Delafield, p.1
Delafield, page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Synopsis
Bella Books Social Media
Praise for the works of Katherine V. Forrest
Also by Katherine V. Forrest
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Acknowledgments
Bella Books
Synopsis
Death is now on her doorstep. Not even her loyal LAPD colleagues can protect her from an attack that may come from anywhere, anytime.
Four years retired, Kate Delafield has a twenty-year old case roaring back on her, a case from which she had recoiled, withdrawn herself. A homophobic homicide far too reminiscent of a recent, haunting, life-changing investigation of the murder of a young lesbian at the Nightwood Bar. Now she suffers in secret, knowing she is personally culpable for the mishandling of evidence.
She has also begun to understand how the roads she has traveled have led her to this day. The key decisions about the conduct of her life and her police career that have brought her directly to this time, this place in the high desert where she has taken herself. All she can do now, she resolves, is protect as best she can the people she loves most, especially Aimee, from this threat. And, until her time runs out, she can go back and investigate, determine who actually ended the life of fifteen-year-old April Shuster.
But events, people, intervene. New people in her present life, some from her past. And they will take her in the most unexpected of directions.
A Kate Delafield Mystery Series Book 10.
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Praise for the works of Katherine V. Forrest
High Desert
With nearly a decade since Forrest’s last foray into the seamy world of the LAPD, it may have seemed as if we wouldn’t see Delafield again. But–she’s back. Not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a full-throated cry of foul at the various hands she’s been dealt since we saw her last… Delafield, who remains the complex and engaging character she always was.
-Lambda Literary Review
Hancock Park
A classic case of what a heck of a lot of crime fiction isn’t—outstanding character-driven writing.
-Reviewing the Evidence
Sleeping Bones
An excellent novel by a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Mystery.
-Library Journal
Murder by Tradition
Lambda Literary Award winner Forrest (The Beverly Malibu) transcends the run-of-the-mill police procedural and courtroom drama with this thought-provoking fourth in a series featuring Los Angeles lesbian homicide cop Kate Delafield. Kate and her partner, Ed Taylor, are called to the scene of the stabbing death of gay restaurateur Teddie Crawford. Working with information from a blood-spatter specialist, the cops learn that the killer has been seriously wounded, and soon pick up Kyle Jensen at the hospital where he has gone for help. Although Jensen claims that he killed Teddie in self-defense after Teddie made a pass at him, Kate suspects that Jensen is a gay-basher and investigates on her own. Just as she is making headway, Kate learns that the only heterosexual male who knows of her sexual preferences will be representing Jensen. She fears that the defense will broadcast her lifestyle, thereby weakening her testimony about the scene of the crime and, worse, jeopardizing her job. Kate’s effort to persuade the jury to accept her conclusion while keeping her integrity intact is the primary focus of this compelling story.
-Publishers Weekly
Lesbian LAPD detective Kate Delafield’s fourth appearance should quash any doubts concerning Forrest’s abilities as a mystery writer, mainstream or otherwise. Well-detailed police procedure, sizzling courtroom drama, and a firm belief in ethics characterize this story of the gory murder of a handsome, gregarious gay man by a muscle-bound “straight.” In tandem with assistant district attorney Linda Foster, and supported by lover Aimee, Kate struggles against departmental homophobics to destroy the murderer’s plea of self-defense. Quality writing; for most collections.
-Library Journal
Daughters of an Emerald Dusk
Pam Keesey: The third installment in the fascinating story of the women who colonized the planet Maternas, this is the follow-up to Daughters of a Coral Dawn (1984) and Daughters of an Amber Noon (2002). In the telling of this tale, set 50 years after Amber Noon, Forrest captures the ethereal, otherworldly, second generation offspring of the women of Maternas… Forrest has given us both an entertaining and thought-provoking account. Fans of Coral Dawn and Amber Noon will welcome this addition to the series and Forrest has still left us wondering what will happen to this colony of women next.
