Bad Memory Read online

  PRAISE FOR LISA GRAY

  “Lisa Gray explodes onto the literary stage with this taut, edge-of-the-seat thriller, and her headstrong protagonist, Jessica Shaw, reminiscent of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, delivers a serious punch.”

  —Robert Dugoni, New York Times bestselling author

  “Thin Air is an exciting whodunit that kept me guessing until the end. PI Jessica Shaw is so capable and strong I couldn’t get enough of her!”

  —T. R. Ragan, bestselling author of the Lizzy Gardner series

  “Thin Air is an assured and fast-paced debut with a compelling central character and plenty of twists to keep you guessing until the very end.”

  —Victoria Selman, author of Blood for Blood

  “Opening with a killer premise and dragging me along for a thrilling ride, this is a cracking read and a brilliant start to a new series with a kick-ass female protagonist.”

  —S. J. I. Holliday, author of The Lingering

  “An assured and explosive debut with a premise that grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. The pace never drops as it hurtles to a stunning conclusion.”

  —Craig Robertson, author of The Photographer

  “Smart, sassy, and adrenaline fueled, this kick-ass debut is a must read for thriller fans.”

  —Steph Broadribb, author of Deep Down Dead

  “Lisa Gray’s thriller is so assured it’s hard to believe it’s a debut. It’s so fast paced it should be pulled over for speeding!”

  —Douglas Skelton, author of The Janus Run

  ALSO BY LISA GRAY

  Thin Air

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Lisa Gray

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542092326

  ISBN-10: 1542092329

  Cover design by Ghost Design

  In loving memory of my dad

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  The dream is always the same.

  High summer, and the night is heavy with heat so thick you could stick a knife in it. She’s grateful for the cool air that blasts from the car vents, drying the sweat on her tanned skin. A key chain shaped like a four-leaf clover hangs from the rearview mirror and bobs and sways in the artificial breeze whipped up by the AC. Her dress is hitched up around her thighs, her bare feet on the dash, toenails painted bubblegum pink to match her fingernails.

  Her feet tap in time to the song on the radio. Some British band. A power ballad. Number one a couple months back and still getting plenty of airplay. Something about dying in your arms tonight. She likes it. She throws her head back and sings along.

  They both laugh at her tuneless singing, and she takes another hit from the joint and blows out smoke rings. The sweet smell of weed fills the car. She drains what’s left of her beer and tosses the empty bottle onto the passenger seat floorboard, and it lands with a thunk next to her sandals. She wipes the back of her hand across wet lips and joins in with the chorus again.

  She’s drunk and high and happy and excited about what the rest of the evening holds. Fourth of July. Independence Day. Party time. Somewhere in the distance, she hears a whistle and a crash and a bang.

  Fireworks.

  The car makes a sharp turn and bounces and lurches beneath her, and she feels the road change as smooth blacktop is replaced by dirt. She rocks from side to side in the seat as the wheels clamber over the rough terrain. It’s darker now. The lit end of the joint glows faintly in the gloom. The lights from the highway get smaller and smaller behind them before being swallowed completely by the night. The car’s headlights switch to high beam suddenly, and she blinks. Her eyes adjust after a second or two, but she sees nothing on either side of the dirt road other than the shadowy outline of Joshua trees, their thick branches reaching out to the charcoal sky like the arms of grotesque monsters.

  The song is still playing.

  The mood changes.

  The dream becomes a nightmare.

  She hears them before she sees them.

  Moaning and whimpering. Panting and groaning. She doesn’t want to see what they’re doing. Doesn’t want to face the reality. But she knows she has to.

  She reaches out a trembling hand and opens the door.

  The smell hits her first.

  Sweat and beer and . . . something else.

  Then she sees them.

  He’s on top of her. His shirt is stretched tight across his back. Black-and-white plaid. Moist circles spreading under the armpits. Blue jeans are bunched around his knees. The milky skin on his ass is shockingly exposed. A pale, slender hand snakes out from beneath him and grips the sweat-matted hair on the back of his head.

  She doesn’t understand what she’s seeing at first.

  And then she does.

  It’s wrong, and she’s angry, and she knows she has to make it stop.

  She doesn’t remember picking up the knife.

  Or moving toward them.

  Or plunging the blade into soft flesh over and over again.

  But she remembers the blood.

  And she remembers the screaming.

  Rue Hunter opened her eyes.

  Damp strands of hair were stuck to her forehead, and sweat pooled beneath her breasts under the cotton nightgown. Her jaw and teeth ached from being clenched too tight together. She was breathing hard, and her heart pounded too fast against her rib cage.

