The Deepest Kill

Book 3: Locard Institute Thriller

by Lisa Black

Genres: Conspiracy Thrillers; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

A riveting thriller that puts the New York Times bestselling author squarely in the same league as Patricia Cornwell and Jefferson Bass, the Locard Institute Thriller series draws on Lisa Black’s real-life scientific expertise and her skill in crafting complex and dynamic female characters, as two female forensic experts team up to solve the deadliest and most devious crimes.

For software pioneer Martin Post, the third richest man in America, his private compound on the Florida coast is a sunny no-man’s-land separating his family from the rest of the world. Now, expert forensic analysts Ellie Carr and Rachael Davies of the renowned Locard Institute have been summoned to its dark side.

Martin’s pregnant daughter, Ashley, had ventured on a day trip in her motorboat into the Gulf, only to wash up dead on a nearby shore. Although the local coroner determined her death was an accident, Ellie and Rachael soon confirm Martin’s gravest fear: His daughter was murdered. Was it a kidnapping gone wrong? Or something even more brutal? Ashley and her husband, Greg, had been working working with Martin on a revolutionary new defense initiative for the US military – could espionage have played a part in her death?  Martin believes Greg is behind the murder, and the spoiled charmer does set off Rachel’s deception radar.  If the widower didn’t kill Ashley himself, why isn’t he more upset that she’s dead?

Drawn into the Posts’ increasingly dangerous family dynamic, Ellie and Rachael must work hard and fast to discover what secrets are buried at the heart of the crime. Because the churning waters of the Gulf are getting rougher. And soon, Ellie and Rachael  themselves will be in danger of getting crushed in their depths.

Release date: February 20, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

“He’s lying,” Rachael Davies said.

“What?” Ellie nearly spilled the cup of overly warm coffee she’d so carefully carted across the terrazzo. Her new boss, Dr. Davies, sat in the cafeteria, absently eating what looked like cold pasta primavera and watching the twenty-inch monitor perched on the counter next to the coffeemaker. They were two of only five people in the large room, built to hold the entire lunchtime crowd of a DC-area boy’s school but now utilized only when sessions of forensic training were being held. The last two had ended the week before. Until more started the following month, the cafeteria provided only coffee and use of a microwave. For anything more, the Locard staff were on their own.

The television monitor replayed the interview of Greg Anderson appealing for the return of his wife, Ashley. Ashley, four months pregnant, a white twenty-five-year-old, apparently went boating one day two weeks previously and disappeared. After one week, local fishermen found the empty boat bobbing in the Gulf. Though boating accidents were hardly unheard of in coastal areas, Ashley’s case stayed in the news—mostly because of her father.

Martin Post, the third-richest man in the United States. Genius of OakTree software and hardware design—there were few computers in the world that didn’t churn up cyberspace using his components. And now, a mere mile from his opulent Florida fortress, his only child had washed up on a beach among the seaweed and discarded water bottles.

On the screen, Greg Anderson pleaded for any information about his wife. “If anyone saw her, if anyone was on the water that day, please call the tip line and let us know. Ashley w—is the joy of my life. And that we were about to have our first baby—” He broke off and put a hand to his mouth, his eyes screwing up into tight knots, apparently overwhelmed.

“Totally lying,” Rachael said again.

Again Ellie’s gaze swung from her to the television and back again. “How do you know that?”

“First, he speaks of her in the past tense.”

“She is in the past tense.”

“Not then. That interview was shot on the day after she disappeared.” Her new boss tore open a bag of chips, chewed one with a thoughtful air, then set the bag down to position her hands with all five pairs of fingers touching. “Second, he held his hands like this.”

“Like he was praying.”

“Not exactly. The palms aren’t touching, the fingers aren’t interlaced. It’s called steepling, and is a huge indicator of confidence. One of the biggest.”

The gesture did seem familiar. “Like a supervillain in a movie.”

“And he’s sweating.”

“It’s Florida.”

“Even at this time of year?” Rachael said, and glanced through the windows where a Chesapeake Bay fall had already begun to bluster, ripping the dying leaves from the surrounding forest.

“At every time of year. Trust me on that.”