-Lambda Book Report
Daughters of an Amber Noon
April, 2006: Katherine V. Forrest’s best-selling Daughters of a Coral Dawn was published in 1984 and became an instant classic. In Daughters of a Coral Dawn, 4,000 women, descendants of a single mother whose origins are the planet Verna, leave Earth to start their own civilization on a planet they call Maternas. But many of their sisters chose to remain on Earth. What happened to those women? Now, nearly two decades later, the saga continues. Daughters of an Amber Noon picks up where Daughters of a Coral Dawn left off…
-Just About Write
Curious Wine
…is a beautiful story about finding out who you are when you least expect it. Published in the early 1980s, it’s a classic lesbian romance that’s won the hearts of many a reader, and for good reason. Curious Wine is masterfully written. It’s perfectly paced and surprisingly erotic, since it’s very much a romance novel and not an erotic romance. What does that mean? To me, romance = relationship drives the story, and erotic romance = sex drives the relationship development. Curious Wine solidly falls in the “romance” category.
-The Lesbian Review
Also by Katherine V. Forrest
From Bella Books
Curious Wine
An Emergence of Green
Daughters of an Amber Noon
Daughters of A Coral Dawn
Daughters of an Emerald Dusk
From Spinsters Ink
The Kate Delafield Series
Amateur City
Murder at the Nightwood Bar
The Beverly Malibu
Murder by Tradition
Liberty Square
Apparition Alley
Sleeping Bones
Hancock Park
High Desert
Copyright © 2022 Katherine V. Forrest
Spinsters Ink
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
First Edition - 2022
Editor: Medora MacDougall
Cover Designer: Heather Honeywell
ISBN: 978-1-935226-89-5
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Dedication
For Jo
For Everything
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
1
May, 2012
“Joe, another one just arrived,” Kate Delafield said, gripping her cell phone as she paced her living room.
“Did you send it on?” Detective Joe Cameron had picked up her call on his private line at Victorville PD as if he’d been waiting for it.
“Just now.”
“Hold on a sec…Got it…” He muttered, “Looks like she’s escalating.”
Kate strode to the breakfast bar and looked down at the handwritten note she’d taken out of her mailbox, photographed and forwarded to Cameron. She read it aloud: “‘Any minute now will be your last.’ That’s about as escalated as it gets. Before she kills me of course.”
“Our offer stands.” His voice was harsh with exasperation. “You have your whole police family behind you on this, Kate.”
“I kno w, I’m grateful. But we both know assigning protection is a waste. She figures to just wait it out.” Nevertheless, and certainly at his behest, patrol cars drifted past her house every few hours. In her view they served only to draw unwanted attention and she felt exposed enough out here in the high desert.
“Yeah, well,” Cameron said, “she might get tired of waiting it out.”
“Joe, I’m armed, alarmed, and on film. This way I won’t endanger anyone else. This way I’m not doing anything different from how you holed up to wait for your brother.” Blunt reminder of the choice he’d made a few years back when she’d helped him protect his family in a cabin not too far from here. “There’s something new, is why I called. A Yucca Valley postmark.”
“Jesus. Did you save the envelope?”
She shook her head at this rote question. “It hardly needs analysis or fingerprinting. We know it’s Ellie Shuster.”
She heard Cameron draw a breath. They’d worked together so many years she held a clear image of him at his desk in the Victorville Patrol Station, unchanged from their days together as homicide detectives at LAPD’s Wilshire Division: his jacket off and hung on the back of his chair, tie loosened, sleeves of a crisp shirt rolled tidily up to the elbow, holding his cell phone to his ear with an index finger, head bent, making notes as he listened. “Kate,” he said, “it’s more than just the envelope and you know it. Coming from out of town, there was always the possibility—”
“—that like most threats they were just threats,” Kate finished for him. She knew better. Had known from the start this was as real as death. “So now she’s right here.”
The missives, this one being number thirteen, had previously been sent from seven different California postmarks in roughly two-week intervals over the past five months, all handwritten in brief, stark variations of the same message: Eleanor Frances Shuster’s only remaining purpose on this earth was to remove Kate Delafield from it.
“At least we can pinpoint some action. Put out another BOLO, check out all the local hotels and motels, distribute a circular with her photo—”
Kate felt a scintilla of hope about a wide area be on the lookout but it faded quickly. There had been no sighting of Ellie Shuster for five months. She had left no electronic footprints; she was now operating untraceably on a cash basis with money awarded to her by the state. She could be anywhere in the high desert, the entire Coachella Valley, even right there in Victorville with Cameron. She could be in disguise. Using her prison connections, she might have arranged for a hitman as proxy, and if so, anyone Kate met on the street could be her killer.
“What’s it been?” he was saying. “Year and a half?”
“About that since her release. Five months and a week since the letters started.”
“What took her so long? That’s what I can’t figure. Even factoring in her wait for the reparations payoff.”
