Murder By Kari, Murder By Ken

By Anna Belle

DON'T BECOME PART OF THE STORY!

 

Two authors defend themselves along with their family and friends from a stalker determined to recreate gruesome scenes found within their published best sellers.  The killer leaves clues via vicious communications on their author websites.  Ken and Kari Whirley must assist their hired security agency and the Chaska police to identify which best seller murder scene was recreated and stop the killer before another person they love is targeted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna belle
• Release date: Jun 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798891216198

Anna Belle

Anna Belle grew up on a farm in North Dakota. She is married and has two beautiful children and three grandchildren. After retiring from her career as a  certified Facilities and Emergency Manager, Anna Belle decided to write murder mysteries where opportunities to create the art of the kill reign supreme.

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Table of Contents

Murder By Kari, Murder By Ken

To my family, who have accepted that I am determined to write murder mysteries, and are still willing to claim me as a family member.  Thanks for all of the kind words and thoughts.

To my husband Steve, who offered up the thought of a husband-and-wife murder mystery.  I think he was thinking of a different scene where the wife was actively trying to kill off the husband.  I might save that thought process for another book.  But it started me thinking about two authors and a stalker. | To Merric, who allowed me to use his unique first name.  He stipulated that he wanted to be a good guy and a hero.  The Merric in the book is not like the Merric in real life, as to age and type of talents.  Merric has his own talents, is funny, thoughtful, and is a special person.  I hope you always want to be the good guy and a hero. | To Megan, who wanted to be a villain in my book.  Megan Boostrom is the complete opposite of the real Megan in my life, as I cannot really perceive her as evil or as easily led.  She leads by example and has excellent opinions about what is right. | The Mall of America is a real place in Minnesota that is visited by many every year.  Although there is a bookstore in the Mall of America, the bookstore in the book is not a real place.  I made it up so I could create a landscape that would fit the situation I placed the characters into. | To my beta readers, Lynn and Mark Wienhold, and Marilyn Gilbertson, who all offered great feedback to me where plot clarification was needed.  To Robert Muster, who edited both of my books and a consistently outstanding job.  Andrea Jankowski was the illustrator for the book cover.

ABOUT ANNA BELLE

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Anna Belle was raised in North Dakota in a small farming community.  While attending college, she met her husband of forty-two years. She currently resides in Minnesota, and enjoys spending time with her children and grandchildren.  Her love of the outdoors includes indulging her hobbies of traveling, writing, kayaking, bike riding and hiking.  Anna has traveled extensively in the United States and most recently in Europe. 

Having retired early, she decided to turn to her love of writing for her next occupation. 

Anna Belle has always enjoyed the mystery of murder and looks forward to creating opportunities where the art of the kill reigns supreme.

Other Books by Anna Belle

The Kill Lists

The Revenge Kill Lists:  Book 2 of The Kill Lists Series

Dedication

To my family, who have accepted that I am determined to write murder mysteries, and are still willing to claim me as a family member.  Thanks for all of the kind words and thoughts.

Acknowledgements

To my husband Steve, who offered up the thought of a husband-and-wife murder mystery.  I think he was thinking of a different scene where the wife was actively trying to kill off the husband.  I might save that thought process for another book.  But it started me thinking about two authors and a stalker.

To Merric, who allowed me to use his unique first name.  He stipulated that he wanted to be a good guy and a hero.  The Merric in the book is not like the Merric in real life, as to age and type of talents.  Merric has his own talents, is funny, thoughtful, and is a special person.  I hope you always want to be the good guy and a hero.

To Megan, who wanted to be a villain in my book.  Megan Boostrom is the complete opposite of the real Megan in my life, as I cannot really perceive her as evil or as easily led.  She leads by example and has excellent opinions about what is right.

The Mall of America is a real place in Minnesota that is visited by many every year.  Although there is a bookstore in the Mall of America, the bookstore in the book is not a real place.  I made it up so I could create a landscape that would fit the situation I placed the characters into.

To my beta readers, Lynn and Mark Wienhold, and Marilyn Gilbertson, who all offered great feedback to me where plot clarification was needed.  To Robert Muster, who edited both of my books and a consistently outstanding job.  Andrea Jankowski was the illustrator for the book cover.

