When Secrets Kill

By Shelly M. Patel

Samantha Devereaux’s world is turned upside down from one phone call from her past- inviting her and Dan to their 10-year college reunion in Costa Rica. She didn’t want to reunite with her old college friends-afraid of what she is harboring deep within her- - a secret too terrifying to tell her husband. She reluctantly gives in and agrees to go on this trip.
The body count rises, leaving one of the most beautiful places in the world into a burial ground. The killer is out there, watching her every move—a diabolical threat who knows way too much about everyone’s past and killing them off one by one. Who is the killer? Does he know her secret? Is he connected to her past, or is this the work of a serial killer?
To answer these questions and protect herself, Sam begins looking into possible suspects and sees a killer in everyone around her. Sam doesn’t count on the investigation led by the local police as she starts to look for the killer herself; at every corner lurks danger. Sam is determined to find the killer before she becomes his next victim and her secret is out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662915017

Book preview

CHAPTER

1

Samantha listened to the wind howling, the night was colder and rainier than usual. It hadn’t rained in Virginia Beach for months, but now it seemed the rain was making up for its absence and then some, great sheets of it coming down. She couldn’t see more than a few feet beyond the window and her heart panged a little for any poor fool stuck out in this deluge. She stared out of her bedroom window, watching the rainfall collect into tiny droplets as they rolled off the rooftop and tumbled down to the thirsty, grateful grass waiting below.

Samantha wished it was snowing rather than raining. She knew life would be different living down south, but the longing for Manhattan kept popping up in places that surprised her. One of the things she missed most about living in New York were the holidays. Sure, the long-time residents might complain about the tourist overload that came with it, but Christmas was a magical time in the Big Apple, always had been. There were just some things about holidays in New York that couldn’t be replicated—the snow, the overcrowded malls, people fighting over parking spots, and those long lines of shoppers. People got jaded by the commercialism, but not Samantha. Watching the big tree light up in Rockefeller Center, seeing the ice skaters at the rink nearby, having a built-in excuse to switch her daily latte at Starbucks to a hot chocolate, it all brought a bittersweet smile to her face. Virginia Beach was sunny, usually hot, and the summer times were busy with floods of tourists grazing the white sandy beach. Virginia Beach had its own beauty besides the sandy beach. The south was known for its hospitality and truly the people made it home. Christmas at the beach is festive, it might have been a novelty if that beach was in Hawaii or somewhere in the South Pacific, but Virginia Beach was definitely different from NYC. Perhaps even more agonizing was the fact that they weren’t even all that far apart. If she hopped in her car first thing in the morning, she could be rolling into Manhattan by 5 p.m. But the distance was more than physical. New York City was different from any other place, and this time of the year, she missed home more than ever.

This is home now, she thought, as she glanced out the window to the red farmhouses in the neighboring development, a new and upcoming community in the meadow area. Everywhere you looked, what was old was turning new again. She suspected that 30 years ago, developers had been trying to exorcise the rural feel from the area to promote it as a new urban center full of hustle and bustle. But now that people were starting to value wide open spaces and their own plot of nature again, the farmhouse appeal and the acre of land had become all the rage again. Her thoughts drifting along different streams were suddenly interrupted as the ringing of the phone startled her back to the moment.

Looking down at the screen, her heart leapt at the name on the caller ID—Stephanie Darwin!

Stephanie? Samantha exclaimed as she answered, so excited to hear from her old college roommate.

Hey! Stephanie cried. How are you?

Samantha’s eyes filled with tears, remembering how Stephanie’s face would always light up at the thought of both of them taking a few classes together. She’d always say, We are going to be together forever, Sam! After all these years, her friend was thinking of her.

Great! said Samantha, the automatic answer despite the melancholy mood she had just been mired in. What have you been up to? It’s been forever!

That is why I am calling you, Sam. It’s been forever since we all were together. I was planning a college reunion in Costa Rica with all our friends and wanted to see if you and Dan were free to join?

She still remembered to call me Sam. No one calls me by my full name, Sam thought.