  She sucked in a lungful of air. Let it out slowly. In and out, in and out. The dream began to fade, her breathing returned to normal, and her heart slowed to a regular beat again.

  But the screaming didn’t stop.

  It never did.

  Screaming and wailing and shouting and cussing echoed all around her, the sounds bouncing off the walls of the empty corridors. The soundtrack of the condemned. Twenty-one women, like Rue Hunter, waiting to die.

  Dawn light bled through the tiny window facing her and softly illuminated the small space around her: the single cot she lay on; the industrial stainless steel toilet and wash basin unit in the corner; the desk housing a couple of well-thumbed paperback books; the white tiled walls, unadorned with posters or family photos.

 
She threw back the thin bedsheet and slowly swung her legs over the side of the cot. Placed bare feet on cold concrete. Three strides took her to the far side of the six-by-eleven-foot cell.

  She held her hands up to the light from the window. There was no maroon residue caked beneath the fingernails. No carmine red stained the creases and folds of the knuckles or the webbing between the fingers. No thick burgundy liquid flowed past the wrists like hot, bloody tears. She lowered her hands and clenched them into fists, curled her fingers tight until the short fingernails dug into the palms.

  She stared out of the barred window as the sun continued to rise over the horizon. She knew there wouldn’t be many more sunrises or sunsets to witness from this spot.

  She would be dead in ten days.

  Strapped to a gurney the color of pistachio ice cream. Arms outstretched like she was flying. Facing a ghoulish audience behind windows on three sides. An institutional clock above her head ticking away the minutes and seconds until the drugs flowed through her veins. First inducing unconsciousness, then muscle paralysis and respiratory arrest, before her heart finally stopped beating.

  She wasn’t scared of dying.

  It was much harder trying to live in a place like this.

  But she was scared of never knowing the truth.

  Never knowing what really happened that summer night a long time ago.

  Rue Hunter needed to know if she really did have blood on her hands.

  And she had less than ten days to find out.

  1

  JESSICA

  Jessica Shaw had been in town for only six months. Not long, but long enough to know the car didn’t belong there.

  It had been parked on the other side of the highway, about eighty yards east of the small detective agency where she worked, when she’d taken a stroll to Randy’s for lunch with her boss, Ed Crozier. The car hadn’t budged an inch by the time they’d returned a half hour later, and it was still there in late afternoon when she had stepped outside the front door for a smoke.

  Metallic blue. Five doors. Some sort of family sedan. Sun glinting off the windshield, the driver’s side sun visor pulled down so that whoever was behind the wheel was shielded from view. Not a particularly ostentatious vehicle but too fancy for Hundred Acres, that was for sure.

  Then there was the license plate screwed to the front fender. Too far away to make out any individual digits, but Jessica could see the plate had dark lettering embossed on a turquoise, orange, and white gradient backdrop. Not the kind of car to have specialty plates, and definitely not the blue on white of regular California plates, so Jessica figured the driver was from out of state.

  In any case, she knew most of the cars in town by now. Maybe not who drove each and every one of them, but she definitely recognized the majority by sight. One of the bonuses of working out of a shop front set back just off the main highway. The agency’s big picture window faced north, framing a view of flat yellow scrub that stretched for miles on the other side of the two-lane highway, the scrubland empty save for the occasional electrical pylon, some mountains far off in the distance.

  Not much to look at other than the traffic.

  The unfamiliar vehicles were almost always just passing through. Short- and long-haul freight trucks. Pickups, station wagons, two-seaters. All using the Hundred Acres Highway as a bypass of the Los Angeles metropolitan area on their way to and from Sin City.

  Unlike them, Jessica was going nowhere. At least for the time being.

  She had spent most of her life—and the first five years of her career as a private investigator—in New York. Following the sudden and unexpected death of her father, Jessica had sold their home and taken to the road, leaving the Big Apple behind for good. She’d moved from town to town, case to case, happy to go wherever the work took her. Then, last year, an investigation in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles, had gotten way too personal, and Jessica had been lucky to come out of it alive.

  She had been working a missing persons case in Josephine County, just over the state line in Oregon, when the New York State Division of Licensing Services finally caught up with her. Her PI license was up for renewal, and they weren’t going to rubber-stamp another two years while she was out of state. Her old boss, Larry Lutz, had covered for her as best he could while she was on the road, but even he could do nothing about the headlines that had followed the events in Eagle Rock and that had alerted the DLS to the fact she had been operating outside of her jurisdiction.

  Returning to New York simply wasn’t an option for Jessica, and so her days as an investigator appeared to be numbered. Then Jason Pryce, an LAPD detective who had known her father, suggested an alternative to waiting tables or finding bar work. A friend of a friend owned a small detective agency in Hundred Acres, a desert community in the Antelope Valley, sixty miles north of LA. She could help out veteran gumshoe Ed Crozier while her application for a California PI license was pending. Then the state, if not the world, would be her oyster.