Ellie and the assistant dean of education had already been through much more than most coworkers, and in a short amount of time. This had made the two women intimately familiar in some ways and left them total strangers in others. Right now Ellie had no idea what her new boss might be thinking as Rachael waved a chip and said, “Exactly! Third, his facial muscles are all relaxed. His lips aren’t compressed, his eyes are wide—until he scrunches them up at the end, because on some level his body knows that his skin isn’t matching his words. He even tilts his head to one side, something you don’t do unless you’re relaxed and, well, happy. Usually, anyway . . . there are always exceptions.”

The news story moved to a new clip, and Rachael continued. “Here, the interview after her body washed up, he doesn’t seem so chipper. His chin is trembling, he’s pressing his lips together hard, he seems to pant when specifying on which beach the body was found. To be fair, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s lying about any part of it. It only tells me he’s worried.”

“Huh,” was Ellie’s less than eloquent comment. The TV coverage continued its recap of the saga with a clip of a news reporter in a motorboat. Ominous clouds gathered overhead as she described the water search after Ashley went missing. “You think he killed her? Or somehow drove her to suicide?”

Rachael crunched another chip. “Not necessarily. I just think he’s glad she’s gone.”

“Martin Post’s daughter? She was young, beautiful, filthy rich—”

“It’s a marriage, which means the dynamics are not always logical. And a lot depends on the prenup.”

“Wow. Can—can you teach me how to do that?”

Rachael laughed, heartily enough to be flattering. “Deception detection? Sure—sit in on my class next quarter. But you probably already know a lot of it, maybe had it in other training?”

Ellie shook her head. “I know how to interpret the crime scene, fingerprints, bullet casings, inanimate objects. Human beings remain a mystery.”

The Locard secretary materialized between them and the television set. “Phone call, Rachael.”

The assistant dean gave her a pleading look. “This is the first time I’ve sat down all day. Can you scribble a message?”

“I think you’d better take this one.”

Ellie watched as Rachael’s interest perked up along with her eyebrows. “Who is it?”

“He says he’s Martin Post.”

The coast of southwest Florida did not care to be convenient, refusing to progress in one solid line of beach from Tampa to the Everglades. It dipped and swirled and created pockets of bays and lagoons and estuaries and mangrove paddies and marshes. There were miles of sandy beach, yes, but also miles where the pockmarked land declined to provide a consistent foundation.

Martin Post, Ellie could see, had gotten around that by sinking a fortune in concrete and making his own. His property formed, more or less, an island in a sea of undeveloped coast, surrounded by soupy bunches of mangrove trees and unstable shoals. This provided an effective but beautiful no-man’s-land between his family and the rest of the world. Paparazzi or corporate spies would have to wind through the marshy, bramble-like growth in a flat-bottomed john-boat, risking alligators, water moccasins, and exsanguination by mosquitos in order to reach even the border of his property. And then, Ellie noted as she approached the security shed, scale a twelve-foot wall equipped with cameras and topped with spikes.

Much easier to make an appointment.

Which, apparently, the fifteen or so news channel and print media vans parked along the street did not have. They had pulled to the side of the public thoroughfare rather than on to the Post property, burning gallon after gallon of fossil fuel to keep their air-conditioning running while they waited, waited, waited, for something to happen. Each occupant sat up like a meerkat sensing a tasty scorpion as she drove down the otherwise empty street, and poured from their doors with cameras running when she pulled into the drive. They started up the pavement after her, then paused, slowed, as if held back by an invisible forcefield of money and a possible trespass charge. No doubt the back of their rented sedan would be on the evening news, unless something more interesting happened before air time.

Ellie had peppered Rachael with questions during the flight down, questions she couldn’t answer as to why the third-richest man in the country wanted to talk to them about his daughter. Clearly the third-richest man in the country wanted to hire the Locard as forensic consultants on his daughter’s death—but what he expected them to do, neither could guess.

“It’s getting cloudy,” Rachael said.

“Rainy season.” Ellie had once lived there. She had once lived in a number of places, since her mother died when Ellie was four and her father had no interest in being a single parent. She lived with her grandmother until the age of nine, spending most summers with her mother’s cousins in Nevada. After the grandmother got sick, it was Aunt Rosalie’s until twelve, Uncle Terry and Aunt Katey in West Virginia until sixteen, then Uncle Paul and Aunt Joanna in Naples. College in California and vacations with her mother’s cousin Tommy and Valeria, recruited to the bureau in DC, and a now-ended marriage to fellow forensics expert Adam. So yes, she knew the local weather. “Florida has two seasons. It rains every day during the rainy season. And then one day it stops, and then it’s dry season.”

