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  THE LAST, BEST LIE

  MADISON MCKENNA MYSTERIES

  THE LAST, BEST LIE

  KENNEDY QUINN

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  Copyright © 2016 Kennedy Quinn

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Quinn, Kennedy.

  The last, best lie / Kennedy Quinn.

  pages cm — (Madison McKenna mysteries)

  ISBN 978-1-4328-3162-2 (hardback) — ISBN 1-4328-3162-3 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4328-3161-5 (ebook) — 1-4328-3161-5 (ebook)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3161-5 eISBN-10:1-4328-3161-5

  1. Women detectives—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3617.U5785L38 2015

  813'.6—dc23 2015022036

  First Edition. First Printing: February 2016

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3161-5 ISBN-10: 1-4328-3161-5

  Find us on Facebook– https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website– http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 20 19 18 17 16

  To Bob: my best friend, my partner, my hero, my husband.

  Love ya, babe.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing is an act of creativity. It is joyful and deeply satisfying. Most of the time. Trying to get published, on the other hand, is an act of insanity punctuated by bouts of confusion, doubt, fear, and frustration. Along the way one meets wonderful people willing to roll up their metaphorical sleeves and read your work (and reread it … and reread it … and reread it … and … well, you get the picture). They provide thoughtful and valuable critiques that turn shaky prose and awkward dialogue into something worthy of appreciation by more than your mother/husband/bff/paid editorial assistant. They offer encouragement and hope. You also meet snarky people who exercise their apparent need to establish dominance over others via a host of mean-spirited and destructive mechanisms. (To the agent who told my good friend that “paragraphs like this make me lose the will to live,” yes, I mean you.)

  To the snarks of the world, I say: “Meh. You go your way and I’ll go mine.”

  To the wonderful ones, I say: “You are amazing! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  Said wonderful ones include, but are not limited to Carin Bigrigg, Keven Spillane, Barbara Warne, and Kristin Scott. You are all utterly and completely awesome!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Perspiration pooled in my cleavage. The low-riding Chicago sun baked the upholstery around me, as sweat glued my jeans to my thighs. I sat on the passenger side of a brown Buick LeSabre that reeked like the dumpster it was on this scorching summer day. And if being sautéed in my own sweat weren’t bad enough, my butt itched as if a fire-ants brigade had invaded my panties.

  My boss, Jake Thibodaux, ex–New Orleans cop and owner of an intermittently solvent Chicago detective agency, sat beside me, stuffed behind an oversized, leather-wrapped steering wheel. An American Handgunner magazine lay propped on the immense globe of his stomach. He flipped to the centerfold: a gleaming forty-five-caliber semi-automatic with a staple through the crescent curve of its trigger. Holding it up, he turned it ninety degrees and whistled short and low. It would appear that one man’s means of mayhem is another man’s soft-core porn.

  Putting the magazine down, Jake grabbed the remainder of his second Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese from the dash and finished it with a staccato bite-and-swallow rhythm—clearly he considered chewing optional—and then tossed the wrapper into the back seat. He let out a long, round burp that filled the car with the stench of pickles, mustard, and under-masticated beef. Cajun drawl and bass voice conveying unhurried imperiousness, he winked at me and said, “Nothing like a good, old-fashioned burger to take the edge off, eh pichouette?”

  I screwed up my face in a scowl. “Have I mentioned lately what a pleasure it is to be in your company?”

  “Why, no,” he said, with a disingenuous grin. “Can’t say that you have.”

  “Feel free to consider the reasons.”

  He snorted. “Can’t you just say ‘fuck you’ like the rest of us?”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Numerous studies have shown that the gratuitous use of obscenities only serves to diminish their effectiveness.”

  “Wimp.”

  “Hey, Jake.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bite me.”

  “That’s a start. There’s my girl,” he said with an approving nod. Stretching his bulk in the seat, he reached for his magazine before settling once more into reading mode.

  I rolled my eyes and turned to look out my window. Six months of working for Jake should have prepared me better for this: steaming in a tin box on stakeout. In fact, we’d spent the last five hours squatting in the August sun across from a South Side alley squeezed between an aged brownstone and a red brick office building, all in hopes of ambushing a cheating husband and his paramour: Big Fun.

  I started to lay my arm on the frame of the open window but jerked it back as my flesh hit the scorching metal. Grimacing, I blew on my forearm to cool it. It was all the more refreshing as there was no breeze, just still air, ripe with the smell of melting asphalt, fermenting trash, and someone’s liver-and-onions supper. A scruffy mutt trotted by, navigating nose-down to a stop sign. Rotating his backside, he sent a stream of pee high on the post. He was probably hoping to fool the big dogs into believing an even bigger dog had been there. I empathized.

  Loping across the street, Bowser launched himself up some swaybacked steps, then plopped down, his long tongue dripping saliva in puddles as his sides heaved. Large brown eyes came to rest on mine. Man, they said, it’s hot out here.

