He clamped his eyes shut, blinked the thought away. Both guns now, one in the belly and one in the mouth, and could he summon the nerve to work both triggers at the same time?
And what would Radburn and his merry men make of that?
No appetite.
At one point he went to the kitchen. There was a single English muffin left, and he split it and toasted it. Buttered it, took a bite, and the process of chewing and swallowing seemed too much of a chore, and pointless in the bargain.
Tossed it. Watched some TV.
Half an hour into the movie, he had a look at the computer. The screen had gone dark, but he touched a key and saw the open Word document.
I did it.
Nothing to add, nothing to subtract. He watched the rest of the movie and went to bed.
The third day was more of the same. He didn’t even try to eat, just sipped some water when he was aware of thirst.
Late in the day he went out of the house for the first time, but only to walk out onto the dock. He stood there looking out at nothing, then went back inside.
Went to bed again, woke up again.
And everything was different.
Thirty-six
He got up, showered, shaved. He went to the computer and backspaced through I did it, erasing the words. His version of Word automatically backed up every document, but not until after you’d saved it once. He checked anyway, and while he was at it he cleared the browser’s history for the past week.
They weren’t coming for him. It had taken days for him to entertain the thought, but he’d somehow awakened at last with it all clear in his mind. His efforts on Stapleton Terrace, his over-elaborate staging of the scene, had actually worked to make two deaths go in the books as a murder and suicide. George Otterbein had killed his much younger paramour, Ashley Hannon, sustaining a profound but non-fatal wound in the process. And then, overcome with remorse, he’d taken his own life.
Case closed.
His every action at the murder scene had been undertaken with great care and foresight, keeping him too busy getting it right to let other thoughts intrude. And yet all along he’d carried the unvoiced conviction that he was doomed, that his role would be instantly apparent, that they’d come for him before the bodies were cold.
And so he’d arrived home and promptly fallen apart. From the moment he cleared his own threshold he was waiting to be arrested, and all evidence to the contrary, starting with Sheriff Radburn’s words on the phone, failed to change his mind.
He’d be caught, he knew it. Forensics would find his skin cells mixed with Otterbein’s blood on the wall. A neighbor who’d helpfully written down his plate number would call it in. Someone who’d caught a glimpse of him would remember an older and whiter face than you usually saw framed by a hoodie, and would pick his picture out of the six-pack they showed him. The mood that came down on him was paralyzing, and all he’d been able to do was outlast it — and, with a little more pressure on the two triggers, he wouldn’t have done so. But he was alive, and in his right mind, or as close to it as he could reasonably expect to get.
And now he had work to do.
The clothes he’d bought at J. C. Penney and worn to Stapleton Terrace, the black pants and hoodie and sneakers, were on the floor of his closet, stuffed into the shopping bag they’d come in. There was blood on them, and gunshot residue, and all manner of DNA — his, of course, and that of his victims as well.
Just sitting on his closet floor, waiting for someone to find them.
He carried the bag to his car and headed for the dump, stopping along the way for a bag of charcoal and a pint can of lighter fluid. The clerk who took his cash and rang him up volunteered that her husband had bought them a propane grill, and she’d never go back to charcoal.
“Well, y’all are modern,” he said. “Myself, I’m too darn old to change.”
There were piles of smoldering trash at the dump. He dumped the bag of clothes on one of them, and tongues of flame greeted the fresh offering. He added squirts of lighter fluid and watched everything burn.
Opened the sack of charcoal, emptied it in another part of the dump. Wiped the can and tossed it. Brought back the empty sack, added it to the fire.
Driving back, he thought, Jesus, they had their chance. Three days in his closet, a bagful of hanging evidence, right there for anybody to see.
And nobody did. So fuck ’em.
His stomach had been trying to get his attention all morning, and on his way back from the dump he was able to pay attention and grasp the nature of its complaint. He hadn’t really eaten in days.
He filled a shopping cart at the Winn-Dixie. When he got home he put everything away, looked over his purchases, and went out to Denny’s. He ordered the Hungry Man’s Breakfast and ate everything they put in front of him. Eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, pancakes, hash browns — a mountain of food, and he cleaned his plate.
Back home, he turned the radio to a local station and let it play while he sat at the computer, checking news accounts.
Nothing, not really. Some of the national media had picked up the story, and if they’d gotten anything juicy they might have run with it. If, say, a B-list star had hopped onto her massage table back in Clearwater, or if she’d at least been arrested a couple of times. But she hadn’t, and the man who killed her was a fairly colorless local businessman who’d never done anything newsworthy until the last day of his life. So they’d covered the story in a paragraph and let it die.
Nothing.
He stepped away from the computer, turned off the radio, sat down on the couch.
And, for the first time in days, he let himself think about Lisa.
There’d been no point, really, in giving her space in his head for the past several days. He couldn’t call her. His phone was gone, smashed and trashed before he’d paid his last visit to the duplex.
He thought about her now.
Thought about his first sight of her, on Radburn’s phone. And then on his own phone, after the sheriff had emailed the picture to him.
Had he ever deleted it?
He reached for his phone, opened up Camera Roll. There she was, and he sat for a moment looking at her picture and remembering. Remembering the first real physical glimpse of her, at the Cattle Baron. And then in his car, watching all the changes of expression on her face and in her eyes as she came to realize what was going on.
Other places, other times.
He thought about the fantasy, and how it had begun to fade as soon as he’d brought it fully into focus. There she was, Fantasy Girl, all he’d ever envisioned and more, and all they had to do was get in the car, his car or her car, and point it away from Gallatin County, and drive.
Not a chance.
So another fantasy had taken its place, this one to grow out of a simple act of murder. It had been a sufficiently powerful dream to make killers out of John Garfield and Fred MacMurray.
And look how well it had worked out for those two.
He went back to the computer, found what he was looking for. Picked up his phone, made a call, talked for a few minutes.
Rang off.
The 4pm feature on TCM was The Last Seduction, a 1994 film starring Linda Fiorentino. He’d never seen her before, not that he remembered, and he didn’t see how he could have forgotten her.
If you were going to cast Fantasy Girl, well, she’d sail through the auditions.
It was a terrific movie, classic film noir given a more contemporary slant, and Fiorentino was almost too convincing in the role of a homicidal sociopath who uses her sexual skills to turn men into killers. At the end she tricks one of them into confessing to a murder she herself committed, and winds up in the clear with all of the cash.