The Silent Widow

She drove home, blind and unthinking. Two plainclothes policemen sat parked outside her gates, courtesy of Detective Goodman, who apparently wouldn’t take no for an answer.

‘You need protection,’ he’d told her last night in the car, his hand somewhere between her knee and upper thigh while she was pouring her heart out about grief. God, it felt good.

‘I don’t want protection.’

‘It’s not about what you want, Nikki. It’s my job to protect you.’

That felt even better.

‘And what if I refuse your protection, Detective?’ Nikki couldn’t remember where her own hand was at the time, but she suspected nowhere good.

‘Then I’ll ignore you, Doctor.’

Detective Johnson had used her title as an insult. With Goodman, it was a come on.

The cops’ presence proved he hadn’t simply been flirting. He’d meant it. Nikki smiled to see the officers in place now, as Goodman had promised they would be. Stubbornness was a trait she had always admired in men. Doug had had it in spades. Darling Doug. If only things hadn’t ended the way they had.

Tears stung the back of Nikki’s eyes but she blinked them away angrily and pulled into the driveway. Inside the house she switched off the alarm, kicked off her shoes and walked into the kitchen, dumping her new clutch bag on the counter. Still too hungover from last night to contemplate a real drink, she poured herself a large Virgin Mary instead from the ready-mixed bottle in the fridge and sat at the counter, flipping open her laptop for a last check of her emails.

That’s what she told herself anyway. In fact she just wanted to see if Anne had messaged.

She hadn’t.

But another email caught Nikki’s attention. Under the title ‘I saw you last night’ the anonymous sender had attached an image. Clicking it open, Nikki saw a shot of Dan Tana’s restaurant with a second image pasted over the top. It was a crudely photoshopped ph

otograph of Nikki’s face above a naked woman’s body. The woman was swinging from a cartoon noose. Beneath it was a two-word missive: ‘Die, bitch.’

Nikki sat back. She felt a moment’s shock. Then a brief fluttering of fear. Then nothing. Nothing at all.

Despite her emotional numbness, the intellectual part of her brain insisted she do something. This wasn’t a prank. This was a death threat. A specific death threat, from someone who knew her movements, who knew she’d been to Dan Tana’s last night, and presumably who she’d been with. She must tell the police immediately. She must tell Goodman.

And yet, she hesitated. Did she really want to give the handsome detective a reason to intrude even further into her life? To creep closer and closer, on the grounds of ‘protection’?

Part of her definitely did. But another, wiser, part knew that wasn’t the answer.

Goodman was a good man and he seemed to be trying his best to solve the case. But his partner, the odious detective Johnson, was the devil incarnate, and whether Nikki liked it or not, the two cops were a team. A team who seemed to be making grindingly slow progress catching Lisa and Trey’s killer, not to mention the maniac who’d tried to mow her down, and almost succeeded.

Meanwhile, her own life was in danger.

Nikki did need protection. But more than that she needed answers, not only about the murders, but about the one question that had haunted and poisoned and destroyed her since the moment she first learned of Doug’s betrayal.

Clicking open Google she typed in the search bar:

Private Detective, West Los Angeles.

It was time for Plan B.

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘So, Andrea. What’s the definition of a bachelor?’

Derek Williams leaned forward over the Formica table at I-Hop and looked up at the waitress expectantly.

‘It’s seven in the morning, Derek,’ the exhausted young mother replied, refilling his coffee cup. ‘If this is another one of your dirty jokes, I ain’t in the mood.’

‘It’s not dirty!’ Derek Williams protested. ‘You know, it wouldn’t kill you to cheer up every once in a while, Andrea.’