by John Farrow
“Same reason that she wanted Andy dead,” Cinq-Mars said. “They carried information. In her business, that’s a deadly disease.”
“Do we pick her up?”
Cinq-Mars nodded. “Let’s go to her house. See if she can produce that car.”
Camille undressed in private and donned her ankle-length bathrobe for the trek back down the hall. She organized her bathing items, her soaps and shampoo, cleansers and hairbrushes, and put them all in a pink toilet kit. Then she took Charlie Painchaud’s pistol out of her bag and put that in the kit as well.
She checked her bath. The hot was too hot, and she added a little cold to the mix, stirring the water with one hand until she got the temperature right. Then she stood and locked the door.
Camille Choquette examined the pistol. She examined it as a woman in a particular mood might explore a dildo. She had one more tangle to unravel, and this would be the best way. The only way. Cinq-Mars was coming. Lucy was going to talk to him. She didn’t know what Charlie had told him, but whatever it was, he was no longer alive to say it again. Lucy was a problem. Lucy connected her to the dead patients in the States. The dead patients in the States included two, one in New York and one in Paramus, New Jersey, whose lives she had taken and whose lips she had sewn. She had smothered Wendell in New York. She had slit the throat of the motel clerk in Paramus, then sewn the wound shut while he bled and died.
All night long, Camille had tossed and turned, knowing that she had made a mistake, that she should never have sewn Charlie’s lips. She just couldn’t help it at the time. She had wanted to do it so much. And now she had to kill the one person who could connect her to New York and New Jersey. One more death. She felt the weight of the gun in her hand and felt the urgency grow inside her. She wanted to do this. She wanted Lucy dead more than she had ever realized.
Camille turned off the taps, opened the door, and left the room. She moved down the hall with her right hand tucked inside her bathrobe, hearing her child splashing happily. That would be her next problem. Carole. She didn’t want to think about that. She carried the gun under her left breast. She did not bother to knock but walked straight into Lucy’s room, surprising her.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Camille said.
“That was quick.”
“The water’s too hot. I’m letting it cool.”
Lucy smiled slightly. “I was thinking about Harry Hillier.” She came away from the window and sat on her bed, curling her legs under her. “I don’t understand it.” She pulled a blanket over her lap to protect against the chill and damp.
Camille seated herself on a chair that had been pulled close to the window. She kept her arms crossed.
“I talked to him,” Lucy admitted.
Camille was surprised. “Harry? How come?”
“I found out that he was working for us after all, even though he didn’t know we existed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I went to his office—”
“You, what?” Camille suddenly realized that if she kept Lucy talking she could learn a lot.
“Yeah, I went to his office to find out what he was doing, if anything, on our project. The data had to go through him, right? He’s the only great scientist we have. Was he with the bad guys, or was he being duped, like the rest of us? Get this. Harry was suspicious. He didn’t say anything, but he was beginning to figure out that the data had had to come from humans, not rodents, as he’d been told. I could tell from the file that he was working it out.”
They heard a sound in the corridor, which startled Camille.
“Relax, it’s only Brother Tom.”
The two women waited while the monk ponderously made his way to the room. He greeted them with a smile and put down a tray with the offerings that Lucy had predicted, including a fourth cup, one for himself. He poured the hot chocolate from a white enamel pitcher, served them each a cup, and seated himself in the small chair at the edge of the desk. “This is like summer camp,” Camille chuckled.
Lucy filled Brother Tom in.“I was just telling Camille about our foray over to Hillier-Largent. Anyway, I shook Harry up a little. I told him that I knew what he’d done, and that I knew whose side he was on. He probably didn’t know what I was talking about, he probably didn’t know there were sides. But I mentioned the file by its code name, Darkling Star. I remember you told me that name. But I figured if Harry was worried that he might be implicated in Darkling Star, he might cause a fuss around Hillier-Largent, or over at BioLogika. Maybe he did. Maybe that’s why somebody blew him up.”
“I didn’t hear about any fuss,” Camille mentioned.
“Would you have? I doubt if Harry and Randall Largent would’ve had a public shouting match over this one. I think they’d keep it pretty quiet, wouldn’t you?”
