Warm blood... steaming guts... almost an hour after Eve had supposedly seen the body. They thought the woman had been alive when Eve found her and alive when Eve left her. Alive, alone, slit open, and dying, and Eve hadn’t tried to save her, had passed the roadhouse with its phone and kept going because she was neurotic, spoiled, unimaginably self-involved. An icy bitch who wouldn’t even take a minute to stop and call for help.
It was a horrendous indictment, but he’d have to think what he wanted. As far as she knew, being cold, neurotic, selfish—contemptible—was not illegal. Let him revile her all he wanted, get it out of his system, and leave her alone.
She must have mumbled it.
“What’s that?” he snapped at her. “What did you say?”
“I said leave me alone.”
“Not on your life, lady. You were there. You know a whole lot more than you’re telling. And if I can’t get you for depraved indifference...”
Depraved indifference?
“Then I’ll get you for withholding evidence. Either way, I’m not going to leave you alone for a long, long time.”
“I’m calling Del Kahn,” Sam said. Del was the Tilden family lawyer.
“No, Sam,” she said quietly. “It’s all right.”
“All right?” Latovsky choked. “You think it’s all right? Well, just in case you’re interested, lady, which I’m sure you’re not—but I’m going to tell you anyway—her name was Abigail. Abigail Reese. Right now, someone back in Tupper Lake is telling her ten-year-old son that his mother’s not coming home and someone down in Schenectady is telling her mother the same thing. And the mother’ll have to come here tonight and get the little boy, because you can’t leave a ten-year-old alone with strangers on the night you tell him his mother’s been murdered. Now can you?”
Eve clasped her hands and stared at her laced fingers.
“Can you?” Latovsky boomed.
She didn’t answer.
“Jesus Christ, lady. What rock did you crawl out from under?” She raised her head to just the right angle and literally looked down her nose at him as she’d seen her mother do to servants. As three hundred years of Tildens must have done, and she said coolly, “I’m sure I don’t have to take this kind of abuse.”
“Oh, but you do,” he snarled. “You’re going to have to take a hell of a lot worse, because she’s not the first, she’s the fifth, and we’re scared—terrified—there’ll be more. Maybe withholding evidence on backwater serial murder won’t cut much ice in the big town where you got more killers, rapists, and coke-head cocksuckers than we got trees, but here it’s going to get you three to five, lady. Hard time, where you get fucked every night by some big black mama with a Coke-bottle dildo—”
Sam screamed something and went for him and Eve yelled, “NO—” then jerked her head back and said:
“I wasn’t there.”
They all stared at her.
“I was not there,” she said, enunciating every word clearly. “I was here. I saw it, just like you think. But I was here in the driveway... on my knees in the driveway... when I saw it happen.”
“Oh, Christ, no,” Sam moaned, covering his face with his hand. “Oh, Eve... don’t.”
The little dark one stopped smiling the wolfish smile. Latovsky stared at her, then said, “What are you talking about?”
“I’ll show you. Much easier than trying to explain,” she said steadily, and reached out toward him. He flinched, but couldn’t get away without leaping out of the chair like a scared rabbit, and he watched her hand come at him, palm out, fingers spread. It touched the front of his shirt, slid under his tie, and pressed itself flat against his chest. He shuddered, then looked up at her. She was smiling. The smile wasn’t cold or mean... or happy or warm. It was the matter-of-fact smile of someone who knew exactly what they were doing, practicing a skill they had down cold. A crack mechanic might smile like that when he finally frees the valve lifter on your sixty Buick, or Itzhak Perlman when he picks up his violin. David Latovsky’s mother had that look when she took a loaf of her locally prized egg bread out of the oven. A whole list of people who knew what they were doing and took quiet joy in doing it marched through his mind as the woman pressed her palm gently against him.
The touch wasn’t cold. He’d shuddered because he didn’t want her touching him, not because of any sensation that came through his shirt from her hand. In fact nothing much happened, except that she looked at him with her steady, grave, really quite mild dark eyes that had a moss-green undercast... pretty eyes... maybe beautiful... and smiled that little smile that had set off his train of thought. Then she said:
“Your wife’s forty-two, same age as you, and you left—no—divorced her three years ago. You have a daughter you see two weekends a month. Your house is on a lake, it’s got a front porch like this one, and it’s too big for one person and hard to heat... heat...” She faltered, then went on in that perfectly conversational voice as if they were comparing the merits of Winey Keemum and Formosa Oolong tea.
“Heat costs you almost two hundred a month in the dead of winter, and you’re afraid it’ll go up much higher this year. You used to have a dog... a mutt with red fur... I can’t see his name. You don’t miss your wife much. You stopped loving her a long, long time ago. You don’t love anyone now except your daughter and your mother and that worries you. And late at night...” She faltered again and her smile turned gentle. “But you don’t want the others to hear that, do you? You love your work, sometimes think that in another time and place and with a little luck, you might have been one of history’s great detectives. You’re a good fisherman, use light line like a real sportsman, and last night you caught a six-pound trout for your dinner, right off the edge of your own lawn. And just now, I got a whiff of the fresh bread your mother bakes.”
She wasn’t waiting for confirmation. She knew and suddenly he knew she knew, and he jumped out of the chair like that scared rabbit he didn’t want to look like and backed away from her. She looked at him steadily and said, “I don’t tell the future, Lieutenant; sometimes I see it, sometimes I don’t. But when I do, I never say so, because I’m afraid people will believe me and make sure whatever I tell them comes true.”
Adam had been careful as always. He kept lawn and leaf bags neatly folded in the trunk of the LTD and he’d slit one open with his penknife and draped it over the front seat of the car to protect it before he got in wearing the bloody clothes.
Now he took the plastic bag carefully out of the front seat and carried it around the back of the house to the yard. The yard was ringed with trees and shrubs. He couldn’t see the lights of other houses and the people in those houses couldn’t see him, even though the moon was still high and it was more like dusk than the dead of night.
He rolled the bag up, stuffed it into another bag that he kept, also neatly folded, with a pile of others next to the garbage cans on the back porch. Then he stripped. It was chilly by now; he shivered as the cool air hit his bare skin, but there was worse to come. He put the clothes, shoes, underwear, gloves, and wig—everything but the scalpel—into the bag, then carefully tied the top and pushed it into the space under the back porch. He turned on the garden hose and directed the freezing spray at himself, starting at his head and working his way down his body until he was sure every trace of blood was washed away. He shivered and shook, his skin pimpled and shriveled, but he persevered.