by C. A. Larmer
In a much calmer voice now, she said simply, “Come on, David, I know it’s you.”
Chapter 36
David Lone was impressed. He stepped back and clapped, a slow, muffled clap, then he reached down and ripped Roxy’s eye cover off, and stepped away again.
Roxy squinted, looking around anxiously. It was dark in the room, and it took several minutes for her eyes to adjust, but when they did she saw him standing a little way off, leaning against a shadowy wall, a rickety looking staircase behind him, leading up into the darkness. His normally blow-waved hair was messed up around his face, and he was clad completely in black right down to black boots and black leather gloves. There was some kind of bag on the floor beside him.
“Roxanne Parker,” he said eventually, the sliver of a smile on his face. “Trust you to work it out.”
She swallowed hard, her throat now drier than a country dam and tried to smile back. “Wasn’t rock science,” she said drolly. Then, looking about, she asked, “Where are we?”
“You’re in the basement of my favourite haunted house, of course. Where else would a ghostwriter show up dead?”
She felt her stomach turn. “What are you going to do? Scare me to death?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s a little cheesy, even for you.”
His smile deflated. “Be careful, Roxanne. You’re in no position to be a smart arse.”
He was right, so she tried a different tack. “Will you at least tell me why? Why you’re doing this to me? I thought we were friends.”
“Friends?! You were investigating me, Roxy, digging up dirt where you had no right to dig it up.”
“I was researching your book. You asked me to do that.”
“I asked you to leave my university days out of it, but you couldn’t help yourself, could you? You had to go and speak to old fuckwit Green. Is that what gave me away? Did that miserable old bastard slander me?”
“Actually, he was surprisingly restrained, even gave you the benefit of the doubt. It was Mrs Porter, your favourite English teacher, who made me suspicious.”
“Oh?” he stepped forward, intrigued. “What did the silly old cow say?”
“She’s not so silly, David. She might have found you charming but she also knew what Professor Green knew—that you’d stop at nothing to be a successful writer. They both emphasized your blind ambition, how you’d do anything to be a star, and it got me thinking. How far would you go? Your last book on the terror cells was a flop, and there was only so long you could ride on the Supermodel Diaries coattails.” She took a deep breath and tried to swallow, but her throat was aching. “This new batch of killings seemed too convenient, too contrived. You said it yourself—an investigative writer’s wet dream. Then when you got that book deal, my alarm bells began to tinkle. How very convenient for you. I suspected then that you might have had a motive, for all three deaths. But I wasn’t sure.”
He held a gloved hand up. “Hey, not all three. Don’t give me all the credit.”
“No, you’re right, you had nothing to do with Seymour Silva’s death, did you?”
His face lit up, even in the dark, and his smile was eerily sinister. “How opportune was that?! Stupid lunatic must have killed himself to teach his manager a lesson. Or maybe Norm did him in. I don’t know, I don’t care. It would have made a great story either way, but my bitch-face editor wouldn’t hear of it, wanted to kill it off before it had even gained traction, the fool.”
“So you decided to take out another writer and keep the story rolling?”
“Come on, you have to admit, it was such a good story—someone popping off famous writers. Besides, William Glad was dying anyway. I just helped him along. That one doesn’t count.”
“You smashed his head in with gardening shears,” she said, a wave of nausea hitting her. She swallowed hard. “You left that poor old man lying in the dirt. I think it does count. To him, to his daughter, Erin.”
“Pfft! She’s just a gold digger. Was waiting for the old man to croak it so she could profit from his books. I did her a favour. But I had to act quickly. I knew there was a full-time nurse arriving that weekend. You know, I was thinking of planting it all on Erin but then I realized she had five kids so ...”
“How very big of you,” she said and, luckily, he ignored this.
“So I decided on that schizo Norm. He had motive for the first murder so it all made sense, I’d have two connected murders and a great story to tell.”
“So you placed the gardening shears in Norm’s car, but it blew up in your face. The police discovered that Norm had a water-tight alibi, didn’t they? He couldn’t have killed William, so someone else must have planted the shears. That put a spanner in the works.”
