Mistletoe and Murder

Prologue

Warren Critch wanted to write more, but he knew the card would be inspected before it left the facility.

Federal prison, that’s where the judge had sent him. Twelve years inside for attempting to shoot a police officer. There’d been no mention as to why a high school chemistry teacher had been holding a gun on the officer in question and only a fleeting reference to the woman said officer had murdered.

Warren pictured his wife’s face in death. Sweet Belinda. How beautiful she’d looked, even with a bullet hole the size of a pigeon’s egg in her chest.

Oh, yes, they’d let him see her. Someone said there’d been mistletoe leaves scattered around her. The police had murmured the usual platitudes. They’d shuffled their cop feet and cleared their collective throats. But not one of them had made eye contact with him. Not in the morgue, not in his jail cell and certainly not in the courtroom.

Jacob Knight was one of their own; Warren Critch was not. As for Warren’s wife, well, just because Jacob had been involved with Belinda once, had lunch with her two days before she’d died and argued with her in public, that didn’t mean he’d killed her. Cops didn’t shoot innocent people. Warren was wrong to believe that. Someone else had put that hole in her chest.

His lips thinned. Did they take him for a complete fool? Jacob Knight had threatened Belinda twice. Then he’d done the deed.

Warren could have stopped him, would have if Officer Romana Grey hadn’t slipped into the alley and pressed her own gun to the base of his neck. She’d warned him to back off, and he had. Dammit, he had. Because of that, Belinda was dead.

Warren’s fingers shook as he shoved the festive card into a bright red envelope. Red for Christmas; red for blood- Belinda’s blood, the blood Jacob Knight had spilled one year ago this Christmas season. Knight had stolen Belinda’s life, then had his own returned to him courtesy of Romana Grey. They would go on being cops while he moldered in prison and Belinda rotted in a coffin.

No justice there, Warren reflected. But there would be, in time. He would see to that.

He would be good, so very, very good. The years would pass, and he would trade these bars for freedom. Christmas would come again and again. And at length two more people would die.

Romana Grey first, then Jacob Knight. By the time their bodies were discovered, he’d be in South America, sequestered in the Amazon jungle, where he’d spent a large portion of his youth. An eye for an eye, the missionaries on the big river would say. A fitting Christmas present, was Warren Critch’s more cynical judgment.

A grim smile flitted across his lips as he opened a second card. Time to offer Jacob the same Christmas wishes he’d bestowed upon Romana.

“Enjoy the holidays while you can,” he whispered to them from a distance. “You have only a handful left.”