Wicked Lies by Lisa Jackson, Nancy Bush Read Free Book Online Page B

standing in the front door of her cottage, the smells of baking bread wafting outside to mingle with the salty scent of the sea. Seeing Harrison’s expression, his sister said on a sigh, “I don’t know what you have against Chico.”
    “Who says I have anything against him?”
    She stared him down, and he gazed back at her with affection. She stood three inches shorter than he, with the same tousled brown hair, the same hazel eyes, the same lean body. She wore jeans and a dark blue T-shirt, and her feet were bare. Chico wriggled from her arms and ran into the house, probably in search of Didi, Kirsten’s daughter, who, by all accounts, should be in bed by now, even though the sun hadn’t quite set.
    “It’s the other way around,” he assured Kirsten. “I love the dog.”
    She snorted as she closed the door. “Yeah.”
    “Really.”
    But he was talking to himself as he climbed back in the Impala. There was no accounting for what went on inside Chico’s twisted little doggy brain, he decided, as he turned the car south toward Ocean Park Hospital. Kirsten’s bungalow was on the north end of Deception Bay. The town sat on a bluff above the beach, spilling over onto both sides of Highway 101, and was about twenty minutes from the hospital.
    Twisted little doggy brain. Twisted psycho-killer brain.
    He would bet that Halo Valley Security Hospital’s escapee was heading back toward his old haunts to pick up where he left off. That was how it was with a twisted psycho-killer brain. Almost instinctive, along the lines of demented decision making.
    “What’s your name?” he asked aloud, into the deepening shadows.
    And where the hell are you?

CHAPTER 4
    T he Vanagon had seen better days, Justice thought, eyeing the vehicle as it limped to the side of the road. From his vantage point on the bluff, he had a bird’s-eye view of the narrow lanes snaking below.
    Volkswagen had stopped making them sometime in the ’90s or early 2000s, a more modern rendition of the Volkswagen bus, but they, too, had disappeared from the showrooms, replaced by Touaregs and Jettas and Passats and others. In his younger years Justice Turnbull had been interested in all makes of cars. It had been a passion. But that was before his mission was revealed and he talked to God, who asked him— ordered him—to annihilate the armies of Satan, armies being incubated in the wombs of the whores who’d been spit from the depths of hell and who pretended their innocence. Whores. Every one. Satan’s profligates.
    They were locked inside a prison of their own making, one they believed was a sanctuary. Fools! Sick-minded, stench-riddled fools. Siren Song. With its wrought-iron fencing and gates. It could be breached. It could. It was only a matter of planning. And timing. He smiled to himself as he thought of those inside and what he would do to them. Theirs, each and every one, would be a slow, torturous death. Each of the witches would learn what it meant to turn on him; they would feel his pain. . . . They would burn. . . .
    In time.
    One at a time.
    His nostrils flared, and he felt a little curdle of recognition that things weren’t as they should be. Not all of them were “safe” inside the walls surrounding Siren Song. Despite Catherine’s vain attempts at locking them away, a few of the more stubborn and curious ones had escaped. They, women who straddled two worlds and elected to stay outside, would have to be taken care of first, before the onslaught he would wreak on their filthy prison, where they huddled, feeling smug and secure. Oh, how wrong they were.
    Killing them all would be simple.
    Like shooting fish in a barrel.
    Who had said that? Old Mad Maddie herself. His upper lip trembled at a blurry memory that wouldn’t quite come into focus as he thought of her. Palm reader? Visionary? Fraud!
    Eyes narrowing, he decided that the Vanagon wasn’t going anywhere soon. It seemed disabled, a flat tire, at the very least. Was this his sign