Deep Night

by Ambrose Ibsen

  Fifteen feet, maximum.

  There was at least one more round in that gun—maybe two—and from this distance one of them was destined to be a kill-shot if Ulrich wasn't lucky. With a pained grunt, the detective threw himself forward and rushed the assailant.

  The gunman took a step back and queued up his next shot, but before he pulled the trigger Ulrich began listing to the right.

  The bullet passed by so close that the detective could have reached out and grabbed it, but something in the gunman's aim—a last-minute hesitation, maybe—had seen the shot go foul. Emboldened by this, Ulrich broke into a sprint.

  The assailant was wearing a strip of cloth around the lower portion of their face, like an outlaw, but their eyes were clear and they sprung wide open as the detective rushed in.

  Ulrich had more than a foot on his assailant and threw out his long arms. He gave the gun-toting figure a jerk and nearly lifted them off their feet—but not before the muzzle of the rifle found its way to his stomach. Ulrich tensed, looked down at the rifle pressed to his gut, then into the assailant's huge eyes.

  The gunman squeezed the trigger.

  This time, though, there came only an impotent click.

  The gamble had paid off; Ulrich's count of the cartridges had been on the money. “This is what happens when you don't keep one in the chamber!” Taking both of his assailant's arms in his massive hands, Ulrich wrenched the rifle out of their grasp and threw them hard onto the ground. Without wasting a breath, he pinned them to the grass with a knee in the stomach and then recovered his flashlight, raising it over his head. “Now, don't you move an inch, else I'll glass you, got it?”

  The bandit panted beneath his weight, eyes trembling and red.

  Ulrich stared down into those eyes in the moonlight. He thought he knew them. Yanking the cloth from the assailants face, he got his first clear look.

  It was Laura Villefort. Locks of grimy blonde hair were visible beneath the edge of the hood she wore, and her crows' feet were damp with tears.

  Though he was still a slave to adrenaline, knowing that he'd nearly bashed in a woman's skull gave him a bit of pause. “Laura?” Ulrich lowered the flashlight a touch, eased up on her somewhat.

  The woman didn't say anything—not for a long moment, anyhow. Chest heaving, red eyes twinkling with tears beneath the moon, she finally muttered, “It moved.”

  Ulrich shook his head. “What are you on about?”

  She licked her lips, wiped her eyes, then raised a shaking finger. She was pointing in the direction of the open grave. “Y-You know why I missed you with that last shot?” She gulped. “The body—her body—it m-moved.”

  Suspecting that this was some sort of trick, Ulrich pinned her harder and then glanced over his shoulder at the hole. There wasn't any movement there, though—no signs that the corpses had shifted in the least since his last look. He eased up on her again. “Gloria moved? I didn't see it.”

  With a full-body shudder, Laura nodded. “I had you in my sights, but... she turned and looked at me.” Tears ran down her cheeks, but she chuckled breathlessly all the same. “That's why I missed. You have her to thank.”

  Ulrich stood and took hold of Laura's sweatshirt. Pulling her towards the grave, he let her drop to the ground with the express understanding that he'd bust her head open if she tried anything funny. He retrieved his phone and placed a 9-1-1 call. All the while, Laura sat, white-faced and trembling, before the lip of the grave.

  Ulrich gave the dispatcher the details—address, number of victims, suspect's name—then pocketed his phone and cleared the grime from his watch face. “They'll be here pretty soon,” he said with a sigh. “Ten, fifteen minutes at most. How can we pass the time?”

  Laura said nothing. She lowered her hood and looked up into the sky.

  “Why don't you tell me why you did it?” asked the detective. “Were you really that jealous that your husband was stepping out? Couldn't handle the thought? I'll admit—I'd had things mapped out differently in my head. I expected to find her here, but not your husband. That threw me for a loop.”

  The woman turned, accosting him with narrow eyes. “You don't understand. You don't understand anything.”

  Ulrich toyed with his flashlight. “Why don't you explain it to me, then?”