Camille nodded. She had made a mistake. If she had heard of a fuss it would have been through Honigwachs, but she wasn’t going to tell Lucy that. It doesn’t matter any more, does it? “It’s a mystery to me. I don’t know why Harry’s dead.”
“Or poor Charlie,” Lucy added.
“No, I know why Charlie’s dead. He’s dead because I shot him. I was aiming for his fucking eye but I missed, I think. I shot him in the head.” Camille smiled then, and held the icy grin frozen on her lips. She thought that the shock on Lucy’s face was a hoot. Slowly, she withdrew the pistol from under the shelter of her robe. “With this,” she told them both. “I shot him with this, his own gun.”
Brother Tom was rising from his chair.
“Stay where you are monk-face,” Camille told him. She aimed the pistol in his direction. “I’ll let you know when you can budge.”
Lucy and her guardian looked at one another, both stunned.
“Sit down, monk-face.”
Slowly, as though his weight was being lowered with the aid of a crane, as though he had lost the full use of his muscles, Brother Tom resumed his seat.
“That’s better.”
“Camille—” Lucy started to say.
“Ah, poor baby doesn’t understand? She gets lost in the ways of the world? Ah, poor little Indian girl.”
“What are you doing?” Lucy whispered, finding a portion of her voice. “This is insane.”
“Ah,” mused Camille, “no. Not a good word to use. I really object to that word. I mean, you’re the bitch who killed forty-two people. Well, forty, actually, because I took care of a couple of those myself, put them out of their misery, anyway. You killed forty people and you have the nerve to tell me that I’m insane? Nope, it won’t wash. Not with me, sister.”
Lucy’s eyes jumped around. The way her fear coiled and moved inside her, she was afraid she might retch. Her skin felt as if it would strip itself from her body and bolt. She had to fight to stay lucid, she was in a daze. She had faced military bayonets and boys in army boots who had looked as scared as she had been, boys who had been likely to do something rash at any moment and you just had to pray that they’d been well-trained. In that famous picture where she stood on an upturned police cruiser and taunted at the army with an automatic rifle in one hand, she had been feeling the fear of her men, the fear of the Warriors themselves, who had been willing to die and knew they might, but she had also understood that they were capable of humiliating themselves. As a woman, she could climb onto that car and screech at the army and no soldier would shoot her, she believed, because she was a woman. If one of the Warriors had done that, some giddy, schoolboy army sniper might have cut him down. And so, she had made a spectacle of herself. In a momentof panicandfright shehad followedan instinct. She had focused attention on herself, and in doing so had released the pressure on everyone else. Her ploy had worked. She’d made the news, but more importantly, there had been no battle that day, where there might have been. This was different, but she had operated under fire before, and a voice inside her was screaming at her to function again.
“Camille, tell me. What’s going on? What are you going to do?” She opted for
a calming tone, but she heard the fear in her voice as well.
With her gun held up, Camille smiled more widely. Then suddenly she frowned. She spoke in a voice not much louder than Lucy’s. “I’m going to shoot you, bitch. Do you know what a bitch you’ve been? I’m going to shoot you.”
“Why? You won’t get away with it.” Lucy looked over at Brother Tom, whose wide-eyed gaze was fixed on Camille, his mouth open, drooling slightly. He seemed to be in shock.
“Sure I will, Luce. I’ll say that I was in the bath when a killer attacked. I heard what I thought were gunshots and just stayed quiet, with the door locked. That’s where I’ll be when the cops arrive. In the bath. I’ll be hysterical for them. My little girl will be weeping in my arms. She’ll be my witness. I was taking a bath. The gun I’ll drop here, it’ll be identified as Charlie’s, the same gun I used to shoot him. Clean the prints off, which any killer would do. If little bits of you land on me, I’ll wash them off in the bath, then run fresh water. It’s perfect. I’ll get away with it, Lucy. I know that rots your socks, but I’ll get away with it pretty easily. It won’t even be hard.”
“Camille, you can’t do this.”
“Sure I can.”
“Why? Oh, God, Camille! What’s the matter with you? What’s happening?”
