“That’s disgusting,” Anne said, fury rising in her.
“Sure it is,” Mark agreed, knowing he should just drop the whole thing, but also knowing he couldn’t. “So’s murder. But it all happens, and we both know it. So he’s thinking about going over there. Maybe he’s even out on the back porch. And suddenly her back door opens and he sees Rory coming out, carrying his girlfriend’s body. What’s he do? Call the cops? Hell, no — that means explaining what he was doing snooping around Cottrell’s house in the middle of the night. So maybe he just waits. He recognized Rory-boy — hell, his picture’s got to be in your files somewhere — and he hatches a plan. He’ll kill Rory himself. He’s already killed the cat — what’s the difference?”
“And Edna?” Anne asked, her voice ice cold. “How does she fit into your little scenario, Detective?” She gave the last word just enough emphasis to make it poisonous.
“How about if she was going in when he was coming out?” Mark asked, determined to ignore her tone, and hating what he was doing almost as much as she did. But it had to be dealt with, whether she liked it or not. “How about if she saw him? She wouldn’t know Glen from Adam, but she’s in your files, too, right? So he knows she’s going to visit Rory, and he knows she’s seen him. And sooner or later she might be able to identify him.”
“So he whacks her, too, as you so charmingly put it?” Anne asked, her voice quivering with fury. “And I suppose Glen imitated Richard Kraven’s handwriting, too?”
“He’s an architect, right?” Blakemoor shot back, unconsciously hunching his body into a defensive position. “That means he can draw, doesn’t it?”
Anne stared at him, scarcely able to credit her ears. Had he gone completely crazy? It had been bad enough when he’d only implied that Glen might have killed their cat. Now, apparently, he was determined to wrap this whole case around Glen just the way she’d wrapped a whole case around Richard Kraven! Except there was a difference — Richard Kraven had been guilty, and Glen wasn’t! And what Blakemoor had just suggested wasn’t merely ludicrous and despicable — it was irresponsible as well. Pushing her chair back from the table, she rose to her feet. “I think this has gone far enough,” she said coldly. “I can’t imagine how you came up with this scenario, but I suggest you drop it. Because if I ever hear of you mentioning it to anyone else — anyone at all — I’ll have a long talk with Jack McCarty.”
“Anne—” Mark began, lurching to his feet, his hand reaching out toward her. But it was too late. She’d already turned and was rushing out of the dining room.
“Ah, shit,” he muttered, throwing some bills on the table to cover the check, then hurrying after her.
He got to the parking lot just in time to see her Volvo pulling out into the road, heading toward the freeway.
CHAPTER 62
By the time she arrived home, Anne’s rage had begun to subside a bit, not because she’d been able to find any merit in Mark Blakemoor’s ridiculous theory, but because her anger itself had finally run its course, leaving her drained and as tired emotionally as she was physically. As she turned the corner off Highland onto Sixteenth, she was surprised to see that Glen’s Saab was back. But Glen had said they wouldn’t be back until late in the afternoon — maybe even tomorrow morning. Sliding her car into a space that was miraculously open right in front of the house, she hurried up the flight of steps to the porch and went inside. “Glen? Kevin? Hello?”
“In the basement!” Glen called, his voice barely audible.
Coming down the stairs a moment later, Anne found her husband standing at the workbench, his back toward her, the bright fluorescent lights casting a harsh glare over everything. “How come you’re back so soon?” she asked, moving closer. Glen didn’t answer. As Anne approached the workbench she saw what he was doing: in his right hand he held a filleting knife, its thin, razor-sharp blade glimmering in the white light from above. On the wooden workbench, held in place by Glen’s left hand, was a large trout. As she watched, Glen jabbed the sharp point of the knife through the skin at the base of the fish’s head, then ran it quickly down its spine, laying the flesh open along the dorsal ridge and exposing the innards. Then, the knife flashing so quickly Anne was afraid he might cut himself, Glen cut the meat away from the bones, finally laying the bright pink fillet skin side down on the bench. With a single deft stroke, he peeled the meat from the skin, speared the skin with the tip of the knife, and dropped it into the wastebasket next to his feet. Only then did he turn to her.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Anne asked.
Glen shrugged. “I didn’t. Turns out it’s easy. Want to try?” He offered her the knife, but Anne shook her head.
“Where’s Kev?”
“Over at Justin Reynolds’s. Where’ve you been? I thought you said you were going to be glued to your computer all day.”
“There was another killing,” Anne said. “This time it was Edna Kraven — Richard and Rory’s mother. They found her up in a campground on the Snoqualmie.” For a split second — a moment so brief she wasn’t sure it had happened at all — she thought she saw something in Glen’s eyes.
Fear?
Anger?
But it was gone so quickly, she dismissed it a second later.
“So that was it,” Glen said. “We passed a campground on the way up that was crawling with cops.” He grinned. “Needless to say, Kevin wanted us to stop and find out what was going on.”
“Thank God you didn’t,” Anne replied, shuddering. “It was horrible.” She hesitated, wondering if she shouldn’t tell him about the note that had arrived, while they were alone in the house. But even as she thought about it, Mark Blakemoor’s suggestion that Glen himself might have written it popped back into her mind, and she knew if she got started right now, she’d wind up blurting out the whole bizarre scenario the detective had come up with.
That — justifiably — would send Glen into a fury, which was the last thing he needed right now. Better to wait until later, when she was completely calm. Maybe tonight, before they went to bed.
“So how was the fishing?” she asked, deciding to change the subject. “You still haven’t told me why you came back so early.”
Glen hesitated. An odd look came into his eyes, but then, as before, it cleared almost before Anne was certain she’d seen it. “It was okay,” he said at last. He seemed to think it over for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, it was okay. But I don’t think Kevin liked it very much. Next time, I think I’d better go by myself.”
A few minutes later Anne headed upstairs. There was something he wasn’t telling her. Something had happened — and obviously it had something to do with Kevin — but for some reason he didn’t want to talk about it.
She went up to their room, only to find a pile of clothes dumped in the middle of the floor.
Soggy clothes.
Picking them up, she turned and started down the stairs to put them into the washing machine, automatically checking the pockets as she went. In the right front pocket of the sodden khakis she found something.
A knife.
A pocketknife, with a tarnished silver handle that had been inlaid with turquoise.
The flat edge of the folded blade was stained as if it had been lying out in the elements for months, even years.
A knife, with a silver handle inlaid with turquoise. And then it came to her: