“Lily told me. She called up here a little while ago, worried sick.” Cole slid the .357 back into the drawer.
What the hell is Mallory up to? he wondered. She could have called my cell phone. Why would she call Cole?
“I didn’t think Penn Cage took clients. I thought he just wrote books.”
“He’s doing it as a favor to me.”
“Celebrity lawyer, huh? I hope he knows what he’s doing.”
“He knows what he’s doing in court.” Waters let his eyes drill into his partner’s. “But that’s not the kind of help I need right now.”
Cole’s big head turned slowly, like that of a battle-scarred old bull. “Talk to me, John Boy.”
“I need to stay out of jail. I don’t give a damn what happens later, but I need to stay free right now, for as long as possible. And to do that, I need an alibi.”
Cole looked at him with sympathy. “I’d like to help you. But it’s too late. Cowboy Tom Jackson called me an hour ago and asked where I was the night of the murder. I had to tell him I was home watching HBO all by my lonesome. I couldn’t say you were there, because for all I knew, you’d already told him you were somewhere else.”
“Shit.” Waters cursed his paranoia. Because he hadn’t trusted his friend, he’d screwed himself on the alibi.
“I warned you about this.”
“I know.”
Cole stood and squeezed his powerful hands together. “Sit down, Rock. You look like you’re about to pop a blood vessel.”
“I don’t want to sit.”
“Sit your ass down. I can’t think with you standing up.”
Waters took the leather chair opposite Cole’s desk, and the big man began to pace the room.
“How much time does Penn think you have before the cops bring you in?”
“Probably not much. They’re questioning me this afternoon.”
“Well, let’s just cut to the chase. Did you kill that crazy bitch or not?”
Waters looked at the floor. “My hands strangled her. But I didn’t kill her. I know that now. Not that it’s much comfort, given my situation.”
“But that’s your joy juice on the slides down at the crime lab?”
“Yes.”
Cole gave a theatrical groan. “What about Lily for your alibi? I’m sure she’ll swear you were home when the murder happened.”
Waters looked up at his partner. “Lily’s not Lily anymore. I can’t trust her to act in my best interest. That’s why I’m here.”
Cole stopped in midstep and stared as though Waters had just sworn the world was flat. “I thought the possibility of being cornholed for forty years in Parchman Farm had finally cured you of this Wuthering Heights, Mallory’s-back-from-the-dead bullshit. But it hasn’t, has it?”
“No. And I’m here because you’re the only guy I know who might be crazy enough to believe me.”
Cole scratched the back of his neck, amusement in his eyes.
“But even if you don’t believe me,” Waters continued, “I know you’ll do anything you can to help me.”
“Now you’re talking,” Cole said. “Okay, lay the weirdness on me.”
“Mallory’s inside Lily now.”
“Tell me I didn’t just hear that.”
“I’m serious. Mallory passed into me on the night Eve died. She killed Eve to shut her up, and to hold the murder over my head. Then she passed from me into Lily.”
Cole began to pace again, moving in a wide circle around Waters. “Why would she do that?”
“Because she thought I’d never leave Lily for Eve.”
“Huh. Would you have?”
Waters thought about it. “I’d like to say no, but I can’t honestly tell you. Did I risk losing Lily and Annelise just to sleep with Eve for two weeks?”
“I guess now we’ll never know.”
“Don’t be so sure. Last night, I convinced Mallory to leave Lily alone. To move into some other woman, on the condition that I would leave Lily for whoever it was. Now I’m afraid I might be arrested today. Penn says it won’t happen, but I have a feeling it’s going to. And if it does, Mallory might decide to stay right where she is. Inside Lily. She’ll be alone in the house with Annelise, and I’ll be stuck in jail.”
“That scares you?”
“What do you think?”
Cole stopped behind Waters and laid a hand on his shoulder. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“If I’m arrested, I want you to bail me out. I’m going to give you access to an account with enough money to do it.”
“You don’t need me for that. Lily will bail you out of jail in a heartbeat.”