  Looking to the grave, she drew in a shaky breath and did just that.

  24

  “Who is it that hired you?” asked Laura. “You claimed to be looking into that painting—that was really good. But who really hired you? Gloria's family? An associate of my husband's?”

  “I was telling the truth,” was Ulrich's reply. “I was hired to look into that painting. It's just that, the longer I looked, the more other things started to stand out.”

  Laura whistled mockingly, tucking in her knees. “Well, then I guess that makes you the sharpest damn detective who ever lived. You start by trying to learn more about some stupid painting but then accidentally solve a double murder. I'm impressed.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” said the detective. “Now, why'd you do it?”

  “That isn't the right question to ask,” she said. “You need to have the background before you can pass judgement on me.” She paused. “My husband was planning to kill me.”

  Ulrich arched a brow. “He was planning to murder you? Not his mistress, but his wife?” He knocked a few dirt clods from his pant legs.

  “That's right. He was plotting to murder me—chiefly because he liked that whore, Gloria, so well. He wanted me out of the picture so that she could be Mrs. Villefort. Get it?”

  “I do,” said the detective. “But how did you know that?”

  “Us wives, we notice things—small things. Like when you forget to hide your burner phone after a lengthy 'business trip'. He'd been gone for more than a week, said he'd been working in Chicago. This business trip of his coincided with Gloria's requested vacation, but I didn't think too much of that at the time. Not until I found the phone.”

  “He'd used it to keep in touch with Gloria behind your back?” asked Ulrich.

  “More than that, he'd been using it to discuss his plans. There were texts on there that I couldn't help but read in a suspicious way—assurances that I'd be out of the picture very soon, that the two of them would be together forever. He talked about preparations he'd been making.” She removed her gloves and dabbed at her eyes. “I didn't believe my husband was capable of something like that. He was a scoundrel, but I loved him. At least, I did at one time. But after discovering those texts, I started looking into things. Usually, I was happy to let him handle all of the finances, but after what I'd read I decided to have a look at our accounts and I saw that he'd been pulling money out in large sums. He never mentioned it to me, but when I saw that, I knew he was planning something.

  “The withdrawals kept coming. Whenever Gloria came by to clean the house, she seemed distant and standoffish. She thought I was ignorant, that I didn't know what was going on between her and Will. But I knew. Then, one day, out of the blue when he was supposed to be on a business trip in Atlanta, he called me and asked me to meet him here, at our second property. He played it very cool, said that he'd been delayed a few days and just wanted to relax with me. But I knew better.

  “I came, just like he asked, but I stopped by almost an hour earlier than expected. Like you, I parked in that barn up the road. That way, he wouldn't hear me coming. I knew what he was doing, suddenly inviting me out here, but I had to make sure. So I left my car in the barn and walked up through the trees, around the pond. You know what I found?”

  Ulrich shook his head.

  She pointed at the hole in the ground. “He'd been digging me a grave. There were other things, too—landscaping supplies. He'd been shopping and was planning to use me as fertilizer. Well, I slipped in through the back. He hadn't expected me to show up early—probably he'd had some detailed plan to follow, some way to ambush me, but I slipped into the house without his knowing it. Turns out he was
in the shower then, probably rinsing off the muck he'd accumulated in digging that hole.

  “I still wasn't convinced. I didn't want to believe he'd do something like that to me. We'd been married twenty years. Two decades. Do you know what that's like, to devote yourself to one person for all those years? I won't lie and tell you that things were always good, or that we still had that same spark, but I loved him all the same. The thought that he wanted me dead didn't even compute. You know what the final straw was? The thing that finally made me understand?”

  “No, what was it?” asked the detective.

  Laura donned a mirthless smile. “I stepped into his office. There, on the desk, was some paperwork. Missing persons paperwork. He'd printed it out preemptively. And you know whose name he was writing down on those forms?” She tapped herself on the breast. “He'd really thought it all out. That's when I knew—really knew—that he was serious. And that's when I decided to do something about it.”

