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  THE CRITICS LOVE

  Hunter’s

  Moon

  “HEAVENLY! MS. ROBARDS WRITES WITH A GRACEFUL FLAIR! Hunter’s Moon is exciting! A real thriller and the most wonderful love story!”

  —The Literary Times

  “AN ENGROSSING TALE of passion, intrigue, and murder. Fans of Robards’ previous works will not be disappointed.”

  —Booklist

  “THE ENDING IS SO SHOCKING IT’LL KNOCK THE READER BACK WITH SURPRISE … the story line will send shivers down the spine. All of this and steamy passion leaves the reader riveted with action-packed suspense and heartwarming emotions.”

  —Rendezvous

  “THE SEX IS UNBRIDLED, UNHARNESSED, and UNSTOPPABLE.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Karen Robards has surpassed her own high standards with Hunter’s Moon. Whodunit remains a puzzling mystery until the riveting and surprising climax.”

  —Gothic Journal

  “ENTERTAINING.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  Copyright © 1996 by Karen Robards

  Excerpt from The Last Victim © 2012 by Karen Robards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  This book contains an excerpt from The Last Victim by Karen Robards. This excerpt has been set for this edition only, and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80149-4

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1_r2

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Last Victim

  PROLOGUE

  November 15, 1982

  At approximately 7:10 p.m., twelve-year-old Libby Coleman, freshly released from the rigors of her cotillion dance class, slides out of the backseat of a navy blue Lincoln Town Car. With youthful exuberance, she slams the door behind her before turning to grin at the occupants. Madeline Weintraub, driver of the car and mother of Libby’s best friend, winces at the force of the slam, fearing for the continued integrity of the vehicle’s trim. Her husband prizes the car, which is new.

  “I’ll call you when I get home!” Allison Weintraub rolls down the rear window to tell Libby.

  “Go on in, Libby. I don’t want to leave until you’re inside,” Madeline rolls down her own window to instruct. The warm air, scented with just mowed hay, caresses her face. It is a beautiful night, Madeline thinks, admiring the vast rolling lawn, like jade velvet in the darkness, and the neatly clipped lines of the boxwood hedge that shelters the stone path from driveway to porch. A huge yellow ball of a moon, which she has learned the locals call a Hunter’s Moon, hangs low over the horizon. A few stars blink against the midnight silk of the sky.

  “Okay, Mrs. Weintraub. Hey, Allie, did I tell you what you-know-who said after you danced with him?” Libby’s grin broadens in anticipation.

  “Russell Thompson? What did he say?” Allison squeals excitedly.

  “Libby can tell you when you call her,” Madeline says, beginning to roll up both windows with the master control switch as a way of terminating the chatter between the girls, which she knows from experience can go on all night.

  “Mo-o-om!” Allison wails.

  “We have to pick up Andrew, remember?” Madeline reminds her. “Go inside, Libby.”

  “I’m going. ’Night, Allie. Thanks for bringing me home, Mrs. Weintraub.”

  Libby waves, then turns and trots for the house. It is a large house, a mansion in fact, because Libby Coleman is the daughter of one of the premier horse farm-owning families in Kentucky’s Bluegrass region. Madeline Weintraub, a relative newcomer to the area, feels fortunate that Libby has chosen Allison to be her best friend. She congratulates herself yet again for persuading her husband to enroll their only daughter in the expensive private school she and Libby attend. Libby’s friendship is a social coup for Allison. Madeline expects to reap increasingly important benefits from it as the girls grow older. For the sake of those benefits, she is glad to act as chauffeur, and prepared to wince in silence over a few slammed car doors.

  “Who is Russell Thompson?” Madeline asks her daughter over her shoulder, watching with half an eye as Libby starts up the wide stone steps that lead to the six-columned front porch. Really, she thinks, to anyone who didn’t know their pedigrees, slender, blond-haired Allison would appear the old-moneyed blue blood. Chunky, rosy-cheeked Libby, with her satin bow askew in her untidy brown hair and her white, beruffled party dress splotched with orange Hi-C, certainly does not look to the manner born.

  Allison giggles, and clambers over the seat back to plop down beside Madeline.

  “He likes me,” she confides, then wrinkles her nose. “Libby says. But sometimes I think he’s kind of gross.”

  “Oh, yes?” Madeline murmurs encouragingly, hoping her daughter will continue. Allison’s preadolescent view of the world is a source of never-ending interest to her. It is hard to remember ever being that young herself. Certainly she was never that carefree.

  “When he laughs and drinks at the same time, Hi-C shoots out his nose.” Allison shakes her head with disgust. “Can we go, Mom?”