Murder by Kari, Murder by Ken

Prolog

No one knew he was there, watching the activities of the house.  He had been there off and on over the past week or two.  The hiding place was on a wooded hill overlooking the house.  Watching the comings and goings of the people who lived there was a fairly easy task.  He didn’t have much time other than the weekends, as he had a job that took up most of his time during the week.  But he came to the woods a couple of times during the week, taking part of the afternoons off.  He had followed the two individuals who lived in the house several times as they went into town or out to eat

The watcher knew that he had not been spotted as he followed them.  Since it was summer, he got to drive his motorcycle, which allowed him to wear his helmet and obscure his face.  The two people didn’t look back while driving and had not noticed that they were being followed around town.  He was starting to get an understanding of their schedules and activities.  The man liked to play pickleball with several friends, and was athletic, so he had some outstanding games.  The woman took long walks in their wooded back yard, which connected with many neighbors’ large wooded back yards.  They took turns doing chores like going to the grocery, getting their cars washed, or stopping at their favorite bakery.

He decided that he had watched enough to understand who came to visit.  He was going to spend one more week, just to be sure.  The parents of one of the two people dropped by for a lengthy day visit on the weekend. There was obvious affection between all of them.  He was going to work on understanding the two people living in the house.  They had a robust online presence and he wanted to know more about their friends and acquaintances.  

He decided that the two individuals he was watching liked to think about murder, and it usually involved the death of close family members when they committed the murders.  Now it was time for them to experience a murder of their closest family members or friends.  The thought of bringing them extreme sadness, by removing someone precious from their lives, brought him sadistic ecstasy.  He had to take a moment to experience the joy before he could continue his thoughts.

The two people in the house had never met him.  He had become fixated on them for a reason they wouldn’t understand.  He knew he was smarter than they were and he could kill much more efficiently than they did.  His entire campaign was based on the fact that he was competitive about this project of his.  They were ahead of him in the number of kills.  He needed to catch up, and then surpass them.  He wanted to gloat once the goal was accomplished.  The messages he had sent didn’t seem to be drawing any notice from either of the two people.  It made him angry that they didn’t notice or respond.  They were going to pay for that omission.

Chapter 1

Kari Whirley needed to get out of the house and go for a walk in the woods.  She had hit a snag in the plot for her latest book.  She needed to get rid of the cobwebs and allow the ideas to grow and change as she walked.  She loved it when she could come up with an unusual twist to the plot.  This particular book was a murder mystery involving an extended family.  She needed to resolve which family member was going to be the killer and how he or she was going to complete the act.

It was late afternoon, and the temperature was in the mid-eighties.  There was relatively low humidity which was typical for a Minnesota summer.  She loved the different seasons in Minnesota.  Each season provided such rich experiences in sight, sound, and smells.  Summer had such colors in the green of the trees, the blue of the sky, and all of the flowers that were growing in her landscaped yard.  Kari was thankful that they had a gardener who came in and tended the grounds for her husband Ken and herself.  Neither liked gardening but loved the variety of flowers and shrubs.

She heard a rustle in the tree at the north end of the property.  She knew it was Merric McKisson, her twelve-year-old neighbor, who routinely climbed that particular tree.  He was at that gawky stage where he was not quite a boy and not quite a teenager. He was going to be a tall, well-built man with dark hair and big brown serious eyes, and was currently gaining inches at a phenomenal rate. She didn’t look up because they had decided to let him believe they didn’t know he was there. 

Merric liked to spy on them. He could often be found in the particular tree, or at another of his favorite perches, whenever he was done with school, or on weekends.  During the summer, he was in the tree for much more of the day.   Merric had a pair of tree-climbing spikes that he used to get up the tree easily.  He had used his Christmas money to buy them online.

Kari wasn’t sure what Merric found so interesting about what Ken and she were doing.  They both worked at home, as both of them were successful, published authors.  Most of the day, they were working in the office area.  They had matching desks with their laptops, docking stations, and multiple large screens.  It was helpful to them to be able to write on one screen and use the other screens to look up information to support their plot lines.

Merric seemed to be lonely, as he was an only child.  There were no other children on the block for him to play with after school or during the summer.  His parents did not invite other children over for play dates very often.  They seemed to send him outside to fend for himself when they were home.  Kari did not want to discourage him from spying if it made him happy.

She turned her thoughts to the glitch in her plot line.  She really had to decide who was going to be the killer.  It would make a difference to what happened next in the book.  She and Ken had different approaches to how they wrote their books.  She liked to let the plot lead her where it wanted to go.  But it was important to get the right murderer and develop his or her life story.  She wanted the killer to be a mystery for as long as possible in the story.  So, if she didn’t even know who the killer was, she couldn’t possibly give it away in the beginning of the book.