Rachael glanced at her as if she might be kidding. She was not.

The security guard at the gatehouse, politely dour, ignored the cameras one hundred feet away and asked them for ID. He took their Locard badges into his workstation, so well air-conditioned that condensation trickled down the open glass door, through which he kept an eye on them. His work space appeared to have enough electronic screens and equipment to operate the space station, an overstuffed couch, and a full kitchen. Nice that Martin Post provided pleasant working conditions, even for an apparent ex-WWF bodybuilder who looked as if he’d have been equally at ease chowing down an MRE in an Afghan desert.

She also noticed no less than three cameras aimed at them and their car, undoubtedly beaming their photos to the main house for confirmation that the two women were expected. Only one lane leading into the estate, and one to let a car back out. Not a drive designed to welcome a crowd and without a chance to dart around another vehicle while the gate lifted. The gate itself went far beyond a single wooden stick across the lane, made of thick stainless steel bars with only enough gap between each slat to allow Florida winds but not a human being. Of course, if Ellie had more money than the GDP of many first-world nations, she would consider security worth paying for too.

The guard gave her the go-ahead and she drove forward into the masses of greenery. She only knew a house existed at the end of the two-lane road by a glimpse of its uppermost floors over the tops of the mangroves. It took longer than she expected to get there, but at last the wild vines parted and a campus of concrete and glass appeared to spring up from the ground. The drive split into three directions with no indication of what might be where, so, true to form, she continued on the middle one.

Boxy, concrete garages sat on either side, more like an industrial park than a home. The door of one stood open with a lithe woman visible inside; she stood in front of a workbench holding a belt sander. “That’s the wife,” Rachael said.

Ellie stopped the car and they got out.

The woman was not alone. A man, also thirtyish and attractive with dark, perfectly cut hair and a slender form. But he wore a suit complete with tie while she had on a white tank top and crumpled khaki shorts that probably would cost Ellie a week’s salary.

The young man’s hand rested on the woman’s arm, gently, an almost pleading look on his face. “Are you sure you even want to do this?”

“It’s too late for that.”

He dropped his hand. “You’re right. It is.”

They both noticed the Locard women at the same time. Before they got close enough to greet, he added, to the woman, “Please get the time to me as soon as you can. I’ve got everyone’s schedule coordinated for that one narrow window, and if we miss that he’ll lose the opportunity to bid at all.”

“I understand.”

“And I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, Tomas.”

Rachael’s shadow on the floor alerted the woman; she set the sander down and turned. The young man nodded to them as he left the garage, while the woman wiped her hands on her clothes and tried for a smile, starting with Rachael. “You’re Dr. Davies.” A statement, not a question. “And Dr. Carr. I’m Dani. I’m Martin’s wife.”

Ellie shook the hand offered, the firm fingers lightly coated with dust. “What are you building?”

It seemed a safe bet for a conversational gambit. Ellie had negotiated so many “news” in her life that a careful approach had become second nature. Stay quiet and polite, don’t tick anyone off, don’t choose allies too quickly. Get the lay of the land first. Keep a pleasant expression glued to your face at all times. Good advice for infiltrating unfamiliar families or second grade or world-class teaching institutes. Or the households of the ultra-rich.

“A bookshelf.” The woman’s smile deepened a millimeter or two, as if embarrassed. “The last thing we need, but this is how we cope with stress. Martin writes code, and I work with wood. Come this way, I’ll take you to him.”

Martin Post’s wife had ice-blue eyes under a shock of artfully cut blond hair that swished with each step, and stood about Ellie’s height but at least fifteen pounds lighter. Her skin, figure, nails, the arch of each eyebrow were all perfect, yet she didn’t seem to care that her stress-release hobby had left her with two deep scratches on her right forearm and an angry patch at her left wrist, perhaps where the sander had jumped its board. Or that she trailed sawdust from her bare feet as she guided them through a door to a cool interior corridor. She hadn’t said anything about being Ashley’s mother, which seemed likely only if she’d given birth at ten. Maybe fifteen.

They entered an elevator. When Martin Post had asked them to come “to the house,” Ellie had expected a mansion, a sprawling example of Million Dollar Listing with gold-plated faucets and a fountain in the curved drive. But perhaps “house” was only OakTree slang for “headquarters.” Even the elevator consisted of four blank steel walls.

Dani said nothing, so neither did they.

