Nope. Nothing.
Her friend’s eyes had become dull and blank and it was kind of freaky seeing someone who’d been alive and arguing with her only a minute ago lying there dead.
Calista had never seen anyone die before, and the idea that Roni would never breathe again, never complain, never accuse anyone of sleeping with her boyfriend again was something that made Calista think about how thankful she should be to be alive.
Yeah, life was something you should enjoy as much as you can and take advantage of every moment you have.
Okay, so it was a little late for Roni to do that, but for the rest of us, you know?
So then there was this blood and a body and everything, and all Calista had wanted to do was spend the evening reading and listening to a little music and not having to deal with anything until Jared came over later to party.
At least Roni being dead made the decision about whether or not to call 911 a lot easier.
But how do you deal with all that blood? With all that mess?
She’d seen a movie once where the killer wrapped up a body in a shower curtain, so that was a possibility, but unless you had an extra shower curtain lying around, that wasn’t really a good idea. If the police checked your place, they would be like, “Hmm… No shower curtain, huh? Guess what? We saw that movie too.”
If she did use her curtain, what was she supposed to do then? Drive out to Walmart and pick up another one? Totally out of the way. Besides, they took advantage of kid workers in China or something like that — at least that’s what she’d heard — and she wasn’t into supporting places like that.
Besides, that wouldn’t look suspicious at all, getting caught on a store’s video camera buying a shower curtain the night her friend disappears.
Yeah. Right.
She decided to use plastic garbage bags instead.
Duct tape did the trick, holding them all tightly in place.
Loading Veronica into the trunk wasn’t like she expected. Her body hadn’t really been dead long and Calista could feel the warmth of her blood, even through the plastic garbage bags.
The corpse wasn’t very cooperative. Roni hadn’t kept herself in shape and Calista cursed more than once wrestling her into the car. Veronica could have made it a whole lot easier if only she hadn’t eaten out so much over the last year and put on, like, twenty pounds.
The pig.
But at last Veronica was in there and Calista collected her friend’s purse, her own bloody clothes, the knife, the roll of duct tape, and the towels she’d used to sop up the blood on the floor, then pulled onto the street and headed for the swamplands about ten miles from town.
As she did, something happened.
Something unexpected, but also rich and sweet and unforgettable.
Calista began to feel a small and secret pleasure. After all, she was driving around with a body in the trunk of the car and no one knew. No one had any idea.
It was like that feeling you get whenever you have something no one else knows about, when you know a secret and you get that quiet, private, tingling surge of excitement skip-scampering through you.
I know something you don’t know.
A secret I won’t share.
You’ll never guess what it is.
I won’t tell you unless I want to.
And you can’t do anything about it.
Yes, it felt good.
Electrifying, actually.
Heart thumping, fingers tingling, Calista drove along the edge of the swamp until she found an isolated place where she could dump the body.
It was a lot easier getting Roni out of the trunk than it’d been stuffing her into it.
On the way back to her apartment, she dropped the knife into a garbage can beside a streetlamp on Vine Drive, then tossed the plastic bags, Roni’s purse, her own ruined clothes, and the towels into a dumpster on the south side of the city.
She parked Roni’s car in the long-term parking at the airport, took a taxi home, and then called Jared to see if he’d like to come over early since the night was still young and she didn’t have any other plans.
The sex was especially good that night, and it made Calista think that maybe the secret that she knew about Roni was part of the reason why. It flavored the night with a buzz that was better than any drug she’d ever tried.
The police only questioned her once, but it wasn’t as a suspect or anything. She told them she hadn’t seen Veronica, had no idea where her friend might have gone — but all the while she was thinking about that secret that the cops didn’t know about, that no one knew about, not even Jared. And it brought the sharp spark of exhilaration back all over again.
In her freshman English lit class they’d studied a story by Poe called The Tell-Tale Heart. When she was speaking to the cops it came to mind again. It was about this guy who went crazy because of the horror over what he’d done, the raw, unbearable guilt worming its way into his sanity until it literally drove him mad.
He’d killed this old man but heard the dead guy’s heart continue to beat in his imagination. Calista had to admit, that would be pretty freaky.
But for her, the secret wasn’t driving her mad. Roni’s heartbeat didn’t haunt her; guilt didn’t scratch away at her conscience or invade her sanity or anything like that at all. Actually, thinking about what had happened was kind of thrilling and enticing and not really something she would want to have to ever give up.
The policemen just jotted a few things down and that was that. They never found the body, Veronica’s car was probably still there in long-term parking, and life had gone on just like it does whenever a person dies and their body gets lowered into the ground and people go back home and flip on the football game or channel-surf their way to their favorite sitcom, pull out the munchies, and settle in for the evening.
Calista had killed two other people since the day she sliced open the belly of her best friend. Jared first, when he started to act suspicious, and then another guy when their relationship didn’t really seem to be going anywhere.
But she had help with those two.
Help from this guy who called himself Akinsanya.
Man, it’d taken her forever to learn how to spell that. These days she pretty much stuck to calling him by his first name: Derek.
How he’d actually found her was still all a little fuzzy. He was friends with one of the cops who’d spoken with her, she knew that much. The cop hadn’t said it in so many words, but she was pretty sure he knew she was turning tricks to make it through college. Maybe that’s what it was, that’s why he’d passed her name along to Derek. Because she was a call girl and Derek was attracted to her type.
An escort.
A courtesan.
She liked that last term. It wasn’t so degrading and demeaning as prostitute or hooker or whore. None of those words brought any respectability to what she did. To who she was.
No one ever called her a courtesan, no one except Derek.
Anyway, after the cops talked with her, he contacted her because of this cop friend, and even though she said nothing about what happened with Veronica, she must have been pretty easy for Derek to read because he figured it out and brought it up one night when they were alone.