“I told you—”
“Lily isn’t Lily anymore…right.”
“That’s right. And I have no way of knowing what she’ll do until she does it.”
Cole took his hand from Waters’s shoulder, walked to his desk, and sat on its forward edge. “Okay, I’ll bail you out of jail. What else?”
“The charge will be murder one. The judge could deny bail. If that happens, I’ll need you to be my go-between with Mallory while I’m in jail. Obviously, she could visit me in jail as Lily, but only for a short time. I wouldn’t be able to monitor her movements or state of mind, or keep her calm if she starts to flip out. You have to do all that, and keep her moving forward with my plan. She has to move into another woman.”
“How do I do that?”
“Tell her I’ll get out of jail one way or another. And when I do, I’ll come to her. I’ll run away with her. You have to keep her convinced of that.”
Cole’s eyes narrowed as he studied Waters. “Is that really your plan? Or are you just trying to get Mallory out of the way so you can run with Lily and Annelise?”
“Christ, man. First things first. I’m not even in jail yet.”
“Seriously, John. I mean, Ward Cleaver gets the chance to run off to paradise…Does he take the wife and kid? Or his beautiful love goddess?”
Waters gripped the arms of the chair in frustration. “This isn’t some hypothetical game! The police want my ass. And I’ll be face-to-face with them at three o’clock!”
Cole held up his hands. “Easy, John Boy. I get the picture.” He got off the desk and walked to within a few feet of Waters. “So, what are you going to tell the cops? I mean, if your lawyer thinks you’re crazy with this Mallory stuff, how are you going to play it?”
“Penn may think I’m nuts, but he also thinks I’m innocent.”
“He does? Who does he think killed Eve?”
Waters gave a hollow laugh. “Are you ready for this? You.”
Cole blinked in surprise. “What?”
“Penn thinks you slipped in and strangled her while I was passed out.”
“No shit.” Cole folded his arms across his chest and looked at the floor. “Penn always was too smart for his own good.”
Waters started to laugh again, but something in Cole’s voice stopped him. “What do you mean?”
Cole stepped forward and crouched before the chair, his eyes inches from Waters’s own. Up close, the blood vessels in his nose were a ravaged red network of lines, like worms flattened by a car tire.
“I mean I killed her.”
The glint in Cole’s eyes left no doubt as to the truth of his words. The hair on Waters’s forearms stood erect, and a shiver went through his heart. He drew back in the chair, but Cole clutched its arms with both hands, penning him in.
“Penn was right?” Waters whispered. “It was you all along? You fed Eve all that stuff about Mallory and me?”
“You’re so lost,” Cole said, as though the subject were not worthy of discussion. “You don’t know which end is up, do you?”
Fragments of Penn’s merciless logic poured into Waters’s mind with the crushing weight of hindsight. Who’s in a position to know all about you and Mallory? Who would benefit if you were to go to prison for murder? I think we both know who we’re talking about…. I’ve seen things done betwe
en lifelong friends that you wouldn’t believe. There’s literally no depth to which human beings cannot sink….
Waters smashed his fists into Cole’s forearms, knocking them from the chair arms, and jumped to his feet. “Goddamn it, why?”
“John—”
“Just tell me one thing, you son of a bitch! Is Lily involved in this?”
Cole stood up, his face bright red. “Not anymore. But why do you even care about that?”
“Why do I care? Lily is all I care about. Lily and Annelise.”
Cole looked suddenly bereft. “Don’t say that.”
“Compared to Lily, you think I give a shit about you and your problems? You made a good living from this company, and you pissed it away on gambling and God knows what else. Now you want to take me down for murder so you can steal the company and get your ass out of a hole you dug yourself? And you use my wife to do it?”
Cole’s lower lip quivered, and the hurt in his eyes dwarfed the pain Waters had seen at the country club the previous day.
“You don’t understand!” he cried, taking Waters by the arms. “You’ve got to listen to me.”
Waters tried to pull free, but alcohol and dissipation had not completely sapped the strength of the old athlete in Cole.
