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Overview
David Miller had a dream job and a beautiful family. But one perfect life wasn’t enough. So he pretended to be an attorney, then a CIA agent. And he secretly married another woman. He juggled it all quite well—until the day his two wives found out about each other. Miller groped for ways to hold on to his finances and reputation. But when he tried using a gun to silence his second wife, his carefully constructed facade of power and wealth exploded.
In Deadly Pretender, New York Times–bestselling author Karen Kingsbury dives into the tangled world of deceit, greed, and lust to reveal what drove a seemingly upright citizen to live a double life, and then, to commit the unthinkable.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781629211381 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 244 |
| Sales rank: | 101,566 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Jayne Marie Miller learned that her husband was a bigamist on September 11, 1991. The oppressive Florida heat and dense humidity that afternoon was typical of the late summer days that caused people to wonder whether relief would ever come.
But a few days later on the morning of September 15, as Jayne drove toward her parents' home in nearby Sanford, weather conditions were the farthest thing from her mind. She made the drive five minutes faster than usual, parked her car in a swift, jerky fashion, and marched angrily up the walkway.
"I've had it," she announced as she entered the house. "I'm moving back to Los Angeles. It's over between David and me."
As Richard Leebrick walked tentatively into the room his eyes fell on his second-oldest daughter. Sometimes seeing Jayne made him remember how much he had aged in the past few years. Not that Jayne looked old. In fact, she was quite pretty, five-foot-three with bleached blond hair and sparkling brown eyes.
But she had turned thirty-three that year and the personal troubles she'd experienced in the past few years were beginning to show in the handful of extra pounds she carried and the tiny lines that had appeared around her mouth and eyes.
Life had not been kind to Jayne. Richard wished he could ease the pain that started when Jayne's first marriage ended in divorce years earlier, leaving Jayne with a son.
But the loneliness of being a single parent was nothing compared with the turmoil she'd experienced since marrying David Miller in February. He was a handsome, dark-haired thirty-nine-year-old man who talked of having a multimillion-dollar savings account. He seemed to all of Jayne's friends and family to be the perfect catch. The knight in shining armor Jayne had spent years waiting for.
But after a six-week period of bliss, David had begun acting strangely. There were unexplained business trips, strange alibis, and on many occasions concocted stories that had taken Jayne on an emotional roller coaster for the past several months. Because of this, Richard was not surprised by his daughter's statement that she'd had it. Jayne Miller was not one to be taken for granted nor taken advantage of and Richard knew there was only so much she would take before walking away from David and what was seemingly a life of lies.
"What's wrong, honey?" His voice was soft and compassionate as he walked over and put his hands on her slim shoulders.
"Dad, I found out something about David, something terrible. I've known for a while but I just couldn't tell you." Jayne's eyes filled with tears and her father leaned closer, angry that David had once again upset her. Richard had long since stopped believing David's endless tall tales.
"What did he do this time?"
"I don't know how to say it. I feel like I must have been crazy for ever trusting him."
Jayne lowered her head and began sobbing. Fighting to keep his anger toward David in check, Richard waited several minutes until Jayne was able to regain her composure.
"Dad." She paused, and Richard saw that she was gathering strength, struggling with whatever information she'd learned about her husband. "David has two wives."
For a brief instant, Richard resisted the impulse to laugh out loud. In her childhood days, Jayne had never been talented at telling falsehoods, and more often than not her parents would see through her stories before she could finish them.
But this time he knew instinctively that Jayne was telling the truth. He looked deeply into his daughter's eyes and slowly sighed as he sat down next to her.
"After everything that man has done to you, I have to say I'm not surprised, Jayne," Richard said bitterly. "You've checked into this, haven't you?"
Jayne nodded and allowed her father to wrap his arms around her in a way he hadn't done since she was a little girl. Minutes passed before either of them spoke.
"What are your plans?" Richard knew without a doubt that Jayne would seek revenge for having been taken advantage of. Unlike weak-willed or co-dependent women, who were routinely attracted to the wrong type of men, Jayne had always been strong enough to walk away from a harmful relationship. Jayne's problem was in being too trusting. But now Richard was certain Jayne would do more than regain her composure. She would get even.
Jayne drew in a deep breath and sat a bit straighter on the sofa. "I'm moving back to L.A. on Tuesday, and after that I'm going to press charges. Actually, I'm going to start the process tomorrow. Before I leave." Richard could see the anger welling up in his daughter's eyes.
David had acted strangely since he'd known him. But lately he had even worried that the man might be dangerous. Despite his concerns, Richard knew Jayne would be all right. She would move back to Los Angeles and start her life over. Even after a blow like this.