Oh, Sam said, her smile faltering a bit. I’ll actually have to check with Dan.

If Stephanie noticed the sudden dampening in her tone of voice, she didn’t say anything, which is exactly what Sam would have expected from her old friend. Their bond had been such that she was always willing to see the brighter side of things and wouldn’t pry unless Sam opened up about it first. It was a remarkable quality, and one that she had long been grateful for. Instead, Stephanie plunged forward to talk about every subject under the sun. How she liked Virginia Beach, how blue the water was, who she had talked to from college lately, what she was reading, what movies she had seen, what she thought about this current event or that one. It was the type of conversation the two of them used to have basically every day in college. The kind that you thought you would be having every day for the rest of your life when you’re that age and your whole life is ahead of you and an endless array of possibilities. It was exactly the kind of pick-me-up she needed and the longer it went on, the more she hoped they could talk all day-even though she knew Stephanie was in the middle of planning and surely had more calls to make. She was right. Even though they talked for close to an hour, when Stephanie said she wished she could go longer but she still had a page full of calls to make, Samantha felt a tiny bit defeated.

Just as she was saying goodbye to Stephanie, her bedroom door opened. She looked up to see Dan entering the room as she hung up the phone.

Who was it? he asked.

Samantha stared up at him, marveling at his six-foot frame, his black hair with greys peeking out around the crown, and his perfectly angular face with strong jawlines. He was in a phase of growing out his beard, which suited him; it made him look more mature and distinguished. He was blessed with an athletic body, despite never having played a sport in his life. While Sam had to work hard to maintain her figure, it was effortless for him. She felt the slightest pinch of jealousy there, recalling a vacation where he had feasted on amazing desserts from the resort chef on a nightly basis and come home two pounds lighter than when he had left, while she had worked hard for months to get herself beach ready.

Sam? Are you okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.

She looked up at him, the phone still in her hand. It was Stephanie Darwin.

Dan stopped and stared at Sam, a slight smile touching his lips, probably remembering some of the shenanigans their group had gotten mixed up in during their university days. It’s been, God, like ten years since we have spoken to the college gang? Everything okay?

Yes. She was calling to get our address. Apparently, there’s going to be a ten-year college reunion with our old gang in Costa Rica on New Year’s. She wanted to make sure we would be joining. She’s trying to help organize the trip with the school Dean.

Dan looked at her expectantly. Well, what did you say to her?

I said I would have to check my schedule and confirm with you before making that commitment. It was a lie, and they both knew it. Deep down, Sam knew she didn’t want to attend this reunion. She was scared of what would happen. What if Dan somehow found out?

He struggled to take off his tie for a moment, then, changing his mind, walked over to Sam, taking her in his arms. He brushed his lips against hers gently before pulling back so he could look her in the eyes.

Well, do you want to go? I’m up for it. It’s been so long since we’ve seen anyone. I’d love to see what everyone is up to.

Are you sure? she asked him, a bit startled to hear his nonchalant attitude toward the reunion. Given how we left things?

You never did tell me what happened that last weekend, Dan said, trying to keep his tone casual, even as a bit of an edge began to creep into it. Any chance you’ll tell me now?

Sam gave Dan a blank stare. How can you love someone and not be brutally honest with them? Sam thought. She tried not to meet his gaze. He will know I am lying. God, why did she have to call after all these years?

Sam, are you listening to me?

Dan, she said, wishing she hadn’t told him about the call. If he hadn’t walked into the room at the precise moment she got off the phone, she could have concocted a believable story about it being a relative or someone she met at a community event. It wasn’t like he trusted her so little he would check the Caller ID to confirm her claims. Nothing really. Everyone was drunk, and they fought after a frat party, she said hurriedly.

