counts," said Alec. "Barker Drule was such a famous man that a lot of people seem to have forgotten that his wife was also murdered. It's really just so nasty when you murder your mother in cold blood. So what's your second point?"

"I'm sure that you're aware that Lenore was raped by her father—correct?"

"Yes, I found out about it when I read the transcripts of Jeff Willard's interrogations of Lenore, and I would hardly say that I came away convinced that her father had actually raped her. In fact, originally, she denied it, and even later, she skirted around the whole issue. I know her sister has been quite vocal about it—did you know that she came to see me yesterday?"

"Raylene Drule?"

"Yes—she's so beautiful, isn't she?"

"Remarkably so," said Curtis.

"Anyways, she was here to plead her sister's case, and the reason I talked to her is that if this goes to trial and we get to the penalty phase, Raylene will be the one who will have the biggest impact on the jury. While she was here, she told me, in very specific detail, about the day she came home from school, heard Lenore crying in her bedroom, and listened to her sister as she described what her father had done to her."

"Do you believe Raylene?"

Alec took some time to reply. "I guess so, but it's probably just because Raylene Drule is about the most beautiful woman I've ever met in my life. I doubt she would have had such a strong effect on me if she wasn't so charming. And, of course, she has a motive for making up the story about the rape—it's obvious that she's trying to save her sister."

"But do you really think she'd go so far as to tell such an outright lie? Doesn't she seem more levelheaded than that to you?"

"Yes, I agree with you. I certainly wouldn't bet my life on the fact that the rape occurred, but I think it's more likely than not. The problem is, Curtis, that being raped by your father does not give you license to execute him."

"No, of course not, but it is an extenuating circumstance."

"It would be for the murder of the father, but I don't see any extenuating circumstances for the mother's murder."

"She let her husband back into the house six months after the rape," said Curtis.

"Granted, but Barker never bothered Lenore again."

"How do you know that?"

"I specifically asked Raylene about that," said Alec. "And what she told me was that her father never so much as touched Lenore again—this is one of the reasons I think Raylene was probably telling me the truth about the rape. It would have been much more helpful for Lenore if her sister had said that Barker continued to molest her after he moved back into the house. However, before I say what I really feel about this issue, I'd like to hear the third thing that you wanted me to consider."

"Alec, I swear I'm not making this up, but when Reggie Stone and I were talking to Lenore two days ago, she told us that she thought her sister was the one who committed the murders."

"Raylene?" said Alec, in astonishment. "You can't be serious."

"That's what Lenore told us, Alec, and one of the reasons I'm bringing this up is that if Reggie and I can't convince her to take a deal, then we'll have to recuse ourselves from the case because Raylene is the one who is signing our paychecks. What's more—"

"That's such a ridiculous accusation," said Alec. "How does Lenore explain the fact that her fingerprints were found on the potato chip bag that was at the murder scene?"

"She's claiming that someone else must have put it there. And also, of course, she's claiming that someone else must have put the case for the Glock into her closet."

"And that someone is Raylene?"

"Yes. Unfortunately, what this means is that if Lenore's case goes to trial, we may very well see Raylene publically accused of the murders. I think she's certainly capable of handling the negative publicity, but it is another factor to consider."

"Why is Lenore doing this?" said Alec.

"I have no idea."

"Is she delusional? Psychotic? What is it?"

"Alec, the best way I can describe it is that she's grasping at straws. Basically, her line of reasoning is that since she didn't commit the murders, then the only person smart enough in her family to pull off the murders and frame her is Raylene."

"That's just...it's just so nonsensical. Have you told Raylene about this?"

"Yes. Reggie talked to her earlier this afternoon. She was quite dispassionate about it—actually, she was the one who brought up the problem of us continuing to represent Lenore."

"She wasn't angry?" said Alec.

"No, apparently not."

"OK, Curtis, I'll have to think this over. I don't know why this ridiculous accusation from Lenore should have an effect on me, but it does. This whole thing will turn into a media circus of unprecedented proportions if Lenore Drule takes the witness stand and claims that Raylene murdered her parents."

"She might not wait until then—the newspapers are already clamoring to get her side of the story."

"So what happens if I offer her the deal? Will she accept it?" said Alec.

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"Maybe...maybe I could go for it. And the reason for it is this: On the one hand, we have Lenore Drule who's obviously at least half crazy and wants to drag her sister down with her. And on the other hand, there's Raylene Drule who will undoubtedly continue to go public with the rape accusation if I decide to seek the death penalty. I hate to be so Machiavellian about it, but I do have to consider my own role in this, and I don't suppose I'd be a very popular guy if I tried to put to death a woman who shot the man who had raped her. Along, of course, with shooting her mother—that's a sorry story that has no legitimate explanation.

"So here's the deal, Curtis, and you have three days to take it or leave it: Lenore Drule admits to the crime; admits that she had no accomplices; admits that she was motivated by the fact that her father raped her; forfeits all rights to any appeal; and signs an affidavit absolving Raylene of any responsibility for the murders."

"Alright, that sounds good to me."

5

Around noontime of the following day, Dalton Drule paid a visit to Lenore. It was the first time he had seen her since her arrest, and as they sat across from each other with a wire-mesh screen between them, he got right to the point.