Jayne shook her head in disgust. "It's a crime to have two wives at the same time. I've been in touch with a private investigator and we're going to meet tomorrow. He says he can help me make a game plan, so I'll know who to turn to and what steps to take."
Richard nodded but said nothing. Jayne had obviously given the matter considerable thought before admitting the truth to her family. Of course, with David's history the news wasn't terribly shocking, and at this point, after finding out that her husband was a bigamist, Jayne was not seeking approval for her plan.
"I won't rest until he's behind bars for this," Jayne promised, turning to stare out the front window. "But there's something I have to do first." She stood up and began walking toward the telephone. Richard waited for her to explain.
"David's things are still in your storage unit," she said. When Jayne and David began having serious trouble a few weeks earlier, Richard had allowed them to use his storage unit to store their belongings until they could work things out.
"I called him last night where he's staying and left a message telling him to be ready to get his things today," she continued. "I'm going there this morning and putting his things outside the unit." She picked up the telephone.
"Who are you calling?" Richard sounded worried. He believed that Jayne could take care of herself, but David had a temper and if he indeed had two wives, he was bound to feel cornered by Jayne's discovery. Richard resisted a wave of panic for his daughter's safety and quickly convinced himself he was overreacting. People like David weren't really dangerous, he silently chided himself.
"I'm calling David. He has eight hours to pick that junk up from in front of your storage unit or I'll have it hauled to the dump."
Richard joined his wife in the back room and tried not to listen to Jayne as she yelled a lengthy message into David Miller's answering machine. When she was finished, Jayne appeared in the doorway.
"I'm leaving."
"Honey, you're not going to see David, are you?" asked her mother. Richard had told his wife about David's other wife and she had been shocked. Now she was even more worried than her husband had been.
"No, don't worry, Mom." Jayne grabbed her purse from the counter. "I'm going to the storage unit now and by the time David gets there I'll be long gone."
"Okay," Janice Leebrick said uncertainly. "Now, you be careful. A man like that isn't stable. You don't know what he'll do."
"I know. I might have been in the dark for a while, but if anyone knows what David's capable of, I do. I'll call you later."
Jayne blew her parents a kiss and walked determinedly out the front door. As she did, she considered what she had just told her parents and decided it was the truth. She did know David. Better than ever. She knew him well enough to know that he was no longer the confident, self-centered liar he had once been. He was a broken man now, and in her opinion no longer a threat to her or anyone else. He had been found out and Jayne could tell from their last few conversations that the fight had left him long ago.
For those reasons, she had no intention of avoiding David. She would return his belongings only after first looking him in the face and telling him her plans to ruin him. He had caused her enough pain and humiliation for a lifetime. Now she would savor the inevitable fear and desperation that would fill his eyes when she told him about her plans to press bigamy charges against, him. And once the charges were filed she would tell every tabloid news show or newspaper reporter who would listen. When she was finished, David's life as he had enjoyed it would be nothing but a memory.
Of course, that wasn't all. There were other, even more significant charges she would mention to him. She had found several boxes of secret papers among David's things. There might be enough information in those boxes, Jayne figured, to bring down at least one top political figure in California. When David realized just how much she knew about that, he would probably go crazy. She smiled to herself imagining the satisfaction of the moment.
Jayne climbed into her car and started the engine just as her eyes fell on a pile of documents the investigator had given her detailing the research he had done on David. At that moment his words came back to her. "Jayne, the guy's very dangerous," he had told her the night before when they had spoken by phone and made plans to meet Monday. "Don't go anywhere alone with him. You've got to let the authorities deal with him now."
Even now, with her mind made up, Jayne appreciated the investigator's concern. But he had not lived with David for the past eight months and he could not possibly know what David would or wouldn't do when confronted.
With any luck, she would see him one last time. As she pulled away from her parents' home just before noon that September day, she put the investigator's warning out of her mind.
CHAPTER 2There are times in the course of human decision-making when one crosses a line to a place where the mind convinces the psyche that truly anything is permissible. In this place, motives are no longer examined as selfish or wrong; they simply exist, free from the burden of self-judgment or appraisal. Free, too, from emotions that previously hindered or shaped the psyche, especially emotions directed toward or by others: love, empathy, and guilt. These become less a part of that person's motivation until they seem to disappear completely.
Medical experts describe this personality as sociopathic, or without social consciousness. This type of mind, led and directed by this type of psyche, is capable of committing acts that make headlines in cities across the country. A mother sets her three small children on fire in an effort to collect their life insurance money. A son hires a hit man to kill his father in order to inherit his classic Corvette. The stories vary only in their details. But nearly all involve a person who has walked away from standard and acceptable behavior and has instead developed an amoral motivation that gives birth to hideous actions, which in turn result in only one, dwindling, emotion.
Fear.
