A Killer's Guide to Good Works Read online




  Praise for the Val Cameron Mystery Series

  PRACTICAL SINS FOR COLD CLIMATES (#1)

  “A strong plot and engaging characters make for a well-crafted mystery, and Val’s humorous attempts to cope with the wilderness do much to lighten the tension. The core of the story is Val’s discovery of her own self-worth.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “Costa hits all the right notes—vulnerable but likable characters, a compelling plot, a clearly drawn setting, and a tangled web of past and present events.”

  – Sheila Connolly,

  New York Times Bestselling Author of A Gala Event

  “Taut, well written and suspenseful, Practical Sins for Cold Climates draws readers into a community where the past haunts the present and residents’ motives are buried deep...just like the truth.”

  – Kylie Logan,

  Author of And Then There Were Nuns

  “An engaging, deftly-plotted mystery with a smart, tough-minded heroine. Shelley Costa delivers a terrific series debut.”

  – Daniel Stashower,

  Author of The Hour of Peril

  “If you want to read a beautifully written story with a twisting and turning plot, this book is for you. Five stars out of five.”

  – Examiner.com

  “A brooding, atmospheric story, you can almost feel the weight of a blizzard bearing down. Highly recommended.”

  – For the Love of Books

  Books in the Val Cameron Mystery Series

  by Shelley Costa

  PRACTICAL SINS FOR COLD CLIMATES (#1)

  A KILLER’S GUIDE TO GOOD WORKS (#2)

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  Copyright

  A KILLER’S GUIDE TO GOOD WORKS

  A Val Cameron Mystery

  Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection

  First Edition | September 2016

  Henery Press, LLC

  www.henerypress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, LLC, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Copyright © 2016 by Shelley Costa

  Author photograph by Portrait Innovations

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-061-6

  Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-062-3

  Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-063-0

  Hardcover Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-064-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For you, Joyce

  ...my dear friend from that day in 1975

  when you turned from the blackboard in the Writing Lab

  and said hello

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a story about how far people will go to possess what more properly belongs to all. When that happens, there is a whiff of brimstone, and for me, as a writer, a story worth telling. Thanks to editors Rachel Jackson and Erin George for holding the line; thanks to Casey Daniels, Emilie Richards, and Serena Miller for helping me figure out what, in the early stages, was possible; thanks to my daughter Jessica Bloomfield for, once again, being a fine beta reader; thanks to Paul Gaston for being my go-to on craft beer; and thanks to Sisters in Crime for—back in January 2014–providing time, space, three squares, and great company.

  Quote

  Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully

  as when they do it from religious conviction.

  — Blaise Pascal

  Prologue

  Veracruz, 1595

  The Franciscan friar lifted his eyes to the open window in the room he had rented by the harbor. Veracruz was a coastal town, more liberal in its ways, and only an outpost of the Inquisition. So it suited his purposes. After working in secret for the last two days, he set down the goose quill and stared impassively at the final page of his work, a satire about the Inquisition he titled “The Entertainment of Spain.” Then he carefully set the pages inside the acacia wood box that used to hold family papers.

  Even after all this time, his fingers trembled as he pressed the finely carved rosette in the lower right-hand corner of the box, which released the hidden spring. Out slid the small, shallow shelf, and with it the heart of his family’s inheritance throughout the ages, from their Judean beginnings as Essenes. Ink on thin leather with ragged edges, the writing in a hurried Hebrew. That scribe, who was his family’s earliest ancestor, recorded the mystical statement of the master that night in Gethsemane…the Son of God in this night among the olive trees of Gat Smanim. For he says what binds his feet, what pierces his flesh, what crowns his head are the way to life everlasting among the world of living men.

  Tonight the weary friar would write a letter in the guise of an unimportant priest, attach it to the satire, and set the lid in place. In the morning, dressed humbly in a stolen cassock, he would deliver the box to the administrators at this outpost of the Inquisition. And he knew them all well enough, without ever having met them, that they would record the receipt of this heretical work. Ah, so much easier than cataloguing the official trials of the accused. This, this was just some, well, literature of dubious harm. Then they would put it in the archives where they would all quickly forget about it. And as the disguised friar would turn away, with their bored thanks, he would smile, knowing he had placed the ancient document that could topple cathedrals in both the Old and New Worlds, in the hands of the Inquisition, its enemy.

  But it was a way of buying time and safety for the words of the master. Over centuries, possibly, the box and its contents would gather dust in a vault. He had to believe that somewhere away from this benighted place and time in human history, a new place across vast waters, where concertinas still made evenings sweet, someone would touch the little rosette, even accidentally, and the shallow drawer would appear. And with it the inscribed words. And perhaps by then they were no longer dangerous. Or perhaps—here, surprised, the friar’s breath caught in his throat—they were no longer in the very least…important.

