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  A CLEAN KILL

  2002 Best Mysteries of the Year, Publishers Weekly

  “The perfect summer read … a paranoia-inducing, smart suspense novel. It’s the best legal thriller of its type since The Firm—but it’s written better.” —Flint Journal

  “Stewart’s third mystery … combines the suspense, richly textured plot, picturesque Alabama settings, double-crossing characters and sparkling writing that set his first two novels apart from the pack.… Stewart throws a curveball in the surprising conclusion that will leave mystery fans eagerly awaiting the fourth in the series.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Stewart knows how to build a solid case for his sleuthing attorney.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “A tense, nerve-wracking narrative, nonstop action, and a tightly mortared plot keep the pages turning. A good choice.” —Library Journal

  “For fans of character-driven legal thrillers—such as those written by Phillip Margolin, John Lescroart, and Scott Turow—this one’s a definite keeper.” —Booklist

  A PERFECT LIFE

  “Already one of my candidates for the best books of 2005 … This is a book for readers, but it should also be loaded into the backpack of any young person who aspires to be a crime writer.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Laced with page-turning tension and memorable scenes … Rich details and smart use of dialogue help make this a near-perfect ride.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Thrillers are supposed to be twisted, tortuous, perplexing. But Mike Stewart’s A Perfect Life is more raveled, roiled and contorted than most.” —Los Angeles Times

  “This is the kind of read that keeps you up at night. The action is fast, the writing is smart and the story is excellent.… Stewart’s plot twists are persuasive and surprising enough to keep you guessing.” —Birmingham News

  “A compelling thriller …”

  —Atlanta Journal Constitution

  “Mike Stewart knows how to wring every bit of suspense out of a story, so don’t expect to get much sleep once you start reading.…” —Peninsula Post

  A CLEAN KILL

  A Dell Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  G.P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition published January 2002

  Dell mass market edition / June 2006

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2002 by Mike Stewart

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001031851

  Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.,

  and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33610-5

  www.bantamdell.com

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm

  Has found out thy bed

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The soft glow from a gas carriage light played across the Volvo’s door as it rolled to a stop alongside the curb. The Baneberrys had a two-car garage under the house and at the end of a downward curving driveway, but Kate was bone tired—physically and mentally exhausted by a solid week on jury duty. She didn’t want to contend with a temperamental garage door. She wanted to be inside her house. She wanted to eat and sleep and have a weekend to forget about lawsuits and lawyers.

  Kate Baneberry stepped out into the damp November night, swung the car door shut, and pulled her boiled wool topcoat tight around her shoulders. In the moonlight, her blonde hair shone white above startlingly blue eyes that seemed to gather and reflect light wherever she looked.

  On the small front porch, she jangled her keys to find the one that fit the door, slipped it into the lock, and turned the dead bolt. She paused to reach inside the black box next to her door and pull out a handful of mail.

  Inside the neat two-story colonial, Kate set her purse, her mail, and a white paper bag on the deacon’s bench in the entry hall. She peeled off her coat, draped it over the backrest, and carried the mail and the paper sack into the kitchen, where she flipped on overhead lights.

  Outside, through the window over the sink, the last gray smudges of dusk disappeared into black. Tension flowed out of Kate’s neck and shoulders and dissipated into a tingling chill along her spine.

  Her gaze drifted from the window to the blank screen of a small television on the counter; then she turned away as if changing her mind about something. She took a blue-tinted tumbler from the cabinet next to the window and filled it from the cold-water dispenser built in to the freezer door. She drank deeply as she crossed back to the granite-topped island and pulled two fast-food roast beef sandwiches from the bag. She began to flip through the stack of envelopes and holiday catalogs.

  And she froze.

  The rush of Kate’s own heartbeat and quickened breathing filled her ears. She pulled in a deep breath, and she listened as a domino line of thoughts tumbled through her mind. She could have sworn she had heard a sound—maybe the soft brush of a foot on carpeting or the whispered friction of a man’s pant legs as he walked—only she couldn’t be sure she’d heard anything, and she wondered if it was possible to somehow sense noises too slight to hear.

  Standing under bright kitchen lights and framed by the empty window, she stood perfectly still and tried to focus. Her perception of the thing that had made her heart race seemed to hover somewhere between sound and premonition. It was neither, exactly. But whatever it was had filled her with the uneasy sense that she was not alone.

  She had been holding the holiday Williams-Sonoma in one hand, thinking vaguely of starting her Christmas shopping. She dropped the catalog on the counter and walked to the back door. As she closed her fingers around the knob, a small scratching noise—a rodent noise—seemed to come from the hallway off the living room.