"Lenore, I don't care whether you shot them to death or not, but I would like to know the truth about what happened that night. It just seems like such an odd thing for you to do. But before you say anything, I want you to remember that this conversation is undoubtedly being recorded, so whatever you do, don't tell me anything that could be used against you. I'm not so old that I can't read between the lines."

"I didn't shoot them, Granddad—I swear to God that's the truth."

"And you didn't steal my gun from out of my room?"

"No! You know how much I hate guns. In all my life, I've never even so much as touched one."

"So is that all the evidence they have against you?"

"No—there's this other thing. Supposedly, they found an empty bag of potato chips in my father's car, and the bag had my fingerprints on it."

"Couldn't you have left it in the car earlier?"

"I haven't been in that car in years—maybe never, and inside the bag of chips was a receipt that showed it was purchased on the day before they were murdered."

"That's really strange," said Dalton.

"It certainly is, but I have a theory about all this. I think Raylene was the one who murdered my parents."

"Raylene? You don't think it could have been Ricky?"

"No," said Lenore, "he's nowhere near smart enough to pull something like this off—in fact, he wasn't even smart enough to stay alive. I can't imagine anything more stupid than driving in the breakdown lane at a hundred miles an hour."

"Forget about him, Lenore. Just tell me why you think Raylene shot them."

"It must be because of that book she wrote about three years ago. Do you remember it?"

"Vaguely. So why would she shoot them because of that?"

"She had a big fight about it with my parents. According to what my mother told me, Raylene sent the book to my father's agent. I guess she was thinking that because of her last name, the agent would go for it, but when my father read the book, he called up the agent and told him to reject it."

"Why would Barker do that?"

"Because the novel was about a man who raped his niece, and my father thought that was a little too close to the truth. Mom actually sent me a copy of the book in an e-mail attachment, and I read parts of it, but it practically made me sick to my stomach because it was too much like what had happened to me. In my opinion, which I told Mom, Raylene was just using me to become a famous writer."

"And Raylene was angry because of this?"

"Very angry. She came barging into my place after the agent had rejected the novel and began saying all these mean things to me. But that wasn't the end of it—about six months later, Raylene turned the novel into an e-book, put it onto Kindle, and--"

"What's Kindle?" said Dalton.

"It's an internet site with millions of e-books where anyone is free to upload a book and people can buy it. The problem was that after Raylene put the book onto Kindle, it received about fifteen really nasty reviews from people that my father knew. Raylene was furious—she even wrote me an e-mail accusing me of being behind it."

"Were you?"

"I didn't even know that she had put the book onto Kindle—my father must have found out somehow. In the e-mail she sent me, Raylene said that the book had been destroyed by all the bad reviews and that she had removed it from the site."

"And you really think she might have murdered them because of something like that?"

"Granddad, you have no idea how obsessed she was with that book. She started it before she met Jed, and I think that novel was her first real love affair. In the e-mail, she even accused me of writing one of the bad reviews. She was so upset about it that it was almost a year before she talked to me again."

"If only we could figure out who stole my gun," said Dalton. "It had to have happened during dinner on Sunday, the day before the murders, because I used it on Saturday."

"Granddad, I didn't even know where you kept the gun, and when I was over there for dinner that day, I never went upstairs. Why would I? And I think if Ricky went up there, we would all have noticed it."

"Perhaps...I can remember that after dinner, Ricky watched TV with Barker and me before he left. He was with us the whole time, and when he left, he used the front door."

"And Ricky got there late—just before dinner," said Lenore. "That's when we all sat around in the living room chatting for a few minutes."

"It's possible that he could have doubled back after he left and used the stairs off the garage to reach the second floor, but...no, that's impossible because I went upstairs just after Ricky left."

"So among the family, that only leaves me and Raylene."

"When you think about it," said Dalton, "the safest time to have stolen the gun would have been while the rest of us were all eating."

"Did you ever tell Raylene where you kept it?"

"Maybe--I don't really remember. But if she did all this, how did she get into your condo so that she could leave the gun case there?"

"I have no idea."

"You never gave her the key?"

"No, never."

"Or anyone else?"

"No, I was very careful not to do that."

"Not even with that weird boyfriend you had about a year ago?"

"No—especially not with him."

"Maybe he stole your key and made a duplicate."

"I suppose it's possible, but I doubt it. It's not like I left my purse lying around all the time."

"What happened to the second key?" said Dalton.

"What second key?"

"The one they give you when you buy a lock."

"That's at the bottom of a dresser drawer in my bedroom."

"Do you know if it's still there?"

"I guess so," said Lenore, "but for someone to find it would take a long time—it's certainly not an obvious place to keep a spare key."

"Your boyfriend could have found it—he must have been there alone once in a while."

"Not very often, but what's he got to do with this? There's no way that he murdered my parents, and there's no way that Raylene would have hooked up with someone like him—remember, this would have been at least a year ago."

"I'd still like to know if that key is there."

"You can contact my lawyer, but what difference does it make if the key is there or not? If someone duplicated it, they would have put it back when they brought the case for the gun."

"Do you ever remember Raylene being alone in your condo or going into your bedroom?"