  1

  New York City, present day

  Val Cameron was taking a break.

  She had been at her desk since 8:43 a.m., slogging away at the line edits on Plumb Lines, an exposé by a hotshot neo-journalist named James Killian who posed as a plumber for three years in Beverly Hills to get into celebrity homes and get the dirt—or as he put it, “the real sewage”—on them. This nasty trash had been acquired by her former boss during his period of extreme bad taste, which immediately preceded his present period of extended time in a Canadian prison. With the kind of alacrity no publisher ever shows in terms of actual book production, Schlesinger Publishing undertook a massive “redeployment of human resources” (read: head rollings) and renovation of the offices.

  It was a purge, a slate wiping, a dry wall response to murder.

  But the bad taste remained, as bad taste often does. Val had inherited his line, been promoted to vice president of something, and
dealt with the remodeling of the space. When an interior designer breezed through, Val fought for a corner—double the windows, wall-to-wall carpeting with enough pile to feel like something other than Astroturf, taupe on the walls, and a desk made out of anything other than pressed wood. She got it all. Including, on the debit side of the ledger, Ivy League Ivy, her with the doomsday personality.

  Miraculously, the girl who had been hired by their former boss had been promoted to assistant editor and was now actually included in editorial meetings, where she bored the whiskey-soaked stuffing out of the other editors with her talk of where things fit in the grand literary tradition.

  Within three months of the arrest of their former boss, his beloved Fir Na Tine—Welsh for Men on Fire—had been renamed because corporate felt it to be “too gender provocative.” So some branding whiz on the ninth floor got it changed to Words on Fire, forget the Welsh. Ah, words on fire! To no one in the company other than Val Cameron, apparently, it evoked a whole grim history of book burnings—although there were a certain amount of titters on Twitter…and smirks over parmesan-encrusted chèvre salads wherever the publishing pantheon lunched. One blogger referred to all the changes at Val’s imprint as Pants on Fire. In the end, she had come cheap. She had saved the imprint from a certain amount of disgrace. Surely more windows was the least her employers could do for her.

  Val set her slippered feet against the edge of her new desk—the Belmont Writing Desk with Bluestone Top in Natural, from Arhaus—and pushed back. The slippers had been a present from Wade Decker, the single best thing to come out of her time in Canada all those months ago. The affair lasted several months, despite the fact that she inspired faux-leopard, bow-tied leather footwear in the man. But finally they ran up against the unsolvable problem of where a smitten fish and bird could live. When it became clear Decker wasn’t about to permanently relocate from Toronto, and Val wasn’t about to head back to the land of more long-suffering jolliness than she could stand, he took a job flying small planes for a Canadian international aid agency.

  When her cell phone buzzed on her desk, Val half hoped it was James Killian calling to cancel their meeting that afternoon. No such luck. She sat up and grabbed the phone. Adrian Bale. “Hi, Ade.” Her college roommate. Her partner in boozy line dances and ill-advised open mike poetry slams, now a curator at a private antiquities museum on the Upper West Side. “Howdy, Valjean.”

  She sounded good. Whenever Adrian felt good she took a shot at sounding like her idea of a cowboy—which was about as far from the brilliant, prim, beneath-it-all salty Adrian Bale as anything in nature could get. “Where in the world are you?” Val asked her.

  Adrian’s warm laugh came right against Val’s ear. “I’m at Heathrow, dear heart.”

  “Doing what?” Val’s eyes scanned the glossy white ceiling while she waited for one of Adrian’s tales of swirling dunes and storybook lovers.

  “Coming back from a visit to my brother.”

  Ah, the pious Antony, a Carmelite monk. “Is he sick? Besides all that piety, I mean.”

  “No,” she said archly. “That’s not Antony at all, Val. If you weren’t such a pill about meeting him—” Still, she said it affectionately, like it was just some lovable quirk of Val’s. They had made it through seventeen years of friendship without Val’s having to tangle with the one she always thought of as Monk Man. Although she never talked about it, Val had a secret fear of clergy, who she suspected always wanted to cure her of sarcasm and save her soul, in that order.

  During their long friendship, anytime Adrian suggested a trip to the coast of England to see the sainted Antony, Val always had an excuse. Finally she got it down to a speedy “no,” followed by an eye-rolling sigh from Adrian. Val never knew which idea was more repellent, trailing unsaved behind the pious Antony in a drafty cathedral, or getting stuck in a game of beach volleyball with the pasty Monk Man. There was no place she could picture pulling off a meeting with Adrian’s silent, gliding brother. So it was just more fish and birds. All of life was just fish and birds.

  “I’m calling to nail down dinner later this week,” said Adrian.

  “Absolutely,” Val smiled. “I can hear all about the trip then.”

