He walked to the door, opened it, looked around. Nothing, nobody.
Two hours later he remember the muffin and plucked it out of the toaster. It had reached just the right stage of doneness, but was cold and hard. He dropped it in the trash and left the room.
At the computer, he tried to compose a note. He opened a new document in Word and typed I did it.
Edmund O’Brien, after that long walk through the halls of the police station, had spun out a tale that lasted close to ninety minutes, clear to the end of the movie. And all he could seem to manage was three little words.
I did it. He looked at what he’d written and tried to think what else he could add. Tell them how he’d done it? How he’d waited for Ashley Hannon, how he’d moved in behind her when she entered the house, how he’d clapped a hand over her mouth and wrapped an arm to catch her neck in the crook of his elbow. How she’d struggled against the choke hold. You weren’t supposed to use it to subdue criminals, because now and then it worked a little too well, inducing a sleep from which the subject never awakened.
His was a good choke hold, easily maintained until her struggles ceased and she went limp in his arms. She was still breathing, and there was no visible bruising to her throat. That wouldn’t show up until later, if at all, and there would be other bruises to eclipse it.
Should he write all that down?
He grew weary at the thought of it. The worst part of being a cop, he’d often thought, were the reports you had to write, and the most important consideration, as he’d learned early on, was CYA. The report could cover any number of topics, but what you really had to do was Cover Your Ass.
But how did you do that in a confession? When you led off with I did it, weren’t you essentially uncovering your ass? Wasn’t that the point?
A little later he got the Ruger from the kitchen cupboard, loaded the magazine, and jacked a round into the chamber.
Doak “Two Guns” Miller, he thought.
He’d used an automatic and a revolver on Stapleton Terrace, and left them both there. Now he was sitting in his house with an automatic in one hand and a revolver in the other, and no clear idea what he wanted of them.
When they came for him, he could go out in a blaze of glory. Suicide by cop, they called it. You had a gun in your hand and you were firing at them, and the cops had no real choice in the matter. They fired back, and generally emptied their guns in the process, and even if they were lousy shots you were pretty much certain to wind up with a tag on your toe.
He looked down at his feet. He was wearing cargo shorts and a tee shirt, and his feet were bare, and he pictured his big toe with a tag on it.
Saying what? Use No Hooks?
Suicide by cop. In the movies, the bad guy would snarl his intention to take as many cops with him as he could. That might make a kind of emotional sense if you hated cops, but Bill Radburn was the closest thing he had to a friend in the whole state of Florida, so why would he want to kill him? Or anyone else who might come through the door?
I did it.
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Like you’re telling them what they don’t already know.
After he’d choked her unconscious, after he’d moved her to where he wanted her, there was a question of timing. Ideally, he’d hold off on the next step until just before Otterbein’s arrival, but you couldn’t set your clock by the man, could you? Say he waited until he saw the Lincoln’s lights in the driveway.
The choke hold wouldn’t keep her out forever. And how long would it take Otterbein to make his way from behind the wheel to inside the house?
He waited as long as he dared. Then he heard her breathing change, and the next thing would be her eyes opening, and he couldn’t let that happen. If he had to look into her eyes—
No.
He got his hands around her throat, and every image came flooding in at him. Phyllis, that dizzy bitch: “Choke me, will you? Come on, how tricky is that?” And Roberta, with his hands on her throat, hands that wanted so desperately to tighten, until he willed them to move from throat to abdomen.
And the story he’d told to Barb Hamill, with the girl a combination of both women, an unmarried and pregnant version who liked to be choked but got more than she bargained for: “And what I do, I just keep squeezing. Both hands, as tight as I can make them, and she starts twitching like a fish on a line . . .”
Yeah, pretty much like that.
I did it.
Only one reason to write it down, whether it was three words or every detail he could remember. All it could be, long or short, was a suicide note.
Suicide by cop?
He didn’t need to wait for a cop to turn up. He was a cop himself, wasn’t he?
Had been, anyway.
Now he was a murderer.
Two-Gun Miller, with a revolver in one hand and an automatic in the other. If he waited for them, the best he could hope for was to go down shooting. If he surrendered, if they captured him alive, the death sentence was a foregone conclusion. He’d killed two people in a particularly vicious fashion, and it would be hard for any lawyer with a straight face to argue mitigating circumstances.
