I said, “Son of a gun.”
As if in response, a cracking sound came from the living room. My first thought was that Leo had become so agitated at the strangeness of his home that he’d knocked something over. My second thought was that somebody had knocked out a glass panel in the front door so they could unlock it. My third thought was that I had left my .38 in the Bronco.
With the bag of money on the floor between my outstretched legs, I began scrambling to get upright. I was on one knee, with one foot on the floor, when the bag tipped over and spilled bundles of hundred-dollar bills onto the floor. Dimly aware of the puddle of money on the kitchen tile, I was frantically sorting through my options, which were more or less limited to running to the back door and hoping to escape through the garage, or climbing into one of the kitchen cabinets.
Martin Freuland came around the living room’s L and stood on the other side of the bar separating the dining area from the kitchen. He held a .9mm Glock in his hand, and his face registered a curious shock when he saw me.
He said, “Oh. It’s you.”
There were so many unspoken assumptions in those few words that I couldn’t think of a response. Obviously, he had known somebody was in the house, and obviously he had expected it to be somebody else.
His gaze swung to the money on the floor, and he nodded. “I knew it was here.”
Still on one knee, I said, “Was it really worth killing for?”
His smile was like a barracuda’s. “It will be, yes.”
That was when I realized he meant killing me would be worth it.
I said, “I was talking about killing Laura. You said you didn’t, but you did.”
He moved the Glock back and forth like a head shaking. “You’re very naïve about the way the real world works. People like me don’t kill people like Laura. We pay other people to do it for us.”
“Vaught?”
He frowned and spoke louder. “I said we pay other people to do it for us.”
Help me Rhonda, we were doing a “Who’s on First?” routine.
I said, “A man named Frederick Vaught has confessed to killing Laura. Is that who you paid?”
He actually laughed, an easy relaxed chuckle. “I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”
I wasn’t as naïve as Freuland thought. I knew about paid killers, knew how easy it is for somebody in Freuland’s position to hire somebody whose morality is measured in dollars. But professional killers simply do their job and leave. They lay a bullet in a precise location, or they surprise with a wire garrote around the neck or a swiftly driven blade between the ribs. They don’t hang around and slash the dead victim’s face in mad fury. Only killers with personal vendettas to settle do that. If Freuland hadn’t killed Laura himself, he had paid somebody with personal history with her to do it.
A wave of dizziness swept over me as I realized how a thing can happen in one place, and the entire universe shifts to make space for the fact of it. A man accepts two million dollars from drug dealers who’ve made millions more from selling hopelessness to other men, and hundreds of miles away a gap in time appears, a cosmic breath is held until a woman is finally stabbed to death in her shower, a death that no longer has anything to do with the two million dollars, but is about a child knowing her father is in her sister’s bedroom doing something shameful, and she is stunted, maimed, soul-stained with jealousy because it means her father loves her sister best.
I said, “Was mutilating Laura’s face part of what you paid Celeste to do?”
If I’d had any doubts that he was telling the truth about not being the killer, they were dispelled by the shock in his eyes.
“Mutilating her face?”
“Her face was so cut up that the deputy who found her body threw up. Think about that, Mr. Freuland. Think about how lovely Laura was, and how she looked when Celeste finished with her.”
A faint sheen of perspiration glistened on his forehead. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, that’s the problem with having somebody killed, isn’t it? You can’t control all the details of how they’ll do it.”
For a moment, we looked into each other’s eyes with the stark rawness that can only happen when one person is about to blow another person to smithereens. He may have paid Celeste to kill Laura, but we both knew he fully planned to kill me himself. I had to stall him, had to keep him talking until . . . until what? Until Pete wondered what was taking so long and came to investigate and got killed too? I couldn’t let that happen, but I wasn’t ready to give up.
I said, “You expected to find Celeste here tonight, didn’t you?”
“She thought she could outsmart me and take all the money for herself. We’d gone all through the plan, all she had to do was show up, tell Laura she’d come to visit, act friendly, like a sister, and then take her by surprise and punish her for what she’d done. The bitch spent the entire night here searching for the money but she couldn’t find it.”
Of course she didn’t. Celeste had never had a cat, and it wouldn’t have occurred to her that it was odd for a person to have forty pounds of cat food stored for one cat.
Now I knew who it was that Pete had seen. It had been Celeste, dressed in Laura’s clothes. That’s why Guidry had questioned him so closely about the time, because Laura had been killed hours earlier.
“I suppose you’ll kill her too, when she comes back?”
He gave me that smile again. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll be long gone when she shows up, and all she’ll find is your body.”
“The cops will think she killed me, and she’ll tell them it was you.”
He shook his head. “She can’t afford to implicate me because she knows I’ll tell them she killed her sister. And the police have no reason to believe she killed Laura. No, they’ll think the same person who killed Laura killed you, some unknown maniac.”
I had to agree that it was a fairly tight plan.
I had never imagined the end of my life happening this way. Even though my husband had died at thirty, and my child at three, I still thought of death as something that happened to old people, an inevitable closure to a long full life. But now here I was with a man who seemed determined to make my death as premature as Laura Halston’s.
I said, “Could you just tell me why? Why did you want Laura killed? And don’t tell me it was because of the money she took, or because she reported you to the feds. That would make you bitter, but it wouldn’t make you a killer.”
I didn’t need to ask why he planned to kill me. We both knew the answer to that.
For a long silent moment, I thought I might have gone too far, and that the next instant might be my last. But then Martin spoke in a tight voice.
“She treated me like a fish, reeling me in one minute and letting me flap at her feet, and then throwing me back.”
“Why? Because you were too little to keep?”
He wagged the gun at me like a head tut-tutting, and I bit my lower lip. I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut when a good line pops into my head.
“She liked keeping me on the hook. Wanted me to dangle there in case one of her other men got away. Then she’d have me in reserve. On ice, so to speak.”
I thought of how TV psychologists act, and drew my eyebrows together in a way I hoped looked sympathetic. “That must have been painful for you.”