Till Death

Till Death

Copyright 2010 by Patricia Bushman

Smashwords Edition

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Till Death

By Patricia Bushman

Chapter One

Stephanie Lindstrom’s reputation as a prosecutor was unsurpassed in Los Angeles. She’d faced the best the legal profession had to offer and had defeated one after the other. She was nothing short of a phenomenon and Robert Carson had often wondered what made her so good.

For reasons known only to fate they had never met before. Looking back on it now, it seemed almost impossible that they hadn’t. He’d tried many criminal cases in Superior court and she’d prosecuted at least as many, but somehow their paths had never crossed until the Browning Case.

On a spring day, as ordinary as any other in Robert’s daily routine, he stood across the aisle from her for the first time in a courtroom. Stephanie was the prosecutor assigned to try Jason Browning for the brutal, almost maniacal, bludgeoning murder of Barbara Ann Lorney and later tossing her nude body into the Pacific Ocean.

Barbara Ann Lorney. The name still made him shudder. She had been the wife of Frederick Lorney, the heir to the gargantuan real estate fortune amassed by his Father, Frederick senior. Like Sherman’s march across Georgia, Frederick senior had invaded Los Angeles real estate development.

You could name almost any development in and around the Los Angeles area and the Lorney group would be involved on some level. They were on the ground floor of buying and selling the best of properties, building high rise condos or office buildings, or leveling old Los Angeles to make way for the new.

Frederick Lorney entered his Father’s business when he graduated from USC at twenty two. He quickly proved he had inherited his family’s knack for spotting a good buy, a profitable development or a one time opportunity.

By the time he was thirty, Frederick was estimated to be worth more than ten billion dollars in his own right. He married when he was twenty nine and, true to the family’s nature, he aimed high. His wife to be was old Los Angeles. Barbara Mannington of the blue blood Mannington family. An old aristocratic name, but as it turned out there was very little money left to back it up.

The Mannington’s situation was not uncommon with many of Los Angeles’ oldest names that struggled along, some just getting by, but never acknowledging their lack of funds. More often than not there was very little left of the fortune they had once known. Most continued to live in sprawling ancestral mansions in the once grand sections of Pasadena without the means to sustain the life they masqueraded.

It was never acknowledged by them or noted by those around them that the home was often badly in need of repair. The name was enough, especially for new money such as the Lorney’s fortune. The money was not as important as the name and Frederick Lorney was determined to become a member of that elite, upper crust society.

Barbara was little more than a teenager when she caught the eye of Frederick. Despite her age, she set her sights on him just as he did on her. Barbara recognized the advantages his fortune could bring to both herself and her family. They’d lived so long without the funds to sustain a society lifestyle that nothing could have dissuaded her from pursuing Frederick once the idea took hold. But no one tried. Her family recognized the opportunity and embraced it.

He was nearly ten years older, handsome, and very, very rich. Barbara was slim, blond and very, very sexy even at twenty. His fortune aside, she quickly convinced herself that Freddie was the most exciting, interesting, and sophisticated man she’d ever met. Within her limited sphere and experience, he probably was.

The stage was quickly set and with barely more than a few dates, the two announced their engagement, followed quickly by an elaborate wedding. Barbara’s Mother was more than happy to stage the extravaganza that was set on the grounds of the Lorney ranch, and was financed by the first of the money the Mannington’s would realize from the marriage.

It was not to be the blissful joining they had all hoped. The Episcopalian priest had scarcely pronounced them married when the trouble began. Barbara was quickly drawn to the fast cars, the easily obtainable drugs and the endless flow of alcohol that filled the local nightlife. Her newfound fortune now afforded her a taste of this life that she’d never known. Barbara fell easily into the sleek cars and nightlife as though born to move among the fast crowds of the young and rich of Los Angeles.

She quickly attracted a following who partied with her through the nights and let her spend the seemingly endless money for their enjoyment.

Frederick was at first stunned by the rapid change in Barbara. The sweet and somewhat shy girl he had married was quickly only a memory, replaced by an increasingly less attractive, fast living, party girl. Freddie, though young, was a serious businessman. He was intent on increasing his fortune and surpassing the success of his Father, under whose shadow he had lived his entire life.