The look on Dan’s face made it painfully obvious that he wasn’t buying it. But he didn’t push it, and she supposed she was grateful for it. Lying to Dan in any situation was like trying to pull a card trick on Harry Houdini. Dan was a lawyer, and a damn good one at that. Part of his prowess was the fact that he could tell when people were lying. The problem was that knowing that they were lying and proving that they were lying were two very different things. When he was first practicing and had won a particularly difficult case, she had asked him to explain the talent one night while they were out celebrating. He wasn’t much one to brag, but loved when she was interested in his work and had given her the breakdown he liked to call The Guilty Husband.

So, here’s the situation, he told her as they waited on another round of drinks at a bar they had frequented so many years ago. "A woman turns up dead and the police’s main suspect is her husband. Her friends and relatives are all eager to share with detectives that he was a grade-A jerk. Didn’t respect her, went out to a bar every night drinking, they thought he had a girlfriend on the side, maybe even an illegitimate kid, there were always uncomfortable arguments at family events, she was cancelling plans so as not to upset him, and so forth. But all that just makes him a person of interest, not a slam-dunk murderer. As one of my law professors once said, being an asshole is not a crime.

So let’s go through two scenarios when the cops get him in the little room to question him. In the first one, they ask him if he did it, and all he says is ‘I didn’t kill my wife.’ He offers no other details, won’t answer any of their questions, doesn’t fall for their whole ‘we just want to help you out’ spiel, and greets every single question they ask with either stone-cold silence or the most important phrase in the history of criminal defense ‘I want to see my lawyer.’

Ugh, Samantha had said with conviction. I hope they fry him.

Dan had grinned knowingly and pushed on.

Scenario number 2, same guy, same circumstances. Except when he gets in the room, he’s extraordinarily forthcoming. He admits to the strain in the marriage; hell, he admits he’s got a bad temper. He has a detailed list of where he was the night of the murder during the alleged time frame it was going on. He went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. He tossed the receipt because he never keeps them, but he remembers seeing the time as 9:47 p.m. on his phone when he got it out to check the score of the ballgame; the Yankees were up 7-3 in the 8th inning and their rookie first baseman had just hit a grand slam. Then he went to grab a late-night snack. He felt guilty about it because he’s been on a low-carb diet with his wife-one of the few things they’ve been doing together lately-and it totally blew his macro count for the day. He was halfway home when he realized he couldn’t find his debit card, so he drove back to the restaurant and asked if they had accidentally kept it, but when they said no, he realized he had dropped it under the seat while putting it back in his wallet, so he pulled off into an empty parking lot and sat there for a few minutes rooting around for it, then another few minutes checking sports scores and emails on his phone before heading back home. When he got there, the door was a little bit open, and he thought something seemed off. So after he put his keys, his phone, and his wallet on the counter, he started calling for his wife, didn’t get a response, went upstairs, and that’s where he found the body.

Dan had waited for her response. It came quickly, Well, that seems pretty air-tight. He might be a jerk, but he’s got all the details and the timeline in place, and the first guy was acting so shady, he’s definitely lying.

Dan had smiled, quite arrogantly at the time as she remembered, but she also remembered being attracted to that sort of I know everything mentality back then. He had broken it down to her step by step.

There are two kinds of liars in the world, he said. "The first kind will tell you a single sentence and stick to it like it’s one of the Ten Commandments. Even if it’s staring them in the face and there’s indisputable evidence, they’ll keep repeating it. We had a guy once who killed his wife, drove the body to another state, and buried her on a vacation property they shared. But he claimed they drove there together in the car, her sitting next to him in the front seat the whole way. He kept claiming that, even when we showed him photos of him passing through the state’s toll lanes, which take your picture to make sure you aren’t violating the toll. Nine different spots along the way, toll booth cameras took pictures of that car and there’s only one person in it, Mr. Murderer. We showed him those photos in the courtroom, and he told us he couldn’t explain it, but the cameras must have malfunctioned-every single time.

