“Eldwin’s alibi is bullshit,” he said.
“So – what? He killed her and the wife covered for him?”
“There’s a thought.”
“Have you ever met Claire Eldwin? Take my word for it: she’d be thrilled to see him in an orange jumpsuit.”
He ignored her. “Joanne gave you the sweater. Did you keep your word?”
“The lab report’s on the desk. You can see for yourself.” He drew back and, keeping one eye on her, retrieved Toles’s fax and flipped through the three pages. Hazel carefully drew herself up against the end of the bed and sat on the edge. “I found the same thing you did. Except I can see it for what it is. It’s from a dock, where she was pulled up.”
“She was pulled out onto the grass.”
“How can you be sure?”
He threw the pages back onto the desk and leapt forward, shoving his face in hers. She smelled the sour taint of his mouth. “Are you fucking stupid? I caught the case, I wrote the report – my name is on it – so what do you think? I saw it on the news? She washed up at the bottom of someone’s garden. We pulled her onto the grass. No wood involved.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Is that what you’re hanging your case on?”
The hell with it, she thought, if I’m dead, I’m dead, and she pushed up from the bed and stepped quickly away from him. He trained the gun on her chest. She had pain, but the adrenaline was covering it. “You want to know what I’m hanging my case on?”
“You wanna get shot?”
“You’re not going to shoot me. You need me.”
“You still believe that?”
“Brenda Cameron was anaesthetized,” she said, ranging in a semi-circle away from him. She knew there was no escape, but she had to keep moving. “Her blood alcohol was.19. That’s more than twice the legal limit. You get to.26 and you might as well jam a swizzle stick in your brain and stir. And there were high levels of lorazepam in her blood, that’s Ativan -”
“I know what the fuck it is -”
“Then you know it increases the effects of alcohol. She was knocked out. She did it to herself.”
He said nothing.
She stood by the window, looking at him, the muscles in her thighs jumping. “Or, on the other hand, maybe someone did it to her. Maybe Colin Eldwin did it. Gave her so many drinks she didn’t know what planet she was on. The problem is that you’ll never know now. Nobody saw them together that night, no one saw anything happen on the lake, nobody heard anything at all. All we have is a stolen rowboat, a body, a griefstruck relative, and you. And that doesn’t add up to anything but a tragedy. Whether you shoot me or not, Brenda Cameron’s going to stay in her grave a suicide.”
He was still sighting her straight down the length of the gun. “Well, if that’s your conclusion, then tell me where you want Eldwin’s body. I’ll do you the courtesy of leaving a trail you can follow this time.”
“You’ve got no reason to kill him.”
“I told Joanne Cameron I’d get her justice. But it doesn’t matter to me what size his cell is. I think you know I’d just as soon put him in a box.”
“And then what? Are you going to bring Brenda Cameron back from the dead? Maybe she’ll sell that necklace you gave her for some rock.”
It was as if he hadn’t heard her – he stood in the middle of the room, staring past her, out at the city. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe this time, she’ll get out alive.” He pulled his gaze back and he was looking at her, his expression stone cold. “You can’t be everywhere at once,” he said. “But you can tell them what happens to them matters to at least one person. You light the way a little, and maybe it saves a couple of them. Maybe they come in before it’s too late.”
“Or maybe it has nothing to do with you. Maybe you’re one of them, except there’s something else in your pipe.”
His eyes travelled to the gun at the end of his arm and he raised it to his face and stared at it like he was trying to remember a name. Then he pressed the side of it hard against his temple, gritting his teeth, his eyes boring through her, his jaw shaking like he was going to blow up. It was a strange, desolate gesture, and she thought this is it, she’d reached him and flipped the switch. She didn’t want to see him put the gun in his mouth and she closed her eyes, but then there was silence. She looked again and he’d turned the muzzle back toward her. He gestured her away from the window. She came toward the centre of the room and he grabbed her again, holding her at arm’s length, the gun cocked beside his cheek, and pushed her toward the bed again. A space opened in her chest; it felt like a massive expanse, a pit she was going to fall into. He powered her down to the bed, her back against it this time, and held the barrel of the gun hard to her forehead. “Goodman,” she said quietly, “Dana…”
His weight was concentrated on the Glock and it felt like he was driving a bolt into her skull. “I took what was in me and gave it to you. To help you see.”
The pressure on her forehead made her eyes water. She felt her mind emptying out. She took his wrist in both her hands, as if she were holding the gun in place against her own head. “I don’t need your demons to see clearly,” she said. “I have my own.”
She heard a click then and wondered if, in her last moment on earth, the world was breaking up into parts. First the trigger, then the firing pin, then contact and the flare and the sound of the bullet firing, all of it in discrete sequence, and she wondered if she’d be able to feel the nose of the bullet at the instant it touched her, right before it entered her: an atom of steel against an atom of flesh. But there was nothing, just the sound of something hitting the floor. She realized he’d released the clip and now he was leaning over and pocketing it as she rose to a sitting position, too weak to stand now, and he tossed the gun at her.
“If you open your door any time in the next twenty minutes, or if I see your partner in the hallway, I’ll kill you both.” And then he was gone and she spun to her right and vomited on the bedspread, hacking and choking, her head filling with spinning black lace. She sat there hunched over, her insides knotted, and then collected herself and lunged for the phone. “He’s heading out to the street,” she said when Wingate picked up in his room, her voice tight in her chest. “Get down there, get your safety off.”
“What’s wrong? Who’s in the street?”
“Goodman. He was just here. He’ll be on the sidewalk any second now.”
“I don’t un -”
“GO!” She hung up on him and went to the window, but she had a view of the wrong side of the building. She was pouring sweat and her legs felt weak. She pushed open the window and looked down to see if Goodman was running down the alley between buildings, but the alleyway was empty and all she could hear was the sounds of traffic out on the boulevard. She pushed her face out into the air as far as the window would allow and felt the wind against her, against her living flesh. She craned her head toward the front of the hotel, but if their man was out there, he wasn’t making a scene. She imagined Wingate bursting out onto the sidewalk brandishing his sidearm and the people there suddenly flying apart in panic. And she knew he would find nothing: Goodman would have melted into the stream of people heading back to work after their lunches, he would already have transformed into Dean Bellocque, perfectly invisible because he didn’t exist.
A minute later, Wingate knocked at her door and she let him in. “I couldn’t…” He leaned over, winded. She let him catch his breath. “What was he doing here? What did he want?”
“He was in my room,” she said. “He was waiting for me here, for fuck’s sake.”
“My God, Hazel. Are you okay?”