  “Oh.” Adrian sighed in that big, airy way Val had always liked. “The abbey’s donating a funerary urn to the Coleman-Witt Museum. I bubble wrapped the hell out of it last night, since I’m carrying it on the plane—”

  Val glanced at the ceiling. “Are you sure there aren’t any ashes in it?”

  “You forget the Catholics bury the body.”

  “Ah.”

  “No,” she went on, “it’s one of those funky Victorian black and white Jasperware things. Not terribly valuable, but it’s bigger than they usually come, and in good condition.” Val heard a voice crackling behind Adrian’s, who overrode it. “Maybe we’ll plant some nasturtiums in it and—” A pause. “Oh, listen, Val, they’re boarding my flight.”

  “Take good care of the prize.” At a knock on the door, Val barked, “Come in!” Stepping onto the threshold was Ivy League Ivy. The associate editor widened her limpid eyes, tapped her watch, and turned on her heel. Ivy’s way of reminding her of the weekly editorial meeting…

  “Not such a prize, really. I’m only accepting it—” Adrian’s voice dropped “—because the Prior insisted. He’s this sweet old magnanimous thing. Believe me, Val—” said Adrian, who sounded at that moment like she was lugging a Victorian funerary urn and heading for the gate at Heathrow, “there’s nothing about this poor little urn that anyone could possibly want.”

  2

  Stepping inside Kyoto, the Asian fusion restaurant where she was meeting James Killian, Val shook off the rain and squinted around the small room. Never having met the man, she was relying on his promise to wave at her like a fool. She had only found one fuzzy online image of Killian, on location on Kauai where he was guest blogging about GMOs. It was the kind of terrible shot you get of shy guys who seem happier on the margins everywhere. At that moment, a man at the back of Kyoto raised an arm at her, shooting her a quick smile. More like minor royalty signaling for the limo to pull ’round than anyone she’d describe as “waving like a fool.” Was it the right guy?

  As Val neared the small corner booth, the man slid from the seat. “Val?” James Killian was reasonably tall, reasonably slim, and more than reasonably good-looking. Older than she expected, maybe forty, with a shock of well-cut dirty blond hair prematurely heading toward white. The lightweight lamb’s wool sweater was camel colored, the leather bomber was the color of old saddles, and the eyes were dark gray. She gave him a speedy scan for some demerits—no matter how unfair—she could fixate on quickly to keep herself from slipping off to unprofessional places. Ah, there it was. One crooked front tooth.

  She thrust out a hand. “I’m Val Cameron,” she said with a thin smile. “Nice to meet you finally.” The red-wrapped hostess slid two menus into place with an even thinner smile, then glided away. As Killian, pretend plumber to the stars, murmured something about a real pleasure, she noticed he was scanning her right back. Not in a sexy, heavy-lidded way, but as if he was cataloguing her somehow. In case he had to pick her out of a crowd of other wavy-haired brunettes with excellent taste in footwear standing on a badly lighted subway platform.

  She shot him a frank look. “I’m 5’7” and 142 pounds.”

  As they sat, he shrugged, waving it away. “I like to know who’s sitting across from me.”

  “I’m pretty harmless.” As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Mainly because it was true.

  “You can work on that,” said Killian helpfully. Then he frowned at the bright green bamboo in a small square vase, and moved it six inches to the left.

  When their waiter, a lad with a high forehead and unworkable poodle curls, hovered, unable to tear his eyes from Val’s dinner date, Killian ordered a double Oban, neat, and Val a Bombay gin
and tonic. They sat in silence for a moment, evaluating each other’s choices.

  Val went first. “You like the idea of a peculiar Scotch more than the actual taste of it.”

  His expression stayed neutral. “You hesitated before you ordered, which makes me think the gin and tonic is a throwback, something you haven’t had for a long time.” Killian narrowed his eyes. “I’m guessing you recently got out of a relationship.”

  She gave him a flat look. “What about the Scotch?”

  “Actually,” he told her, “I like both—the idea and the taste.” He smiled, and for a moment she thought he was talking about sex. Crooked front tooth. Crooked front tooth. “Otherwise,” he went on reasonably, “what’s the point? Why choose,” here he opened his hands wide in an innocent way that was about as far from innocent as she could stand, “when you can have it all?”

  She was holding her breath. “Are you talking about the Oban?”

  “And one or two other things besides.” Then he grinned in a speculative way.

  Was the man actually flirting with her? Do people still flirt? She looked him straight in the eye, which felt more disturbing than a Words on Fire business dinner at a friendly little Asian fusion place should be. This was Midtown. There were rules. She was pretty sure.

  At that moment, the smitten waiter showed up and set down the double Oban in front of Killian. Then he turned an inattentive face to Val. “Sorry, but we’re out of Bombay.”