Then something struck me. “Why are you even here on a Friday?”
“Oliver’s taken Kyle out,” she said proudly. “Like, a Dad’s day? And I was at home and I thought, well, there’s so much stuff I still don’t have a clue about on the computer, why not come in and go through it? Friday’s always quiet—could be I might get some stuff done.”
I was surprised. A couple days ago I might even have been impressed. I responded as if I was still that person. “Good for you. By the way—you keep all your e-mails, right?”
“Of course. I mean, I lose a few, but you know.”
“Could you find the one where I asked you to make that reservation at Jonny Bo’s?”
She looked wary. A lot of computer-related things made Janine look wary, or confused. “Well, probably. But why?”
“I want to check a tiny thing. No biggie, just a technical issue. Could you find it, forward it back to me? Actually, to my home e-mail address?”
“Sure. I know how to do that now.”
“Great. Oh, shoot—just remembered something I gotta do. Back in ten, okay?”
I was kept waiting in reception for twenty minutes. In the meantime I called the hospital to check on Steph again and was told that everything was the same except her “brother” had brought in the remains of the bottle of wine she’d been drinking. It had been sent for testing.
The thought of the guy brought a twist to my stomach, but I was glad he’d done it. I didn’t know what I was going to do about that situation. Right now it wasn’t my highest priority, but at some point it probably would become so. Real life comes due in the end. You can’t just focus on work. You can keep scribbling on separate Post-it notes and shoving them in drawers, but sooner or later every real thing comes to its moment on the great To Do List of Life. Probably it came down to what this “friendship” amounted to. I hoped it wasn’t much and took solace from the fact that the guy had only been at the company for five or six weeks. It couldn’t be that serious, surely. I didn’t know whether to be sad or worried or angry. I didn’t know how much of the situation could be laid at my door, either, for failing to provide some thing or things Steph felt she was lacking. It is a bitter shame we’re so much better at imagining perfection than life is at providing it. The perfect evening, perfect weekend, perfect house . . . Our minds effortlessly serve these images up, and so we write fairy tales in our heads, and they’re always so damned bright. The world meanwhile digs in its heels and prevaricates and stalls—yet we believe the universe is so much bigger than we are, bursting full of potential wonders, and so we’ll denigrate and underuse the good things we have on the basis that there’s better out there. There probably isn’t. The best life you can have may be the one you’ve already got. This fecund imagination of ours is just The Dark One’s voice, cajoling, promising. Some gods might fight back by giving us lives that run closer to what we’d like, but ours doesn’t operate on the letter-to-Santa model. He wants our respect because he’s God—not for being nice or merciful or any pansy-ass crap like that.
And as I sat there, I did kind of pray, something I hadn’t done in a long time—since back when I thought of myself as William rather than Bill. My mother was a lapsed Catholic, and prayed once in a while. I know the tune, that’s about all. I tried to hum it. I felt sick and light-headed, and Cass’s face was still appearing in front of my inner eye on a regular basis. I was trying not to think about where her body might be and had given up attempting to imagine why anyone would have done it.
I kept remembering, too, that my thumb drive was still in her apartment, and each time this made my stomach flip as if someone was turning it with a red-hot fork. I shoved all this to the side as best I could, however, and sent up a prayer for Stephanie.
I have no idea where it went.
Finally the guy behind the desk nodded at me. I went over to the elevator and took it to the fourth floor.
I knocked on the door to the Thompson apartment, and it was opened by Tony immediately, as if he’d been standing behind it. It could be that I was judging everyone else by how I felt, but it seemed to me he looked a lot older today. Older and tense and deep-lined around the eyes. The eyes themselves were flat, and despite the speed with which he’d opened the door, he didn’t seem in any hurry to invite me in. Behind him I saw Marie on the big white couch, arms folded.
Eventually Tony stood aside. The bottle of wine I’d presented him with was on the coffee table. It was unopened. Tony didn’t sit, and didn’t invite me to, either.
“So what’s up, Bill?” Marie asked.
I’d only been directly addressed by Marie on a couple of occasions. I had always found the experience unnerving. She’d gone full-bore on the figure-over-face school, and the planes on the latter were harsh and unforgiving. Even in her youth it would have been a countenance to be admired rather than enjoyed: the bones were big and asymmetric, arranged as if to withstand impact rather than inspire attraction. On the other hand, I’d seen this woman in her sixties beat Karren soundly on the tennis courts in front of a small crowd, and I was pretty sure Karren hadn’t been playing politics.
“I bought that bottle along with one more,” I said. “Someone took the other from my house. They drank half of it. They’re in the hospital and very sick. I don’t know if there’s a link. But it’s possible.”
“Tony said you bought the wine on the Internet.”
“Yes. I heard him mention it, thought it might be nice to see if I could track it down for him.”
“To curry favor with us.”
You could have held the sneer in her voice in your hand. You could have fed it. You could have kept it as a pet. “Yes.”
“How precisely did you get hold of it?”
“I already told Tony. I found a wine forum on the Web. Put up a post.”
