He never saw her again.
He entered the upper room to see them standing there. Marie and Tony Thompson. They turned, startled.
“It wasn’t our fault,” Tony said immediately. John barely recognized him. They’d only met once, and the man had changed. Twenty years ago he’d been a lion. Now he looked old, and afraid.
“It was only supposed to be a warning,” Marie said. “I said we’d give her money to go away, and David agreed. He was only coming because he knew her better, he said, because he might find it easier to talk sense into her, get her to drop the idea of blackmailing us.”
Hunter walked up the middle of the room, gun held out where they could see it. “But?”
“But David . . . It looked like it was going to go okay, and he convinced us to go talk it out somewhere private, but . . . something happened to him. He broke a bottle and pushed it into her face.”
Hunter didn’t doubt that the reflection of old horror he saw in the woman’s eyes was real, that she had suffered, a little. Not enough.
“That photo was taken afterward?”
“Phil and Peter didn’t know about what had happened at that point. We . . . we came up with everything else later.”
“You all went to dinner?”
“It . . . was booked.”
“John,” Tony said, “I know it was a terrible thing, and what we did was wrong. But it’s a long time ago now. And we’re wealthy, you know that. So’s Peter. We’ve talked about it. We want to put things right.”
The first bullet took off the top of Tony’s head. John saw Marie pulling the tiny handgun out of her purse, but he saw it just a little too late.
He kept on firing anyway.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It was after seven when we got to Longacres and the light was fading. As I drove into the community a phrase popped into my mind: entre chien et loup. I knew this was a French idiom for this time of day—“between the dog and the wolf”—and realized that I must have heard my father speak the language after all. Muttered under his breath probably, in some long-forgotten twilight, scooped up by childish ears on the prowl for adult indiscretion to be parroted with eerie accuracy at the least opportune moment. I must have asked what he meant—hoping it was really rude—and he’d told me. Enthusiastically? Matter-of-fact? In the vain hope I’d be intrigued? I couldn’t recall. We walk through an endless sandstorm of experience, but in the end our lives boil down to those few grains that happen to stick to our clothes.
I jammed the card against the access point across the private road, and it let me through, the gate lifting with its familiar slow confidence, the stolid gravity of an object performing a job for humankind. I was ludicrously relieved, as if I’d been expecting that even this part of everyday experience would have broken over the course of the day.
“Nice,” Emily said as we drove in.
I didn’t say anything. I was busy adding to a mental list of stuff to take with me to the hospital, and then beyond. (Where? I didn’t know. A hotel or motel, somewhere to sit tight for a couple of days before coming home again to a life that had been corrected in the meantime.) Discovering that even Janine had taken part in what had been done to me made it difficult to take anything for granted. Were my neighbors involved in the fun? Had someone knocked on the Mortons’ door and made a donation to their church? Had sweet Mrs. Jorgensson been offered an envelope of used bills and thought, Well, seems like harmless fooling, and it would mean bigger Christmas presents for the grandchildren, so why not?
Did I know any of these strangers, really?
Did I know anyone at all?
“Nobody here is in the game,” Emily said, disconcertingly. “At least, not that I’m aware of.”
“How did you know . . .”
“You think loud.”
Yes, I thought bitterly. Maybe I do, and maybe that’s it. Perhaps it was the naive and brash self-evidence of my desires and ambitions that made me the perfect target for the game in the first place.
He’s a wanter. He has designs above his station. Let’s take that and twist it. Let’s show him how things really work behind the scenes. Let’s break his little dreams apart.
I parked in the driveway. “You want to stay here?”
She shook her head. “Think I’ll come wash this mess up, see what I’m dealing with.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital regardless.”
“So you keep saying.”
The house was quiet and dark. I led Emily to the kitchen. My note to Stephanie was still on the counter there. The problems of the man who’d written it seemed trivial now. I pushed it to one side.
“What do you need?”
“Paper towels, antiseptic if you have it. Painkillers would be good. Got a home medical kit?”
“Somewhere.” I went to the big cupboard at the rear of the room. As I rootled through it, wanting to get Emily set up so I could run upstairs, she wandered away from the counter, looking around.
“Nice,” she said again.
“Is that irony? Just, I’m not in the mood.”
“No,” she said. “You have a nice home.”
“You don’t seem the type to want this kind of thing.”
“Everybody wants it,” she said. “Just some of us know it’s unlikely to happen in this lifetime. So we pretend the white-bread life sucks.”
I stalled, still shifting things around in the cupboard, trying to find the first aid kit. Was I really going to run from all this, even temporarily? Okay, I’d wanted more, bigger. But this was a nice house, and I’d earned it. Steph and I repainted it. She’d found nice things to put in it. It was ours. It was mine.
Was I going to let a bunch of assholes force me out, when I hadn’t done anything? Running is a deep instinct, but isn’t it better to turn and fight, defend your corner? No—I have a good cave, and no asshole is going to take it away from me, for even a day.