  “California’s a big place,” Pryce had pointed out. “Plenty of room to roam.”

  Jessica powered down her laptop now and began to gather her stuff. Ed had left an hour earlier to “take care of some business” in the next town. She knew the only business he was taking care of was a quick shower and shave before catching the end of happy hour at Ruben’s over in Shady Bluff. In his sixties and a widower for the last five years, Ed was determined to grow old disgracefully and had no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

  Jessica consulted her watch. Just after six p.m. A later finish than usual for a Friday evening, but she’d wanted to complete the paperwork on her latest case. A thirty-year-old Hundred Acres lifer, Michelle Foster, was about to be fired from her job at the local liquor store, just as soon as Jessica delivered confirmation to Jed Lockerman, the store’s owner, that his assistant manager was tampering with stock orders and invoice slips and selling the booze she stole to teenagers from the back of her daddy’s truck.

  Just to complicate matters, Michelle was also the pissed ex-girlfriend of the guy Jessica was dating, so an angry visit from her was definitely in the cards. But not yet. It was too soon. Which meant the mystery blue car had nothing to do with Michelle Foster.

  Jessica slipped Lockerman’s copy of the Foster file into a manila envelope and stuffed it in her bag. She would drop it off in his mailbox on the way home. She turned off the office lights and stepped outside into the warm desert evening. The sun had yet to begin its lazy descent, and Jessica still had a clear view along the highway. She turned to lock up behind her. The sedan was still there, by the roadside, a few yards in front of a giant sun-bleached billboard for a gentlemen’s club in Victorville forty miles away.

  Jessica was just about to make her way to her Chevy Silverado when the sedan’s door opened and the driver emerged. It was a woman. She just stood there for a moment or two—the evening breeze blowing a small cloud of dust around her—as though debating what to do next. Then she took advantage of a break in the traffic and strode purposefully across the two lanes in the direction of the detective agency.

  The woman was in her midfifties. Tan slacks, white linen blouse, strappy sandals with a modest heel. White-blonde hair stylishly bobbed and huge sunglasses like Jackie Kennedy used to wear. She held a white leather purse tight against her body as though expecting an opportunist thief to snatch it from her grasp. Jessica watched her approach. Up close, the woman looked like an aging soccer mom. The type who would have been an active member of the PTA and made the best cookies at the bake sale when her kids were still at school.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” Jessica asked.

  “I wanted to discuss hiring you for a case.”

  Jessica detected the hint of a southern accent. Arizona or Texas maybe. Not quite strong enough to be a native but probably someone who had lived there for a long time.

  “Sorry, we’re closed now.” Jessica nodded to the CLOSED sign hanging behind th
e glass on the door to emphasize the point. “Drop by Monday morning after ten. We can talk then.”

  “Monday will be too late. I need to speak to you tonight.”

  “So why not just stop by the office earlier? You’ve been parked along the highway for most of the afternoon.”

  “I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  Jessica frowned. “My boss left the office over an hour ago. You’ve had plenty of opportunity for a private chat.”

  “I wanted to make sure he wasn’t coming back.”

  “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

  The woman took a deep, shuddering breath, as though psyching herself up for what she was about to say next. Then the words all tumbled out in a rush, like she had to get rid of them fast.

  “My sister confessed to killing two people more than thirty years ago. Right here in Hundred Acres. She’s been on death row ever since. Her execution is scheduled to take place in a week’s time.”

  Jessica arched her eyebrows. She’d always thought of the town as a sleepy place, where nothing interesting ever happened, so she was surprised to learn about its dark past. “Wow,” she said. “Not what I was expecting to hear. I’m sorry about your sister. But I don’t see where I fit in.”

  The woman regarded her for a long moment from behind the Jackie Kennedy sunglasses. Jessica could see her own distorted reflection staring back at her in the black lenses. The barely concealed impatience on her face as Jessica wondered how soon she’d be able to kick off her own happy hour.

  Then the stranger said, “I want you to prove my sister is innocent before they kill her.”

  2

  JESSICA

  The woman glanced around again. “Can we talk inside? I don’t want anyone from town seeing me here.”

  “Um, sure.”

  Jessica fished in her bag for the office keys and unlocked the door. She pushed it open and stepped inside, flipping the light switch. The overhead fluorescent beam hummed loudly and then blinked to life, bathing the room in a dull yellow glow. The woman followed Jessica into the small office space.

  She said, “You know, I must’ve passed by this place hundreds of times, but this is the first time I’ve actually been inside.”