  Having watched Libby gain the safety of the lamp-lit porch, Madeline nods and shifts the car into reverse. Her last impression of Libby is of her bouncing dress, bouncing curls, bouncing hairbow as she skips toward the front door.

  Though Madeline doesn’t realize it as she backs down the long driveway, this image will be seared on her consciousness forevermore. She will resurrect it countless times, for Libby’s family, for the police, for half a dozen private detectives, for an army
of newspaper reporters, neighbors, and friends.

  Because that view of Libby Coleman skipping happily across her own front porch is the last anyone will ever have of her.

  From there, she simply vanishes.

  Despite a massive search, public pleas by her frantic family, and offers of a huge and continually growing reward for information as to her whereabouts, Libby Coleman is never seen again.

  1

  October 11, 1995

  “Hey, Will! Will! Would you look at that?”

  Will Lyman responded to his partner’s urgent whisper by opening his eyes a slit and glancing up at the monitor installed in the ceiling of the van. He was slightly groggy, and it took him a second to remember where he was: parked outside a barn at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Kentucky, charged with bringing to justice a gang of the pettiest crooks it had ever been his displeasure to chase. He, who had pursued big-time names from Michael Milken to O. J. Simpson and worked on big-time cases from the Hillside Strangler to the Oklahoma City bombing, had been assigned to get the goods on a gang of has-been horsemen who had taken to supplementing their income by substituting fleeter-footed “ringers” for the broken-down Thoroughbreds they were scheduled to race.

  How the mighty are fallen!

  It was just before 4:00 a.m., and dark as the inside of a grave in the van. The gray glow of the monitor’s screen provided the only illumination. The picture was grainy, old black-and-white TV quality, but the image it conveyed was unmistakable: a slender young woman in skintight jeans had entered the previously empty tack room in the barn they had had under surveillance since dark. Back to the camera, she was in the act of bending over the bait: a large burlap feed bag stuffed with five thousand dollars in cash.

  When Wyland Farm manager Don Simpson took it home with him, they had him. Case closed.

  Only this girl was not, by any stretch of the imagination, Don Simpson.

  “Who the hell is she?” Wide-awake now, Will shot off the dilapidated couch that filled one side of the lawn service van that was their cover to stand staring in disbelief at the monitor. “Do we have a file on her? Lawrence never mentioned a girl. He said Simpson would pick up the money himself.”

  “Nice ass,” Murphy said, staring at the screen. The comment was detached. Murphy, fifty-two-year-old father of five, had been more or less happily married for thirty-some years. When it came to female flesh, he was looking, not buying.

  “We got anything on her? Do you know who she is?” Irritated that Murphy had forced him to notice the small, firm, unmistakably feminine butt that was thrust almost in his face as the girl bent at the waist, backside toward the camera, Will spoke with an edge to his voice.

  “Nope. Never seen her before in my life.”

  “Well, don’t go into a panic over it.” Will spared a second to glare at his partner. Murphy never hurried, never worried, never got into a state about anything. The trait was about to drive Will insane.

  “Okay, okay.” With a grin, Murphy swiveled sideways in his chair, turned on the computer that rested on the narrow work station built into the wall opposite the couch, and started punching computer keys. “Caucasian, female, between, oh, twenty and twenty-five years old, five feet seven, wouldn’t you say, and maybe a hundred fifteen, hundred twenty pounds.… What color’s her hair?”

  “How the hell should I know? The damn picture’s in black and white.” With an effort, Will controlled his irritation and took a closer look. “Dark. Not blond.”

  “Brown,” Murphy decided, typing it in.

  “She’s opening the bag!”

  The clicking of the computer keys ceased as Murphy swung around to watch too. The girl on the monitor now crouched in front of the sack, which rested on the speckled linoleum floor in the corner directly opposite the hidden camera. Her hands were busy untying the frayed piece of hemp that was wrapped tightly around the sack’s twisted neck. Her back was still to the camera, but at least her butt was down. A thick curtain of shoulder blade-length hair kept Will from getting a look at her face. Though her butt was certainly memorable enough for him to be able to pick it out of a lineup if he ever had to.

  “Can you get me something on her, please?” Perilously controlled annoyance at both himself for noticing and Murphy for existing tightened his lips.

  Murphy turned back to the computer.

  “She’s found the money.” Will hadn’t really meant to say it aloud, because he didn’t want Murphy distracted. But the circumstances were so damned unexpected that his mind was not operating with its usual efficiency. He needed an ID, pronto. To decide what to do, he had to know who she was. Did the girl, who sank back on her heels to stare at the bundles of cash she had uncovered, work for the target of their investigation, or did she not?