“Christ, here it is.” I turned, opening the first aid box and pulling out a roll of bandages to see what else was inside.
“Bill.”
She’d walked to the far end of the room and was staring through the doors into the pool area. Her voice sounded strange.
“What?”
“Fuck,” she said. The middle of the word stretched out for a long time.
I went to stand next to her. There was something floating in the pool. Something else was lying beside one of the loungers. Emily reached behind for her gun, found she couldn’t begin to hold it with her right hand. She got it with the left instead. It looked awkward, heavy. I opened the screen door.
We went together, Emily sweeping the gun from side to side. There was a rushing sound in my ears.
The thing lying by the lounger was a forearm. It had been hacked off at wrist and elbow. There was blood on the floor around it, but not much. Presumably because it had been cut off after the person was already dead.
My stomach rolled over. There was nothing in there but liquid, which splattered to the stone floor. I emptied my guts until it felt like they were going to come out.
I straightened and we turned together to look at the thing floating in the pool. It was facedown, tilting on the right, as if it would not be long before it sank.
It was wearing the torn remains of a long black skirt and a black blouse. I knew the blouse. It ended in lacy cuffs at the wrists. I knew the front fell down a little when the wearer leaned forward. I knew because I’d glanced down it less than twenty-four hours before.
Emily stowed her gun and went over to the pool equipment and brought back the long pole with a net on the end. She couldn’t manage it, and gave it to me.
I reached it out and snagged the body’s left shoulder. I pulled. The body moved, spinning slowly about the middle, but did not come any closer. I tried again, this time resting the loop of the net across the body’s back and pulling more gently.
It started to drift toward us.
We watched it come. When it was resting against the
side of the pool I squatted down.
They’d shaved Cass’s head. Before, during, after? Hacked at her back and her arms and legs. Floating there, pale and waterlogged and as dead as anything could be, she looked larger than I remembered, life taking with it the anima that had lightened her progress across the earth.
I reached down, against my will, and took her upper arm in my hand. I turned the body over.
The damage to the front was far more frenzied, especially over the chest. They’d taken her face, too. Someone had gone at her face with instruments I couldn’t imagine. An ax, hammers, a saw. There was nothing left but holes and insides.
Something changed forever inside me then. Hazel’s body had looked strange but somehow okay, part of a story we never want to hear but that death is always going to whisper to us someday. We die, it happens.
Cass’s body said more than this. It said God was dead, too, and that he’d always hated us anyway.
“Bill.”
Emily was pointing at the wall of the pool area, at a two-foot smear of dried blood. “And there.”
Another smear, on the floor toward the side. This was what the forearm had been used for. Someone had held one of the cut ends against these surfaces and dragged a trail of evidence, to make it that bit harder trying to hide it all. Were these smears just down here? Or upstairs, too? Were they in the bed, under it? In drawers, in the roof?
Emily looked sick. Evidently even her experience in the Gulf was not enough to make this okay.
“This isn’t a game,” I said.
“No. Nothing like this was ever in the plan, ever even hinted at. You think I’d be here if it had been?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I had tears running down my face and appeared powerless to stop them. “I mean, how could anyone think of this as a game? I mean, what kind of person could even do this?”
“Warner? From the sound of it he was someone with—”
“He’s been AWOL since yesterday evening. Hunter said he was injured, and I saw the chair he’d fallen in, too. I was with Cass after that.”
“Right.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve only got my word for that.”
She shook her head. “You were seen on the Circle last night with her, late—by me, remember? I’d started to realize things were fucked up by then, but I was still holding the role. When Brian failed to show later I got properly nervous, and then I was at her apartment first thing this morning. I know it wasn’t you. You didn’t have time, and you were the most freaked-out and bewildered man in the world. And you’re . . . you’re just not that guy.”
“What about the things Hunter said? Asking how much I actually knew about you?”
“I guessed that would come up again.” She held her gun in my direction, handle first. “You want to take this?”
“Of course not. I have no idea how to even use it.”
“Just trying to show you can trust me.”
“It might not even be loaded, for all I know. So—did you come into Cass’s apartment while I was unconscious on the floor, kill her, hand the body off to someone to do all this to it, and dump it here? Then fake the chase afterward to make me believe you were on my side?”
“No.”
“This isn’t still part of the game? The script playing out? You earning your final payout?”
She held up her mangled hand. “Hard-earned, if so.”
“Yes, you got hurt, but Hunter was the wild card nobody expected. He’s the thing that screwed up their game, and Warner’s, too. You weren’t to know about him, either—and that could be the only reason you got injured.”
She shook her head, and I thought I believed her—but part of me didn’t know.
“Still hearing your thoughts loud and clear,” she said. “The answer’s no. But it strikes me that Marie Thompson went to some pains to tell you to come back here. Made it look sincere, too.”
