“Hell no.” I laughed. “See the car over there? That’s my wife. Karren and I work together. Far as I know she doesn’t even have a boyfriend right now. Waiting for Mr. Right, you know how it goes.”
The man smiled, evidently cheered by the prospect of his neighbor being as single as he’d let himself hope, during long evenings alone in his apartment surrounded by paperwork and the remains of microwave meals.
We went to the door together. He let himself in, and let me follow. I thanked him without making a big deal about it, and as he went to the mailboxes I ran up the stairs, thinking: this is how people get killed, sometimes—someone is helpful to the wrong guy.
Up on the second floor I hurried to the far end. Two things about the door to 204 were immediately obvious. First, it was open, hanging slightly ajar. Second, there was a piece of Shore Realty letterhead taped to the door. Someone had written a single word on it in big clear capitals. And underneath they’d put a smiley face.
I stared at it. The three dots and a little curved line. The word MODIFIED.
There was no doubt now, but I could still go forward, or back. I could push open the door, or I could back away and run.
I reached behind and pulled out the gun. I gently pushed the door. Beyond was a short wide hallway. It was dark. I stepped in, leaving the door open behind me. On the left, the hall dead-ended after a couple of feet in a wall with a couple of hooks on it. A smart blue jacket, a purse I semi-recognized. Both Karren’s.
I looked the other way. There was a doorway on the left-hand side, four feet away. I crept along to it. A glance showed it was a half bathroom. Small, no windows. It smelled operating-room clean.
I backed over to the other side, keeping close to the exterior wall. I moved sideways along the corridor, heading toward the point where it hit the end wall and where there was a wide gap into the main apartment.
I flashed back in my head to the visit I’d made to a property in this block. It hadn’t been a corner property—so the layout might not be the same. Given the length of this hallway, however, and how close I’d been to the extent of the building when I got to Karren’s door, I thought the gap I could see likely opened onto the main living space, a large room with double aspect glass doors onto the wrap balcony I’d seen from the gardens below.
I took another slow, silent side step. I stood motionless for half a minute, listening. There was the sound of a car on some road, followed by a horn, even farther away. Both had a clarity, despite their evident distance, that made me wonder if the doors to the balcony were open. I hadn’t noticed from outside. I put my other hand around the handle of the gun, the way I’d seen Hallam do it. I took the final step to the side, and looked through the gap in the wall.
The living room. A couple of dark red couches, three lamps, a coffee table partially obscured from my position by a big easy chair. Pale carpet. There was a bookcase against the wall on the right, with more books than I would have expected. Everything was very tidy.
There was nobody there.
Now what? Should I call out? Would that be sensible or dumb? How was I supposed to know? I opened my mouth, took in a couple of long, slow breaths. All I could hear was a ringing in my ears.
I took a step forward, to the threshold of the room. I noticed something on the near end of the coffee table, now revealed from behind the chair. A couple of small rectangles of cards, a few other pieces of paper, and Karren’s cell phone.
I thought maybe I should call out. If Karren was in the apartment, in the kitchen or bedroom or bathroom, she’d be scared witless to see a man coming into her living room—especially if she’d already started to become nervous about things happening in her life. But if she was here, why hadn’t she responded to the last call? And even if she was shocked to see someone here, she’d realize soon enough that it was me.
But I couldn’t get a call to come out of my throat. I took another couple of steps into the room instead. From there I could see that the things on the table looked like photographs: three stubby rectangles, like Polaroids. The other pieces of paper had the thin, curling shape of cash register receipts.
I moved diagonally toward the table, one step at a time, keeping my eyes—and the gun—trained on the door on the right, gateway to the rest of the apartment. I could see a kitchen, a couple of dim underlighters, a corridor that would lead to the bedrooms.
I got to the table, glanced down. Then looked again, properly. The receipts were for credit card transactions. I recognized the number, the last four digits. It was the number of my Amex card—the one I’d used in Jonny Bo’s with Hazel—the card Sheriff Barclay already told me had been cloned to buy the gun that had killed his deputy. One of the receipts was for several hundred dollars, from a store called Hank’s Sporting Goods. It seemed likely that was the one. There were a few more, for similar sums, but I didn’t get as far as logging where they’d been spent, because I saw what was in the photos.
In the first, my swimming pool, taken from the living room of the house. In the second, the mangled body I’d seen floating there. In the third, that body, naked and facedown on a floor, before someone had undertaken the work of removing pieces of it.
Only someone who was part of the game would have access to these things.
I realized then that Karren White had been on the edges of everything that had happened in the last week. She worked in the same office. She knew my movements, was party to everything I did in working hours every day—and for months and months before.
She was the person who took the first alleged meeting with David Warner, and was then removed from the scenario to make way for me—dressed up such that I’d be only too pleased to step into her shoes.
She was the person who’d been conveniently in position at her window for someone to take the pictures.
I’d even phoned her a couple of times over the last forty-eight hours, handing her up-to-the-minute information about where I was and my state of mind.
I realized that it was possible I’d maybe been very dumb indeed, and that maybe Karren hadn’t called me here because she was scared.
“Hey, Bill,” said a voice. “Cool gun.”
I jerked my head up to see a woman in a robe leaning in the doorway to the kitchen. Her arms were folded. She looked relaxed and slightly amused.
It was Cass.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I stopped being aware of my hands, my feet, my body. I was merely eyes.
“Whoa,” she said with a delighted laugh. “That is even better than I hoped. You totally look like you’re going to fall down or something. Priceless.”
“Cass?”
“Glad to see the facial recognition software is still functioning. After such a hard day, too. You rule.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
“That’s okay, take a moment,” she said. “You want a drink or something? There isn’t much. Though it could be after last night you’re avoiding alcohol, right?”
I tried to rethink everything since I got back to my house that afternoon. Since even before that—from the moment I’d woken in this woman’s apartment to find a word daubed on her bathroom door, in what I’d thought had been her blood. I even took a faltering step to the side, to check I was seeing what I thought I was, not some ringer in makeup, that the effect worked from a different angle, that I couldn’t see through her. That she was real.
“How are you not . . .”
“Look again at the photos.”
I looked at the pictures on the coffee table. I saw my pool. I saw the floating body. Then I saw the naked back in the third picture, and realized I perhaps should have wondered why someone might bother to strip a body before reclothing it in a black lacy blouse—a garment distinctive enough to make a man jump to the wrong conclusion when confronted with a corpse in his pool.