And why fight the death sentence? Whatever cocktail of drugs they fed into your veins, it had to be better than life without parole. And can we skip the appeals? Florida was pretty good at killing people, and he’d make it as easy for them as he could.
Still, it wasn’t the Old West, they didn’t find you guilty on Tuesday for what you did on Monday, then drop a rope around your neck first thing Wednesday morning. Even if he greased the skids, he was looking at a year or more in a cell.
Wouldn’t welcome that.
Thirty-five
* * *
He went to the bathroom, came back, sat down, picked up a gun in each hand. Took turns trying them in different positions. In his mouth, angled up and back, poised to send a bullet through the palate and into the brain—and, as with George Otterbein, out through the back of the skull. Pressed into his belly just below the solar plexus—much easier now, with his own hand and his own stomach, than when he’d propped up Otterbein’s unconscious body and wrapped his own hand around Ashley’s limp hand and helped her dead finger squeeze the trigger.
That wound hadn’t been enough to kill George, that’s not what it was for, and it had taken another blow to the back of the head to keep the man unconscious. Then he’d manhandled him over to the staircase, stuck George’s index finger in the abdominal wound and wiped it imperfectly.
He unloaded the Taurus, reloaded it with George’s fingerprints on the shells. Got his prints on the gun butt as well, including one from the bloody index finger. Then he’d used his own finger to force George’s thumb on the trigger.
And he’d dipped his own finger into the belly wound so that he could inscribe George’s confession on the wall. He remembered that famous case, some loony leaving messages on a mirror, Stop me before I kill more, but that hardly applied, and in the end he’d settled for God forgive me.
Fat chance.
George’s blood, but his own finger. So who then was the one seeking divine forgiveness?
Consciously, he’d been doing nothing more or less than staging a scene. But on another level . . .
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 res
t 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.
He watched the entire credit roll before he turned it off. Not the best picture to be watching, he thought, given his present circumstances.
Maybe it was a sign to call that number again: “Listen, I changed my mind since I spoke to you two hours ago. I’m going to cancel.”
No, he thought. The cards were dealt. Play the hand.
It was just past 7:30 when he pulled into the lot at the Cattle Baron. He didn’t see her car, and wondered if she’d returned to work yet. She might have felt it necessary to spend a little more time playing the grieving widow, might simply want to give the scandal a few more days to die down before making herself available to the public.
Or she might have quit the job. She certainly didn’t need it, neither for the money it paid nor for the excuse it provided to get out of the house. She was a rich widow, she lived by herself, and she could do as she pleased and go where she wanted.
He took another turn through the lot, looking for a Lincoln this time. They’d have returned Ge
orge’s car to Rumsey Road, after forensics had found nothing in it but whatever prints and trace evidence George had left there, and maybe she’d want a change from the Lexus.
But no, there was the Lexus, parked where she always parked it, in the very spot where she’d left it unlocked, with the Baby Browning waiting for him beneath the front seat.
How had he missed it the first time? Maybe it was a message from his guardian angel, the same one who’d tried to use Linda Fiorentino to get him to change his mind and cancel. Maybe—
He parked the Chevy and went into the restaurant.
She was seating a party of six when he reached the hostess stand. He watched her moving smoothly among them, making small talk, smiling. Then she straightened up, steered a waitress to their table, and headed back to her post. She had almost reached it when she registered who was waiting for her.
And if he hadn’t been looking at her face, watching her eyes, he might have missed her reaction. It didn’t show in her body language, only on her face. He fancied he could see her thoughts written on her forehead, and they all ended with question marks. But when she was within a few feet of him she flashed her hostess smile and asked him if he’d be dining alone. Or would someone be joining him?
“I’m by myself,” he said.
“Right this way,” she said, smoothly, professionally, and led him to a table off to the left. It was set for two, and she scooped up the napkin and silverware opposite him. As she straightened up, the tip of one finger traced a two-inch line across the back of his hand.
No one watching could have seen a thing.
“Your waitress will be right with you,” she said, and walked out of his field of vision.
He chose the same meal he’d had last time, unable to think of any way to improve on it, and ordered it from the same dishwater blonde. He remembered her name—Cindy—but she didn’t recognize him until he specified that he wanted his steak cooked black and blue. Her eyes widened at the phrase, and she looked at him and said, “Oh, hi! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”