David shrugged. “Not for long, thanks to Oliver. Yet again he was in the wrong place at the right time. I wasn’t going to frame him, you know, not at the beginning, but he made it all so bloody easy.” David pushed off from the wall and began pacing around the room, the pitch in his voice rising with excitement, speckles of dust dancing about as he walked. “He was at the funeral so he had access to Norm’s car, then, to make it even easier, he’d been studying William’s old publishing contract, had even gone to see him the very night he died. Brilliant! You couldn’t have planned it any better. He was like a fly straight into my trap.”
She thought then of what Gilda had said about David, and realized he wasn’t an annoying insect at all. He was far more predatory than that. More like a lone wolf, the name she’d used on his computer file at home. She’d never realised how prophetic that would be.
“Then of course there was the great good fortune of his having absolutely no alibi,” David continued. “And not just for William’s death but for Seymour’s a few days earlier—that’ll teach him for walking out on my movie.” He stopped in front of her, his eyes flashed. “So I played the disgruntled agent card. It was a great motive. He had been sacked by Seymour just weeks earlier, it all made sense. It was like a gift from the gods!”
“So, you had your story. Two writers were dead. Why kill Tina?”
He shrugged again. “You know how these things work, it’s never a strong plot when there’s only two. They’ll never announce a serial killer until there’s a third murder, surely you’ve seen enough CSI to know that? And again, Oliver made it too easy. When Tina came into his office that day, telling us all about their date that Saturday night, well, it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. Her fate was sealed. So was his.”
She felt a wave of nausea hit her again but she shook it off. She needed to keep him talking. He was right, she’d seen enough murder mysteries in her time to know that the longer she kept him talking the better it would be for her. She didn’t know why but that’s the way it seemed to work. The truth was, she didn’t really believe anyone would find them—how could they, she didn’t even know where she was?—but she had to buy herself more time, it just seemed like the right thing to do, so she asked, “But ... but how did you know Oliver wouldn’t stay the night with Tina? Thwart your plans?”
He sniggered. “As Caroline would say, ‘Puh-lease!’ She was just a slutty little tease.” He paused. “A lot like Caroline, actually. All lovely dovey but not much putting out. Stupid bitch, pity Caroline wasn’t a writer ...” He smiled to himself and Roxy winced. There was such evil in those eyes now, she wondered that she had never noticed it before. Her intuition had been way off on this guy. She had been too blinded by his sparkly success to see the evil lurking underneath.
“Anyway,” he was saying, “Oliver was never going to land Tina, been trying for years. It’s funny, despite what her dad thought, she was a frigid bitch.” Roxy winced again. “So I figured, either way, the world wouldn’t miss her much. I waited until she’d kissed Oliver off at the front door, like I knew she would, then showed up soon after, pretending to be Oliver, got access to her townhouse and did what needed to be done.”
“Is that why you dragged me b
ack to your place that night? To create your alibi.”
“Dragged?’ He snorted. “You were begging for it, Roxy. Begging! It all worked out so beautifully. I’d tried to lure you away from Max’s party, remember? But you weren’t having it, not until that beer kicked in.”
“You spiked it?”
“Just a little, enough to fuck you up. I was hoping you’d feel so groggy I’d be able to whisk you away, but when that didn’t work, Max stepped in and did the job for me.” He sniggered again, brushing a stray lock from his face. “You spotting him kissing up to Gilda was all the encouragement you needed. You insisted on coming back to mine, you made it so easy for me. All of you did. You’ve only got yourselves to blame.”
Roxy’s head was now pounding like a jackhammer and her cheek felt like it had swollen to the size of a football, but she ignored the pain and pressed on. “Then you drugged the wine back at your place?” He nodded. “I should have picked it when you said I’d polished off your Pinot Grigio. I would never pick a white wine when there’s merlot lying about. Nor would I have got that drunk. Ever.”
