Free A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) by Lauren Carr Page A

certain?”
    “He was going to run away. He told me Saturday night. He’s been working on something that is going to have a big payoff, and then he’ll have enough money to take off where no one will ever find him.”
    “Did you tell Grace that her boyfriend was going to leave her high and dry?”
    “It was none of my business. The little idiot thought the two of them were going to elope.” Her sneer told him that she really didn’t give a damn about the predicament the girl she had led into the nightlife was going to be left in.
    “Who else would want to kill your friend?” Tad used the term “friend” loosely.
    Nicki shrugged, and then took another gulp of her drink.

    “She said I was a bitch.” Heather Connor was explaining the reason for her fight with Grace to county prosecutor Joshua Thornton. She was the millennium version of her mother.
    The former Margo Sweeney had graduated from high school with him.
    The daughter of the bank vice president and a county commissioner, who were both active in the PTA, Margo managed to get herself onto the varsity cheerleading squad. Whereas the stereotype of cheerleaders used to be perky, pretty girls who aspire to make their high school experience the best it can be before studying husbandry in college, Margo’s major field of study was causing trouble.
    She was not as athletic or as pretty as the rest of the girls on the squad. She wore heavy cosmetics and dyed her hair bright red. To be kind, her figure was voluptuous. She dressed to accentuate her large breasts that she let fly during her cheers, much to the amusement of the adolescent boys.
    Joshua disliked her cruel sense of humor. The butts of her jokes were those less fortunate than she. When he intervened, she would turn on him to make him the object of her ridicule. By their senior year, Margo split his inner circle into two camps: his, who believed in being kind to their fellow students; and hers, who got their kicks by cutting down those they considered beneath them.
    Joshua looked across the conference table in the courthouse interview room at Margo Sweeney, now Connor. With her polished, metropolitan lawyer perched at her side to defend her daughter, she smirked at him.
    Her figure had ballooned to fat. Her breasts, which seemed to grow along with the rest of her figure, were encased in a bright dress with a plunging neckline. She still dyed her hair red and wore a hat like something you would see on the Queen of England.
    Her real estate and development business was one of the biggest employers in the valley. For her daughter’s interview with the county prosecuting attorney, Margo displayed her wealth like a king showing a rival country his weaponry. She wore jewels on every body part upon which they could be displayed.
    In contrast to her client’s brilliant appearance, her lawyer, Christine Watson, dressed in a black suit and was devoid of jeweled ornaments. She wore her short black hair slicked back.
    Joshua had come up against Christine before in the short time he had been county prosecutor. She was a humorless professional who considered any show of femininity a revelation of weakness to be penetrated by the male enemy. He didn’t know if Watson was married. She lacked so many of the qualities associated with feminine behavior that he found himself wondering if she was a lesbian.
    Joshua studied Heather after she explained away her beef with Grace by claiming she had been upset to learn that the blue-eyed blonde had said an unkind word about her. “So you burst into the girls’ locker room and tried to beat her up for telling someone that she thought you were a bitch?”
    She wiggled her head from side to side. It was a gesture her peers adopted to use as a sign of strength, much in the way dogs let the hair on their back stand up on end right before a fight. “I wanted to talk to her about it. There’s no law against talking.”
    Heather had her mother’s cocky smile. She also used the same