  The prickling butt sensation intensified. I tried to wriggle my backside discreetly on the rough stitching of the seat.

  Jake spoke without lifting his head from his reading. “Christ on a crutch, petite, scratch it if it itches.”

  Fine, then, to hell with discretion. Arching my back, balancing on my toes, I scratched heartily from knees to backside. Grandmother Ivy would not approve, but God, oh God, it felt so good. Lowering myself, my jaw wrenching in a huge yawn, I grabbed my warm Big Gulp Diet Pepsi from the console between us. Slurping it loudly through the straw netted me a low-throated growl of warning from Jake. I slid my eyes in his direction, not bothering to hide my grin, and slurped harder.

  He flipped a page. “First, it goes out the window, and then you do.”

  Yeah, that didn’t get nearly enough of
a rise out of him. “I’m bored,” I said.

  “Get un-bored.”

  “Entertain me.”

  He swiveled his head slowly on his large, thick neck and simply stared at me. Now, let me make this clear. Jake is the big, bad wolf. He’s six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-a-lot pounds, and, okay, a bit past prime. Most people, nonetheless, would suffer serious bladder control issues facing that stare. Or at least be smart enough to stop flicking the wolf on his ear.

  I, on the other hand, shrugged. “Fine, I’ll entertain myself.” Putting the drink between my legs, I pulled the straw out and bent it, twisting it until it split into two pieces. I tossed the longer piece into the back seat and inserted the smaller one through the x in the plastic lid. Then I brought the nearly full drink up and blew hard across the top of the straw. A small geyser of soda erupted out of it, and I rushed to suck the excess off the top. Shaking off the small amount that had landed on my hand, I looked over at him, smiling proudly. “Neat, huh?”

  “What the hell was that supposed to be?”

  “Differential air pressure. Blowing across the top of the straw creates a situation where the air pressure at the top of the straw is less than that at the bottom. It’s like a vacuum, drawing the liquid up and out of the top of the straw. It works best with a short straw.”

  “Uh-huh, and what are you going to do now that the straw is too short to reach the rest of the drink, Miss Wiseass?”

  Ah. Hadn’t thought of that. Time to change the subject. I frowned, shoved the drink into its cupholder, and gave him my best long-suffering sigh. “Oh, come on. How much longer do we have to do this? We’ve been at it every afternoon for three days. I’m dying of boredom here. And I stink almost as bad as you do, which, given your substantially greater surface area, should be impossible unless parts of me have died.”

  He grinned. “Oh, but you look so pretty.”

  It was my turn to snort. Okay, with a little work on my part, pretty applies. And being twenty-three and healthy buys me a pass, most days, on serious effort. But today, I knew exactly how bad I looked. My blue eyes were bloodshot, my face was bloated from a steady diet of greasy, salt-laden fast food, and my black hair clung in thin, sweaty tendrils to my neck. “You’re an evil man.”

  “So they say.”

  “Furthermore, I’m convinced that this cheap titanium-dioxide sunscreen you bought is decomposing into its basic elements, which are individually toxic and which, in contact with the porous membranes of my eyes, may well render me blind. And then you’d be sorry.”

  “How about you swallow it and be rendered mute?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “You know absolutely nothing about chemistry, do you?”

  Jake laid the magazine on the dash. “What I don’t know is why I put up with a whiny egghead who can’t even follow simple instructions.” He pointed to his beloved traveler’s mug in the cupholder between us. It was brown and stamped with a large intricate crest around which was scripted, Cabrini High School, New Orleans. “Hot coffee. You were supposed to get me hot coffee. Not this iced frappachichi crap you filled my cup with. What’s the matter? Your fussy little engineer’s brain couldn’t handle that?”

  I leaned forward, unfolding my arms and counting on my fingers as I spoke. “First, I am not fussy. I’m meticulous, and you’re a grump. Second, my brain is not little. I am a physicist, minoring in chemistry. I am not—repeat, not—an engineer. I’ve nearly been kicked out of my family tree for abandoning my studies, as it is, and without adding that slur to my name, thank you very much. Because I am this close,” I held my thumb and forefinger a millimeter apart, “to having my Ph.D., I deserve a more dignified characterization than egghead. I would be willing to allow you to refer to me as Genius, Savante, or, in a pinch, Mistress Brainiac.”

  “Mistress Smart-Ass, maybe.”

  “Third, it’s a hundred and ten freaking degrees, Jake. Cows give evaporated milk in heat like this. It’s hot, h-o-t, hot! I got you iced coffee because only a lunatic, such as yourself apparently, would want hot coffee on a day like this.”

  “Listen, petite. I don’t give a damn how hot it is outside; I don’t give a damn how cold it is outside. I drink coffee, and I drink it hot. And I drink regular coffee: dark-roasted, no-frills, no-fuss, no-shit Columbian. Not that fruity, nutty, organic, pussy crap you drink.”

