Too Much Blood

by Jane Bennett Munro

  No Lovenox there either. I checked my watch again. An hour and fifteen minutes had passed. I felt a pang of dread. I was running out of time. If I had a brain in my head, I’d get my ass the hell out of here. But I hadn’t looked in the garage or the crawl space. I was getting discouraged, but I reminded myself that the police and fire department hadn’t found anything either.

  But I guess I didn’t have a brain in my head, because suddenly I felt really sure that the crawl space was the hiding place. Ruthie’s garage was little more than a carport, surprising for such a large house in such an expensive neighborhood. And there was no storage space there. So that left the crawl space.

  In my house, the entrance to the crawlspace was a trapdoor in the closet that held the water heater, but it could also be in the kitchen or laundry room.

  In Ruthie’s house, it was in none of those places. It had to be the trapdoor on the back porch.

  I unlocked the back door, looked around, and saw nobody. But it was getting late. Days are short in December, and it’s dark by five. In another hour or so, people would start coming home from work, and there’d be more neighbors around. I found a ring set into the floor and pulled up on it. It took all my strength, but I got it open. I shone my flashlight around and saw a ladder leading from the trapdoor down into the blackness below. Here goes nothing, I thought and lowered myself through the hole. The crawl space was about six feet deep where I stood, but I could see that in some places it was much shallower than that. I could also see a small amount of light coming in through openings in the sides that were covered by latticework. That wouldn’t last much longer.

  The furnace stood right behind the ladder on a concrete pad, directly under the kitchen floor. Nothing was hidden where I was standing; I saw nothing but dirt. So I started toward the front of the house, around the side of the furnace. The space was shallower there, and I was obliged to bend my head in order to stand up straight. Within the maze of pipes and hoses that led away from the back of the furnace, I saw something pale. Something that wasn’t a pipe or a hose. I crept closer. I reached for it. I grabbed it and worked it free.

  Bingo.

  Inside a plastic grocery bag, I found several unopened boxes of Lovenox, ten syringes to a box, as I found when I opened one. All the boxes bore pharmacy stickers with Lance’s name on them: “One syringe, 40 mg (4000 IU) to be injected subcutaneously in the abdomen daily, alternating left and right sides.”

  With my breath coming in short bursts and my heart threatening to pound its way out of my chest, I worked my camera out of my jeans pocket. Too late I wished I’d spent more time learning how to use it, but I remembered that I had taken pictures of the kids opening their presents. I had used the flash, and I didn’t think I’d changed any of the settings.

  I hadn’t. The flash worked. Kneeling on the cold concrete and trying to still my shaking hands, I photographed the boxes inside the bag and out. I photographed the contents of an open box of syringes, took a close-up of the label, closed the box, put it back in the bag, and replaced it where I’d found it. I shoved the camera back into my pocket.

  Now all I had to do was get out of here before Ruthie—

  Too late.

  Chapter 34

  The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  Whang! Something whistled through the air and crashed into the furnace just above my head. I must have been subliminally aware of air movement because I had ducked reflexively. Otherwise the blow would have landed on my head.

  My evasive move had knocked me off balance. I tumbled off the concrete pad onto my back in the dirt. Ruthie stood over me, something long, shiny, and metallic in her hands, ready for a second try. She’d changed out of her funeral clothes into black pants and a black sweatshirt with the hood up, looking like a fat ninja. Her eyes were distended, teeth showing in a grimace, face distorted with such malevolence that I hardly recognized her. This was not the bubbly, cuddly Ruthie we all knew. This was a raving madwoman.

  I tried to scramble to my feet. Ruthie swung again. I heard the whistle through the air before her weapon caught me in the right side. The pain knocked me off balance. I fell over onto my back. Ruthie swung again. Her breath rattled harshly in her throat. I rolled to the side, and the weapon caught me again in the right side. I rolled back onto my back to minimize the force of the blow, and she got me again in the abdomen. Jesus. What the hell is that thing? I rolled onto my side, the breath knocked out of me. With a strength born of murderous rage, Ruthie finished me off by stomping me in the ribs. I felt them crack.