  She shook her head from side to side and said, “Oh, good Lord,” out loud. Kate w
alked back into the entry hall and through the living room and down the short hallway to the bedroom she shared with her husband. As she went, she flipped on lights as her fingers found familiar wall switches without her needing to look or think about what she was doing. And, all the while, she listened for squirrels on the windows or mice in the walls. She smiled to convince herself to smile, but the same strange sense still hung heavy in the house. And, in her bedroom, she caught the barest whiff of some vague, indefinable scent. It wasn’t unpleasant—just foreign and, it seemed to her, masculine.

  A clicking sound startled Kate, and her heart popped hard in her chest. Someone was in the kitchen.

  Painted walls and pale carpeting blurred as she rushed through a familiar jumble of rooms and hallways. She was just outside the kitchen door and still moving fast when the realization hit that she was hurrying toward the noise and not running away. Maybe she was angry. Maybe it was territorial. She was standing on the tiled kitchen floor before she had time to think about it. And she was alone.

  For the second time that evening, Kate crossed the room and closed her fingers around the backdoor knob. She twisted the cool metal to make sure the door was still locked; then she turned and hurried back through her house, jiggling outside doors, scanning windows for open locks or broken glass, and finally peeking out front to make sure her station wagon was still parked by the curb, still visible in the glow of the gaslight.

  She stopped in the small foyer and listened. Seconds ticked by. She forced her breathing to slow. The thumping in her chest subsided and then faded away. A few seconds passed, and Kate had convinced herself that nothing more ominous than squirrels in the attic or bats in the chimney had prickled her already frayed nerves. And she began to feel foolish.

  She walked back into the kitchen, where she clicked on the television to feel less lonely. An ad for a BMW convertible flickered across the screen. A silver sports car swerved through curves on the California coast, and Kate thought how glad she would be when that awful trial was over and she and the rest of the jurors could get back to their lives. The whole thing, she thought, was making her a little nuts.

  As she dragged up a wrought-iron stool next to the center island, the commercial ended and Channel Five started a news story about a road-rage shooting on the Daulphin Island exit ramp off I-10. The male anchor introduced the pretty blonde reporter with the great laugh—the one Jim, her husband, had a little crush on—for a background piece on gun control.

  Kate squirted packets of red sauce inside her sandwiches. She stood and poured her water into the sink, refilled the glass with ice cubes, and then covered the ice with cold tea from the refrigerator. She felt a second wave of tension melt away as she sipped the comforting, bitter brew flavored with bright green mint leaves from her garden. She climbed back onto the stool and ate dinner.

  Twenty-six hours later, Kate Baneberry—an attractive, middle-aged housewife who heard noises and sensed danger and ate roast beef sandwiches for dinner—was pronounced dead at Bayside Hospital.

  One

  Two little boys with blond bowl cuts were playing in the yard. Over and over, one tore across the lawn, holding a football overhead like the skull of an enemy, and then dove into a pile of dead leaves. The second kid piled on and they rolled around in the leaf pile, fighting like wild dogs over the football; then the victor would pick up the ball and take off for another running dive into a new pile. I remembered doing pretty much the same thing twenty years earlier in a different small town with my brother.

  Some things are eternal. Young or old, rich or poor, human beings love to beat the hell out of each other.

  I sat down on the brick front steps across from a pretty blonde woman, balanced a plate of food on my knee, and watched. She smiled, and I motioned at the kids. “Are they yours?”

  She shook her head. “No. I think they’re Sara’s.” I didn’t know Sara, so I arranged some turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce on a fork and put it in my mouth. She said, “Looks like they’re having fun.”

  I smiled and nodded and chewed.

  “Relative or friend?”

  I looked at her. “Of?”

  She laughed. “Sorry. Of our hosts.”

  “Oh. Friend.”

  She kept looking at me with her eyebrows raised, as though I wasn’t through talking.

  As a general rule, I try not to fill in conversational blanks. At worst, it can get you in trouble. At best, well, it’s just babbling. But it was Thanksgiving. And, I thought, what difference does it make? “The woman I would have been with today just moved back to the Midwest, and my elderly parents are on a holiday Caribbean cruise for elderly parents.” I pointed my empty fork at the sky. “So, here I am.”

  She took a sip from a mug of coffee. “Oh, I know who you are. You’re Tom McIntosh, aren’t you?”

  “Close. I’m Tom McInnes.”

  “Oh, sorry. Nice to meet you. I’m Sheri Baneberry. Our hostess, B.J., said I should talk to you.”

  Sheri had really large, spectacularly white teeth. Other than that, she was a perfect compilation of mediums—medium nose, medium build, medium-length hair. The overall impression was of a pretty, twentysomething woman completely devoid of sexuality—sort of a universal, upper-middle-class mom-in-waiting. Of course, I realized it was entirely possible that I wasn’t turning her crank, either. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking when a bloodcurdling scream pierced the crisp fall air, and I spilled gravy on my pants.

