The Overkill Suspect

Prologue

Mellie

Two years earlier

“Help! Baby!” His helpless eyes begged me to reach out. But I was numb.

Numb? Was that the word? No. I was savoring this. The way the drugs gave him vertigo and dulled his senses. The way he thrashed with all his might, but no matter what he did, his muscles didn’t comply.

Monsters make monsters. He had made me this way.

“Pull me up!” His voice gurgled as his lips sank beneath the surface.

He sounded pathetic.

As pathetic as I had sounded all those times I begged him to stop.

I pulled away, prying his fingers off me one by one.

“Baby…help me!”

He screamed for his life, his instincts kicking in past the alcohol- and drug-induced haze. Lake Mourningkill was especially cold today, and the wind on the water prickled the skin of my naked breasts.

I hated that nickname. Baby. I always had. I always would.

“Baby!” Desperation gave him a final burst of energy as he called to me. What would his final words be? Sorry I groomed you? Sorry I isolated you, broke you, used you?

What could he say to make up for years of manipulation and pain? What words could possibly be enough?

None. He deserved to die.

“No one loves you more than I do, Melody. No one will want you more than me.”

For a moment, I believed him. Maybe no one would ever want me; the pieces of me he’d shattered and left were like discarded and mistreated things. Just junk. But so what? At least he’d never do this to anyone else ever again.

His head dipped below the surface as an eerie fog came off the water and the sun peeked over the Catskill Mountains. Bubbles formed around his nose and mouth as he continued screaming. I watched in rapt fascination as his face slipped beneath the glassy lake.

His arm went under. His hand. Then his desperate, outstretched fingers.

Down, down, down, he went until his image faded, then disappeared into the blackness underneath.

Picking up my shirt and putting it on, I sighed in contentment as my cold skin warmed beneath the flannel. I picked up the bottle of whiskey he’d had his mouth on and turned it upside down to let the amber contents spill after him.

“Aged twenty-five years, single malt.” I robotically repeated what he’d so proudly told me just minutes before. “Two years older than me.”

“Enjoy it.” The last drops fell, discoloring the water that claimed him. Then I let the bottle drop, bobbling along the surface as it filled, before it was pulled down to its owner.

Lake Mourningkill. Appropriately named for the many lost in its undercurrents, frozen and twisted to the dancing floor beneath the waves that forever moved the bodies and wrecks back and forth in an eternal tango. Never gone. Just preserved—but too far below the depths to retrieve.

I tapped the water, causing ripples on the surface. The lake will freeze today. Tomorrow, maybe my brother, sister, and I will skate on the ice.

Would Luke swim to the surface to scream and pound against the ice? Would he reemerge like an unwanted turd that refused to flush away? Would I hear the sound of his heartbeat as I was wracked with guilt?

I smirked because the answer was a resounding no.

The rain started to fall, quiet at first. Distant thunder told me there would be a downpour. That was good. It would erase any evidence when I let drift out to the middle of the lake.

The only thing I felt was the euphoria of relief. “Goodbye, Daddy.”