Almost Dead (Lizzy Gardner #5)(56)

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I’m done listening to your endless tirades. You need to back off. I mean it.”

Silence. Finally.

She used baby oil to take off a layer of thick makeup, then turned on the bathwater before making her way to the living room and turning on the television. It was the same on every local new station: five people dead, one in critical condition. She wasn’t worried. She’d seen Mindy Graft eat the brownie in two quick bites. She wouldn’t be dead, none of them would be, if they mixed things up every once in a while. They all trundled around along their little tracks. Same routine, day in and day out. Mindy Graft hit the grocery store every Saturday, rain or shine. And today had been no different.

Jenny hadn’t meant to, or at least hadn’t wanted to, kill innocent people who were not on her list, but she’d known in this case that it couldn’t be helped. After watching Mindy pull up to the store and park her car, Jenny had grabbed the tray of brownies and hurried to the entrance. Even after she had Mindy in her sights, she’d waited, not uncovering her tray until Mindy was within ten feet of her. Within the blink of an eye, the people walking into the store had become scavengers. Jenny had been forced to shoo away a couple of people just to save a brownie for Mindy. It was as if they’d never eaten before.

Leaving the television on, she made her way to the bathroom and turned off the water. Then she went to her office and pulled out the kill list. Using a fine-tip marker, she drew a line through Mindy Graft’s name.

She wanted to call Lizzy, find out if Mindy had been warned before she took a brownie from a stranger. But Jenny didn’t have time for unnecessary chitchat at the moment—she was going on a date with Dwayne Roth. He’d told her that he’d noticed her from the start, since she’d first started working at Ecco Chemicals.

With a smile on her face, she headed back for the tub, slipped out of her robe, and climbed into the hot water, letting her mind drift to thoughts of sun-kissed beaches; blue, cloudless skies; and Dwayne.





CHAPTER 39

After being taken by surprise in the parking garage, Lizzy had spent two hours filling out police reports. The man she’d sprayed was nowhere to be found.

She never should have left the scene.

For the first time in her adult life, she’d panicked and ran.

There was absolutely no excuse. She’d been carrying a gun—had him right where she wanted him.

And what did she do? She ran.

So disturbed by her actions, or lack thereof, she found it next to impossible to concentrate. And she had to concentrate. At the moment, Lizzy sat across a kitchen table from Shelby Geitner’s boyfriend, Ben, while his mother hovered over them with her arms crossed, her mouth a tight line.

Ben was a cute kid. He had recently turned eighteen. He wore jeans and a dark-blue T-shirt. His blond hair was cut short, except for the bangs that fell across his forehead and covered his right eye when he wasn’t pushing the hair out of his face.

“How did Shelby seem to you the last time you saw her?” Lizzy asked the boy.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

Ben seemed nervous. He twiddled his thumbs and had a difficult time keeping eye contact. What was he hiding?

“Over the course of the past few weeks,” Lizzy tried again, “did Shelby act different in any way? For instance, was she overwhelmed by schoolwork or preoccupied with teenage drama of any kind?”

“She does have a good friend,” Ben said, “who was afraid she might be pregnant. I know Shelby worried about her, but—”

“Ms. Gardner, I really don’t see how talking to my son is going to help you find Shelby.”

Lizzy looked at the boy’s mother, peered into her eyes. “If your son was missing, wouldn’t you want me to talk to everybody he’d been in contact with, including his close friends?”

The woman managed a barely discernible huff, but she backed off.

Lizzy turned back to Ben. “Mrs. Geitner remembers Shelby looking over her shoulder a lot, as if she thought somebody might be following her. Did Shelby seem nervous or skittish to you?”

Ben straightened slightly, and for the first time he looked right at her. “You know, Mrs. Geitner is right. Shelby didn’t even want to go to a movie because she said she had a bad feeling about going out at night. I asked her why, but she shrugged it off, said she really wasn’t sure. I laughed and told her she’d been watching too many scary movies. But I could tell she was feeling weird. Something was going on, but I didn’t take it seriously.”

Lizzy’s cell rang and she excused herself to take the call. It was Hayley. “What is it?”

“Mindy Graft is dead.”

Impossible. “How? When?”

“Not more than twenty minutes ago,” Hayley said. “We watched her house all morning, then followed her to the grocery store. She didn’t lock her car. I kept a lookout, watching the parking lot, but nobody stood out. About ten minutes after she went inside, there were sirens and emergency vehicles all over the place. Five people are dead. One person is hanging on, but it’s not Mindy.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“We overheard a man telling one of the officers at the scene that a woman was handing out free brownie samples. He said she ran out of samples fast. Described her as a white woman, overweight, curly red hair, wearing sunglasses and a long dress. The witness was adamant about what he’d seen, even recognized the first woman who was brought out on a stretcher as one of the people to eat a brownie.”