That had just occurred to me. “Maybe in the hope I’d be caught red-handed with the body.”
“We should go,” she said. “Now.”
“Bandage your hand. I’m going to grab a couple of things.”
She headed back into the kitchen. I stayed a moment longer, wiping my face, looking at the sinking body in my pool, remembering swimming there with Steph late on the night of our anniversary, floating in the aftermath of sex and food and thinking how fine everything was.
Four nights ago. That’s how long all this had taken.
“I’ll get them,” I said to the body. My voice was thick, throttled, quiet. “I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I will.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
By the time I got back into the kitchen, Emily was wrapping a bandage around her hand. I’d forgotten what had been on my list of things to take from the house, and doubted any of them had been important anyhow. The only thing that had merit was a set of clothes for Stephanie. Anything else could stay until the world had been sorted out and I could start living my life here again.
“Going upstairs,” I said. “Two minutes. Then we’re leaving.”
“Roger that,” she said, holding the bandaged hand against her chest as she tried to fasten it with tape. She was shaking. I thought it was unlikely this was from fear, or even from what we’d seen in the pool.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“It really kind of does. I’ve come around to the idea of going to the hospital. You’re wiser than I thought.”
There was a knock at the front door.
Our heads turned together. The knock came again, loud. Then someone pressed the doorbell.
I whispered, “What do I do?”
She had no advice. The doorbell rang again, and then we heard someone speaking loudly on the other side.
“Mr. Moore, it’s Deputy Hallam. I came. So if you’re here, open the door.”
Emily reached behind with her left hand and fanned out to the left. When I saw that she was braced up against the wall, out of sight, I walked across the living room and opened the front door.
Hallam stood lit by the lamp above the doorway. He was alone. His cruiser was parked down in the street. He looked exhausted and spaced-out.
“So, on the way I hear there’s been a shoot-out at St. Armands Circle,” he said, with something like wonder. “Tony Thompson is dead. Marie’s on the way to the hospital, along with some other guy, the alleged shooter. She received three bullet wounds, but gut-shot him in the meantime. She’s probably going to live.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You don’t sound surprised by the scenario I’ve just outlined.”
“I know who the shooter is. His name’s John Hunter. I know why he did it.”
Hallam caught sight of Emily in the shadows. “Who the hell is that?”
“One of the two people in the world who I trust right now,” I said. “You are not the other. So come in slowly, keep your hands where I can see them, and do not do anything that could look like screwing me around.”
He entered cautiously. Once the door was closed behind him, Emily moved out of the shadow.
“Take his weapon,” she said to me.
Hallam laughed. “Are you kidding me? I still want to know who the hell you are.”
Emily moved her hand to where he could see her gun. “Any cop with half a brain would have established that before he stepped over the threshold,” she said.
Hallam knew she was right, and he didn’t like it. He put his hand on his side holster.
“Lady, I want you to understand something—”
“Her name’s Jane,” I interrupted, before this could get out of hand. “She knows a lot more than I do about this. Jane—this guy’s okay. I think. So everyone just be cool and nobody shoot anyone, okay?”
His eyes still on her, hand there on his gun, Hallam stood his ground. “Whatever it is you believe you have to tell me, Mr. Moore, you got three minutes max. I need to get to the Circle. The call’s out to the sheriff but he’s not t
here yet and he’s going to be furious if he finds out I’m not, either.”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” I said. “But I need to show you something first.”
“What?”
“It’s out back.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Emily said.
“He needs to know.”
Hallam saw me glance out through the glass doors to the pool. “Need to know what?”
He leaned forward, peered into the gloom. “What the hell is that?”
I led him out.
Hallam stared down at what was in the pool. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He turned eventually, but his eyes found the forearm lying alongside, and so he kept moving his head until it came to rest on my face.
“Who is she?”
“A girl called Cassandra,” I said. “She was murdered in the small hours of this morning, at the place I tried to get you to come to this afternoon.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. All I saw was blood. They moved the body and brought it here.”
“The crime scene still the way it was? The one at her apartment?”
“Not exactly,” I said. Emily looked away.
Hallam rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “This is fucked up.”
He walked back into the house.
“So?” I asked him. “You going to arrest me right now, or do I have a chance of standing my ground? Are they so in control that I have to get out of here for a while?”
“Wait. Who’s ‘they’?”
Hallam’s eyes looked like he was still seeing what was in the pool. The body had half rolled back over in the water when he saw it, hiding some of her face—but he’d still seen more than enough. He looked as though he was trying to decide what to do first out of about eight possible choices, all of them well above his pay grade.
“Tony and Marie Thompson.”
His eyes snapped back to life and he laughed outright. “The Thompsons? You’re kidding, right? They murdered some girl, hacked her body to pieces, smashed her face off? I don’t think so.”
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