Dana Rozier was going for the door. She had no chance of making it without help, and George was sure that if he stepped out of the pantry he'd be covered in his own blood within a couple of heartbeats. Rozier was too big for him, in better shape, and carrying the biggest fucking knife George Patniks had ever seen.
George pushed the door open a little more, wondering what the hell Rozier was planning to do. That was when Rozier tripped over George's toolbox. The knife flew out of his hand and spun across the floor. Rozier went sprawling, smock billowing awkwardly.
Dana Rozier went for the door, losing strength. Too many bolts. She reached for the phone as her husband got to his knees and scrambled for the bloody knife.
"No, no, no," Dana Rozier panted, unwilling, unable to turn her back on her husband.
George, standing in the pantry doorway, watched her hit three numbers, 911 for sure. But she heard nothing as Rozier found the knife. There was nothing she could hear because George had cut the phone wires.
Too late. Too late now. Rozier was on top of her, pulling his wife from the phone, plunging the knife in wherever her flailing arms let him through. Face, eye, scalp, chest, arms. She crumpled, whimpering, and Rozier went on.
George didn't move, couldn't move. Rozier knelt over what was left of his dying wife, panting, his white smock splotched like a bloody Rorschach.
George watched the exhausted man's face and heaving body and knew what was about to happen. Rozier looked back across the room to see what had tripped him. His eyes found the toolbox. He panted heavily, not understanding, and his eyes moved across the room, finding George almost instantly.
Their eyes met. Rozier puzzled, weary, confused. George Patniks in panic. Rozier tried to rise, using the knife to prop himself up like an old man with a cane.
George's legs were trembling and nausea tickled inside his stomach and went for his throat A sound came from George and he knew he was running, his feet sliding on the tile floor, knowing that if he went down, Rozier's knife would get him, that the dead woman's blood would snare and bind him. His back was turned to Rozier now, and he had no idea how close the man might be. George sucked in air and ran for the window through which he had cut the hole. He tucked his head between his arms and threw his body against glass and wood, hoping it would shatter, but it didn't, not completely. He tumbled into cool air, rolling on his back, arm cut. He caught a glimpse of Rozier's shadow at the window, a ghostly, sheeted shadow carrying a bloody knife, panting.
George got to his feet and ran, ran for his car, forgetting about cuts, slashes, and murder, forgetting his tool case, and ignoring the certainty that he had fouled his underwear and legs.
He slid into the driver's seat of the Toyota, cracking his knee against the steering wheel, and locked the door with one hand as he turned the key with the other. Rozier wasn't at the door. Not yet. He threw the car in reverse and tried to keep calm, keep from hitting the birdbath or the bushes and slamming into the trees mat lined the driveway.
He let his eyes move upward quickly as he screeched backward into the night, and what he saw was as frightening as the murder he had witnessed.
Rozier hadn't moved from the window. He stood, motionless, looking directly at George Patniks. Their eyes met again as George hit the gas and swirled madly and loudly down the red-brick driveway. George wouldn't swear, but he was pretty goddamn sure that Harvey Rozier was smiling at him.
In Which Things Go Awry
Pitty-Pitty Patniks was wrong. Harvey Rozier had not been smiling. His evening had gone even worse than the burglar's. When he was sure that the madly retreating car of the burglar hadn't struck a tree, a house, or a pedestrian, Harvey turned back into the room, wiped the handle of the knife on his linen floor-length robe, and threw it in the general direction of his wife's body. He didn't want to look at her. It had taken months of fear and anger to go through with the murder, and now he wanted to, had to, convince himself, hypnotize himself as best he could into believing, that the lie he would tell was truth.
Harvey had seen many of his clients lie so convincingly to the press and the Internal Revenue Service that he was sure they had convinced themselves of the lie. Trudeau. Martin Trudeau, millionaire leader of the Evangelical Free Church of Christ, had lied to the IRS. Took a lie detector test Results were inconclusive. Could Harvey pass a lie detector test? Possibly, he thought, forcing himself to look at Dana's body once more to be sure she was dead. Possibly.
One thing to plan. Harvey was a great planner. Another thing to execute. He hadn't planned on Dana running down the stairs. He wanted it to look as if she had been surprised in bed by an intruder. Now he had a trail of blood, bloody footprints, and a goddamn witness.
She was dead.
He tried not to think about the burglar, at least not consciously at first. He had a plan. He had to execute the plan. He would… He had stripped naked except for the sneakers. He washed his bloody, surgically gloved hands, dried them on a relatively clean corner of the robe, and got a plastic Hefty garbage bag from under the sink. He threw in the white linen robe he'd purchased two weeks ago on a business trip to Lexington and carried ate bag to the back door, taking care that it picked up no blood. He opened die door, stepped out, and walked to the brick driveway, where be removed the sneakers and surgical gloves and dropped them into the plastic garbage bag. There was a faint trail of partially footprinted blood leading from the house.
If the burglar goes to the police, Harvey thought, hurrying barefoot up the stairs, he runs die risk of being accused of Dana's murder, but this guy was a burglar, not a murderer. Harvey got in the shower and turned on the hot water, letting it scald his chest. He covered himself with soap-liquid soap-head to toe. Had to be fast. Harvey was shivering, trembling. He heard something and threw open the shower curtains. Had some neighbor heard the damn burglar go through the dining room window and called the police? Nothing, no one, just the blare of music from the stereo speaker downstairs. He closed the curtains but not all the way, pushing back the fantasy of Dana as a blood-drenched zombie coming up the stairs with a knife in her stained hand.
And the burglar, the burglar, goddamn it, the burglar. The burglar might not be very bright. He might not think it through, might not realize that he was in big trouble if he stepped forward. He might go to the police and describe what he had seen, identify Harvey as Dana's killer. Would he be believed? Would he reemerge when he had calmed down in a week, two, a month, and try to blackmail him?
Harvey turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, reaching for a towel.
Had to hurry. Think on the way.
He was back in his tux and down the stairs, avoiding the trail of Dana's blood on the carpet. One last quick look around. The door to the kitchen was closed.
"All right," he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice made his hands tremble. "All right," he demanded, and his hands obeyed. "What have I forgotten? The toolbox."
He moved back to the kitchen door, opened it with his elbow, avoiding the bloody trail, and went straight to the burglar's toolbox. He wiped the box with a dish towel and left it sitting in the middle of the room for an instant, an island in a sea of blood. Then he picked up the toolbox, holding it away from his body, went to the sink, washed off the already-drying blood, and moved to the door to the garage, glancing at Dana's deep-red-against-white corpse. She had stopped bleeding. He hid the toolbox in plain sight, beginning to panic, already making up an excuse-loose bowels, nausea-if the concert was over when he got back to the Bismarck. He checked himself for blood stains and found none.