  I curled myself into a ball, trying to protect my soft parts and get some air back into my lungs, but my newly broken ribs made that a really painful process. Ruthie discarded her weapon, tossing it behind her where I couldn’t reach it, and hauled a roll of silver duct tape out of her pocket. Roughly, she rolled me over on my stomach, and jerked my arms behind me. I tried to resist, but she placed a knee right in the middle of my back and put her full weight on it. Oh my God, could she possibly have chosen anything more painful to do to someone with broken ribs? Obviously she didn’t care. I tried to buck her off, but it hurt too much. She taped my wrists together behind my back. I felt her lift her weight off me, and I tried to roll back onto my back and kick her, but she evaded me. She forced me back on my stomach and taped my ankles together too. Then she crawled around behind me and managed to drag me, in short painful jerks accompanied by a great deal of huffing and puffing, into an upright position against the side of the furnace.

  The pain was unbelievable. Every tortured breath produced a knifelike agony.

  I was done.

  Once she got me where she wanted me, she collapsed on the dirt, gasping for air. It couldn’t have been easy, dragging someone who weighed the same as she did across a dirt floor, and I’d done nothing to help. Not that I had anything left with which to fight her; I’d simply let myself be dead weight.

  I watched in a miasma of pain as she caught her breath and crawled around behind the furnace again, reemerging with a flashlight in her hand. She crawled over to where she had discarded her weapon and returned to sit right in front of me. Now I could see that the weapon of my destruction was a golf club, a five iron, unless I missed my guess—probably one of those new, lightweight titanium ones that were supposed to hit a ball fifty yards farther than the old ones did. No wonder it hurt so much on impact. If I survived this, my side and abdomen would be a glorious shade of purple.

  “Doctor Toni Day Shapiro,” she said, laying the golf club across her knees. “You think you’re so smart. Look at you. Bet you don’t feel so smart now, do you?”

  Did she think I was going to play twenty questions now? Not hardly. I occupied myself with continuing to breathe.

  “So who’s the smart one now?” Ruthie taunted me. “Sorry I had to hit you like that, but I couldn’t have you running off to the cops with my Lovenox, could I?”

  She crawled around me, and I heard her fumbling around in back of the furnace. I felt my cell phone buzz in my coat pocket. I was practically lying on it. If only I could reach it with one hand, I could flip it open. But my hands were tied, literally. I attempted to twist my body so that my bound hands reached my pocket, but oh my God, it hurt. I gritted my teeth and attempted to rearrange myself so that my fingers slipped into my pocket. I held my breath while struggling to flip my phone open inside my pocket, which would automatically answer it. I heard Hal’s voice and prayed that Ruthie hadn’t heard it too. I attempted to cover it up by talking.

  “Ruthie, what the hell do you think you’re doing? You’ll never get away with it.”

  Christ on a crutch. In a truss. It even hurt to talk.

  Apparently it worked. She was busy back there doing something that rustled, and she gave no sign that she’d heard Hal’s voice. She came back out with the grocery sack and em
ptied it a few feet from me. “I bet you’re wondering what I’m doing, aren’t you,” she said conversationally. “I meant to get rid of these boxes earlier,” she went on, “but then I had the fire, and I had to leave, and the fire department said I couldn’t come back here. But I had to dispose of all this Lovenox before the police found it.”

  There were five boxes of syringes there. Ruthie began opening them. “But now I’m glad I didn’t have a chance to get rid of them, because now I’ve got the perfect place to put them.”

  Once she had all the boxes opened, she crawled over to me and pulled on my feet until she had me flat on my back. I was lying on my bound hands, which was damned uncomfortable, but not nearly as uncomfortable as what Ruthie had in mind. Surely she wasn’t going to do what I thought she was.