  The slightly smaller bowl cut was wailing and cupping a tiny hand under a nose streaming blood from each nostril.

  I started to stand, but the hurt little boy didn’t wait for help. He sprinted up the bricks between me and my dinner companion, holding his nose and crying and screaming for his mother. The bigger kid froze for two beats and then hightailed it around the back of the house.

  I blotted at the gravy on my pants with one of those hand-embroidered linen napkins that pressure guests to struggle through the meal without actually having to wipe their mouths. I nodded in the direction of the little boy who had just galloped up the steps between Sheri Baneberry and me. “Dinner theater.”

  She smiled. “Which one were you?”

  I stopped to think about what she meant. “I guess I was the nose breaker, since I was older. But my little brother wouldn’t have run for Mom. He’d have gone to find a baseball bat.”

  She laughed. “Do you two still have the same loving relationship?”

  More than a year after his death, I still missed a beat before saying, “His name was Hall. He died last year.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. Me too.”

  Sheri Baneberry turned sideways on the steps and pointed her knees at me. “But in a way it brings me to the thing I wanted to talk to you about. My mother passed away, well, it’ll be two weeks ago this Saturday.”

  I told her I was sorry for her loss.

  She just nodded and went on. “It was some kind of food poisoning. She was just forty-six, which surprises people. But she had me when she was twenty-one, which is younger than most people have kids nowadays, and she was pretty young-looking. So … anyway, Mom checked into Bayside on a Saturday afternoon. She’d been sick all morning with the kind of stomach and intestinal problems you get with food poisoning. And the short version is that something went wrong and she died that night.”

  I set my plate on the bricks between my feet and folded my thirty-dollar napkin to hide the gravy smear. “I’m sorry, Sheri, but I don’t do malpractice, if that’s where you’re heading. I do go to court—I’m not a green-visor, transactions kind of lawyer—but I tend to represent clients who’re involved in business disputes. An argument over a contract, something like that.”

  She flashed those big teeth, but it didn’t seem friendly. “So you’re not a slimy plaintiff’s lawyer?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. There are some bad doctors out there, just like there are bad lawyers and bad Indian chiefs, I guess. An
d there are good lawyers who do that sort of thing. It’s just not what I want to do. So I don’t.”

  “And B.J. tells me that if you don’t want to do something, you just don’t do it.”

  I looked into her medium-brown eyes. “Sounds almost unflattering when you say it.”

  She forced a small laugh. “Sorry, I guess I’m not at my best. It’s just that I need someone I can trust to look into what happened to Mom. I was talking to B.J. inside, and she says that even though you can be kind of …” Sheri hesitated, and a rose blush crept up either side of her neck.

  “The last time I checked, B.J. was a friend of mine. So it couldn’t be that bad.”

  “Well, she just said you’re kind of headstrong. Maybe a little difficult sometimes. It was nothing much worse than that. But she also said, quote, ‘Tom McInnes is as trustworthy as a Boy Scout.’ ”

  I didn’t really know what to say to that, since I wasn’t sure it was true, so I just looked at her.

  “She also says you’re supposed to be … well, ‘smarter than God’ is the way she put it.”

  I smiled. “That’s what I keep telling people.”

  “Anyway, my father’s on the warpath. You know. He wants to sue everybody and their uncle, and I don’t want a lawyer who’ll look at him and see dollar signs.”

  “Are you asking me to talk your father out of something? Because I can’t do that.”

  “No. Definitely not. I’m looking for someone I can trust to take a look at what happened to my mother and give us an honest report.” Sheri took a sip of coffee from her mug as her eyes darted around our Thanksgiving hosts’ front yard. “I guess it’s obvious I don’t think Dad needs to sue anyone. Just putting the whole thing behind us is what I’d like to do. But if one of the doctors or the hospital did something god-awful, then, you know, I guess we need to know that.”

  Across the lawn, what had been a series of neatly raked and rounded piles were now jagged circles of brown and red and yellow leaves. I turned back to examine my new client’s face. “Okay, Sheri. As long as you know what you’re getting and what you’re not getting. At this point, all I feel comfortable agreeing to do is analyze what’s there and give you a report, but the way we’re talking about doing this won’t be cheap. A regular plaintiff’s lawyer would take it on contingency, which means he or she would only charge if you win. I don’t work that way, especially since I wouldn’t be investigating with the goal of collecting a big verdict at trial. What I do is charge two hundred an hour, which is not unreasonable around Mobile. My investigator gets seventy-five. And this could take a while.”