According to the indicator they had passed three levels when the doors split to reveal yet another cool corridor, but at least this one had artwork hung at uniform intervals. Dani moved forward and the two women followed.

The photos were of Martin Post, sometimes with Dani, sometimes with Ashley. They carried water bottles on a cliff overlooking the Grand Canyon or hiked in Machu Picchu with backpacks and walking sticks, all matted and framed to coordinate with the creamy taupe walls. This family, Ellie thought, values experiences more than gold-plated faucets. Good for them.

They turned the corner and came to the mansion part of the “house.” The single room would encompass the entire footprint of her bungalow near Chesapeake. With an outer wall of glass from floor to twenty-foot ceiling, ash wood floors, a kitchen area in the back left corner, a group of seats facing a cold fireplace, it seemed all straight lines and minimalist elegance and smelled faintly of lavender. The muted shades and a spare coffee cup left by the sink didn’t make the place much more homey, but hominess wasn’t needed, not when the blue expanse outside the window immediately captured each last synapse of your attention. The Gulf of Mexico churned and flowed and took any human back to their basic, vital foundation, rooting them to their planet and their place on it. No matter how strong you become, the water seemed to say, I’ll still be stronger than you. And bigger, and deeper. Eternal.

Directly below the window she saw part of a pool, then high-end patio furniture scattered across lush green grass, then a spread of mangroves and trees with one wooden boardwalk winding through it. After the trees stopped came a swath of beach; she could only see the thinnest line of sand before it sloped down to the water, the exact edge out of sight. These sections of landscape extended as far as she could see to the right and left. Neighboring houses did not exist.

The waves of the Gulf were rougher than usual, the first tremors of an approaching tropical storm. Fall was the hurricane season, after all. But when she looked down to the ground level, the picture seemed to distort ever so slightly. She realized the glass must be thicker than normal, inches thicker, hurricane and maybe even bullet resistant. Such a calm environment, but then details like that reminded one never to take this oh-so-serene environment at face value.

Nature dominated the view so fully that Ellie almost missed the slender, quiet man standing to the side of it. He came forward and, as his wife had, held out a hand. “Dr. Davies? Dr. Carr?”

He shook Rachael’s hand and turned to Ellie, who banged a shin into the sharp corner of the coffee table as she reached him. She had to stifle a grimace while saying, “I’m so pleased to meet you.” Then she remembered why they were meeting. “I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances.”

“Me too,” he said simply.

The man looked exhausted. Dark hair flecked with gray hung in neglected clumps, and his thin face seemed all the thinner, its lines elongated by grief. Shoulders sagged under a heavy T-shirt and the sinewy arms twitched. His lips were dry and cracked from the dehydration common to fatigue. Though Ellie had never had a child to lose, she knew grief. But she’d known it at an early age, with limited comprehension. Martin Post now knew it in all its myriad, multilevel implications, and it might devour him whole.

“Please sit down,” Dani said to them, gently handling the social niceties that he could not.

But Martin Post didn’t have time for niceties, and didn’t pretend to. He visibly shook off the fog and spoke. “Thank you for coming. I realize it’s short notice, but time is short. The medical examiner’s office is about to release my daughter’s body. They’ve ruled her death accidental.”

“Yes,” Rachael said.

“My son-in-law will have custody, since he’s technically next of kin.”

“Yes.”

“I need you to examine her body.” He took a deep breath, steeling himself to say the next words, the stuff of every parent’s most crushing nightmare. “I need you to examine every factor in her life. I don’t believe my daughter died in an accident. I believe she was murdered.”

Rachael Davies, in her former life as DC medical examiner, had had many similar conversations with similarly grieving family members. She modulated her voice into the perfect combination of sympathetic and professionally brisk. “What makes you say that?”

“Ashley hung out in boats all her life, motorboats, catamarans, sailboats, you name it. She knew everything about them, had experience with every vagary of the weather—which had been fine that day, a little rain in the afternoon but no particularly high winds. It wasn’t as if she’d been in a sailboat, where a gust could have caught the sail. There’s no way she’d just fall out and . . . drown.” He said the last word reluctantly, as if still unwilling to concede that Ashley had died at all.

“Was it common for her to go out alone like that?”

Martin Post paced as he spoke as if his energy, fueled by grief, would not allow him to stay in one place. Dani silently folded into a leather love seat with a fresh water bottle, and watched him with sad eyes.