  The clicking stopped as Murphy, as expected, glanced around at the monitor. Will shot him a look that should have singed his eyeballs. Murphy hunched a shoulder guiltily, and started typing again. The girl reached into the sack to finger first one then another rubber band-bound bundle of twenties.

  “Nothing … nothing … nothing,” Murphy grunted as the screen blinked a couple of times, then shone a maddeningly blank fluorescent green. “No woman fitting her description in the files. Unless I’ve done something wrong.”

  That cheerful admission made Will want to tear out his hair. For a quick-talking, quick-thinking, quick-acting type A personality like himself, being teamed with a laid-back kind of guy like Murphy was a penance. Which was probably just what Dave Hallum had in mind when he paired the two of them up. Will’s boss was still mad over the loss of his cabin cruiser. Hell, Will couldn’t help it if the crooks he’d been chasing had thought the damned thing belonged to him, and decided to blow it up.

  Hallum always had been one to hold a grudge.

  Clearly this assignment, complete with Murphy, signaled payback time.

  “She’s taking the money!” Will watched as the unidentified girl, after retying the sack and casting a quick glance around that afforded him the merest glimpse of her profile, stood up with their bait in her arms. Then she turned, finally facing the camera, and walked straight toward them. Her face, Will discovered to his disgust, was as memorable as her butt: fine-boned and beautiful. He blinked in pure self-defense, and in that brief time she—and the Bureau’s money—were out of camera range, and presumably out the door.

  Murphy, leaning back in his chair, wolf-whistled appreciatively. “Whoa! Fox-y lady!”

  Ignoring him, Will pressed a button beneath the monitor, and waited for the second camera panning the barn itself to pick up the action. All he got was a screenful of snow.

  “Doesn’t look like it’s working,” Murphy observed as Will frantically twirled dials and pressed buttons.

  No kidding. Will gritted his teeth, abandoned the monitor, and with a dagger-glance at his partner snatched up the phone.

  2

  The burlap bag held place of honor in the center of the picnic table that served her ramshackle family as a kitchen gathering place. Molly felt queasy every time she glanced at it. She had stolen five thousand dollars from Barn 15’s tack room. Had anyone missed the money yet?

  Dumb question. It was just after noon, and she’d walked out of that barn before 4:00 a.m. Of course someone had missed the money. Who in his right mind wouldn’t miss five thousand dollars?

  The question was, how long ago had they called the police?

  If she got caught, she could go to prison for years.

  Or worse.

  She wasn’t stupid. That much money stuffed in a burlap feed bag and left sitting around in a corner of a deserted tack room in the middle of the night sure wasn’t a bank deposit. It almost had to be somebody’s ill-gotten gains. But whose? For months there’d been rumors around the stable that something dirty was going down. But what? Drugs? Illegal gambling? Fixing races? Who knew? Molly didn’t want to know.

  If that money was dirty, whoever it belonged to wouldn’t—couldn’t—call the police
. What was the alternative? Visions of hired hit men on her trail made Molly feel light-headed.

  But no one had any way of knowing that she had taken the money. She no longer groomed for Wyland Farm. Four days ago she had quit, in a fit of fiery temper that fifteen minutes later she remembered she and her family simply could not afford. Even if Thornton Wyland, obnoxious college-boy grandson of the stable owner, had grabbed her butt.

  Last night—or rather this morning—she’d arrived at the barn to pick up her last check. Which Don Simpson would make her beg for, she knew, and might not even give to her though he owed her two weeks pay. He didn’t like people quitting on him, and he had a vindictive streak a mile wide.

  She’d thought maybe she might even screw up her courage to the point of asking for her job back. Not that it was likely to do any good. As he often said, Don Simpson didn’t believe in second chances.

  She should never have lost her temper. The thing to have done in such circumstances was simply knock away the hand groping the back of her jeans, and laugh the whole incident off.

  Not punch the farm owner’s grandson in the gut, and threaten to render him genderless if he ever touched her again.

  And then tell her boss what he could do with himself and his job when Simpson, ignoring Thornton Wyland completely, snarled at her for yelling in the barn and spooking the horses.

  Temper, temper. It had gotten her in trouble before, and no doubt it would do so again. But this time she should have thought about the consequences before she shot off her big mouth.

  Not thinking before she acted was something she did too often. Just like she hadn’t thought it through before taking the money from that tack room.

  The question was, what did she do now?

  Except for the horses, and a gimlet-eyed cat, the barn had been deserted when Molly entered it. Simpson always arrived for work at 4:00 a.m. sharp, and it was a good half-hour earlier than that. The groom who was supposed to be on duty throughout the night was nowhere around. She had seen no one. No one had seen her. No one knew she had been in that barn. No one knew she had the money.