  “Typical grumpy, old, white guy: intolerant. Just because something is different—”

  His hazel eyes narrowed, as if my comment struck some dark resonance within him. He swung his massive bulk to face me. “That’s the problem with you kids—”

  “Oh, give me a break. I’m not a twelve-year-old.”

  He raised his voice as he pointed a finger at me. “The problem with you kids is that you’re all about tolerance this and tolerance that when it comes to what you believe in, but tolerating your elders’ opinions is a different story, isn’t it? Your generation thinks it invented truth and justice. Everything you do is right and fair and so fucking smart, but God forbid any regular, hard-working Joe, who’s spent his life serving his community and tries to live his life by the Good Book, stands his ground on his values, because then he’s a closed-minded, prejudiced old fogey. Give you a break? You give me a break!”

  I blinked. Sure, I knew Jake’s standard modus—a.k.a. crotchety—was more affectation than nastiness, but this was different. Whatever spot I’d hit was a real sore one, now. Frowning, I said, “Take it easy, Jake. I was just fooling around.”

  He stared at me for a beat, his eyes still narrow, his expression bleak. Then, as if swatting away a troublesome fly, he waved his hand and shook his head. “Ah, don’t mind me. Sometimes you say things … you remind me of … you remind me of somebody, that’s all.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” I asked carefully.

  His gave me a half smile and sighed. “No. It’s just … hard sometimes. Kids. Always have to be right, don’t you?” Then quietly, as if to himself, he added, “No matter who gets hurt.”

  I cocked my head at him, still puzzled. Well, that was surreal. But before I could say anything, he snatched his mug and thrust it toward me. “But when I say I want hot coffee, I damn well mean hot coffee. Now take your geeky little ass down to the 7-11 and get me some real, hot coffee.”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you kidding? You want me to walk five blocks in this heat? There’s a reason we haven’t seen even gang-bangers for hours. They all went home to enjoy their heatstrokes in the comfort of their living rooms. I bet I could collapse on the sidewalk and no one would even come out to steal my iPhone to sell on eBay. I should do this all for a cup of coffee?”

  “You’re right. We done ate all my Chee Wees,” he said, glancing back at the three empty bags of the New Orleans–style cheese curls that constitute a good quarter of his daily food intake. “Get me some barbeque chips. With ridges. The ones in a bag, not the sissy ones in the can.”

  I reached right over him and snatched the keys from the steering column. “You want hot coffee? Fine.”

  He bent to look at me as I angled out of the car onto the blistering pavement. “What do you need my keys for?”

  I rounded the car and unlocked the trunk. I had two napkins from getting the coffees. Using them to cover my palms against searing, I jerked it open and rummaged through the toolbox. In short order, I had a “D” battery, a small spool of lead-free hobby wire, wire cutters, and every MIT grad’s weapon of choice: duct tape.

  As I got back into the car, I tossed Jake the keys and laid my booty on the dash. Grabbing the wire, I measured out roughly six inches and snipped it off with the wire cutters in my left hand. Jake rolled his eyes. I’m a leftie, which, for some reason, amuses Jake, but at least he’s given up ragging me about it.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jake said.

  Laying the wire on my lap, I reached for the duct tape. “Getting you hot coffee.”

  “Is this another one of your crazy-ass gadgets?”

  I smiled. �
��You know you love them. It’s one of the reasons you find me so fascinating.”

  “Cocky little thing, aren’t you?” Yet he peered at the paraphernalia with curiosity.

  “Oh, quit complaining and prepare to be amazed. And give me your pocket knife.”

  “Only if you promise to cut your tongue out with it.”

  I gave him my most banal look and wriggled my fingers.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he grumbled. With a grunt, he dug into his pocket, pushing his shoulder holster with its enormous Colt forty-five to the side as he did. “You’re a real pain in the ass. You know that, right?” He handed me his red Swiss Army knife.

  I took it and leveraged it open, pulling out the miniature scissors and then using them to cut two small rectangles of duct tape. I closed the knife and dropped it on my lap. Laying an end of the wire on one side of the battery, I taped it down. “This won me five points in the Brain Buster Blow-Out of Milton Street.”

  He adjusted his shoulder holster into a more comfortable position. “The what?”

  “My best friend, Timmy Atwell, and I had summer competitions demonstrating physics principles with whatever was handy.”

  “Sweet: nerds in love.”

  I laid the other end of the wire against the other terminal and proceeded to tape it down, effectively shorting the battery. “We weren’t in love. We just, you know, hung around.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure.”

  “Well, up until the summer Mary Lou Simpson developed breasts.” I shrugged. “I didn’t see much of Timmy after that.”

  “Figures.”

  I looked up at Jake, grinning broadly. “But in the fall, I developed breasts, and mine were much better than hers.”

  That netted me a genuine smile. “I’ll bet you made that little boy pay, didn’t you?”

  “You bet I did. That was the year Timothy James Atwell learned that the pressure of his penis on his zipper was directly proportional to the amount of cleavage displayed.”