  She was. She unbuttoned my coat and spread it out. She pushed my shirt up over my boobs. Then she uncapped one of the syringes and shot the contents into my abdomen. Ouch. But Ruthie wasn’t done. Ten syringes to a box. Fifty syringes in all. One by one, she shot all of them into me, while I rolled around and struggled as much as I could with broken ribs. But eventually she managed to discharge all fifty syringes into some portion of my anatomy, mostly into my abdomen, which meant that I had received fifty times the recommended dosage of Lovenox in a matter of ten minutes or so.

  I wasn’t just going to bleed; I was going to dissolve.

  Ruthie glanced over. “Now I’m gonna burn these boxes and these syringes, and gee, it might spread to the rest of the house, so you’ll burn or die of smoke inhalation—if you don’t bleed to death first.”

  The syringes wouldn’t burn. They were glass. If Ruthie burned down the remains of her house and I died in the fire, they’d still be here as a silent testimony to how I’d really died. Small comfort.

  “So, since I’m gonna die anyway, why don’t you tell me the whole story,” I suggested. Maybe, if my cell phone battery hadn’t died and the connection was still open, Hal could tell the police. Maybe while she was talking and bragging on how smart she’d been, somebody would miss me and come looking. Just call me Scheherazade.

  No, wait; Ruthie was Scheherazade. I was Camille.

  She hauled a butane lighter out of her coat pocket and pointed it at the pile of refuse. But she didn’t light it. “Why not?” she said. “I’ve never watched anyone bleed to death before. It might be fun. So here goes.”

  “Start at the beginning with the Ponzi scheme,” I suggested.

  “Jay and Lance were both in on that Ponzi scheme,” she said obediently. “While Jay sold it to the doctors, Lance managed both his and Jay’s money in a legitimate, offshore Swiss bank account, which I set up myself. But neither one of them invested a dime into the Ponzi scheme after the first investment. They weren’t as stupid as all those doctors. When they took the first payment, it went straight into the Swiss account, which was invested in all sorts of blue chip stocks that went through the roof.

  “You know, Jay and I were lovers long before he got involved with any of those other women,” Ruthie said. “Before I married Lance, as a matter of fact. Jay got me pregnant too. But it almost killed me, and I lost the baby.”

  “Gee, that’s too bad,” I said.

  She inclined her head. “Thank you for your sympathy. Even I know you don’t really mean it,” she said. “Jay and I were going to leave our families and retire to a Caribbean island under new identities with all the money. We’d even picked the names. We were going to be Mr. and Mrs. Alastair Montgomery Atterbury.” She sighed dreamily. “I was going to be Mrs. Mildred Atterbury. We had fake passports and everything. Everything was going great until the economy crashed.

  You could pick any name you wanted and Mildred is the name you picked?!

  “But Jay knew just what to do. He took Tiffany home and had sex with her in his bed on an afternoon that he knew Kathleen would be home early, so she’d catch them, and he knew her well enough to know she’d divorce him. That way he wouldn’t have to divorce her and go through all the explanations and recriminations and stuff. Then, when that doctor sued him, he declared bankruptcy, flew to Grand Cayman, took his money out of the bank there, transferred it to a bank in Barbados under his new name, and got credit cards and a driver’s license. Then he flew to Barbados and bought a house and a car using his new identity too.”

  I closed my eyes and prayed that my cell phone battery would last and that I hadn’t accidentally turned it off. With any luck, Hal would have called the police by now. Ruthie ignored me. “He had everything in place. The only thing we had to do was get rid of our families. Then, finally, we could be together.”

  By now it had gotten too dark to see clearly. Ruthie got up on her hands and knees and crawled over to me. She shone her flashlight in my face, and her expression turned mean—meaner than before, if that were possible. She gazed into my face through slitted eyes. Now what, I wondered. What was she going to do to me now? Hadn’t she done enough? No, probably not; she hadn’t killed me yet.