“Getting scared, are we? The bad news is sinking in. Hang on a second, Luce. I need to have a word with monk-face first. Brother Tom,” she told him in a hectoring voice, “you move that arm again, you shift that leg again, you wiggle around on your ass again, and it will be the last second of your life, understand me? Now I’m going to explain a few things to Indian-girl here, and I expect your full attention. Got me?”
The monk solemnly nodded.
Camille sneered at him. “Hey, maybe before the day is out I’ll get Brother Tom to say a few words. What do you think? Would you like to live to hear that Lucy? Do you think he’ll sit up and beg for us, if we give him the right encouragement?”
The squad car was speeding by the monastery when Cinq-Mars said, “Stop.”
“What?” Mathers asked.
“Stooopppp!” the senior detective shouted, and Mathers jammed on the brakes, fighting hard with the steering wheel to stay out of a spin. Each man was jostled and bruised by the car’s swift halt.
“What, Emile, what?” Mathers demanded, recovering.
“It’s a car. The monastery parking lot. I don’t know. But it could be Camille’s!”
“What the fuck’s going on?” Recchi blustered in the back seat, but his words were no sooner spoken then Mathers was accelerating and turning the car on a dime, tires squealing, heading back the way they’d come. He bounded down the drive to the monastery, and every officer’s head banged against the roof. He skidded to a stop next to the Mazda. Cinq-Mars and Mathers both stared at the window, which had been punched out and replaced with a sheet of plastic. Then Cinq-Mars and Mathers jumped from the car and drew their weapons.
At the sight of the guns, the New York cops suddenly sprang into action themselves.
“Big place,” Cinq-Mars said. “We need to cover some ground. Everybody goes inside. Trust no one. Especially don’t trust any women you meet who are armed.”
They ran down to the nearest door. Mathers opened it, and the four cops burst inside.
“So, Brother Tom, you may want to shut your eyes, or maybe you prefer to die happy. Whatever. That’s up to you.” Camille stood. “I’m taking my robe off, in case I get any messy bits on myself.”
She was careful, removing her robe, to move the pistol from one hand to the other so that it was trained continuously on Lucy Gabriel. The monk did not avert his eyes, nor did he seem either offended or interested by her nudity.
“This way, I can wash off easily,” she said. Between the slight slump to her breasts and her sharply poking hip-bones, her ribs were obvious, and winter’s pale progress showed on white skin, with only her face and hands weathered by the wind and sun.
Carole called from down the hall. “Mommy! I want to get out now!”
Camille returned to the door, keeping her eyes and the aim of the pistol on her captives. She shouted, “Stay there! Don’t you dare move until Mommy comes back!”
“I want to get out noooowwww!”
“Stay—the fuck—there!”
Her voice echoed down the hall.
“What?” she asked Lucy, noting her appalled expression and lifting her head to demean her with her look. “You don’t like how I talk to my kid?”
“You need help, Camille.”
“Nope! Wrong! Wrong thing to say! I don’t like that, Luce, not one bit. And I don’t take that shit from nobody. Now you take it back or I’ll be mean to you. I’ll sew up your lips. Monk-face, you must have a needle and thread.”
Lucy’s face was quivering now, her lips trembling. Her hands also shook and her breathing caught in her throat.
“No, Camille, please, what’s wrong with you—don’t,” Lucy implored her, and inched her way back on the bed, against the wall. “Please.”
“Aw, Lucy, getting scared? I like that. Especially from you. Little Indian warrior! Brave little red-hearted girl with the rifle stuck above her head.” She walked back and forth in front of her now, taunting her with her words and the pistol. “I always thought that was bogus. Who’d you kill, Lucy? Who’d you kill with that thing? You wouldn’t have the guts.”
“Mommy!” her daughter called from down the hall.
“Stay there, Carole!”
“Who’d you kill, Camille?” Lucy asked, turning the question on her. “Did you kill Andy?” Her mind raced. She had to buy time. She hadn’t seen anyone except Brother Tom since her arrival. This wing of the monastery had truly been abandoned, and from what she understood there were hardly any monks in the main building either. Men just didn’t become monks any more. Apparently, Camille wanted to talk about murder and Lucy held onto a single thread of hope. Cinq-Mars was supposed to visit her this afternoon. At no specific time. He was her only hope, and she had to keep Camille talking in the meantime.