He stopped walking and sat down on the arm of the old sofa, a puff of dust springing up as he did so, causing her to cough violently for a few seconds. “I didn’t have to give you much, you were comatose within minutes, so I pretended to go to sleep with you and then snuck out after an hour or so, when it was clear you were not waking up. By the time I got back you were still out of it. You woke up the next morning and there I was lying beside you ... innocent as a baby, and you ...” He snorted. “You were hilarious, all ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry! I’m so embarrassed!’” He had put on a high-pitched girlie voice and sounded like a psycho, so different from the cool, collected man she had first met just weeks earlier at his film launch. “You were pathetic,” he spat, leaning in towards her, “but you did your job perfectly. Now I had my alibi and her name was Roxy Parker, best friend to policewomen everywhere.”
Roxy leaned away from him, shuddering at the thought that she had woken up beside a killer; that just hours earlier he had been poisoning poor Tina. As if reading her mind, he leaned in even further and said, “Tina Passion won’t be missed, she’s a whore, sold herself for her books—just ask her dad. I was doing him a favour, and her. Those Twitter trolls were right, she deserved to die just for her substandard writing alone. She should never have been a success, those books were A-class crap.”
“Can’t have been too bad. You held onto one of them.”
“Ah yes, Lover’s Delight. The missing proof. Is that what gave me away? I saw it on your car seat, and that’s when I knew I had to act fast.”
Roxy coughed again. “Actually, it took me a while to work out where I’d seen Tina’s book before. At first I thought it must have been at Oliver’s office or in Lorenzo’s bag, then I remembered. It was at your house, the morning after Max’s party, when I slept over. You had that copy on your bookshelf. But how could you? There were only two in existence, the one the editor had and the one that was stolen from Tina’s house the night before. You must have taken it home with you.” She smiled, her lips cracking as she did so. “Get hooked on the A-class crap, did we?”
He smiled back. “Figured I’d keep a memento, didn’t realise it was a proof copy. Wouldn’t have taken it if I’d known.”
“So, you drugged me, slipped away and killed Tina. But how did you know that Oliver wouldn’t have an alibi? He might have headed to a bar or to a friend’s place after dropping Tina home. You were so lucky he—”
“Bullshit! That wasn’t luck; that was foresight. Oliver’s always been a total loser. I knew he’d have no alibi, I knew he’d be all alone. Yet again.”
She ignored this, her anger growing in leaps and bounds. “And you were also very lucky both Tina and William were alone when you killed them. Tina could have had her dad staying. William could have had his daughter over.”
He shook his head. “Nope, I checked all that.”
“Of course, the elusive mobile phone. What, you rang a few times to check they were home alone? Then you planted the phone at Oliver’s office?” He nodded. “That was another giveaway for me. In fact, I have to say, David, I think it was your biggest mistake.”
“Oh really?” He stood up this time and leaned into her, menacingly, his two hands at her shoulders, his knees touching hers, his face just inches from her own. “And why is that, pray tell?”
She gulped hard and tried not shrink back this time. “Because it meant it wasn’t some random psycho as I was beginning to suspect. It made me realise that it had to be someone close to Oliver. I kept going over it and over it. No one else had access to Oliver’s office in that short time frame except you, me and Sharon. I knew I didn’t do it and I was pretty sure Sharon didn’t have it in her, despite the way she carries on. But why would you do this to Oliver? Why?”
He stepped back and began pacing the room again, and she relaxed a little. “Arrgh, will you get over fucking Oliver already! That’s no loss, besides, I hear his lawyer’s half decent, he’ll probably get off.”
“But not before you’ve destroyed his reputation, his career, the agency he’s spent decades building up, that made you the success you are today.”
“Hey!” He stopped walking and stormed back towards her. This time she did recoil. “I made myself a success. No one can take credit for that, no one!” He took a deep breath, looked at his watch. “This is bullshit, I haven’t got time for this.”
As he made his way back towards the rickety staircase and the bag he had left there, Roxy could feel her panic rising again.
Did he have a gun in that bag? More poison?
“Yes, but ... but Oliver can’t be blamed for this one,” she stammered. “He’s back in Sydney, he’s staying at Sharon’s. He has an alibi this time.”