“Let go, goddamn it!”
He was about to slam his knee into his partner’s groin when Cole sobbed and drove him back against the office wall like an offensive lineman. Waters’s head hit the painted bricks hard enough to blind him. The first thing he saw when the stars cleared was Cole staring at him like a madman begging for understanding.
“You don’t know anything about Lily!” Cole shouted. “You think you know her, Johnny, but you don’t!”
Johnny? Waters tried to think through the blur in his brain, but Cole kept talking, his face wet with tears and mucus, his right arm across Waters’s chest, pinning him to the wall. “Listen to me, Johnny. I’m trying to do what you told me to. But you don’t even care!”
Waters remained frozen.
“You lied!” Cole screamed. “You said you’d give up Lily and come to me if I went into another woman. But you were lying!”
Waters’s heart stuttered, then kicked off again with an arrhythmic beat that he feared would not sustain consciousness. He shut his eyes against confusion so profound that it felt like psychological whiplash.
“Say something!” Cole demanded. “Look at me!”
Waters opened his eyes. His partner’s face, livid a moment ago, was now pale, and his mouth worked in a silent struggle between rage and despair. Even as Waters’s emotions tried to convince him that Cole was only playing another scene in a drama written to deprive him of his sanity, cold reason forced him toward the awful truth. Cole was not that good an actor. He could dissemble in front of husbands whom he had cuckolded, but the pain and confusion in his face now were utterly foreign to the man Waters had known all his life. Cole Smith simply did not panic, and to mimic it like this was beyond him.
“Oh God,” Waters breathed. “No…”
A strange light suddenly shone out of Cole’s eyes, and his lips curled into something like a smile. Horror unlike anything Waters had known in his life turned his bowels to water. This morning, while he was talking to Penn or giving blood to the police, Mallory had followed his order of last night in a way that must have given her savage pleasure. As Lily, she had seduced Cole, and by this single act had both violated the wife Waters loved and robbed his best friend of his mind. The image of Cole thrusting inside his wife drove Waters to a point of fury that bordered on madness. He rammed his knee into Cole’s testicles, then slammed an uppercut into the soft area under his jaw. The big man fell back, gasping for air, and Waters retreated behind the desk. Two blows wouldn’t stop a man of Cole’s size for long, so he reached into Cole’s drawer and brought out the Magnum .357.
“Tell me what you did!” he shouted, aiming the gun at Cole. “You made Lily sleep with Cole, didn’t you?”
Cole tried to straighten up but could not. The blow to his groin had effectively crippled him. But he did raise his face, and when he did, Waters saw the light of triumph in his eyes.
“It wasn’t”—Cole gasped—“wasn’t like it was the first time they’d done it. It didn’t take much convincing to get your partner over to your house, Johnny. It took even less to get him to provide service in the bedroom. Lily bought a fifth of Johnnie Walker to warm him up. Then she fluttered her eyelashes and shed a few tears, and he was on her like a hound dog.”
“Lily never cheated on me with Cole!”
“Not after you were married. But Cole has very fond memories of Lily as a college freshman. Mostly because she’s your wife, I think. Lily wasn’t anything special in the sack, but she was young and firm. A nice diversion on a Friday night.”
Waters hoped this was one of Mallory’s lies, but the sick feeling in his stomach told him it probably wasn’t. He choked back a response and cocked the pistol’s plowshare hammer.
“And neither one of them ever told you about it,” Cole said. “The whole time you were falling in love with her, showing her off, telling Cole how great she was, he was thinking about the times he did her. That’s friendship, isn’t it?”
A strange sense of relief rolled through Waters. By trying so hard to damn Lily and Cole, Mallory had made him realize that both were innocent of anything beyond a college fling. There was no scam, no conspiracy. Both were pawns in Mallory’s twisted plan. Lily probably wouldn’t even remember having sex with Cole. Unless…like Eve, she had “awakened” to find herself naked and under Cole—
“Where’s Lily?” he asked. “Right now? Did you hurt her?”