"No, I'm positive that she never went into my bedroom. I mean, in all the time I lived there, she visited me only three or four times. I can't even remember her going into the bathroom, much less my bedroom."

"And if she didn't have a key, she would have had to use a ladder and climb in through a window?"

"That's about it," said Lenore. "Wait a second—I just remembered something. I did give the second key to someone. It was a long time ago, about two years after I moved into the condo."

"Who was it?" said Dalton.

"My mother. I was going away for a week to spend some time with a friend I had made in college, and in those days, I had a cat, so I gave my mother the key so that she could feed it. But Raylene wouldn't have known about that—she wasn't there when I gave the key to my mother."

"Your mother might have told her about it."

"Even if she did," said Lenore, "this was like six years ago. Don't tell me that Raylene was plotting all this out back then."

"That's not the point, Lenore. The important thing is whether she knew where the key was."

"And also whether it was still there—there being wherever my mother happened to put the key after I returned to town because she never gave it back to me. In fact, when I asked her for the key, she said that she didn't know where it was, and I had to have a spare key made to replace the one I gave her—that's the one that's in my dresser drawer."

"What did your mother do with the key when you gave it to her?"

"She put it in her pocketbook," said Lenore.

"Raylene must have found out about it somehow."

"I know you're trying to help me, Granddad, but it doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, maybe my mother told Raylene that she was going over to feed the cat, but how would she have known where my mother put the key afterwards?"

"Who knows? But she must have gotten her hands on it."

"But you see what I mean, don't you, Granddad? If I didn't do the murders, then it had to be Raylene. Ricky could never have figured out all this key stuff."

"How do you suppose Raylene got ahold of the potato chip bag with your prints on it?"

"She must have picked it out of the trash when she brought the case for the gun over."

"Don't lie to me about this, Lenore. I'm counting on you to tell me the truth."

"Granddad, don't you remember how afraid I was of that gun?"

"I remember you used to tell me that the gun was evil and that when you touched something evil, the energy would go up through your arm and into your brain where it would eventually destroy you. But you're wrong about that part because the gun hasn't destroyed me."

"That's because you don't think guns are evil, so for the time being, you're shielded from the bad energy, but you need to be careful because eventually, evil things have a way of catching up to you. I'm telling you the truth, Granddad—I won't even touch the bars on my cell because I know that if I do, I'll be trapped in here for the rest of my life."

"Maybe I'll have a little talk with Raylene," said Dalton.

"It won't do any good," said Lenore. "She's running around town like she's a saint because she weaseled the money out of probate court to defend me. Raylene has never done anything for me in my life, and now she's acting like my best friend. I think she's afraid that I'll suspect her, so she's trying to confuse me."

"You might be right about that," said Dalton.

"Here's something you need to remember, Granddad—if I didn't murder my parents, the person who did murder them will be afraid that I might come to some conclusions. After all, if you had been arrested for murdering them, wouldn't you be trying to figure out who the actual murderer was?"

"Of course."

"OK—it took me a while, but I don't have any doubts about it anymore. Raylene is the one who's behind this."

6

Curtis and Reggie met with Lenore and talked to her about Alec's offer. "So," said Lenore, when her lawyers were done with their presentation/sale's pitch, "I'll have to admit that I was guilty and that Raylene had nothing to do with the murders?"

"That's correct," said Curtis. "Also you'll be giving up your right to appeal."

"Even if, later on, evidence was found that proved I was innocent?"

"It would depend what the evidence was," said Reggie, "but generally, the courts will refuse to reopen your case unless the evidence is very compelling. For instance, even if someone else were to confess to the crime, that would not be considered as sufficient grounds to grant you a trial."

"A trial? I would think that if someone else confessed, that would be the end of it."

"Anyone can confess to anything, Lenore, and the courts are always dealing with phony confessions. About the only thing I could think of that would help a person in your position would be DNA evidence, but that doesn't seem to apply in your case because no DNA evidence was found at the crime scene."

"Why's that?" said Lenore.

"Because the killer was almost certainly wearing gloves, so there were no fingerprints or other trace evidence discovered in the car."

"Then how did my fingerprints get on the bag of potato chips?"

"Those prints would have come from sometime before—presumably, when you ate them."

"This is just such a rotten choice," said Lenore. "Either I admit to a crime that I didn't commit, or I'm going to be put to death. How would you like to be born into my nightmare?"

"You have forty-eight hours to consider this, Lenore. We understand how difficult a choice this is. Basically—"

"Do you think that you could get me some pills?"

"Pills?"

"Yes, like about two hundred aspirin. That's a lot better choice than the one I'm confronted with now. It wouldn't be that hard—you could just smuggle them in here inside your briefcase. What's the big deal?"

"No, we can't do that," said Curtis.

"Why not?"

"We just can't—it's highly illegal, and if you committed suicide and it was discovered that we had given you the aspirin, we could be charged with murder."

"That's so ridiculous," said Lenore. "Look, you could bring me ten aspirin each time you came to talk with me. What are you afraid of? I'm not going to be around afterwards to squeal on you."

"Lenore," said Reggie, "we're trying to save your life. Don't you understand that?"

"For what? So I can sit in a prison cell for the rest of my life because my sister went off and shot my parents? What kind of a life is that?"