“Utterly. She did it almost every day. She said the water was the only place she could think.”

“Could Ashley swim?”

Martin said, “Like a shark. We’re all pretty big swimmers. Dani’s practically a pro. Ashley led the swim team in high school.”

“What is her medical history? Any chronic illnesses? Hereditary issues? Surgeries?” Asking questions of family members not only gained information, it gave them a chance to focus, could temporarily diffuse the tension of grief.

But Martin only shrugged. “Nothing, really. She had chicken pox in the fourth grade, strep throat a couple of times. Broke her arm when she was eleven—”

“How?”

“Riding. Never was crazy about horses after that. But the worst time . . . we were climbing on Mount Denali—just a low climb, doing a bit of the West Buttress, not going anywhere near the top. Ashley was only fifteen. We started off from the Kahiltna Glacier, but on the second day she fell into a crevasse. She only fell twelve feet and onto snow . . . it wouldn’t have done much except knock the wind out of her if she hadn’t hit an outcropping on the way down. It cracked her femur.”

“Wow,” Ellie breathed.

He glanced around as if he’d like to sit and then realized the futility of it, took another step in another direction. “The doctor said later we could have just splinted it and she could have walked out, but we didn’t know that. She felt sure it was broken, and I believed her, kept thinking about blood clots from the marrow going to her heart or lungs, so I didn’t want her to move. It took almost eighteen hours for rescue to get there and rig up a way to lift her out of the bottom of the crevasse. I lay with her the whole time, trying to keep her warm, thinking this was it, I was going to lose her.” He put one hand over his eyes, but didn’t cry. Rather, it seemed a gesture of utter hopelessness, as if the despair he’d been holding off for the past two weeks had finally eaten its way in. “And when we made it to the hospital, were warm and dry and her leg in a cast and the doctor said she would be fine, I thought, ‘At least I’ll never have to go through that again.’ I guess I was wrong.”

The room grew so silent that Rachael could hear the miniature thumps as insects collided with the glass windows.

“She’s perfectly healthy,” Martin said, as if realizing this point needed to be made clear. “She . . . was . . . The doctor gave her a gold star every visit. No gestational diabetes, anemia, hypertension, nothing. She had just had the amniocentesis—that was fine too. She hadn’t found out what gender it was, yet . . . said she wasn’t in a hurry. She said she liked considering the possibilities.” He smiled at the memory, lines deepening in his thin face.

“Do you have the autopsy results?” Rachael asked, even more gently. “I haven’t seen anything about them.”

“They said there was a linear cranial compression leading to a hematoma.”

A bump on the skull with some internal bleeding, in other words, possibly from slipping and hitting the head on a hard surface. Perhaps just enough to cause unconsciousness, and if she’d sustained the injury during a fall into the water, fatal since it would cause her to drown. “And”—Rachael chose her words carefully—“you don’t agree with that?”

“I’ve spent hours and hours on boats with her, and never saw her slip. She has the balance of a cat. But she would never take any chances, either—especially in her condition.”

“Pregnancy can change things. Babies can shift, throw off one’s balance, press on nerves . . .” Not that she would know from personal experience.

“Not her,” Martin insisted. Across from Rachael, Dani made the tiniest sound. It could have been a sigh, or it could have been the shift of her slight weight against the leather.

“But—murder,” Rachael said. It was quite a leap, but Martin Post wouldn’t be the first to make it. She’d been over this ground before. Usually in cases of suicide, where the harsh reality that they couldn’t save their loved one sent family members on a desperate search for other explanations, but also in cases of natural death or misadventure. The popularity of forensic-based television shows, of both fictional and true crime types, had only made it worse by portraying every death to have hidden complexities. Rachael could well understand wanting to believe a suicide had only been an unfortunate accident, but it had always escaped her why a parent would want to believe their child had instead been purposely killed by another human being.

At least, it had until Danton came into her life. Now she wasn’t so sure.

“There’s a number of possibilities.” Martin Post’s voice became calmer, more methodical, a keen analyst delineating the variables, and she pushed thoughts of her own toddler from her head. “Obviously, I have a lot of money.”

Which was like saying the universe had a lot of stars.

“I’ve made sure our home here is well guarded. Ashley didn’t go out often by herself—no reason to, she’d never been much of a shopper, didn’t golf, didn’t have a club. The water would be the best,. . .