  “Why didn't you run, contact the police?”

  “I wasn't thinking straight,” she said. “I wanted to protect myself, so I hid in the house, took his gun out of the office. I'm no enthusiast, but I've been hunting a few times over the years and know how to work the thing. I hid in one of the empty rooms, listening for him. Turns out his squeeze was on the premises, too—she'd been napping in his bedroom when I arrived. Well, minutes passed. I heard Will step out of the shower. He dressed. He and Gloria made some small talk, then they went downstairs. Quietly, I followed them.

  “It'd been raining that day. The ground had been mucky. By the time they came out, the rain had mostly stopped, but Gloria was still holding onto that umbrella—one of mine, as a matter of fact. She stood next to my husband, holding it over him. The scene made me sick—watching them act like lovebirds while planning to murder me, using my umbrella. She had no problem with any of it; she was impatient to have me interred. All she wanted was to replace me, step into my role. For awhile, I just watched them from the front window. They were talking right here, next to the hole, waiting for me to arrive at the prescribed hour—and probably gloating about what they were planning to do.

  “I crept out of the house, didn't make a noise as I slipped out the door and across the lawn. By the time they saw me, it was too late.” She pointed at her husband's corpse—at the wounds it bore. “I caught William twice in the abdomen. He didn't stop moving till I put a third in him, though. The girl was a different story. She begged me not to kill her. She admitted to everything right then and insisted she'd had nothing to do with it—that she'd tried to talk William out of it, in fact.” She looked away from the corpses. “You can see how well that worked out for her.”

  Ulrich listened, brow tightly knit. He was no fan of this woman—she'd just emptied a full magazine at him, after all. Still, there was no denying that this put a new face on the matter. He'd worked under the assumption that Gloria had been a victim in all of this, and while that was still true to some degree, her hands may not have been entirely clean after all. “And after that?”

  “I buried them,” she said matter-of-factly. “It was hard work, but I dumped them both into the grave they'd intended for me. I smoothed it out, waited for the ground to dry up a little and spread some grass seed, some fertilizer. Within a few days new grass was growing.”

  “And you thought you'd get away with it?”

  “Sure, why not?” asked Laura. “Short of the authorities raiding this property, no one was going to look for them here. William was a known philanderer, and I was doing a good job of playing the aggrieved spouse card—and not without a little sincerity, mind you. When it became clear to others that the two of them hadn't just run off, I planned to point to the financial irregularities, come up with a story about the two of them disappearing abroad to start a new life together.”

  Ulrich nodded. “Sure, but you still would have been caught. If not by me, then by someone else—and if not sooner, then eventually. You really don't give the police enough credit.” He touched the wound on his calf. The area was raised and sore, but the shot had merely grazed him. It'd done more damage to his pants than to the skin underneath. “Anyway, why did you have to go and shoot at me, huh? If you'd suspected your husband of doing something, you could have hired someone like me to look into it, to build a case. Wouldn't you have rather seen the two of them locked up for their plot?”

  Laura peered at the two corpses with a smirk. Apparently seeing the two of them this way didn't bother her too much.

  “And that missing person's paperwork—you could have taken it and used it as evidence. Hell, even though you killed them, you might have been able to use that sort of evidence to prop up a self-defense case and highlight the conspiracy against you.”

  “I didn't get rid of that paperwork,” she replied. “I stashed it in the safe in Will's office. I knew that it might be helpful in case I got caught. I just wasn't planning on being caught. That is, till you turned up. And when you did, I panicked.” She leered back at him, adding, “I drove by earlier tonight to check things out. I'd been stopping by every other day to tend to the property, make sure the new grass was growing in and the bodies were undisturbed. When I saw your shitty car in the driveway, I feared you were onto me and I took off.

