Hobart looked around him and up toward the vaulted ceiling and then his eyes followed the curving staircase to the second floor. “Are you planning to burn this place, too?”
“What? Why?”
Hobart shrugged. “I assume she has some kind of evidence on you, right?”
“No, just suspicions and resentments and an inexhaustible supply of anger. If I let her go, she’ll spend all her time and my money paying people to dig up something or fake it. I can’t let her do that. You can’t let her do that. If people look hard enough at me, they’ll probably find something that relates to my business with you. Neither of us wants that.”
“Where is she now?”
“She’s in the wine cellar. She was out of control-threatening to call the police, threatening me with everything she could think of, and refusing to listen to anything I said.”
“Is she tied or restrained?”
“No. I just put her in there and locked the door. She’s been in there for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Let’s see. I put her in there about four this morning, so I guess it would be about sixteen hours.”
“All right. I’ll take care of it. What you’ll want to do later is tell the cops an intruder did it, stole something, and left. Figure out something you want stolen.”
Forrest felt vindicated. It was so much like the idea he had thought of that nothing came to mind to say at first. Then he chuckled. “It won’t be hard to find something expensive that only she ever liked. Just don’t pawn it or something, okay?”
“I know better than that. Do I need a key?”
Forrest couldn’t let him do it that way. He had to be around when Hobart did it. He had to shoot Hobart over Caroline’s body. If he shot Hobart anywhere else, it wouldn’t look as though he had been trying to save Caroline or that he had surprised Hobart in the act. If he did it up here in the foyer or outside, it might just look as though he had shot the man in the back. Revenge wasn’t a legal reason to kill someone. “I’ll come down and show you,” he said.
“Okay.” Hobart followed Forrest into the hallway toward the kitchen. Hearing Hobart’s footsteps behind him made Forrest nervous and uneasy. He had to hide his feelings. Hobart would be good at detecting fear.
He went down the steps to the basement, hoping the gun under his sport coat wasn’t making a lump that Hobart could see. He went to the door of the wine cellar.
Hobart put on a ski mask, then nodded at Forrest.
Forrest was disconcerted. He started thinking that there was no practical reason for a man to wear a disguise with a woman he was about to kill, but Hobart was a killer, and maybe that was how he liked it. A man like him must be crazy, must get something out of it besides money. Maybe the mask was part of it for him. Forrest unlocked the door and stepped back.
Hobart nodded at him again.
“Caroline?” he said through the door. “I’m back. You can come out.”
There was a delay that seemed long to Forrest, and he began to hate her even more.
“Caroline,” he called. “Caroline. I’m letting you out.”
After about five more seconds, he reached for the door, but the doorknob turned. The door opened inward, and she stepped into the doorway. She looked profoundly tired. Her hair was tousled, and there were wispy strands that seemed not to have proper places in her hairdo. She squinted a bit in the light. “Who are you?” she asked Hobart.
“He’s a friend of mine,” Forrest said. “I invited him.”
“To what?”
“He’s here to prove to you that you shouldn’t have behaved like my enemy.”
“You hate me this much? You bring a man with a mask on? What is he going to do-kill me?”
Forrest turned to Hobart. “Same pay as before. Go ahead.”
“Oh my God!” Caroline said. “You did bring him to kill me.”
“What did you expect?”
“I wasn’t trying to harm you. I was trying to keep you out of jail. This is crazy!”
“We’ve already had that argument. Go ahead. Kill her.”
“Okay.” With a smooth, relaxed motion, Hobart reached into his coat, pulled out a pistol, and raised his arm to aim it at Caroline’s forehead.
Ted Forrest edged slightly away so he could be a bit behind Hobart. He just had to wait until Hobart pulled the trigger on Caroline, so the right man killed her with the right gun. He reminded himself that the report would be very loud, and he would have to be quick, to move through the shock of it, not taking time to blink or flinch.
Hobart pivoted and fired through Ted Forrest’s brain. The sound was bright and sharp, and a blood spatter appeared on the stone wall beyond Forrest before he fell.
Caroline shrieked once and then stood frozen, staring down at the horrible sight of her husband’s body on the floor. After a few seconds, she raised her confused, terrified eyes to Hobart. “Why did you do this?”
“None of your business. If you scream or follow me to the stairs, or do anything for the next fifteen minutes, I’ll kill you, too. Do you understand?”
She nodded, her head barely moving.
He knelt and patted Ted Forrest’s pockets. He took Forrest’s gun and cell phone, then stood and moved to the stairs. “Remember what I said. This is the luckiest hour of your whole life. Make it last a long time.”
And then he was up the stairs and gone.
38
Hobart began to divest. He drove to the San Jose airport to return the car he had rented, then went to another company and rented a different one with a credit card in a different name. He drove eastward into the mountains and began to get rid of things. First had to be the two cell phones: his and Theodore Forrest’s. He took both of them apart to get to the SIM cards, drove the car over the two phones, and threw the pieces down a steep cliff. He cut the SIM cards into tiny pieces and fed them out the window into the slipstream.
Hobart’s gun had to be next. He disassembled it-magazine, slide, spring, barrel, frame, grips, trigger, and sear. He hurled the springs, trigger, and sear into a lake in the Sierras, buried the frame, and pounded the barrel into the earth in the woods with a stone. He subjected Theodore Forrest’s gun to the same treatment when he reached the east side of the Sierras and the land was drier and rockier.
One by one he tossed the items he had used in the past few weeks. His suitcase and the clothes inside it, the luggage that Theodore Forrest had used to hold the money, and the clothes he had worn to Theodore Forrest’s house, all ended up in Dumpsters behind businesses in towns that he passed along the way. He kept on driving through Nevada and on to Utah, ridding himself of things.
Hobart bought a car at a lot in Salt Lake City and turned in the one he had rented in San Jose. He bought new clothes, went to a fancy barbershop and had his hair cut much shorter than he had worn it before, and got a manicure. He drank only water and ate very little during these days. When he was ready, he drove back down from Utah into Nevada. He stayed on Interstate 15 until he was back in California, and then made his way to Interstate 10. At three A.M. the second night, he pulled into the trailer park outside Cabazon and parked. He walked across the blacktop to the side of Valerie’s trailer, unlatched the door with his pocketknife, and stepped inside.
He said, “Valerie, it’s me Jerry.”
He heard rustling noises coming from the bedroom. “Jerry?”
“I apologize if I scared you, but there didn’t seem to be much sense in sitting alone out there waiting the rest of the night for you to wake up.”
She appeared at the bedroom door, a blanket wrapped around her and her blond hair in complicated tangles. “How do you even know I’m in the bed alone?”
“I don’t. I hope you are, but I don’t have a right to expect it. If you want me to go away for an hour so you can settle that, I can drive down the road to the casino and have a cup of coffee or something, but then I’d like to come back and talk to you.”