“Did you use your normal e-mail address?”
“Of course. Why?”
Marie and Tony looked at each other. “So that’s how,” she said.
Tony nodded, with something that looked like relief. “Which means it wasn’t necessarily aimed at us. Just a throw-out. A random spike in his life.”
“Yes. Though . . .” She had a thought, and turned back to me, frowning. “What did you actually say in your post? Did you say you were looking for the wine as a gift?”
“Said I wanted to do someone a favor, which is why I was keen to track it down and willing to pay well.”
She took a long drag off her cigarette, looking at me through the smoke. Her eyes were the same color. “That’s . . . less good. Come on, Tony—who else could Bill have wanted to suck up to?”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Can you just tell me?”
Neither seemed to hear. Both appeared deep in thought, gazing out of different windows. After a moment, a question of apparently trivial importance struck Marie.
“Who drank the wine?”
“Stephanie,” I said. “My—”
“Wife,” Marie said. “I know. Pretty girl.”
Something inexplicable happened to her face, and she pursed her lips together.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Seriously,” I said. “I tell you my wife is in the hospital, and you have to bite down on a smile?”
“Rather her than me, don’t you think?”
I stared at her, and I remembered something Hazel Wilkins had said when we’d met for coffee a hundred years ago: Self-centered. Dangerously so.
Tony picked up on how angry I actually was. “Bill—I’m sorry to hear about your wife. Do they have any idea what was in it?”
“Not for sure,” I said. “But they were talking about E. coli. The bottle’s at the lab now.”
“How on earth would he get hold of E. coli?” Tony asked, but he wasn’t talking to me.
Marie shook her head. She wasn’t looking so pleased with herself anymore. I was brutally glad. “Probably wasn’t him,” she said. “He will have tasked one o
f his little helpers.”
“Wouldn’t one of them have said?”
“No. They’re his helpers, not ours. Always have been. Which is why I said—”
“Who?” I said, infuriated at being treated as though I wasn’t there. “Who the hell are you talking about?”
The phone on the coffee table rang—the sound sudden and jangling and harsh. The Thompsons looked at it. It kept on ringing. Finally, after about six rings, Marie leaned forward and picked it up. Listened.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”
The change in her face was remarkable. She stared up at her husband, suddenly looking about eighty years old.
“Get rid of him.”
Tony took my arm and led me to the door. His grip was hard and strong. “Look,” I said, but by then I was outside in the corridor. The door closed behind me.
I didn’t walk away. A beat later I heard Marie’s muffled voice.
“Hazel’s disappeared.”
As I stepped out into the sun I saw Big Walter the maintenance guy standing in the middle of the lot. He had his cap in his hand. He didn’t look right.
“You okay?”
He looked at me. “Don’t know,” he said. “You know Mrs. Wilkins is missing?”
“I just heard. But she could just be out somewhere, right?”
He shook his head. “I was just up there. Melda took me. I been in that apartment many times, fixing things. Tidiest damned condo I ever saw. Now it looks like someone was looking for something, got mad when they didn’t find it. Clothes ripped, furniture on its side, everything broken all over.”
“Well,” I said, backing away. “I hope it turns out all right.”
It was weak. I didn’t care. I headed over to my car. I was done here. I was going. I wasn’t sure where. Probably back to the hospital.
As I was unlocking the car I heard footsteps and glanced up and saw someone heading quickly in my direction. He looked familiar, and I realized he was the guy I’d seen the day before, the maybe prospect who’d been wandering around looking up at condos.
“Hey,” he said.
Something happened that was fast and hurt, and then everything was red black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
My eyes were open. I found myself in a field of gray white space, every particle in slow, rotating movement, like a flock of pale birds in flight. This kept trying to resolve into something in particular but evidently didn’t know what that might be. I blinked, and fell into myself with vertiginous nausea.
I could smell dust. Concrete.
I rolled onto my side. I was lying on something hard. And gritty. And gray. Some of the grayness was closer to my face, a flat plane stretching out from my cheek. Other parts were farther away, like blocks. The far side of these was a patch of different colors. A vivid, blurry orange, and a kind of pale beige. This gave me something to focus on. I blinked again, more deliberately this time, and concentrated on the patchwork. The colors wavered, and then abruptly snapped into something I could recognize.
Hazel Wilkins.
I sat up fast, and my head swirled away from me again, making my gorge rise.
“Easy,” a voice said. “Take it slow.”
Hazel was sitting against a cinder block wall about ten feet away. She was wrapped in an orange blanket. She wasn’t really sitting, though. She’d been propped. Her head tilted away from her neck. She looked gray, too. She looked small. She looked dead. I’d never seen a dead person before, but Hazel looked really dead.
I woozily jerked my head around toward the source of the voice. A man was sitting with his back against the other wall. He was the guy I’d seen in the parking lot of The Breakers, the one who’d said, “Hey.” Dark hair, flecks of gray. His gaze was calm but attentive.
“So the name’s William Moore, right?”
