Cruel Intent

“Not that many. My parents, Christopher and Athena, Dave and his three kids, one of my friends from California. Mom probably wouldn’t mind doing the turkey. She usually does, but she and Dad cook every single day of their lives. I wanted to give them a break.”

“Not to worry,” Leland said. “We’ll work it out. You come up with the guest list, and I’ll manage the rest. We’ll make it a memorable occasion. And speaking of occasions, the florist called. They said they tried to deliver your flowers to the gym, but the place was locked up tight. I’m having them deliver them to me here instead. I’ll drop them off a little later myself. That will give me an opportunity to give the lucky couple my own good wishes as well.”

Ali tried to remember if she had mentioned the engagement news to Leland. With everything else that had been happening throughout the day, it didn’t seem likely.

“So you know about that?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Leland Brooks replied. “Mr. Reynolds came to me a couple of weeks ago with some concerns about where to take the ring to have it redesigned and resized. I sent him to see the man who used to handle all of Miss Arabella’s work. I hope he was pleased with the results.”

“I’m sure he was,” Ali said. “And I’m sure Chris appreciated having the benefit of your advice.”

Ali couldn’t help feeling slightly left out. Yes, she knew that Chris and Athena had wanted to surprise her, but her folks had both known about Chris’s engagement well in advance of last night’s ring unveiling. Obviously, the same was true for Leland Brooks.

I always tried to raise him to be independent, Ali thought ruefully. I may have succeeded too well.

When Peter woke up, he needed to pee like a racehorse and was astonished to see that he had slept for the better part of ten hours. When he was younger, he had been able to manage on far less sleep than that. It was, he supposed, part of getting older rather than better. He fixed coffee and some toast. Then he uploaded the memory stick from his camera and, after deleting some of the less-well-thought-out shots, added the remainder to his DVD.

Scrolling through them, he congratulated himself on the fact that the crimes were all different. Morgan, still dressed, lay half in and out of the swing with her face battered and bloodied beyond recognition. He had arranged Candace so she lay on the ground with her various pieces put back together in all the wrong places-like a macabre human picture puzzle gone horribly wrong. He had heard that a novice FBI profiler had claimed this indicated a highly disorganized killer. Peter had laughed outright when he heard that; he was anything but disorganized. Melanie Tyler had been shot to death with her husband’s.38, while Debra Longworth had been stabbed to death before being the victim of a vicious postmortem sexual assault. And that was another part of being smart. Never do it the same way twice.

The pictures were fine, but Peter was feeling vaguely displeased with himself as he stowed the DVD in his safe. He spent some time examining the diamond he had removed from Morgan’s finger. It was large and showy, though Peter understood enough about diamonds to know that it wasn’t as flawless as it should have been. But then Morgan hadn’t been flawless, either. With a sigh, he returned the precious diamond-loaded key ring to its customary hiding place.

After one of his exploits, Peter usually spent the next day patting himself on the back. After all, who else was going to tell him “good job”? This time he couldn’t quite manage it. Yes, by trying to track him down, Morgan Forester had posed a threat to him. As a result, she had gotten exactly what she deserved. But had it been worth it? Usually, he came back from a kill with a euphoric sense of accomplishment. Today he was left with a lingering sense of forboding.

When Rita had fallen off the mountain, he had been right there with her. Naturally, he had been a person of interest in that case, but the cops had never charged him. With the others, he had managed to make sure his name had never surfaced in the resulting investigations, and all those cases had gone cold without ever being solved. This time he worried that he might have made a mistake. He couldn’t get that asshole from Hertz out of his mind.

One of the things Peter counted on in life was that worker bees would function that way-as miserable drones who collected their paltry paychecks without caring that much about doing their job. Peter’s big problem with the guy ru

For the first time, Peter realized that he might have made a slight miscalculation. He had used Matthew Morrison’s name for car-rental purposes because he could. Because Matthew Morrison was convenient. Because he was as good a fall guy as any.

People said that being a doctor let you play God. That was especially true in the ER. Patients came in. Peter sewed them up and patched them up. Some lived; others died; and after Peter was done with the ones who survived, he turned them over to other doctors who helped them go on with the messy business of living. But what he did and didn’t do with his patients in the ER was nothing compared to the havoc he could wreak in people’s lives when, as Internet puppet master, he could run them up and down a flagpole at will-as he had with Matthew Morrison.

Much as Peter despised cheating women, that was nothing compared to his overriding contempt for weak-willed, pussy-whipped men like Morrison. Peter had created Suzie Q-her name, her profile, her e-mails, her everything. He had pe

As far as Peter was concerned, Matthew was less than nothing. Peter had used the man’s hijacked identity for the car rental without the smallest concern that anyone would notice. And even if someone did notice, Peter couldn’t help wondering how Matthew would manage to talk his way out of that. The man was utterly petrified of losing his job. It didn’t seem likely that he would have the balls to tell someone that he couldn’t possibly have murdered Morgan in Sedona, since at the time she died, he was down in Red Rock waiting to get it on with some hot-to-trot sexy babe named Susan-who didn’t, in actual fact, exist.

Peter had looked forward to watching Matt squirm, but because of the guy at Hertz, he’d have to deny himself that pleasure. He sca

That done, Peter turned his attentions to Matt Morrison’s hapless computer. Peter had kept his file-eating Trojan lurking undetected in the background of Morrison’s HP for a very long time. Again, all it took was a few keystrokes to bring the worm to life. When Matt came home from work that afternoon and tried to log on as he usually did, the worm would destroy his hard drive. He wouldn’t be able to boot up. The only thing left on his desktop would be the blue screen of death.

Taking out Matthew’s computer meant that Peter would no longer have an unauthorized window into the man’s pathetic life. Though Peter had enjoyed the game as long as it lasted, now it was over.