Once a person has abandoned society's behavioral standards and instead developed his own, fear is often the only emotion to remain. Fear of being caught, fear of being forced to adhere once again to society's standards of behavior. Quite often, the thrill of living contrary to what is acceptable is greater than the fear of being caught. In this case, fear, too, becomes something the psyche can no longer feel or be affected by. The mind is then free to plan and commit even more hideous acts — at least by the standards of those who have not yet and never will cross that line.
David Miller had such a mind, led and directed by such a psyche. Years before the moment when Jayne sped away from her parents' home plotting revenge against her husband, David had crossed that line, giving himself permission to live exactly as he pleased. Originally, this was not so much because David was without a conscience as it was that David so thoroughly enjoyed a good lie. He discovered the thrill of lying early in his life and ignored the standard parental warning that telling one lie often leads to telling two, two leads to four, and so on. David was good at lying, one of the best ever. But as the lies accumulated, he was forced to cross that line and live a life that was completely contrary to society's standards. The more lies he told, the greater the fear that he might someday be caught. And therein lay the problem.
For David had not yet learned to deal with fear.
At first, the fear was not overwhelming. David did whatever he chose, then told one lie after another in order to live the lifestyle he preferred, all the while denying the reality that he could be caught at any time. Those were happy days for David, days when he lived separate from any pangs of guilt or sorrow. Days when fear was little more than an occasional warning light on the operating panel of his mind. But those days had been cut short in February when he married Jayne.
As is typical with such people, David had needed little time to convince himself that he could manage two wives. He enjoyed his first wife and had no interest in divorcing her. And he enjoyed Jayne. Because his psyche no longer operated like those of most people, David could think of no reason to deny himself the pleasure of having them both.
But David had not first considered the implications of being caught. He had not imagined that fear of this would become an all- consuming, grotesque monster, one that would invade his mind at all hours, stealing any pleasure his selfish actions and successful lying might have brought. Because of fear, being married to two women had brought David nothing but misery.
Of course, David may have had more on his mind than being caught committing bigamy. He also must have been aware that a politician he had dealings with was under investigation for fraud.
In fact, by September 15, 1991, fear had become something of a haunting, living, breathing being in David Miller's life. It traveled beside him on airplane trips and buckled itself in next to him whenever he climbed into his car. It shared a bed with him at night and stared him in the mirror each morning. It laughed at him, jeered at him, and promised never to leave him.
That morning, after hearing Jayne's message on his answering machine, fear was threatening to destroy him.
David could not understand how things had gone so terribly wrong. By his standards he was a good husband. Kind, loving, and faithful to each wife in his own way. He was, in fact, to be applauded for making not one but two women happier than they would have been without him. Why shouldn't he have been able to continue his marriages to both women? How could either of his wives find room to complain, even if they had learned of each other? Trapped in his emotional vacuum, David had long since lost the ability to know the answers to his questions. And so, whenever fear threatened him, as it did that morning, he could only shrink away from it, puzzled and terrified by its presence.
By that morning, David had made yet another in an ongoing series of decisions that were permissible only to those who, like himself, had abandoned society's standards. He had probably decided that if fear came from the concern of being caught, he would need to eliminate the person who threatened to expose him. That person was Jayne.
David waited until that afternoon, then climbed into his car and glanced at the seat beside him. Fear was there, snickering and laughing at him with cruel eyes and a bloodthirsty, jeering smile. It was horribly real, terribly alive, and its presence permeated the car. David gazed at the narrow margin between fear and himself and saw the gun. A 9 m.m., loaded.
There was time for fear to change its mind, to leave him without being chased away by bullets. But David wasn't taking any chances. He started the car and began driving toward the storage unit.
CHAPTER 3David Miller was not always without a conscience. During his childhood David was much like other boys in his neighborhood, playing make-believe games of cops and robbers and participating in sandlot baseball games. But as he neared adolescence, David grew restless and began spending much of his time away from home. When Russell Miller would ask his son where he had been, his answers would be short and obviously lacking in detail. As his younger sister Diana would say, David didn't exactly lie back then, but there were a lot of things he never actually said.
Truth be known, David had nothing to hide. He was not involving himself in the sort of trouble-making teenage activities that were common in Sardis, Ohio. He did not drink or dabble in drugs and he steered clear of the rougher kids who sometimes had run-ins with local law enforcement. David was simply too busy to explain much to his parents. Whereas most kids his age might belong to one club or sports team, David had made himself an integral part of dozens of activities at the same time. He was active with the town's boys' club and he was the primary statistician and scorekeeper for several of the sports teams at River High School. Although his parents worried about when David would find time to study, he inevitably brought home brilliant grades at the end of each semester.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Deadly Pretender"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Karen Kingsbury.
Excerpted by permission of Bondfire Books, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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