"It's better than no life at all," said Curtis.

"Sure—it's a wonderful life. A concrete cell, unhealthy meals, and real murderers for companions. To tell you the truth, I think I'd rather have the needle than sit around here for fifty more years. Plus, if I demand a trial, I can take the witness stand and tell everyone that Raylene was the one who murdered them. What is there to lose? Thanks for the offer, but the answer is no thanks." 

# CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS

1

The only thing she had to do now was hold steady and keep her nerve. It was so bizarre that Lenore was accusing her of the murders. How had she ever guessed?

Now that it was over and her parents had been buried with that wonderful eulogy she had given, it was kind of a shame that she couldn't tell people how it had all come about; how carefully she had worked through every nuance of the plot; how, even so, she still had to have a lot of luck on her side. For instance, if Lenore had ever had an airtight alibi, the whole thing might have fallen apart. Not that Lenore ever went out at night, but still...

She'd been waiting for her chance, just like a panther waits for its chance. Pounce!

When was the first time that she'd ever thought about killing them? It was probably about a year ago—what a shocking thought! She'd immediately put the thought out of her mind, but it kept coming back, especially when she was alone. Sometimes, it would be like a strange and persistent whisper; other times, it was much clearer and uncomfortably loud, but no matter what form it took, the voice would always say, "You should kill them for what they've done to you."

Why had her father been so determined to destroy her novel? Not once, but twice—the first time by convincing his agent to reject it, and the second time by having his cronies post all those malicious reviews to her book. Maybe it was because he was afraid that the terrible crime he had committed would somehow come out if her book was published, or maybe it was because _The Secret_ _Within_ was so much better than anything that he had ever written. But it didn't matter what the excuse was because there was no excuse—a person had the right to publish a book and let readers decide its true value.

She'd put her heart and soul into that book. It was her life, her being, her baby, her love. And he'd stomped all over it—and this from a man who knew what it meant to be an author. But he'd had no mercy, and he had squashed her book like it was a mosquito on a hot summer evening. Oh! She had cried so much that night when she realized what he had done and how there was nothing that she could do about it. Just cried and cried and cried. And all the time he was laughing at her as her baby was slowly strangled to death. Her father hadn't just raped Lenore—he'd also raped her.

She'd never been able to forgive him, but the first time she heard the voice hadn't been until that day when she had been considering writing a second novel. And then, while she was sitting in front of her computer, she had realized that it would be a useless effort because no matter what she wrote, her father would find an excuse and a way to murder her creation. Maybe the last thing that she had thought before she heard the voice for the first time was that the only way she could ever be a successful author was if her father was dead. Real dead.

She kept putting the thought out of her mind, even though the voice would repeat it's refrain a few times each day. She'd be working on a deposition and suddenly she'd hear, "You should kill them for what they've done to you." It wasn't a very pleasant thought, and one of the reasons she found it so unpleasant was because it was such a dangerous thought. What if she were to be caught? They had the death penalty in this state, and they weren't afraid to use it. And even if she managed to avoid the needle, she could end up spending the rest of her life in prison.

But even though she tried to put the voice out of her mind, it kept coming back, and as the days went on, it actively began to encourage her. "It's not as dangerous as you think—all it takes is some careful planning and nerves of steel." She knew she could plan, and she knew that she had nerves of steel, but still... _what if she were to be caught?_

"You won't get caught—not if you think it out carefully." Maybe she could go about it as if it were a game that she was never going to play. Almost as if she were constructing a plot for a novel. She knew what writers did in murder mysteries--when someone was trying to commit the perfect murder, the novelist framed somebody. So who could she frame? Lenore would be the best choice because of the fact that their father had raped her. And Lenore deserved it because she hadn't been any better than her mother or father when it came to _The Secret Within_. All Lenore had ever done was look down her nose at the book and claim that she didn't want to see her "raped body" being written about by her sister. Also, there was all that other negative stuff Lenore had said—you'd have thought she was one of those idiotic reviewer friends of her father who liked to pass the judgment of death on people who had risked pouring their hearts out onto a piece of paper.

But she was getting ahead of herself. How was the actual murder of those two going to go down? When? Where? There were so many details to account for, so many things that had to come together before it could happen. The where part wasn't too difficult—the only logical place was at the house because there would be only one potential eyewitness. Gramps...was she going to have to kill him too? That was way too complicated, plus he had a gun of his own. However, he did go to bed early at night so that meant the best time to kill them would be between 9 P.M. and midnight, but she'd prefer not to go inside the house because Gramps might hear the shots, and also, it just seemed riskier somehow. Her father probably had a gun stashed away somewhere, and he might be able to get to it before she shot him. Better to have the murders take place outside—like when they were coming back from Fallon's after their Monday night dinner.

So how was she going to get a gun? Buy one? Way too risky. What if she could steal Gramps's gun? Wow! Now that was an idea. But there were all sorts of problems connected with that—first of all, how was she going to steal it? And secondly, what if he noticed it was missing? This meant the gun had to be stolen right before the murders happened.