“Why would I hurt her?” Cole asked. “What happens to Lily later doesn’t interest me, but I don’t want you to feel any guiltier than you have to when you come to me.”
“You swear she’s all right?”
“I don’t want to talk about her!” Cole snapped. “You told me you’d leave her, but she’s all you care about! You lied.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Waters replied calmly, trying to get his thoughts back on track. He let down the hammer and set the pistol on the desk. “What did you expect me to do? You’d blotted out my wife’s mind. You threatened my daughter’s life—”
“You threatened me first! You said you’d act like I was dead!”
You should be dead, Waters thought. “This is just like twenty years ago, Mallory. You don’t trust me to love you. You think you have to make me love you. But you can’t make anyone feel love. Love doesn’t work that way.”
“I know how love works!” Cole screamed. “I know how you felt with me when I was in Eve. You were lost inside me! You loved me then. And you will again.”
Waters wasn’t about to argue. If Mallory decided to hurt Lily and Annelise, he had no way to stop her. Certainly the police could do nothing to prevent it. He slid the .357 back in the drawer, closed his mind to the male face across the desk, and spoke as tenderly as he could.
“I always loved you, Mallory. And you always sabotaged us with your paranoia. But now…now I see that you’re doing what you promised. You left Lily alone, and you’re going to go into someone else. And I intend to keep my part of the bargain.”
Cole wiped his eyes and walked toward the desk. “But how long is it going to take? Who am I going to go into?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to find a woman I think I can live with.”
“What about Sybil?” Cole said, his eyes suddenly bright. “Cole already sleeps with her. Or he did until a month ago, anyway. She’s pretty, she’s only twenty-eight, she’s got a wonderful body…and no husband or kids to worry about. Nobody to ask questions. She’s perfect. I even know she’s fertile.”
“How do you know that?”
Cole’s face articulated pure sadness in a way that Waters had not seen since Cole was a child. “She got pregnant when she was in high school,” he said. “Her parents made her get rid of the baby.”
Wat
ers didn’t want Mallory thinking about abortion. “Sybil could be the one,” he said. “But I don’t know yet.”
“I don’t want you to take too long. You know me, Johnny. I need intimacy.” Cole was coming around the desk now, and nothing about his bodily movement was familiar. He was like 250 pounds of graceful woman stuffed into khakis and a button-down shirt. “You know,” he said, “having experienced sex as both male and female, I have to say I like being the man better. I was always more of an aggressor in sex. But…I couldn’t ask that of you.”
Ask what? Waters wondered, realizing the answer even as he asked the question.
“Unless,” Cole said softly, “you don’t mind the idea.”
Cole took hold of his hand, and before Waters could overcome his shock, Cole kissed his wrist, then slid his tongue along Waters’s inner forearm.
Waters jerked his arm free with a cry.
Cole laughed. “I knew you’d be like that. Oh, well. Men can’t bear children, anyway.”
Waters’s stomach churned with fear and revulsion. “Tell me one thing before I go. When you told me how you moved from person to person, you said it took you a while to control people’s minds. How are you doing it now? To people you just entered?”
Cole smiled cagily. “I learned a lot in ten years, Johnny. And some people just aren’t very challenging. Lily is depressed. She still blames herself for her miscarriages. Basically, she’s just weak. Cole is a burnout case. Eaten up with guilt about his debts, insecure about sex with his young conquests. His mind is a nest of snakes drowning in scotch. He takes Viagra to cheat on his wife, for God’s sake. There’s not enough of the original Cole left to resist me.”
Waters shook his head. The parallels to virus transmission kept hitting him; when a person’s resistance was down, the virus gained a foothold and grew exponentially.
“The people in your life are empty,” Cole said. “They could never make you truly happy. But I can. You know I can.”
Cole pressed a button on his desk phone. After a moment, Sybil said, “Yes?”
“Could you come in for a minute, Sybil?”
“I’m pretty busy.” Her voice was clipped and cold.