Sarah grabbed one of the ambulance attendants as he walked past, and said, “My husband’s been hurt.”
I recognized him as the male attendant who’d come to our house during The Backpack Incident. While he might have remembered coming to this address, he made no suggestion that we had met before. My face was too badly bruised and bloodied to be recognizable.
They ended up taking both of us to the hospital. Even though Sarah showed no obvious signs of injury, they wanted to check her out just the same. I told Paul to get in touch with Angie, let her know that we were okay.
“Does she think you’re not okay?” he asked.
And tell her not to worry about going to school today, I said. Get one of the officers to bring you to the hospital to meet us once she shows up, I said.
Turns out all Sarah had were some tape burns on her wrists. Hospital officials would later tell the press that she was “in good condition,” but I knew better. Nobody came out of something like this in good condition. I figured the nightmares would begin that night, and would be with her for a very long time.
The doctors and nurses had a fair bit of work to do on me. I needed stitches in three places on my face, my left eye was puffed up the size of an egg but the color of a prune, and I had an assortment of bruises all over my body from my tangles with Rick and crawling across the floor while still secured to a chair.
The police interviewed us separately. Needless to say, I had a lot more to get off my chest than Sarah, who was still pretty much in the dark, and was kept busy with detectives, including my friend Detective Flint, for a lot longer.
Hours and hours longer.
I started from the beginning. I’d considered, briefly, telling them I’d grabbed Stefanie Knight’s purse by mistake, but knew I’d get caught in a lie somewhere down the road once they turned on the hot lights and brought out the rubber hoses.
I spelled out for them the whole Valley Forest Estates thing. The blackmailing of Carpington, the murder of Spender, how Stefanie was offered up for sexual favors. They’d found Carpington, by the way, sitting down by the edge of Willow Creek, listening to the sound of the water as it flowed by, and when two officers approached him, he turned to them and smiled and said, “It’s beautiful down here, don’t you think? They should never build homes around here.”
The police wanted to know: Did I kill Stefanie Knight?
No, I said.
Did I know who had killed Stefanie Knight?
Not for certain, I said. But my money was on Rick. He certainly had an unlimited capacity for violence.
They told me that his full name was Richard Douglas Knell, that he was thirty-eight, and that while he’d spent much of his life working in construction, he’d also spent some time “inside” (where he did his reading), having kicked in a man’s head outside a bar six years earlier. There was evidence that he’d acted, in some small way, in self-defense, otherwise the sentence would have been longer. He’d come back to work for Don Greenway, who’d been his employer years ago, and Greenway found a way to exploit Rick’s special talents of persuasion.
“He liked snakes,” I said.
My interrogators concurred. But Quincy, alas, was no longer with us. When they popped the trunk of Rick’s car, they found he’d already squeezed the life out of Mr. Benedetto, and was in the process of digesting him. He’d only gotten to his knees, and when the panicked officers saw what they were dealing with, they unloaded several rounds into the snake, trying not to disgrace the body of Mr. Benedetto in the process, although they did nick his shoes. They’d remarked later, privately, that since Mr. Benedetto was already dead, it would have been interesting had they opened the trunk much later. They wondered just how much of the guy the snake would have managed to get down its throat. It would have been something to see, no doubt about it.
Anyone else on my list of suspects? they asked.
Well, there was Greenway, of course. Stefanie had decided, it appeared, to get out of Dodge, and she was leaving with her homemade supply of cash, plus a ledger for possible future blackmail purposes, and the roll of film. It wasn’t clear whether she had the film because she was tired of being used for such seedy purposes, or simply hadn’t gotten around to turning it in to Greenway for developing. I wondered where he normally had his film processed. Mindy’s would do it for you in an hour, $6.99 for twenty-four exposures, another set of prints for two bucks.
I promised to hand over the negatives, still hidden in my Seaview model, and the ledger.
Earl’s name never came up. As far as the police knew, I’d busted into the Valley Forest Estates office alone. I didn’t have to bring Trixie into it, either. The police were left with the impression that I had something of a handcuff fetish. Later, when we compared notes about what we’d been asked, Sarah said to me, “When did you switch from sci-fi modeling to handcuff collecting?”
When the police finally decided to let me go home, with the proviso that they would be wanting to talk to me again, probably several times, I said to them, almost as an afterthought:
“You might also want to take a look in Carpington’s and Greenway’s cars. I don’t think there’s any snakes in them. They’re out behind the Valley Forest Estates offices. You never know, you might find some interesting things in there.”
“Already have,” said Detective Flint.
I WONDERED WHETHER THEY WOULD charge me with something. There had to be lots of offenses to choose from. Not reporting Stefanie’s death to them immediately, hindering prosecution, who knew? They take their time with these things, and I knew that if they wanted to lay charges, they might take months to get around to it.
But they didn’t waste any time charging others. Greenway, who hadn’t bothered to make a run for it that morning, who knew the game was over and simply waited for the cops to arrive, was arrested, as was Roger Carpington.
A couple of days later, with some fanfare, they announced that they were charging Carpington with the murder of Stefanie Knight.
They had found, in the trunk of his car, a bloody shovel. They’d run DNA tests on the blood, and it turned out to be, without a doubt, Stefanie Knight’s.
And I thought: I’ll be damned.
LIFE TOOK SOME TIME TO get back to normal. Sarah’s bosses told her to take off as much time as she wanted, which meant she probably had about a week. In seven days or so, her editors would be calling to say “You okay? You think, you know, coming back to work and editing stories about murder and mayhem would help take your mind off things?”
There were insurance matters to deal with. We’d lost a car. There was a big hole in the basement wall, from my doing batting practice with the tripod. And there was the grisly matter of the blood-soaked carpet where Rick had fallen on his sword.
And there was some other damage that the insurance adjusters weren’t equipped to handle. Sarah didn’t want to talk to me.
She was there for me, of course, while I recovered from my injuries. She’d make me tea, bring me an ice pack, get me a glass of water to help me wash down my Advils. But she didn’t have much else to say, and I couldn’t blame her. I’d nearly gotten us both killed by being a busybody. I’d nearly turned our kids into orphans.
They weren’t that pleased with me, either, but they were more upset that their mother and I weren’t speaking. Or that their mother wasn’t speaking to me.
“I’ll talk to her,” Angie said to me.
“Thanks, honey,” I said. “But I just think it’s going to take some time.”
“How much time?”
When I crawled into bed next to Sarah, she flicked off her light, turned her back to me, and pulled the covers up around her neck. I stared at the ceiling for an hour or more before finally falling asleep.