"Oh, absolutely boring. Though, to be fair, I suppose it's difficult to be scintillating company once your throat is slashed and you're bleeding to death." Zachary lifted his wineglass again, then watched, surprised and helpless to prevent it from tipping forward. His fingers could not close around the crystal. The wine spilled across the couch cushions in a wide red stain.
Johanna was reminded of Timothy Kidd quietly bleeding his life away in an armchair.
Zachary gave her a foolish smile. "I'm drunk."
She shook her head. "No, that's not it." Johanna looked down at her glass. "Such a poor wine. That's all you had in common with Timothy- neither one of you had a discriminating palate. I think my chemicals actually improved the taste."
It was a struggle for him to keep his eyes open. There was a high color in his cheeks and his eyes were those of a dullard, slow to focus. But now, as he began to understand what she had done, he made a clumsy attempt to rise from the couch. Panic worked against him. "You drugged me." His fingers wormed around the handle of the gun, but he could not lift it from the cushion. "You put me to sleep."
"I considered that option," she said. "I have a high tolerance for these drugs, but you have greater body mass. So I couldn't count on outlasting you. And you might've been the first to wake up. No, I didn't sedate you… I killed you. A syringe in the cork. It's the simple plans that work best."
"But you drank – "
"I killed us both. There was no other way." Johanna sat quietly, finally coming to terms with Timothy Kidd's last moments and sharing them. She sipped air and life, what measure was left.
The more Ian Zachary struggled, the faster he died. The red wine stain spread across the upholstery, just like the bloodstains on Timothy's chair. She had not anticipated the justice of this tableau. She had not dared to think so far ahead, lest she falter with the syringe while poisoning the wine.
Zachary's head rolled to one side, and he stared at her in dumb surprise. The muscle spasm, a preview of her own death, made his body go suddenly rigid. Then came the violent shakes, and then nothing at all. He had ceased to exist.
And she was alone.
There was no euphoria to numb her own panic while she separated from the solid earth. Johanna Apollo, the recalcitrant suicide, grieved for her lost life as she careened away from it. This was the moment after the leap from a mountain, the knowledge that she could not scratch her way back to the ledge, and the experience of free fall was intense. There was such cruelty in this long descent from grace – so much time for regret.
The final spasm came. The wineglass fell from her hand. And, in the ether of her dying brain starved of oxygen and blood, regret, tenacious thing, remained.
Riker was bleeding from a head wound, always a good indication of ongoing life, and his pulse was strong. Mallory was still holding on to his wrist as she spoke to the 911 operator, saying the words guaranteed to get the best service, "Officer down."
His limp hand fell back to the floor. Mallory rose to a stand and moved on to examine other elements of her new crime scene: Riker's blood on the wine bottle, his stolen revolver in the loose grip of Zachary's gloved hand. So the doctor had lost the gun to this man before she could get off one round; no surprise there. The Reaper's trademark, a honed penknife, lay at Zachary's feet, and one case was closed. What else? Spilled wine on the couch and a shattered glass on the floor by the doctor's chair. In the absence of visible wounds, poison was such an easy call – a murder-suicide.
No, it was not quite that simple. There were a few outstanding details.
And now the scene was all too easily read, and here her mind made a bruising stumble, slamming up against her own mistake: she had underestimated the doctor's feelings for Riker.
He moaned, and she turned around to see other signs of Riker's awakening, subtle movements of his face and limbs. Before the real horror show could begin, she turned out the light so he would not open his eyes to see the dead white face of Johanna Apollo.
After dragging his body into the hallway, the young detective returned to tamper with the crime scene. In her limited rule book for a cop's life, this was an act of heresy.
She could not remove Riker's stolen gun from the premises; Jack Coffey knew who had taken it, and he would expect to find it listed on the crime-scene inventory. She settled for hiding the revolver in a drawer of the armoire, and now it was less clear that suicide had been Dr. Apollo's second option. Next, with one hand, Mallory wiped the wet face of a corpse, formerly a woman who had loved her life and proved it, leaving behind the irrefutable evidence of tears.
All gone now, perfectly dry.
Riker would never know and never blame himself.
When the ambulance arrived, Mallory was on her knees, holding Riker tightly in her arms, rocking him and lying to him, telling him that everything was fine – just fine.
EPILOGUE
A WAKE FOR A DEAD CAT." RlKER'S FATHER SHOOK HIS head, mystified that he should be invited here on such a foolish pretext. The old man had been the first guest to arrive. Mugs's real friends would come later to view the remains, possibly to spit upon them, and be reassured that the cat from hell was finally out of their lives. The ever skeptical Mrs. Ortega would prefer to see the dead body, but ashes would do. Riker lifted his beer can in a toast. "To a great scrapper." Over the months since Jo's death, the cat had declined, day by tail-dragging day, finally succumbing to old age and grief, but not without one last fight, a good one by Riker's account. Though Mugs now resided in an urn on the fireplace, Riker still bore the scabs of long scratches. His own fault; he had tried to cradle the dying animal in his arms, though he always omitted that part from the story of the cat's final brawl.
However, he had invited his father for another reason. He wanted to tie up one last loose end. A question had nagged at him every day since Jo had been gone. Without being asked, the old man had taken charge of her funeral arrangements, and Riker's gratitude ran deep. Had the matter been left to himself, the turnout would have been pathetic, not filling one pew of a small church. Dad had called in a lifetime of stored-up favors to fill a cathedral with cops, a grand affair that had made the front page of the New York Times. What power the old man had. Even high command officers had come out that day in dress blues as a tribute to the lady, a stranger to them all.
Father and son so rarely spoke, it was difficult to ask how Dad had known about this woman's terrible importance to him. No one could have mentioned it to the old man. Riker had not even told Jo. And so he had to ask.
Dad's reply was predictably brief. "I read your statement and the police report." He glowered at his son, for this evidence was so obvious. Why was he being asked to waste words upon it? That was not his way, and his own son should know better than to expect this of him. All of that was in the old man's eyes, but no more words were forthcoming.
"Not good enough, Dad." Riker slugged back his beer, then crumpled the can in one fist to tell the old bastard that he was dead serious. "Now, why did you go to all that trouble for a woman you've never met?"
"I told you. It was all in the paperwork and her fingerprints. When she clubbed you with that wine bottle – well – what that woman did – " This was a strain on him, so many words and all in a row. He paused to read his son's expression, which said, with quiet resolve, that there must be more. And so his dry cracked lips pressed into a line of resignation, for Dad wanted it known that he spoke under duress.
"You went in there that night – without your gun. You loved her." He tilted his head to one side to ask his son if this was clear, the connection between these two things, or had he not raised a detective after all. "She died for you," the old man said. And thus he owed an enormous debt to Johanna Apollo, for his son was precious to him; that was also in his eyes, and he lowered them lest any more nonsense should leak out in this manner.