Free Deadly Beloved by Jane Haddam Page B

MacLaren would have thought about Karla Parrish making a success of herself. It really was too bad that Patsy had sunk out of sight and left not so much as a ripple in the water.
    Still, Liza thought, sometimes you had to admit it. Sometimes life really did work out just the way you wanted it to.

9.
    F ORTY-SEVEN MINUTES LATER, AT precisely eighteen minutes after four o’clock, a black Volvo station wagon parked on the second level of a Philadelphia garage began to rock. The noise it made was so distinctive, the man in the glass ticket booth at the garage’s entrance began to get disturbed. He was worried that there were vandals in the garage, or teenagers looking to steal something they could sell for serious money. The neighborhood around there had been going to hell for years. The man put out his cigarette on the cement floor of his booth and stepped out into the air. He lit another cigarette and rocked back and forth on his heels. Maybe he ought to go back into the booth and call the cops. Maybe he ought to just walk away from there, take what money he could and leave. He wasn’t supposed to be smoking this cigarette. Nobody was supposed to smoke on duty in the garage. He took a deep drag and started up the incline.
    The Volvo was parked in one of the spaces that faced that ramp. He saw it as soon as he came up over the rise, bucking and shuddering, as if somebody were having trouble with a standard transmission. For a moment he thought that must be what it was. Somebody was having trouble getting their car started. Then he saw the driver’s seat behind the wheel and realized that no one was there. The car was absolutely empty and the locks on the doors closest to him were pushed all the way down.
    The woman who wanted the all-day parking ticket, the man thought to himself as he continued climbing up the ramp. Then he heard something like a pained grinding of gears and stepped instinctively back. The stepping-back probably saved his life. A second later there was a scream and a blast. The garage was suddenly so hot, it was like being in a blast furnace. Smoke and fire shot up out of the Volvo and side to side too, hitting the cars on either side of it, starting a chain reaction in a small Toyota that had come in only half an hour before. Smoke and fire was rising up into the concrete. Metal was everywhere, and glass, and what felt like melted rubber still hot enough to burn flesh.
    The man began to back down the ramp. Then he turned and started to run. He ran right out of the garage and onto the street. The sidewalks were full of people at a dead stop. Black smoke was billowing out of the garage’s third level. Windows were broken on cars half a block away.
    “Fire department, fire department,” the man started shouting, but no one was listening to him.
    They were all standing stock-still in the street, so that when the second large blast came—the biggest one, ripping through cars on either side of the Volvo like a buzz saw through balsa wood and shooting bits of debris into the air like lethal snow—three people had their eardrums shattered and four got bits of powdered glass in their eyes.

PART ONE
    A Marriage Made in Heaven or Someplace

ONE
1.
    F ROM THE MOMENT THAT Gregor Demarkian had first heard about Donna Moradanyan’s wedding, he had wanted to be happy about it. After all, he kept asking himself, what could there possibly be not to be happy about? In all the years Gregor had known her, the one thing she had really needed was a good husband. She was only twenty-two years old and on her own with a small child. The small child’s father had disappeared into the mists of studied irresponsibility as soon as he had heard of the impending arrival of the small child. The man she was marrying was a blessing too: Russell Donahue, once a homicide detective with the Philadelphia Police Department, somebody they all knew. Donna was even going to go on living on Cavanaugh Street. Howard Kashinian was fixing up