She was excited about this idea because it seemed very clever. Granted, it didn't seem to fit in with her strategy of framing Lenore because it could turn her grandfather into a suspect, but she was beginning to think that having more than one suspect might be a good idea. No sense putting all her eggs into one basket. She drank some more coffee and went through it in her mind. She was definitely going to have to have luck on her side, but the good thing was that if the breaks didn't go her way, she could immediately back out of it. This meant that if she couldn't figure out a way to steal Gramps's gun, then she'd just take that as a sign and drop the whole plan. If it was going to be done, it would be done with Gramps's gun.

How about if she stole it during one of those Sunday dinners that her mother occasionally had! This would be perfect because it fit in so well with killing them on a Monday. And also, nobody would think that it was strange for her not to be at the dinner because she hardly ever went to those pathetic things. However, this would only work if Lenore was at the dinner because then the cops would realize that she could have stolen the gun. So, while Lenore was at the dinner table with her parents, she could sneak up the stairs that started near the garage, take the gun from that chest Dalton kept under his bed, and then...

Slowly, it began to come to her. She wouldn't have any time to waste after she stole Gramps's gun, but it seemed like the plan she was beginning to form in her mind was well within the realm of possibility. What she'd do is run down the back stairs and out to her car and then drive over to a place close to Lenore's condo...once she had parked the car, she'd put on a disguise—a black wig, glasses, and frumpy clothes...use that key Lenore had given to her mother years ago—hopefully, it was still in the kitchen drawer...actually, get the key duplicated beforehand...go into Lenore's condo and plant the case for the gun...and then, a sudden inspiration, find something of Lenore's that she could leave on or near the bodies of her parents.

It was a plan that obviously could go wrong. Maybe Gramps had moved the gun, and she wouldn't be able to find it...maybe Lenore would come back early from the dinner and find her prowling through her condo, but if she did, so what? It would be very embarrassing, but no one would know that it was the preliminary step to two murders. Obviously, the murders would then have to be aborted, but she could live with that. She'd let fate decide whether her parents should live or die.

As far as her alibi went, that would be a problem. What was she going to do about that? She and Jed almost always spent their evenings together, so he was like a stone around her neck when she was planning a murder. What could she tell him that would give her an excuse to go somewhere? That she was running out to the store for wine? No, it had to be much better than that.

She couldn't figure that one out, but the next time she was over her parents' house, she found the key to Lenore's condo in the kitchen drawer where she had seen her mother put it years before. She returned the key after having it duplicated and then bought the disguise she would wear when she went to Lenore's, along with a black jogging outfit and black hood that she would wear when she shot them. With that, everything was ready, but the lack of an alibi made it impossible to do anything. Frustrating!

But then, just when she was about to give up, everything seemed like it might be falling into place. About a week before she and Jed were planning to leave for their annual vacation at Eagle Lake, her mother phoned her and asked whether she could come to dinner on Sunday. After she told her mother that she would be away at Eagle Lake, she literally began to tremble with excitement. Somehow, with Eagle Lake being eighty miles away, it seemed like it might provide her with an alibi. But not if Jed were there with her--if only she could persuade him not to go to Eagle Lake. She began to think bizarre thoughts—like maybe, once they reached Eagle Lake, she could drug Jed early in the evening...or maybe she could go out for a ride...but Boulevard Hills was eighty miles away, and along with the time spent lying in wait for her mother and father, the whole thing would probably take three hours. If the cops ever found out that she had vanished from Eagle Lake for that amount of time on the night of the murders, she'd look mighty suspicious to anyone investigating the case. Of course, the plan to frame Lenore was still in effect, but it was way too risky for her taste.

It was so depressing to be stymied by what seemed like such a small detail. But there it was, and she had to accept it. She wasn't going to bow to any internal pressure or break her principles—if there was even the tiniest chance that she could be suspected of the crime, then she wasn't going through with it. If only she had thought of the alibi problem first, she could have saved herself a lot of time and false hope. So that was that, and there wasn't anything she could do about it.

But then, on the Wednesday night before the weekend on which their vacation was to begin, Jed came back from work and told her that a new multimillion contract had come in, and the president of the company had asked him to work twelve hours a day over the weekend and into the next week. "This is like a make-or-break deal for us, Raylene, and everyone is afraid that something will go wrong. I had people coming into my office all day long with one problem after another. I know we've been planning on this trip to Eagle Lake all summer, but I don't see any way I can make it up there—not until next Wednesday at the earliest, and that's a best-case scenario."

"Jed—it's OK. Since you'll be working so many hours, I'll just stay out of your way and go up to Eagle Lake on Friday by myself—that way, you won't have to feel guilty. It certainly won't be the same without you, but it will still be fun to get away for a while."

"It's just that...I'm so upset that it happened on the one week that we had made plans to do something together."

"There'll be lots of other weeks for us, Jed. Are they giving you a bonus for this one?" she said, with a wink.

"They haven't said anything about it yet, but if we pull this account in, it will mean millions of dollars for the company."

"Don't worry about me," said Raylene. "I'm just going to lie on the beach and soak up the sun."

2

So at the last minute, fate had intervened, and now that she had what amounted to an alibi, nothing could prevent her from attempting to do what she wanted to do. This meant that she had to pay attention and focus entirely on her plan, her carefully thought out plan. No deviations at all.

