Then I flash on the empty, dull-eyed expression I saw on Gina’s face as she sat in the same chair and, oddly, this disturbs me even more. Something about the way she was sitting there seems wrong. I can’t put a finger on anything specific, but it keeps nagging at me.
I try to shake it off by focusing on Rubbish instead, who is playing with a mangled tampon he most likely fished out of the bathroom garbage. I laugh as he bats the tampon across the rug and hunkers down, his pupils huge and dark, his little ass wiggling. Then he springs in for the kill, grabbing the tampon between his feet and rolling with it. He tosses it away, hunkers down again, and repeats the attack. At one point he manages to push the tampon under the corner of the rug, where he then spends several minutes trying to get at it from above. Finally he gets wise and burrows his way under, creating a tiny, wriggling hump in the rug.
And that’s when it hits me. It’s not the way Gina was sitting in the chair that bothers me, it’s what happened when she got out of it.
I have to go back to the house. I run into the bedroom to dress, only to realize all of my bras are in the washing machine. After digging around in the few clean clothes I have left, I choose the loosest-fitting top I can find, not wanting to advertise the fact that I am braless. Minutes later, I am headed out of town, stopping briefly at the Quik-E-Mart to buy a disposable camera.
The Carrigan house is dark when I pull up out front but there is a police car parked in the drive. Sitting inside it is Brian Childs. The front door to the house is sealed shut with crime scene tape. Brian gets out and walks over to me as I climb out of my car.
“What are you doing back here?” he asks.
I show him my camera. “I need to get some shots of the den,” I tell him. “For Izzy.”
“We already took a bunch,” he says. “Can’t you use those?”
“I suppose we can, but Izzy likes to have his own. And this way, we don’t have to wait for you guys to make copies,” I explain. I hold my breath, hoping Brian will go for it.
“Okay,” he says with a shrug, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I follow him onto the porch, where he slices through the tape and peels it away. “I’ll replace this when you’re done,” he says. “And I’ll have to record that you were here,” he adds. “Scene preservation, you know.”
“No problem,” I tell him. If my suspicions are right, by the time anyone else learns I was here, it will be a moot point. As soon as he has the door unlocked, I scurry down the hall and enter the den. I grimace at the lingering scent of dried blood that hangs in the air, and when I flip on the light switch, I see that the room doesn’t look any different than the last time I saw it.
I turn back to Brian, who has followed me. “I need to close the door so I can take a shot of this end of the room,” I tell him, and as I hoped, he backs up. “It’ll only take me a minute,” I promise, closing the door before he has a chance to come inside.
Immediately, I move over to the chair, standing in front of it and digging into my memory. Just as I thought, the edge of the Persian rug is up against the front legs of the chair. But I’m certain that when Sid was sitting there, the chair had been angled toward the desk, the two back feet resting on the hardwood floor, the two front ones resting on top of the rug. I remember how Gina nearly fell when I helped her up because her foot became entangled in the rug’s edge. And I remember how the curled-edge fell back down, stopping in the position it’s in now.
Obviously, the chair had been moved between the time I saw Sid in it and the time I saw Gina in it. I recall the noise I heard not long after Gina entered the room, the faint thump sound that spurred me to action. I suppose the noise could have come from Gina collapsing into the chair, but that would have moved the chair backward, away from the rug. How had it ended up closer?
I reach down and pull back the edge of the carpet, peeking underneath. There, about a foot and a half from the edge, is a small defect in the hardwood, a metal ring set into a hollow in the floor. I kneel down and study the ring more closely, realizing it’s a handle. When I grab it and pull, a six-board section of the floor opens up, revealing a large, velvet-lined space beneath. Molded into the velvet are three imprints, each one bearing the recognizable shape of a gun. Next to the empty imprints is the real thing: a cold, deadly-looking pistol.
A loud noise out in the hallway startles me and I jump, letting the section of floor fall back into place. I hear the door to the den open and start to turn, but I’m not quick enough. From the periphery of my vision I see something coming toward me just before I feel a crashing pain on my head. For an instant I see a flash of bright, blinding light, but after that, there is nothing but darkness.
Chapter 34
I can’t remember ever feeling so cold. My teeth are rattling and every muscle in my body is trembling as I try to shiver my way to warmth. I am curled into a fetal position and I try to tighten it, to pull all my parts closer together so they can warm one another. But the movement sends shock waves of pain from my head down my neck and back, making me moan.
“Ah, good. You’re awake.”
Slowly, carefully, I open my eyes, wincing as the room’s light pierces its way through to my brain. Fuzzy shapes come into view, familiar shapes. Sid’s den. I place one hand on the floor and, bracing myself against the pain, I push myself into a sitting position. Gina is standing in front of me, a gun in one hand. It doesn’t take me long to figure out where she found it or what she intends to do with it.
Seeing the direction of my gaze, Gina holds the pistol up for a moment, eyeing it appreciatively. “Is this what you were looking for?” she asks.
“Apparently,” I mumble.
“Too smart for your own good, aren’t you?” she sneers. “I knew you would figure it out sooner or later. That’s why I came back here to watch the house. I thought you might show up.”
“Brian…” I mutter, my head pounding in pain.
“Oh, he’s out there in the hallway,” she says. “But if you think he’s going to help you, you’re sadly mistaken. I’ve taken care of him.”
I take a moment to mourn Brian and to allow my head to clear. “It was you,” I say, all the pieces finally clicking into place. “You killed Karen and Mike.”
“I had to. That Owenby bitch just refused to listen to me. Kept insisting she was going to milk Sid and me for every penny she could get. So I had no choice. I shot her.”
The cold indifference in her voice makes me shiver even harder.
“The next morning,” she continues, “when Sid told me how he’d run into David the night before, I realized what a perfect setup it was. I figured David was probably somewhere between here and that sleazy motel around the time of Karen’s death, so he wouldn’t have any alibi. And I knew all about him and Karen—hell, half the town knew. They were together all the time at the hospital until David broke things off with her. Then she started getting desperate and stupid, chasing after him, making threats, picking fights. Several people at the hospital witnessed it. It made him the perfect fall guy. All it took was one anonymous witness to get the cops sniffing at his door.”
“It was you who made that call.”
Gina smiles broadly.
“Pretty coldhearted.”
“Hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
“But why? Why did you have to kill Karen?”
“Because she was blackmailing Sid, and he, the dumb sonofabitch, was paying her. She discovered him one night at the hospital in an on-call room with Mike. I don’t think she knew about Sid’s little secret before then. No one did. Even I didn’t. I didn’t find out until Karen came to me, hoping to wring even more money out of us with her little blackmail scheme.”