I know without being told that they have been sleeping together, and every word Jay has ever told me turns to fable. Now I understand why Agent Jilison Mclntyre was perplexed when I said that Bev Kiffin's husband was a truck driver for Overland. Mclntyre was undercover. She did the company's books. She would be aware of it if there was an employee named Kiffin. The only connection to that criminal-infested trucking company is Bev Kiffin herself, and the gun and drug smuggling that goes on is connected to the Chandonne cartel. Answers. I have them, and now it is too late.
Lucy walks close to me, her face concrete. She shows no reaction as we are walked at gunpoint past rusty campers that I suspect are unoccupied for a reason. "Drug labs," I say to Jay. "You making designer drugs out here, too? Or maybe just storing assault rifles and other things that end up on the street and kill people?"
"Kay, shut up," he softly says. "Bev, you take care of her." He indicates Lucy. "Find her a nice room and make sure she's comfortable."
Kiffin smiles a little. She taps the back of Lucy's leg with the shotgun. We are at the motel now, and I scan parked cars and find no sign of another human being. Benton flashes in my mind. My heart pounds and the realization roars through my brain. Bonnie and Clyde. We used to refer to Carrie Grethen and Newton Joyce as Bonnie and Clyde. The killing couple. All along we have been so certain they were responsible for Benton's murder. Yet we have never known for a fact who he was meeting that afternoon in Philadelphia. Why did he go off alone and not tell any of us? He was smarter than that. He never would have agreed to meet Carrie Grethen or Newton Joyce or even a stranger with information, because he would never have trusted a stranger with so-called information when he was in a city trying to track down a cunning, evil serial killer like Carrie. I stop in the parking lot as Kiffin opens a door and waits for Lucy to walk ahead of her into one of those rooms. Room 14. Lucy doesn't look back at me, and the door shuts after her and Kiffin.
"You killed Benton, didn't you, Jay." I state it as a fact.
He lays a hand on my back, the pistol pointed and touching me as he pauses behind me and says for me to open the door. We enter room 15, the same room Kiffin showed me when I wanted to see what kind of mattresses and linens she used in this dump. "You and Bray," I say to Jay. "That's why she sent letters from New York, trying to make it seem they were from Carrie, to make Benton assume they were written from up there where she was locked up in Kirby."
Jay shuts the door and waves the gun almost wearily, as if I am tiresome and he is not enjoying this. "Sit down."
My eyes wander up to the ceiling, looking for eyebolts. I wonder where the heat gun is and if it is part of my fate. I keep standing where I am, near the dresser with its Gideon Bible, this one not opened to any special chapter about vanity or anything else. "I just want to know if I slept with the person who killed Benton." I am looking right at Jay. "You're going to kill me? Go ahead. But you already did that when you killed him. So I guess you can kill me twice, Jay." It is odd, I feel no fear,
only resignation. My pain, my anguish is over my niece, and I
wait for the sound of a shotgun to rock these walls. "Can't you just leave her out of it?" I ask anyway, and Jay knows I mean Lucy.
"I didn't kill Benton," he says, and he has the livid face of people who walk up and shoot a president. Pale, no expression, a zombie. "Carrie and her asshole friend did that. I made the call."
"The call?"
"Called him to meet. That wasn't too hard. I'm an agent," he enjoys reminding me. "Carrie handled it from there. Carrie and that whacko scarface she got hooked up with."
"So you set him up," I say, simply. "Probably helped Carrie escape, too."
"She didn't need much help. Just some," he replies with no inflection. "She was like a lot of people in this business. They get into the goods and fuck up an already fucked-up brain. She started doing her own thing. Years ago. If you guys hadn't solved the problem, we would have. She was at the end of her usefulness."
"Involved in the family business, Jay?" My eyes pin his. The gun is by his side and he leans against the door. He has no fear of me. I am like a bowstring wound too tightly, about to snap, waiting, listening for any sound next door. "All these women murdered_how many of them did you sleep with first? Like Susan Pless." I shake my head. "I just want to know if you helped out Chandonne or did he follow you and help himself to what you left behind?"
Jay's eyes focus more sharply on me. I have probed the truth.
"You know, you're much too young to be Jay Talley, whoever he was," I say next. "Jay Talley with no middle name. And you didn't go to Harvard, and I doubt you ever lived in Los Angeles, not as a child. He's your brother, isn't he, Jay? That horrible deformity who calls himself a werewolf? He's your brother, and your DNA is so close that on a routine screening you could be identical twins. Did you know your DNA is the same as his on a routine screening? At a four-probe level, the two of you are exactly the same."
Anger flashes. Vain, beautiful Jay would never want to
think that his DNA was even similar to someone's as ugly and hideous as Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.
"And the body in the cargo container. The one you helped us believe is the brother_Thomas. His DNA had many points in common, too, but not as many as yours does_yours from the seminal fluid you left in Susan Pless's body before she was brutalized. Thomas a relative? Not a brother? What? A cousin? You kill him, too? You drown him in Antwerp or did Jean-Baptiste do that? And then you lure me over to Interpol, not because you need my help with the case, but because you want to see what I know. You want to make sure I don't know what Benton was probably starting to figure out: That you are a Chandonne," I say, and Jay does not react. "You probably mastermind the business for your father and that's why you got into law enforcement, to be an undercover asshole, a spy. God knows how much business you've diverted_knowing everything the good guys are doing and then turning it against them behind their backs." I shake my head. "Let Lucy go," I tell him. "I'll do what you want. Just let her go."
"Can't." He doesn't even begin to argue with what I have said.
Jay glances at the wall, as if he can see through it. I can tell he is wondering what is going on next door, why it is so quiet. My nerves wind tighter. Please God, please God. Please. Or make it quick, at least. Don't let her suffer.
Jay pushes the lock in and fastens the burglar chain. "Take your clothes off," he says, no longer using my name. It is easier to kill people you have depersonalized. "Don't worry," he bizarrely adds. "I'm not going to do anything. I just have to make it look like something else."
I glance up at the ceiling. He knows what I am thinking. He is pale and sweating as he opens a dresser drawer and pulls out several eyebolts and a heat gun, a red heat gun.
"Why?" I ask him. "Why them?" I refer to the two men I now believe Jay murdered.
"You're going to screw these into the ceiling for me," Jay tells me. "Up there in the crossbeam. Now get on the bed and do it and don't try anything."
He places the eyebolts on the bed and nods for me to pick them up and do what he orders. "It's all about what becomes necessary when people get into something they shouldn't." He gets a rag and rope out of the drawer.
I stand where I am, just looking at him. The eyebolts gleam like pewter on the bed.
"Matos came here to find Jean-Baptiste and it took a little coaxing to know exactly what he had in mind and who gave him the order, which wasn't what you think." Jay takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over a chair. "Not the family, but a first lieutenant who doesn't want Jean-Baptiste to start talking and ruin a good thing for a lot of people. One thing about the family…"