She reached Eagle Lake at six-thirty on Friday night—her disguise and black jogging suit were in the trunk of the car...the motel room at the lake had already been paid for by credit card...spent the first night walking back and forth on the beach...was there anything that she had forgotten?...if there was, she couldn't think of it...tomorrow, Saturday, would be the off day, the day when she would go into Eagle Lake and buy some groceries...probably she should stay inside her room most of the day because she didn't want to be too conspicuous...just enough so that people could vouch for her being there...also, she should avoid the beach so that some sex-starved guy didn't try to hit on her.

During the day on Saturday, she could feel the tension building. A murderer...how had it ever come to this? Insults, insults, insults. That's how! Destroying her book for the most selfish of reasons...hardly anyone else would be able to understand her motive because how many people wrote a book in their life?...how many people knew what it felt like to be on the verge of something really big, and then, at the last minute, it was snatched away from you? ...an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—if he could destroy her, why couldn't she destroy him?

Saturday night, she took a sleeping pill—very unusual for her, but she knew that it would take her hours to go to sleep without one. Next morning, she drifted around a bit outside her room so that people would remember her...this was a key day, almost as key as the murder day...she left for Boulevard Hills at two-thirty, but before she did, she turned off her cell phone—that was in case Jed called...she didn't want to bring the phone on the road because she'd heard that cops could track its whereabouts...parking about a half mile from her parents' house at the edge of a small wooded area and walking towards the house by the back way so that no one would see her...coming up to the side of the cliff behind the house and staying in the woods...looking up at Gramp's window to make sure the stupid idiot wasn't about to fire off his gun...staying out of sight and skirting along the edge of the woods until she was about a hundred feet from the front side of the garage and was in a place where she could see Lenore arrive...like a spy movie...it wasn't all that warm, but she was sweating like it was ninety...saw Lenore drive up and then Ricky arrived about fifteen minutes later—she didn't even know he was coming...so much the better because now there was one more person who could be suspected of stealing the gun...waited, because she knew that dinner wouldn't be for a while and that the best time to steal the gun would be when they were eating... putting on some thin leather gloves so that she wouldn't leave any fingerprints in Gramps's room, and then eventually, after a half hour, walking over to the side of the garage where there was a door...stepping as softly as she could, even though there wouldn't be anyone around...over to the stairs and then up to the second floor landing....so lucky that Gramps's room was before the main stairway to downstairs...as she walked down the corridor, she could hear them—they were all at the dinner table, including Gramps...opened the door to his bedroom, went in, and pulled the trunk out from under his bed...that's where he had told her that he kept the gun...God, what if the trunk was locked?...wouldn't most people lock it?...but the top lifted off without any trouble, and the gun case was right on top...she lifted it up, opened it, and saw the gun inside...grabbed a box that had at least a hundred rounds of ammunition in it...pushed the trunk back under the bed, slowly opened the bedroom door, stepped out onto the landing, and made the stairs in about five seconds flat.

This was where she had to do everything as fast as she could because there was no telling when Lenore might return to her condo...running through the woods, going past the cliff, and reaching her car...driving to that deserted playground that was near Lenore's...taking the Glock out of the case and putting the case in a plastic shopping bag...putting on her disguise and walking the short distance to the entrance to Lenore's condo...nobody around that she could see...walking up the stairs and putting the key into the door—wouldn't it be a disaster if Lenore had changed the lock?...the key turning, the door opening...had to find a good place to hide the case for the Glock--it had to be out of sight, but it couldn't be so out of sight that the cops would miss it... maybe in the back of her closet...perfect! Right under some dirty clothes that were strewn on the floor...even if Lenore did the wash the next day and found it, she'd probably never know that it was the case for Gramps's gun.

Now she had to find some possession of Lenore's that she could leave at the murder scene...she'd completely forgotten about this until now and hadn't thought about it since the time when it looked like she wasn't going to be able to find an alibi...It had seemed like such a simple idea when the thought had first come into her mind, but now, as she stood in Lenore's bedroom, she couldn't figure out what to take with her...there were obvious things like Lenore's checkbook, but that seemed way over the top—nobody, not even Lenore, would be clumsy enough to drop her checkbook beside her parents' dead bodies...it was important to be more subtle than that because she didn't want anyone to suspect that Lenore had been framed...walking around the place and finally ending up in the kitchen...what about that empty bag of chips on the kitchen table?...she stood there staring at it for almost a minute...wouldn't it have Lenore's fingerprints on it?...it would be almost impossible to open a bag of chips without leaving some prints on it...looking at how the bag had been opened--scissors or a knife would haven't been good, but the tear was ragged, very ragged...and right beside the empty bag of chips was a small shopping bag...peering in, she saw the sales slip...maybe they had video cameras at the place where Lenore had bought it...OK, the bag of chips was the best shot, so she picked the bag up with her gloved hand, put it into the bag Lenore had brought back from the store, and put that bag into the bag she had used to bring the gun case into the condo.

Sneaking out was easy--on the short walk to her car, she saw no one except a few people driving by on the main road...once in the car, she took off her disguise and then drove back to the motel...another sleeping pill...another good night's sleep...tomorrow was the big day.

