Page 38 of View from Above
Her mind raced to supply answers. Came up empty. “You. What are you doing here?”
“Even after all that time we’ve spent together, you still don’t remember?” Joy Leonard feigned a sad expression with full pink lips. Large curls of dark hair framed a too thin face and overlapped the collar of the woman’s blue blazer. Her father’s grieving assistant dragged Lucille’s purse from beneath Mallory’s hand and clutched it under one arm. “Pity. I thought I’d made more of an impression than that.”
“No. You… You did this?” She could see the similarities now, uninhibited by the Midazolam or the fear of death. The same dark hair, same shape of a nose she’d always hated growing up. Mallory hadn’t noticed any of it before as tunnel vision had led her down the wrong investigative path. “What did you do to my mother?”
“The same thing I’m going to do to you. Again, that is. The first time had one too many variables, and you’re surprisingly more of a fighter than I expected.” Joy produced a small revolver handgun from the back of her black slacks and took aim. “Wow, your family isn’t going to come off very well in the press, I can tell you that. Three suicides in two months. You people really should get some help.”
“I’d say the same thing to you, but it seems you’ve been posing as one of my patients for months.” She didn’t have proof, but Payton had been right. It was the only scenario that lined up with the dates the first three times she’d been sedated. “Claims of OCD and PTSD due to physical and mental abuse during childhood. You’d done your homework on me. Because of my history, you knew I would respond to your story and take you on as a patient. Was any of it true?”
“Quite the opposite, in fact. You see, there really is no such thing as compulsion. There are choices. You can blame someone else or something for the way you turned out, but really, it’s all a matter of coping mechanisms and what you decide you want to be.” Joy waved the gun before centering it back on Mallory. “While you rebelled against the life you’d been freely given and titled yourself a victim, I learned to channel my anger into something productive.”
“Killing people?” Mallory searched for something to use as a weapon, but nothing in her mother’s bathroom would match a gun. She didn’t just have to worry about her life this time. Lucille’s life hung in the balance right along with her.
“I’m good at it, don’t you think?” Joy motioned her out of the bathroom with the revolver, and a streak of panic for her mother cut through her. How much sedative had she been dosed with? “I mean, look how long it took the police to figure out Roland didn’t go off the roof of that building without some coaching. The sedative did a great job of ensuring he couldn’t fight back, but the rest? That was all me, baby.”
“The delusions of grandeur are a nice touch.” She had to do something. Her mother was alive for now, but who knew how long that would last without emergency help? She just needed time to think, to find a way out of this for them both. Hands held palms out in surrender, Mallory scanned her parents’ bedroom with the gun at her back. “You put yourself in the perfect position as my father’s assistant. I’ve got to give you that. He obviously trusted you.”
“With everything.” Joy pressed the barrel of the firearm into Mallory’s spine to nudge her forward. “The idiot practically handed me the access I needed to take him down on a silver platter. His client lists, his bank accounts, even his will.”
“Was that the plan from the beginning?” Her gaze skimmed across her father’s nightstand, the closest of the two. If there was one thing Roland Kotite gave a crap about, it was protecting what was his. With or without the 9mm Smith & Wesson tucked beside his bed. Mallory took a step off the directed path and turned to face her half-sister. “You’d been his assistant for six years. Did you know it was going to end like this?”
“Not at first.” A tranced look came into Joy’s eyes as if she were recalling better days. “Call it curiosity or sense of belonging, whatever you want, but, really, I just wanted to get to know him. What kind of man he was, see him for myself. Once my adoptive parents told me the truth, I spent years fantasizing about who my birth parents were, why they’d given me up, and wondering if they were looking for me, too. I imagined them showing up on the doorstep and whisking me away to a better life.” A psychotic laugh trilled up her throat. Those hard blue eyes focused on Mallory. “But reality doesn’t work like that, does it? Turns out, Virginia Green was a nobody. A washed-up paralegal who wanted nothing to do with me, but she did give me the name of my birth father. What better way to get close to him than to take a job in the very litigation firm I was set to inherit after his death?”
“You overheard us arguing the week of his death.” Mallory shifted her foot back another six inches toward the nightstand. Her heart threatened to beat straight out of her chest. Just a few more feet. “You found out he’d left me the firm.”
“I already knew about the will. I was the one responsible for getting his signature on all the documents his lawyer sent, after all. Just as I know about the 9mm in Roland’s nightstand, and that there’s no way you’d be able to reach it without me putting a bullet in you first.” Joy took a step forward to counter Mallory’s escape. “What I didn’t expect was that he’d refuse to amend it when I told him who I was two years ago.”
Two… Two years ago? Her father had known she’d had a half-sister, and he hadn’t said a word? “He left me that damn firm as a punishment, Joy. Be grateful it wasn’t forced on you to manipulate you into doing what he wanted.”
“Grateful? No.” The killer shook her head. “But I was patient. I took some time to myself. As a therapist, I imagine you’ll be happy to know I’d started attending a regular support group to manage my grief and rage. He stole the life I was supposed to have.” Joy rounded Mallory’s left side, keeping the gun aimed, and slid open her father’s nightstand drawer. Driving her free hand inside, she extracted the Smith & Wesson. “I couldn’t very well kill Roland outright, no matter how many times I thought about it. Lucky for me, I met some likeminded people who understood exactly what I needed. I went away for a little while, and during that time they taught me things I’d never imagined possible. So when the time was right, I’d be ready. Before I knew it, I reinserted myself back into Roland’s good graces. All I had to do was bide my time. Then your mother walked into his office and confronted him about the affair and the baby he’d had with Virginia Green.”
“Your doing, I presume?” Mallory’s throat dried as Joy took apart the 9mm without so much as looking down at the weapon and tossed it on the bed.
“Okay, so maybe I wasn’t as patient as I claimed,” Joy said.
The doorbell rang, followed by several knocks.
Mallory took a step toward the bedroom entry.
“Ah, ah, ah.” Joy pressed the gun into her stomach and loaded a bullet into the chamber. “Move, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”
The front door swished as it was opened downstairs. “Mrs. Kotite? It’s Trooper Rowan Wells. We met at the station. I was wondering if I could talk to you about your husband’s investigation for a few minutes.”
“Looks like that’s our cue, sis.” Joy backed Mallory against the French doors leading out to a Juliet balcony overlooking the side of the house until her shoulders hit glass. The doors parted under the slightest pressure, and Mallory fell through the opening. “You first.”
The railing bit into her hips. “You’re insane if you think I’m climbing down the side of the house at gunpoint.”
“Who said anything about climbing?” The killer shoved her over the balcony.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Seattle Clinic’s offices stared out over Lake Union. Depression, suicide, obsessive compulsive disorders. And apparently brain damage.
Payton climbed the ramp at the front of the building. The vice constricting his heart refused to release since the moment he’d hung up the phone.
Mallory had found his father.
The reality of that statement still burned as hot as the moment she’d told him what she’d done. So what the hell was he doing here? The entire point of locking his father’s missing persons file in his desk was to force himself to move on, to forget. Hell, he’d practically thrown Mallory out of the precinct and shut down any chance of forgiveness with the woman he’d started falling for over it. Now here he was standing at the automatic sliding glass doors and tearing into old wounds. “Shit, you’re a glutton for punishment.”