The 9th Girl
Also by Tami Hoag
NOVELS
Down the Darkest Road
Secrets to the Grave
Deeper than the Dead
The Alibi Man
Prior Bad Acts
Kill the Messenger
Dark Horse
Dust to Dust
Ashes to Ashes
A Thin Dark Line
Guilty as Sin
Night Sins
Dark Paradise
Cry Wolf
Still Waters
Lucky’s Lady
Sarah’s Sin
Magic
SHORT WORKS
The 1st Victim
DUTTON
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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hoag, Tami.
The 9th girl / Tami Hoag.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-101-60659-9
1. Young women—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
3. Psychological fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Ninth girl.
PS3558.O333A617 2013
813'.54—dc23 2013009750
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
With thanks to Susan and Tina for keeping me fed and connected to the real world, if only by a fraying thread. Good friends on the front line of deadline.
And with thanks to Nick Tortora for introducing me to the world of mixed martial arts and for helping to keep me focused and sane (more or less) through the war that is writing a book.
1
New Year’s Eve.
The worst possible night of the year to be the limo driver of a party bus. Of course, Jamar Jackson had really not found a night or an occasion when it was good to be a limo driver. In the last two years working for his cousin’s company, he had come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people hired stretch limos for one reason: so they could be drunk, high, obnoxious, and out of control without fear of being arrested. Getting from one place to the next was secondary.
He drove the Wild Thing—a twenty-passenger white Hummer with zebra-print upholstery. A rolling nightclub awash in purple light, it was tricked out with a state-of-the-art sound system, satellite television, and a fully stocked bar. It cost a month’s rent to hire on New Year’s Eve, which included a twenty percent gratuity—which was what made hauling these assholes around worth the headache.
Jamar worked hard for his money. His evenings consisted of shrieking girls in various stages of undress as the night wore on and frat boys who, regardless of age, never lost the humor of belching and farting. Without fail, driving party groups always involved at least one woman sobbing, one verbal and/or physical altercation between guests, some kind of sex, and a copious amount of vomit by journey’s end. And Jamar handled it all with a smile.
Twenty percent gratuity included
was his mantra.
On the upside: These experiences were all grist for the mill. He was a sociology grad student at the University of Minnesota with a master’s thesis to write.
His customers for this New Year’s Eve were a group of young attorneys and their dates, drunk on champagne and a couple of days’ freedom from seventy-hour workweeks. His assignment for the evening was carting them from one party to the next until they all passed out or ended up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.
Sadly, the night was young by New Year’s Eve standards, the booze was flowing, and if he had to listen to Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” one more time, he was going to run this fucking bus into a ditch.
Twenty percent gratuity included . . .
His passengers were loud. They wouldn’t stay in their seats. If one of them wasn’t sprawled on the floor, it was another of them. Every time Jamar checked the rearview he caught a flash of female anatomy. One girl couldn’t keep her top from falling down; another’s skirt was so short she was a squirming advertisement for the salon that did her bikini wax.
Jamar tried to keep his eyes on the road, but he was a twenty-five-year-old guy, after all, with a free view of a naked pussy behind him.
They had started the evening at a private party in the tony suburb of Edina, then moved to a party in a hip restaurant in the Uptown district. Now they would make their way to downtown Minneapolis to a hot club.
The streets were busy and dangerous with drivers who were half-drunk and half-lost. Compounding the situation, the temperature was minus seventeen degrees, and the moisture from the car exhaust was condensing and instantly freezing into a thin layer of clear ice that was nearly impossible to see on the pavement. An unwelcome complication on a rotten stretch of road that was pockmarked with potholes big enough to swallow a man whole.
Twenty percent gratuity included . . .
Jamar’s nerves were vibrating at a frequency almost as loud as the music. His head was pounding with the beat. He had one eye on the girl in the back, one eye on the road. They were coming to a spaghetti tangle of streets and highways crossing and merging into one another. Hennepin and Lyndale, 55 and 94.
The girl with her top down started making out with Miss Naked Pussy. The hoots and hollers of the partygoers rose to a pitch to rival Adam Levine’s voice.