Ken always knew who his killer was at the beginning of the book.  He worked backwards from that to develop the plot and adversity that his hero was going to overcome in discovering the killer.  She couldn’t work that way, but it produced excellent scary plots for his best sellers.  Her way of finding her killers had apparently pleased her readership, as she had just as many best sellers as Ken.  Not that it was a competition between them!  Okay, yes it was.  And she wanted to beat him to the next best seller.

Ken hadn’t experienced as many blocks to creating his plot twists.  She was going to have to work hard to get her book ready at the same time as his.  She thought over the different characters she had developed in her story so far.  The family members were all created with different issues that could cause plausibly them to become a killer.  She knew who would be killed first.  She pondered two different age groups for her killer.  Was the one too young to be that vicious?  Was the other too old and slow-walking?

She decided that they would collude to kill the other person.  They could capitalize on the traits of each to create the perfect murder.  Kari decided she needed to return to her office and develop what she was thinking to make it an effective partnership.  She hurried down the path.  She had forgotten all about Merric, who was still sitting in a fork of the tree, watching.

Merric took out his notebook and jotted down his impressions of what Kari was doing.  He had recorded the birds he had seen and a rabbit.  He liked sitting up high and watching for animals.  He would often capture the movements of deer or a wild turkey. People didn’t know that he was terrific at drawing.  He kept the artistic drawings to himself in the notebook he always carried.  He wasn’t really spying on Ken and Kari, but when they came out and walked in the woods, he did some sketches of them.

He liked to draw Kari’s face.  She was tall for a woman, being five foot eight inches tall and slender.  He loved the chestnut color of her hair and the fact that it was long and had natural curls.  Her face was interesting, slightly triangular, dimples when she smiled, with slightly tilted grey eyes and a straight nose.

Ken was tall also, but not as tall as Merric’s dad.  He was maybe two inches shorter.  He was well built with sandy blonde hair and brown eyes.  He didn’t come out in the woods as often as Kari did.  She ran in the woods every morning and often walked through in the afternoon.  Ken seemed to go off with friends rather than walking.  He must not like running because Merric had never seen him doing it.

Merric looked at his watch and sighed.  He climbed down the tree and headed for home.  He knew he had better not be late for dinner.  His mother Karen, was a stickler for people being on time when she had spent time cooking.  She was a terrible cook and if you were late, the food would be more inedible than usual.  His dad, John, was just coming down the stairs as Merric entered the house. They both sniffed to see if they could determine what she had cooked.  It smelled like meatloaf and burned vegetables.  Her meatloaf was usually acceptable.  John winked at Merric and whispered to him Well, we won’t die today from her cooking.  Buck up, boy, we have to face the food and pretend it is great.

Merric nodded and said Watch me act.  He strolled into the kitchen and said Wow.  Mom, that smells good.  I am so hungry today and I love your meatloaf.  Then he sat down and plowed through two helpings of meatloaf. It wasn’t too bad if you didn’t spend a lot of time chewing and tasting.  The vegetables were really burnt.  He did his best to get one helping down.

When he was done, he helped with loading the dishwasher and then escaped to his room.  He grabbed his notebook and reviewed the pictures he had drawn that day.  He had gotten highly skilled at drawing faces of the animals.  He had sketched a nice picture of Kari as she paused at the top of a slight hill and looked around.  He was happy with the day.

Chapter 2

Ken had watched Kari head out for her walk.  He smiled at the way she moved, it was so graceful, and her long legs just ate up the ground.  She always moved quickly when she was thinking.  He knew she would need to ponder her book and that he wasn’t welcome to go out there with her.  He would interfere with her process of getting through her temporary writing block.  He hadn’t told her that he was blocked also.

He had gotten his killer through three murders.  His hero had gotten himself stuck in a situation that defied extrication.  He hadn’t quite figured out how to resolve it that didn’t seem really cheesy.  If it wasn’t realistic, all of his readers would pounce on him with sarcastic emails, low ratings, and messages on social media.  He had created a terrible flaw in his second book.  Several of the readers had spotted it and blistered him for the ridiculous mistake. 

He had gone on book tours for that second book and everyone always asked about the terrible error.  He had developed a smooth response and asked the audience to move on to something else.  Sometimes they were stubborn about not letting it go.  Then he would apologize for the error and tell the audience he had learned from it so he could avoid doing it in the future.