“The rage was building, is my guess.”
“She had nineteen years for that,” he argued. “Kate, you seem way too…I don’t know, unruffled over a case that was a total Torrie Holden fuckup.”
“Believe me, Joe, I’m ruffled. It doesn’t matter about Torrie. I was the D-three, she was a D-one. The case was my responsibility. I suspected she was a fuckup before she proved it the hard way.” Kate flexed the shoulder that reminded her daily of an arrest gone south in every dimension including the death of the seventeen-year-old suspect, and a crossfire bullet that had put her down and on leave for six weeks. A bullet that came from the weapon of then-partner, Torrie Holden. “Besides, Torrie’s out of the frame.” Long since dead of breast cancer.
“It was a strong case even without her mess-up,” Cameron retorted. “Incriminating diary, motive, testimony…”
She gritted her teeth. He would not let go of his determination to persuade her into absolving herself of any blame. Like everyone else, he had no inkling of her actual culpability in Ellie Shuster’s wrongful conviction. She tossed the note back onto the counter, wishing that instead of giving in to her electric fear when she saw the postmark, the need to immediately share with him this newest and most alarming communication, she’d ripped up the goddamn thing and thrown it to the desert winds. She said flatly, “We put the wrong person on death row. Destroyed her marriage. Took nineteen years from her life.”
“The jury did. It took the Innocence Project—”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“—getting the case reviewed with new evidence and reneged testimony. Which you had no way of knowing back then.”
How many times did he have to repeat all this? She’d read through the trial transcripts and appeals, examined her copy of the murder book innumerable times, run over it in her mind a thousand more times looking for anything that might have been missed. If Ellie Shuster hadn’t done this crime, who did?
“Joe, I know all this and so does she. It makes no difference. She’s out to have someone else know how it feels to have their life torn up the way we did hers. Feel what it’s like to be on death row.”
“Aimee would—”
“Leave Aimee the hell out of this.”
A song from the radio next door suddenly impinged on her consciousness and she involuntarily laughed.
“What is so goddamn funny,” Cameron snapped.
“Music from next door. The Police, ‘Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you.’”
“Yeah, that’s really funny. How’s your sobriety?”
“Holding,” she said shortly, irked by the question, an unwelcome reminder of what had been out of her awareness however momentarily.
“How about I come over to see you tonight?”
“Be glad to see you anytime, Joe. You know that.” She clicked off.
Mostly anytime. Mostly she could do without his useless, hovering anxiety.
She began to pace her house, her go-to routine in confronting the renewed ache and craving for the soul-deep soothe of alcohol. She gazed at the tile flooring, beige tinged with coral, that she’d installed throughout and splashed with woven Native American scatter rugs. At her armchairs-only living room, all four of them in pale pastel shades and with ottomans. The angular glass coffee table and end tables, the mounted TV on a wall she’d painted sunset citrus, the two other walls layered in rough-hewn shelves crowded with books. The kitchen alcove with its breakfast bar, ruthlessly utilitarian as were the two bedrooms, basic bed and dresser in each and with another complement of books. She liked looking at, savoring this house, the first place she’d created just for herself. Never mind the monetary cost, its much higher cost emotionally, everything in here was hers, her choice, no compromise. If her life was to be taken away, let it be here with Joshua trees and desert winds as her companions. And when it happened, just let it be quick.
Infinitesimally lightened by the survey of her house, she moved to the front window and went through her next checklist, the practical one, less comforting. Minimal danger from the left: a rock formation that could be navigated only with boulders noisily breaking loose underfoot. Neighbors to her right, all of them familiar if not personally known to her. Beyond the back deck, a few widely scattered dwellings, then open desert extending for miles to Joshua Tree National Park. Before her, rocky sand patchworked with cactus, cholla, ocotillo; across the road, a purely desert vista of Joshua trees, creosote, chaparral, and brittlebush overseen by the far distant San Bernardino Mountains.
Not in view but much in her awareness were the police-mounted rooftop cameras that rotated front and back of the house and one above the front door, the alarms active on windows and doors. Motion-activated lighting that at night would wash the house in illumination at the approach of an intruder. All of it solid protection unless she left the house. She could be shot on the way to her Jeep. But she was always armed, and the shooter would be starkly visible on this desert landscape. Not that it mattered. She guessed that Ellie Shuster, if she performed the act herself, would want to be clearly visible whenever she finally acted.