“Andy was Wiener’s big day,” Camille revealed. “He botched it. Typical.” She paraded in front of them, an arrogant swing to her hips accompanied her slow steps, her gun slightly upraised. “I don’t know what’s the big deal about killing somebody else. I was only doing humanity a favor. After Wiener shot him, Andy had to be drowned like a rat, and I had to tell Wiener to do it. He stepped on his head until the life went out of him. Sorry about that, Lucy, I know you liked the guy. After that I helped put him under the ice and stuff.”
“Who’s Wiener?” Brother Tom asked.
Neither woman turned her head, but both shifted their eyes to look at him.
“Monk-face is talking!” Camille sneered. “Your big chance to get into Heaven as a perfect, dutiful monk, Tommy. You blew it. Now I’ll have to sew your lips to keep your mouth shut in Hell. Why not? I sewed Charlie up. It’ll show we got the same killer here, which we do. I’ll sew you up nice and tight, Brother Tom. You won’t be babbling away throughout eternity. You too, Lucy. I’ll sew up your lips. I’m sick to death of what comes out of your prying mouth. I’d love to do that.”
“Mommy! Mommy!” Carole was screeching from her cooling bath.
“Oh, God!” Camille complained. “I’m going to have to snuff that child, too. Put her out of her misery.”
Lucy pushed herself back against the wall, despairing now, convinced now that Camille was cracked, that she wasn’t remotely sane. She was panting, afraid of dying here, but if she was going to die she wanted to be brave, at least.
“Who’s Wiener?” Brother Tom asked again. He had a guttural voice, and he never looked directly at the woman with the gun.
Her pistol aimed at her old friend, Camille looked sideways at the monk. “Wiener is Werner Honigwachs, Tommy. Sorry, Brother Tommy. He killed Andy Stettler, an old friend of mine. I just helped him out a little. When the going got tough, the tough had to stand up and get the job done, you know
? Yeah,” she said, and she held her pistol with two hands and shifted her aim from Lucy’s chest to her face, sighting down the lonely barrel and declaring with finality, “Now it’s your turn, little Indian girl.”
“No, Camille! Noooo!”
“Oh, yes,” Camille taunted, her face crooked in a manic grin.
“Camille!”
“Mommy! I’m cooold!”
“For you, Lucy, right between the eyes.”
“Oh God,” Lucy whispered, and she turned her face away.
“Show me the whites of your eyes, Lucy. Come on. Come on. Don’t be a baby. Turn to face me. That’s it, honey. Turn. A little more. Come on.”
Slowly, in increments, weeping, breathing in rapid gulps, Lucy Gabriel turned to face her.
“Open your eyes now. That’s a brave little Indian girl.”
She opened her eyes.
The blast of the gunshot exploded in the monk’s cell, echoed down the corridor and through the wing of the monastery. A sound that was slow to decay, moving along the old stones and marble floors, resonant and shocking. As it struck the four detectives climbing the stairs, moving hurriedly with their weapons drawn, they stopped for an instant, then rushed on up.
Her body, contorting, convulsed, then collapsed onto the floor, the sound a mere thump, muffled, a life rapidly expiring.
Brother Tom stood up.
The bullet had passed through the fabric of his robe into the heart of Camille Choquette. He looked across at Lucy Gabriel, who had crumpled with shock and fright against the wall. He crossed the room quickly, stepping over the body, and pulled a file folder off the windowsill. Then he snatched up Lucy’s car keys.
Lucy couldn’t take her eyes off Camille’s broken corpse, silent on the floor. The shock was welling through her. She felt dizzy, then frantic, then calm, then she she’d go through the spectrum once more. She couldn’t believe it. I’m alive! Alive/
Brother Tom put his gun down on the desk and peeled his robe off over his head. She looked at him with a sudden overwhelming confusion and curiosity. He was wearing a mauve shirt and blue jeans, with a gun-belt around his waist.