Arrayed on the floor in front of him were my phone, my wallet (the contents removed and lined up in an orderly row), my car keys, and the pack of cigarettes. These piles occupied four out of five points, a neat semicircle. The last was taken by a handgun.
I tried to speak and it came out as a wet click, like a foot being pulled out of mud.
The man reached to the side, picked up a small plastic bottle of water, tossed it in my direction. I got nowhere near catching it. My hand hadn’t even made it off the floor before the bottle bounced past. I turned and saw that a few feet behind lay the remains of a broken chair in the middle of what looked like a patch of dried blood. A few pieces of canvas strapping were nearby. The water bottle had come to rest in the middle of all this. I decided I’d do without it.
I looked up. Above was half a floor, some big windows covered with tarpaulins. “Where is this?”
“Lido.”
“How did I get here?”
“Pushed you into your car and drove you out. Amazed I got away with it, to be honest with you, but I guess I was owed one piece of luck this week.”
I couldn’t not look at Hazel any longer. “Did you kill her?”
He was silent. I thought that if he hadn’t, he’d have been quick to say so, and so that meant the answer was yes. I’d never been in the same room as someone who’d killed someone. I didn’t know what, once you’ve killed one person, there was to stop you from killing a few more afterward—especially if you’re the kind of guy who props a body in the corner while you have a chat with a man you’ve just kidnapped in plain sight.
I didn’t know, either, whether you talk to people just before you kill them. I really hoped not.
“Did you . . . did you kill Cass also?”
“I have no idea who that even is.”
“A girl.”
“Wasn’t me, anyway. When did it happen?”
“Last night.”
“You know what time?”
“Not exactly. Very late.”
“She mean something to you? You two going out?”
“No,” I said, and we had not been—but the word collided in my head with the memory of us sitting on the floor, and came out wrong. “Just someone I knew.”
“Right.” He looked at me, as if reconsidering something, then stood up and walked over. I was glad to see him leaving the gun where it was.
He squatted down in front of me, pulled something out of the pocket of his jacket, and held it out where I could see. It was a photograph, six by four.
“Know any of these people?”
The print looked very new, but the picture hadn’t been taken recently. The colors and hairstyles gave that away. It showed a bunch of people around a restaurant table. I started to shake my head, but then I flashed on the location—one of the sidewalk tables outside the Columbia Restaurant on the Circle—and then started recognizing faces, too.
“Guy in the middle is Phil Wilkins,” I said. “I think so, anyway. I only met him a couple times.”
I couldn’t help glancing at Hazel as I said this. For almost all the time I’d been in Sarasota, she had been defined by her continued existence after the death of the man she’d loved. As of very recently, that was clearly no longer the case. I realized that this made her position propped against the wall look more peaceful than it might have done otherwise.
“Yes,” the man said irritably, “I killed her. But it was an accident. I want you to know that.”
I stared at him, not knowing how much of this to believe, if any. “Okay.”
“Got no reason to lie to you,” he said. “So. The others in the picture?”
“No idea who the younger guy next to Wilkins is,” I said. “But on the left, the man with the blonde, that’s . . . I think that’s Peter Grant. I’m pretty sure. He owns Shore Realty. Where I work. And . . . Christ, okay, yeah, the couple on the other side. I know them, too.”
“Tony and Marie Thompson.”
“What is this picture? Why have you got it?”
The man stowed it back in his pocket. “Funny thing,” he said, though all levity in his manner had disappeared. He looked tired, and pained, and n
ot like a man for whom things were going well. “Reason I picked you up is you’d just come from seeing the Thompsons. I figured you might be able to help me pay them a visit. We’ll work on that. But now I’m thinking we may have a lot more in common than I realized.”
“What do you mean?”
He reached a hand up to the neckline of his T-shirt and pulled down the front. There, scrawled onto the top of his chest in letters that looked more like a series of knife slashes, was an old, amateur-looking tattoo. A single word: MODIFIED.
My reaction must have been plain to see. He grunted, let the material flip back up again.
“Woke up one morning to find that,” he said. He fetched the bottle of water, handed it to me. “I’d been drugged, I guess. Couldn’t remember anything about getting home the night before. I had bruises up my sides, scratches on my arms that looked like they’d been done by someone’s fingernails. Long nails, like a woman’s. I took a shower, put some peroxide on my chest, tried to get my head straight. Half an hour later, a police car arrived. You know a cop called Barclay? He still around?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s the sheriff.”
“Figures. He was a deputy back then. He arrested me.”
“What for?”
“I said to them—look what’s happened here, guys. Someone’s tattooed a word on me. They were not interested. They didn’t care when I said I’d seen the word before a few times in the previous weeks. Barclay accused me of starting up an insanity defense. Said I’d had the ink done myself. That was so ridiculous that I got frustrated and took a swing at him, and soon after that I was handcuffed in the back of the cruiser. Thing is, I’d met the guy before, and I knew he was a good cop and a decent guy. He just wasn’t listening that day.”
Killer Move Page 21