He swept around to face her again. “Beeeeep! Wrong again, Roxanne. He’s just left me a text message, saying he’s on his way back to his place now, via cab. That means he’s home alone. Yet again.” He did a little bow. “Besides, I’ve got his car. I’ll drive it back to Sydney, leave it a few blocks from his house, your DNA all through the back of it. Then of course there’ll be all that CCTV footage of him driving it down the highway.” He reached down and pulled an old fedora and a bowling shirt from his bag. “Not hard to look like a tosser these days.” He proceeded to put them on.
“But ... but hang on,” she said. “You still haven’t told me why.”
“Why?
“Why you’re doing all this? Why you killed William and Tina.”
He laughed. “For a smart woman, Roxy, you’re incredibly thick.”
“It couldn’t be the book deal, surely? It couldn’t be as pathetic as that?”
He snarled. “Pathetic?! There’s nothing pathetic about a top-selling book, Roxanne, but of course you wouldn’t know about that. You’ve never so much as made the top one hundred.”
“Hey, my last book reached eighty-seven, I’ll have you know.” She tried for a smile but he did not smile back.
“You’ll get it when you reach number one, one day ... Not that you’ll get the chance.”
He was going to kill her, that was now obvious and her anger began to edge out the fear. “Oh, who cares about number one—”
“I do!” he boomed, cutting her off. “I was a success, I was Top Dog! Hell, the only reason you looked twice at me was because of that, because I now had a best seller and a shit hot film deal. You don’t even remember me when we first met!”
“Yes I do—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me. You women are all the same. I had you all eating out of my hand when I hit the big time. Damned if I was going to fade away quietly into the night.”
“But you have your other book deal, the one on the elite athletes.”
“Wasn’t ‘exciting enough’,” he said, doing the curly finger thing and she wished she could break free of her ropes and strangle him. “You think I’m stupid? People were already starting to call me a one
-hit wonder. Damned if I was going to let that happen. No fucking way. Not when there were more gripping stories to be told.”
“Gripping stories? There was no story until you fabricated one! Murdered a bunch of people for a bloody book deal. You are pathetic.”
He dropped the bag and rushed towards her again, his face contorted with rage. “I don’t want to hurt you, Roxanne, so you better shut your fucking mouth.”
She wanted to, really she did, but she was almost blind with rage herself now. She didn’t want to die and she wasn’t going to go quietly. Besides, he looked comical in the hat and fedora and it emboldened her. “Someone will work it all out, David,” she cried. “You will get found out, I can promise you that. Take this place, they’ll connect it to you, somehow ...”
“You don’t even know where you are, do you?” She stared at him, not speaking, and he began to laugh. It was an ugly, cackling kind of sound, and it made her skin crawl. “You won’t get found, Roxanne, not for many, many weeks, maybe even months or years! And it only takes a few days without water to die. But that’s not the worst of it.” He paused and looked around the room. “This house is haunted, Roxanne, there’s restless spirits here, you know? It’s going to be a very frightening couple of days.”
She scoffed, buoyed even further by the realization that he was not intending to kill her himself, that he was aiming to leave her here. “You’ve got to be kidding me, right? I don’t believe in ghosts, David. I’m not four years old. You can’t scare me to death.”
He sniggered. “I’m not going to scare you to death. You’re going to scare yourself.” He waved around the room. “When I’m gone and the darkness settles in, every little sound will freak you out. Every creak and groan will make you wonder. And if the spirits don’t scare you, perhaps the rats will.”
A cold wave washed through her. Rats? She hadn’t thought of that. His grin turned wider. “Ooooh, not looking so brave now, are we? Did you know, vermin don’t wait for you to die before they start nibbling at your body? Helping themselves to your doomed flesh?” Roxy’s throat constricted, bile filled her mouth. “And it’s not just rats, you know. There are lots of creepy crawlies in this house. Snakes, spiders, bats ... Don’t worry, Roxanne. It’ll be agonizing but it’ll be over soon enough. Then you’ll be at peace and I’ll have my best seller.”