"Second kind of liar is the detail specialist. They figure, the more details they give you, the more believable the story is. If I roll in an hour late for work because I overslept, and my boss is riding my ass, maybe I cover myself by saying there was a wreck. But if I’m the nervous type of liar, I play the whole thing out big-time with multiple details. Where it was, what kind of cars were involved, how many cop cars were there, someone was hurt, they called the ambulance, blah, blah, blah. He probably buys it at the moment because I’m so heavy on the details, and some of those details distract from the main point-me being late. But the problem is that the more details you give, the more lies you tell, which make you have to remember all of them every time and give the other person more and more places to poke a hole. If my boss pegs me for problems with lying, he might decide to check the local news stations for reports of this bad wreck. He can even go through the traffic websites and see if there were any alerts about the supposed wreck. When those start coming up dry, he’s got more and more ammo that I’m lying.

"So let’s take the second situation with the Guilty Husband. He’s given amazing amounts of detail. But any normal person who comes home and finds their spouse dead on the ground is going to go through some form of shock, and a big part of that is some temporary memory loss of surrounding events, because you are witnessing extreme trauma in the moment and every resource your body has is being used to handle that trauma. So the odds of him remembering it was 9:47 p.m. at the pharmacy and that the Yankees’ first baseman had hit a homerun are already pretty scant. He tells us he tossed the receipt-which would keep us from corroborating when he was at the pharmacy, except that the store will have the matching receipt, which he might not be aware of. But the real damning evidence is that he claims that he found the door open and thought that something was off, but still put his wallet and keys on the table before going to look for his wife. Now, if you got home and you thought I was upstairs asleep, but the door to the house was open and things seemed weird inside, the last thing on earth you would do is put the three things that are essentially your lifelines to the rest of the world down on the table. If someone’s in the house robbing the place or anything else, you’ve just invited them to deprive you of your only means of defense. That guy’s story is so full of holes we’d convict him in two days.

The guy who just keeps repeating he didn’t kill his wife and wants his lawyer is the smart one. He says the one fact he knows is true and gives them nothing else to twist around and use against him. He’s innocent of the murder, 100%.

In short, Dan knew when people were lying and didn’t want to deal with that at home. Samantha’s utter lack of details was almost as bad as if she had spun a 30-minute story of ridiculous details. Dan had no interest in another blowup based on lies. He had enough of it at work.

Dan was still trying to make the reunion possible despite her hesitance.

Back to the reunion, don’t you want to see where our friends are in life and what they’ve been up to? Plus, we were all stupid kids. Who doesn’t fight, especially when people are drunk? You can’t hold this over their heads for this long, he prompted, knowing this wasn’t the real reason.

Sorry, Sam said, hugging him again. She knew she could be rigid at times.

Dan, do you really think it’s a good idea to go? We don’t really know them now, she asked, still hugging him. He was soft in her embrace, and she knew they would end up going to the reunion whether she agreed or not. What if Dan found out what happened that night? Would their marriage be over? Would he ever forgive her? Would his entire political career be at risk because of that one night?

God, Sam wished she never listened to Stephanie, Arnold, and Tom. If only she could rewind the events of that night. She hugged Dan tighter. She loved him so much, and she couldn’t bear to let this ruin what they had built. Never, she thought, he can never find out what happened that night.

CHAPTER

2

Later, as they laid in bed, Sam silently reminisced about those happy days, though they seemed like another lifetime. Her thoughts were jumping from one life event to another when she started to think of Stephanie again. I wonder what she is up to? Not like her career, but what is she UP to? I wonder if she is happily married to Tom? Sam wanted to ask her friend, but she knew better than to ask her. That was a pretty intimate detail to get to after a long time between girl-talk conversations.

Sam could still recall that first day she met Stephanie. Sam was struggling to lift one of her heavy boxes with her mom and dad trailing behind her, trying to give her a bit of space as they moved her into her college dorm. Sam had placed her heavy box down to get a better handle, and Stephanie came to her rescue.

Here, let me help you with that, she said, grabbing the box.

Thanks, Sam said and pulled her hand out. I’m Samantha Devereaux, and these are my parents, Bob and Melinda.

Stephanie had a beautiful smile, and she followed the gesture with a firm handshake. Instantly, Sam knew they would end up