When the two bodies are found in the house, one of them even the most jaded investigators will not forget. The body lays mostly, on the bed. Cold. Wrapped in a luxurious coyote coat.
The how is pretty obvious. The why and the who? That requires some telling.
So does the who? There are only two coyote candidates. Adelaide owns one, Elizabeth the other. They are linked further, fatefully, by one man, Philip.
Elizabeth is the young heiress of a banking fiefdom, a social insider of the first rank. She is intelligent, gentle, open and quite simply beautiful. And married. She is beloved even by those who envy her, not to mention all the men around her. That includes her business partner and still-devoted ex-flame Philip.
At eighteen, Adelaide is over a decade younger than Elizabeth, years savvier in certain ways and more closed than Elizabeth is open. No one will ever describe Adelaide as beautiful, but she has an improbable presence that captivates and impossibly narrow eyes that offer no hint of what resides inside.
Do Adelaide’s eyes hide a conscience? Or was it packed away during one of the many moves by her corporate climbing father? Like any permanent outsider, Adelaide has discovered that hooks, not scruples, are what count. Hooks that get her inside. Drugs and sex, just for starters.
A few years earlier, Adelaide briefly encountered Philip, but the moment seemed destined to be only a flirtatious memory.
Forget memories. Adelaide is back. She is enough older now to be way beyond flirting.
Adelaide shares something more with Elizabeth than wanting Philip. Each owns a sensual coyote fur coat, partly to keep out cold, partly to wrap heat inside. For each, sex on the two coyote coats transforms the furs into symbols of their passions. When betrayed, a symbol, like a need, can turn wicked.
And so, one coyote will turn deadly. But for whom?
Born in 1950, John Nicholas Datesh lived mostly in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania until early 2009. At Brown University, he took many courses in writing as an institutionalized rationale for doing just that. Then, at Boston University School of Law, he learned to mix in words and phrases like “Hereinafter” and “It Depends”.
After two years of losing reasons to stay, he moved cats Lila and Lucy Liu to a condo one mile east of Naples Bay in Florida. He left his Pittsburgh career in law, business and product development in favor of concentrating on writing fiction, winging blogs and cultivating beach chairs, presumably in that order of dedication.
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