3

But even with the sleeping pill, it must have taken her an hour to go to sleep...so many thoughts swirling around in her mind...what if the cops never connected the potato chip bag to Lenore?...the chip bag was a key part of the plan because without it, the cops wouldn't have a reason to search Lenore's condo...maybe the prints on the bag were smudged, or maybe the cops would just totally overlook it as a piece of evidence, but there wasn't any point in worrying about it now because there was nothing that she could do about it.

She could still back out of it...she could back out of it right up until the moment she pulled the trigger...so strange the way her life was turning out...and what about her parents?...probably sitting around having wine and talking all their meaningless talk...her father raving about that stupid new book of his—the one where all the severed heads were rolling down a hill in San Francisco...such a stupid life, even if he was rich and famous...death always snuck up to the people in his novels—did he know it was about to sneak up on him?...How could he?...and what did it feel like when you were shot?...she didn't really want to think about that, but as much as she tried to distract herself, her mind kept returning to the moment when a person realizes that they've been shot...bullets put people through so many immense changes in such a short period of time.

Tomorrow night, they'd be coming back from dinner at Fallon's and be pleasantly high from one of the thousand-dollar bottles of wine they liked to drink...everything normal, nothing to worry about...she'd wait until they were out of the car...had to aim for the midsection...cripple them first, and then shoot them in the head...but what did it feel like when a bullet cut through you and destroyed your liver or heart?...too bad that her father wouldn't be around to write about it.

4

In the morning, she drove out to a deserted area that was about ten miles from the motel and fired all seventeen rounds that were in the magazine of the gun...no problems--she'd already studied Glock guns on the internet and knew how to load them...the silencer worked much better than she had expected it to and was a perfect accessory to her murder equipment...she loaded seventeen bullets into the magazine—bullets for Mom and Dad--and put the magazine into the gun...everything was all set, and she was ready to go.

An hour later, she ate lunch at a local restaurant and then watched a movie on the TV in her motel room...couldn't even remember what it was about five minutes after it was over...left for Boulevard Hills at five, arrived at six-thirty, parked about a half mile from Fallon's, and walked to a concealed place where she could see both the front and side entrances to the restaurant...they arrived about seven-thirty, and she watched them go inside...waited ten minutes and then drove back to the house...went past the driveway and parked about three hundred yards down the street...lots of parked cars on both sides of the street—no one would notice her...changed into her black jogging outfit and waited until the clock on the dashboard said eight thirty and dusk had fallen...took the gun and the hood with her in a black shopping bag...it only took her two or three minutes to reach the house...walked through the open front gate and up the driveway before she picked out the tree she would stand behind, which was about twenty feet from the garage...no lights on inside the house except that small one they always kept on in the kitchen...Gramps was probably in his room—he usually went to bed around eight...she slipped the black hooded mask over her face--now all she had to do was wait.

5

It seemed like a long, long time before she saw the car beginning to pull up the driveway...it was so odd—they should be the ones feeling fear, not her...but, of course, they had no way of knowing what was about to happen to them...no way of knowing that they were down to the last hundred breaths of their lives...it surprised her how much fear she felt—not, anymore, of the potential consequences that could occur but of the actual act itself...she wasn't a trained assassin...what if her hand was shaking so much that she missed them and they were able to get into the house?...what if the gun jammed and her father ran up to her and unmasked her?...the car stopped, the headlights went off, and her father stepped out of the car...easy to see him because of the small light above the garage door...to be or not to be...to do or not to do...nerves, nerves of steel, nerves that never waver...he had reached the back of the car when she stepped out from behind the tree...turning, he said, "Who's there?"...he was only ten feet away and any chance of turning back was over...she fired the first three shots quickly, and he fell to the pavement in an awkward way, with one of his legs sprawled out underneath him...had to take care of mother next...she was still in the car, so if the door was locked, she'd have to shoot her through the window...yanking the door open, and there she was—face to face with her mother...only her mother had no idea who was holding the gun that was pointed at her heart...the almighty matriarch, the one who knew all the answers to everything, was frightened out of her wits and started to scream or say something, but it never came out of her mouth...that's what three bullets will do to you.

Walking around to the other side of the car and opening the driver's-side door...better make absolutely sure...one more bullet—this one for mother's head, and then around to the back of the car so that she could give her father a parting shot to the head...done, finished...going back to the car and tossing the potato chip bag on the floor of the front seat...the gun went back in the black bag along with the hood, and she walked quickly to her car...once inside, she took off the jogging suit and put on her regular clothes...her heart was racing, racing, racing...but by the time she had reached the outskirts of Boulevard Hills, her heart was beating normally again...she didn't drive back to the motel the direct way—in fact, she headed in the opposite direction and waited until she reached a deserted stretch of the road before she got out of the car, put on the gloves that she had used when she shot them, and tossed the gun as far as she could into the woods...the only thing left to do now was get rid of the gloves, jogging suit, and hood...dangerous things because, through DNA, they could be traced back to her, and they would almost certainly have her parents' blood splatter on them, but she had this one all figured out...turning down a narrow road that led to a lake she had frequently gone to as a teenager...nobody there at this time of night...lots of metal trash barrels around, most of them nearly empty...dumping out her murder garments into a trash barrel...and then sousing them with a can of charcoal lighter fluid that she had bought and brought for the occasion...lighting a stick and tossing the stick into the barrel...whoosh.