  “Only one problem,” she hissed. “The son of a bitch changed his mind. He decided to take his family with him. Instead of me. After all I’d done for him too. So I killed him.”

  “And how did you do that?”

  “Need you ask, Miss Smartass? I thought you had it all figured out.”

  “I want to hear all the details,” I said, thinking of Rebecca. “Come on, Ruthie, I’m already dead. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  She seemed only too happy to oblige. “Well. When Jay came back, he flew into Boise, checked into the Red Lion Riverside under his new name, and called me. I went to Boise to pick him up, driving his car. We spent three days in Boise. I put rivaroxaban in his drinks and his food, and he got sicker and sicker, and finally started vomiting blood.”

  “My goodness gracious,” I said.

  “That was when I decided to bring him home. But I couldn’t get him out of the hotel and into the car by myself, so I called Lance, and he drove up to Boise to help. By that time Jay was so weak he couldn’t walk or dress himself, so we dressed him and carried him out the back way when it got dark and nobody was around. You ever been to the Red Lion?”

  “Downtown or Riverside?” I asked. Like it mattered.

  “Riverside. You know how the wings are all stretched out end to end, so you have to walk a mile to get to the dining room? Well, our room was in the furthest wing on the far end.”

  “Good choice.”

  “We laid him out in the back seat of his car with one of those big forty-five-gallon lawn-and-leaf bags under him and towels under his head and on the floor in case he bled any more. Then we left without bothering to check out or clean up the room.”

  “That wasn’t very nice,” I said. “Weren’t you afraid of leaving Jay’s DNA all over the place?”

  “Why should I care? The room was registered to Alastair Atterbury, not Jay Braithwaite Burke.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “I drove Jay’s car, and Lance followed me in our car. It started to snow. By the time we got to Jerome, the roads were snow-covered and slick. We saw cars off the road all over the place, but we managed to stay on the road until we passed exit 165 for Jerome, and then I slid off the road into the median, and Lance pulled over and stopped to help me. We both thought Jay was dead by then.

  “So we put him in the driver’s seat, turned off the lights, left the engine running, and disposed of the plastic bags and towels in the nearest Dumpster when we got to Twin.”

  “So much for Mr. and Mrs. Alastair Montgomery Atterbury,” I commented. “Was he going to call himself Monty or Al?”

  “Oh, very funny,” she sneered. “Where do you get off making fun of me?”

  “You’ve already killed me, Millie,” I pointed out. “I can do anything I want.” Where the hell were the police? When was all this Lovenox going to take effec
t? And how? Nosebleed? Hematemesis? Bloody diarrhea? Were my broken ribs bleeding into my chest?

  She turned and crawled away from me. When she turned back around and sat, her eyes glistened with tears. “I couldn’t let him do that to me. I couldn’t! So I decided that if I couldn’t have him, I’d get the next best thing: the money.”

  “Let me guess. Next you had to kill Lance,” I said.

  “Don’t you dare tell me what I did next! This is my story.”

  “Sorry. Who’d you kill next?”

  “I had to kill Lance,” she said.

  “Told you so.”

  She glared at me furiously. “You shut up and let me talk! Or I’ll—”

  “Ruthie, get on with it, would you?” If I could have done it without poking my ribs out through my chest, I’d have sighed. “I’m probably running out of time.”

  “I will if you quit interrupting.”

  I would have held my hands up in surrender if they hadn’t been tied behind me. “Please proceed.”

  “I put rivaroxaban in his food. It was supposed to make him bleed, but he got jaundiced instead and stopped eating. So I took him to the hospital.”

  “That’s because he had pancreatic cancer.”

  “That’s what Dr. Marshall said. So I took extra Lovenox in my purse and put it in his IV when nobody was looking.”

  “How clever of you.”

  “You’re making fun of me again,” she accused.

  I shook my head. My nose started running. I must have shaken something loose in there. I sniffed mightily, or at least as much as my ribs would allow. “Never. Please continue.”

  She smiled. “You’re bleeding. It won’t be long now.”