He was now at the point where if he didn’t go do something else, he might make another terrible mistake in the current work.  He left a note for Kari, saying that he was going into town for some things at the grocery store.  He hopped into his Porsche 718 Boxster S and took off down the drive.  Kari saw him as he turned the corner towards town.  She waved but he didn’t see her.

Ken stopped and bought an ice cream cone.  He put his window down, tuned the radio on to a good rock station and relaxed.  He looked around as he was eating his cone.  There were only a couple of other cars in the lot.  Only the grey pickup had another person in it.  He appeared to be asleep with his faded khaki hat partially over his face.  Ken turned his attention to his hero and the dilemma of how to get out of the situation he was in.

His main character was currently hiding in a closet in a potential victim’s house.  The potential victim was currently in the bedroom and intended to open the closet.  Ken needed to get him out of the closet without discovery.  Since the main character was one of the suspects for the murders, Ken really didn’t want him to get caught in the house.  He had to create a believable diversion so the main character wouldn’t get caught.  He needed to make it unusual enough to be fun, but believable. 

He decided to drive to the grocery store.  As he was wandering through the aisles, he thought he saw the same individual who was sleeping in the lot at the ice cream store.  The same faded khaki hat was moving around the corner of the next aisle over.  Ken had a passing thought that it was interesting that the same man was in the store, but he quickly forgot about it.  He was focused on selecting a special bread to use for their dinner that night.

Ken drove slowly back to his house, assessing some improvements the neighbors had made to their landscaping.  He really liked the gazebo and terracing they had put in.  It had been a little run down before they had started the project.  He turned in to their driveway and hauled the groceries into the kitchen.  Peeking into the office, he saw that Kari was typing furiously away.  Her block must have been resolved.

They lived in Chaska, Minnesota, which had a population of 28,000 people.  It was in Carver County, and was a southwest outer-ring suburb of the Twin Cities.  It had a historic downtown area, with Native American influence marked by mounds in the city square, believed to have been built by the Mound Builders. Recorded history for Chaska began in 1769 when Jean Baptiste Faribault established a trading post there.  The site became a city in 1891 and the name Chaska is derived from a Dakota word used as a name for the first-born male child.  Capitalizing on the large amount of clay in the area, Chaska became a thriving brick manufacturing center.  Many of the homes in the historic area were constructed of that brick.

Ken and Kari’s house was situated on a street that had large private lots with wooded back yards.  The place was a fifty-five hundred square foot house with five bedrooms and four bathrooms.  There was a beautiful staircase leading up to several bedrooms on the upper level.  The master bedroom suite was accessed via elegant double doors that opened into a large spacious sleeping area.  The adjacent master bath had two separate sink areas, a large soaking tub, and glassed-in shower. 

He started creating dinner by following a new recipe for lemon garlic shrimp pasta.  He was going to serve it with a salad, the specialty bread, and a rich, full-bodied domestic Cabernet Sauvignon.  Kari wandered out when she smelled the wonderful aroma of cooking garlic.  She assisted by setting the table, then cutting the bread and toasting it in the oven for a few minutes.  They loved to cook together and moved around the large open kitchen easily without getting in each other’s way.  The stove was situated at the center island, which made it easy for them to work in harmony.

They talked about their books and where they were in their plotlines.  Kari said You know, as soon as I decided that the older person and the younger person would collaborate in the murder of my victim, it all started to fall into place.  I can’t believe how hard it is to come up with such a simple solution.

Ken responded I know.  I have my hero stuck in the closet about to be discovered.  I want a new and innovative way to get him out of that closet.  I am drawing a complete blank.

Well, I can understand you not wanting a simple distraction like a doorbell ringing.  How boring would that be for the reader’s imagination?  The whole notion of the person being able to climb the walls and support themselves above the head of the individual seems really stupid.  Most closets aren’t big enough for that anyway.  If there was a larger closet, there wouldn’t be anything to support them on.

You’re right, Kari.  Maybe I need to rewrite the scene so he isn’t stuck in the closet.  I will think on that overnight and rewrite it tomorrow.

Chapter 3

The next day, they had a meeting with their publicist.  Lisa Videtto, who had been selected by both of them to represent their bodies of work.  They paid her an obscene amount of money, but she was worth every penny. She had a public relations degree and was a very organized individual with obsessive compulsive tendencies.   Both Ken and Kari received a massive amount of social media attention from their fans and Lisa had to vet all the information and remove posts that were harmful to their image.

Lisa was extremely tall for