The deed was done, and no one would ever know who had done it. On the ride back to the motel, she thought of something that John Wilkes Booth had said just after he shot Abraham Lincoln: "Sic semper tyrannis." Thus always to tyrants.

6

Afterwards had been the best part—it was so amusing to have that Inspector Willard eating out of her hand like he was a pet at the zoo...not all that hard to do, of course, because he wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the room...the trick with him was to always be helpful and never accuse Lenore of the murders...just—hesitantly--drop the bomb about the day Lenore was raped and let the Inspector roll with it...give him little nudges but never overdo it...always be polite and sincere...maybe accuse Gramps of the crime because by pointing the finger at him, it deflected the attention from Lenore.

The whole problem was that Lenore might figure out that she was the one who had murdered their parents, so that's why she had to be Lenore's defender. Besides, she didn't really want her sister to get the death penalty...that was a little too harsh, but if Lenore was going to be stubborn and insist on a trial, then there wasn't much she could do about it...she wouldn't, however, be attending Lenore's execution.

All in all, it was sad to think about Lenore. Looking back on it, she kind of wished that she could have framed Gramps—there was an execution that she would gladly attend! But she was beginning to regret the fact that Lenore was going to be taking such a hard fall. After all, it was her parents who had shoved her novel in front of Lenore's face—they were practically begging her to trash the book...Lenore was just a pitiful little accomplice to the murder of _The_ _Secret Within_ , but somebody had to take the fall for the murder of her mother and father, and it certainly wasn't going to be her. Who said there wasn't such a thing as the perfect crime?

# CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A LIFE FOR A LIFE

"911, what is your emergency?"

"Hello, yes—there's a man who's holding a woman at gunpoint in the parking lot outside our building."

"Where are you located, ma'am?"

"The parking lot is across the street—it belongs to a law firm. I think the name is Blanchard and Scully—it's on St. George Street."

"Someone will be there in—"

"Please hurry—we can hear him from here. He's got a gun pointed at her head, and he's threatening to kill her."

Two cop cars came into the parking lot almost simultaneously from different directions and stopped about eighty feet from where a man was standing with his back against a brick wall as he forcibly restrained a woman who was standing directly in front of him. The man had a forearm around the woman's neck, and with his other hand, he was holding a gun to her head.

Both police cars had two cops in them, and everyone ducked out of their patrol cars and took cover behind them. The situation appeared serious enough that besides radioing for backup, they also advised that the swat team should be sent.

"Sir," yelled the cop who was nearest to the hostage, "put down your gun so that we can resolve this peacefully."

"I'll be happy to," said the man, "but before I do that, this woman is going to admit to you what she's done."

Only now did the cops realize that the man appeared to be quite old, perhaps even in his eighties. "Sir, what is your name?"

"My name is Dalton Drule, and the person in front of me is my granddaughter, Raylene Drule."

The cops could see that the woman was terrified. "Sir—"

"Raylene," said Dalton, "if you refuse to tell the people in front of you the truth, I am going to shoot you in the head. I know, and you know, that you murdered your parents and framed Lenore. Now these people have to hear it."

In the distance, sirens could be heard. "Your time is running out, Raylene."

"Sir, put the gun down!"

"I didn't...it's not like what it seems," said Raylene.

"Tell them Lenore didn't kill your parents," said Dalton.

"No...please...I know she didn't kill them."

"Then who did?"

"I don't know what happened—I—"

Suddenly, the old man pushed the woman forwards, and almost simultaneously, he began firing at her. The first shot hit her about halfway down her back, and as she began to fall towards the pavement, the second and third shots hit her in the neck and head, sending a bloody orange spray in the direction of the cops.

Before the old man could fire another shot, all four cops opened up on him, killing him instantly--an autopsy would later show that he was hit by eleven bullets.

As for Raylene, she was pronounced dead at the scene.

Although Raylene had said that Lenore didn't kill her parents, her statement was held to be meaningless since there was a gun pointed at her head. And so, three months later, Lenore was brought to trial, convicted of the murder of her parents, and sentenced to death. The sentence, but not the conviction, was soon overturned by an appeals court because of a trivial technicality, and the prosecutor again offered Lenore life in prison without parole. This time, Lenore decided not to insist on a trial, and at her sentencing hearing, she said not a word.

Eventually, a noted true crime author wrote about the case in a book entitled _The Fall_ _of the House of Drule._ However, after charges of plagiarism were brought against him, the book was withdrawn from circulation.

This is one of many books of mine that can be purchased on various web sites--currently, as of June 2020, there are 24 novels, 4 novellas, 9 anthologies, and 6 non-fiction books, so there is plenty to choose from!

I would like to emphasize that my novels are _very_ dissimilar from one another and have all sorts of different plots, themes, and attitudes. I've written a number of murder mysteries, four love stories, a gothic tale, a trial of a police officer for murder, a couple of unusual fantasies, a story about a homeless guy, a trial of a young guy who thinks that he's discovered the secret to life, a locked-room mystery, a book about a psychiatrist and a troubled woman, a tale about a student/teacher relationship, two satires, an unreliable narrator mystery, and three novels that are essentially political, sexual, and social commentaries.