After he was married into the social establishment he had desired, he believed his personal life was in order. He once again engrossed himself in his business affairs almost immediately after the wedding. Barbara rapidly became disenchanted with his early departures and late returns from his office. Freddy was not, it seemed, the man of her dreams after all. He was just another boring, workaholic husband.

Within months after the nuptials she was content to let him go his own way and stopped asking where he went or when he would return. She had what she’d always needed, plenty of money and the freedom to spend it. In less than half a year the two had established separate lives and began to move in circles that were not only incompatible, but were alien to each other.

By their first anniversary they’d given up all pretense that the marriage had any meaning for either of them. They were not unhappy and didn’t quarrel. They were just not very interested in what the other was doing. They lived in the fourteen-room Malibu home, with days often passing when they didn’t even see each other.

Freddy hadn’t consciously considered divorcing Barbara, but even if he wanted to it was too late. Divorce was out of the question for him. In his rush to get Barbara to the altar and her rush to secure his money, he had failed to get a prenuptial arrangement to protect his fortune. It seemed almost unfathomable that with his millions he hadn’t known better, but he was a young man, who at the time was smitten with love, and the thought failed to cross his mind.

The dozens of attorneys employed by both the family and the business should have insisted, but they too seemed to have negligently overlooked this detail. In their experience what junior wanted, junior got and none of them wanted to cross the sometimes ill tempered young man. Each preferred to assume the other had taken care of protecting Freddy. In the end no one, including Frederick’s three times married Father, saw to arrangements to protect the young man’s money. So that was the way it remained. Frederick, if he was discontent had no options.

Rumors surfaced that he had offered her ten million dollars after just eight months to end the marriage and that she had laughed in his face and sped away in her red Corvette. Although this particular gossip was not true, it was a fact that by the end of the year Frederick had realized his mistake.

He had no choice but to live with it. She would never divorce him. She needed his money to support her newly acquired and expensive lifestyle. And he couldn’t divorce her without losing a sizable portion of his net worth.

Ultimately he simply put the matter out of his mind and get on with his life, coming and going as he pleased and reconnecting with the half dozen or so women he had been regularly seeing before his marriage.

He was right in assuming that after years of just scraping by Barbara was not about to give up the fortune now at her disposal. She was young and the way she blew through money even the rumored ten million dollars would not have been enough to sustain her for long.

No one outside the Malibu estate knew the whole truth about the state of their marriage or any efforts to end it except that neither was beginning divorce proceedings.

They lived together day to day, drawing farther distant from each other, neither able to live amicably as husband and wife, but both with too much to lose to part ways.

Another problem arose to complicate matters further. By the time things began to seriously fall apart Barbara was already three months pregnant, and divorce or not, Frederick would be on the hook for the child who would become his heir. Frederick made up his mind to accept his situation and the coming child, but animosity between them began when Barbara refused to give up her drugs and frequent round the clock partying for the sake of Frederick or his child that she carried. Frederick worried about the child as he did about the potential for scandal. It was important to his business to not have his wife, albeit in name only, appear in the headlines of the Los Angeles Times. A pregnant woman living the fast life that she now embraced would be an inviting target for his enemies and the multitudes more of his Father.

His misgivings about the publicity she might invite became reality and, almost as if he had experienced a premonition, Barbara Lorney’s name dominated the headlines on a warm September day.

It was not her behavior, as he had feared, that landed her there. Rather it was her murder.

On a dry and windy night, while the Santa Ana winds blew across Los Angeles, Barbara failed to come home from one of her now legendary nightly sessions of drinking and drugs. Frederick was otherwise occupied and not particularly concerned for Barbara’s absence. She always returned home when she was ready.

But he worried once again about what her habits might mean to the child she carried. Would the child be handicapped in some physical or mental way? Or would it even survive the nine months in her womb? Might it be born drug addicted or with fetal alcohol syndrome? Her lack of concern and the risk to his reputation began to infuriate him.

Failing to return home was not especially unusual for Barbara. She had on more than one occasion been gone for days at a time. But her closest friends, a handful left from the days before her marriage, disagreed with Freddy. They were calling the house and Barbara’s cell phone for three days before Frederick finally answered at their home. They questioned him about Barbara but he dismissed their concern. She may not have kept in touch with him but she had always maintained close ties with her friends, especially her favorite party group. She hadn’t contacted any of