  “I spent a miserable few hours after that, wondering what I should do. I returned a few hours later, after you'd gone, and started digging up the bodies. My plan was to move them, bury them somewhere else. But then you came back. I was out here when you pulled into the barn—I'd been keeping an eye on the road for incoming headlights, had gone looking for you with my binoculars intermittently. When I saw you pull in, I began making plans to hide a third body.” She grinned, tossed her shoulders.

  Ulrich looked to the road. A mile or so in the distance, he could see flashes of blue and red breaking through the gloom. Blaring sirens shredded the quiet. “How did that work out for you?” asked the detective.

  Laura stared down at Gloria's corpse, the wide, terror-stricken look returning to her eyes. “Why did she move?” was all she said before the first wave of police cruisers pulled up to the house.

  25

  They led her away in handcuffs, and the next time Ulrich would see her would be in the considerable news coverage the murder would go on to receive.

  The bodies were hauled off in ambulances for further study and cops fanned out all across the property, cordoning it off for the purposes of establishing a proper crime scene. Before the paramedics had gone, Ulrich had asked one of them to have a look at the scrape on his leg. “It's pretty sore,” he'd complained. Having more important things to do, the ambulance driver had done nothing but offer him a Spongebob band-aid before hopping back into his rig.

  Something like twenty cops showed up in total, and among them were the sheriff and sheriff's deputy. Sheriff Russ Wyner was a large man with a drooping, bearded face that made him look almost like a grey Persian cat. He wandered about the property at a quick trot, feigning a supervisory role to the whole operation but seeming to do very little in all actuality. At one point, he stopped to speak to Ulrich and gave him a firm pat on the shoulder. “Now that's some good detective work. Glad to meet you and gladder to have you in Tanglewood, fella.”

  Deputy Marc had been among the first to approach him after the suspect had been carted off, and he'd done so with a wry grin on his face. “You know, I was set to clock out in an hour. Now I'm going to be filling out paperwork till noon. I told you we never have murders take place around here—I don't even know what the hell I'm doing, what the procedure is.”

  “You'll figure it out,” replied Ulrich with a laugh.

  “Listen,” continued the deputy, “I owe you an apology. I should have put more stock into what you said when you came by earlier. You were right on the money and I feel like a damn fool.”

  “I don't hold it against you. I was the one who showed up without any evidence in hand.” The detective was summoned towards the drive by a different officer—this on
e with the State police. “Ah, looks like they want to talk to me. I'll see you around, Marc.”

  And talk to him they did. For the next three and a half hours, Ulrich was questioned by the reporting officers. While evidence was gathered around the property and journalists were kept at bay by a line of irritated cops, Ulrich was asked to explain things from the top no less than three times, by three different officers.

  He did the best job he could without delving into the ghost business. As usual, no one wanted to hear that. They wanted to know about his brilliant detective work—about how he'd cracked this case through deduction, through sheer force of reason. That was more or less what he gave them. While explaining how he'd begun to investigate the murders of Gloria Ramos and William Villefort, he made sure to disclose everything Laura had told him in her confession—this way, the officers would be able to collect the most damning evidence in the house without delay.

  He described being approached by Nancy Pruitt, his study into the painting's provenance. Ulrich discussed his initial interview with Laura Villefort, then his search for her husband. Citing a gut instinct—a feeling that something was “very wrong”—Ulrich had begun looking for clues around the property that would bear out his suspicion that William had murdered his mistress. He'd returned that night to have another look, only to have his expectations upended; both William and Gloria were discovered in a shallow grave. Moments later, he'd been attacked by Laura. When he'd managed to subdue her, she'd spilled her guts.

  Ulrich watched the officers carry many things out of the house; boxes of papers that likely contained the receipts for lawn supplies, bank statements, the safe where Laura had stashed the missing persons paperwork her husband had planned to file after her murder. The weapon, too, was confiscated as evidence, and the rounds Laura had fired at the detective were carefully scooped out of the ground. With this mountain of evidence in hand, one of the officers admitted to Ulrich something that he'd known for hours: The case against the woman was ironclad.