Killer Move

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

I waited an hour in the street outside the gates to Cass’s building. Hallam didn’t show. I didn’t know what else he had on his plate, but I believed that what I’d said should have been enough to get most cops to come take a look. Maybe he just didn’t give a damn.

A clot of pain was attached to the back of my skull, mingling badly with the lingering effects of the previous night’s drinking. It was making the world hot and bright and unreal. I called the cop’s phone but got routed to voice mail again. I didn’t leave a message. Fuck him.

I noticed I had an indicator saying that three Facebook “friends” had sent messages, presumably updating me on what passed for their news. Fuck them, too. The idea that I’d care about whatever was going on in their lives—that I’d ever cared, or pretended to—made me want to laugh out loud.

I’d sat absolutely still after finding he was no longer behind me, convinced he’d moved to some position I couldn’t see, the better to pull the trigger in safety. I gingerly got to my feet. I took some tentative steps, still half believing they were going to be my last. I darted forward and swept up my wallet and car keys. I made my way through the half-built structure until I found a thick plywood door. I stepped out into the glaring sun and a mothballed building site, and walked across it to the road. My car was parked there.

When I’d stood on Ben Franklin Drive for five minutes and watched vehicles drive past and a few tourists stroll by, I finally began to believe that the guy had simply gone. I limped along the road to the building where Cass had lived, and waited. In the meantime I’d checked on Steph and was told she was sleeping.

So now what? I realized suddenly that there was something I could do, and I should probably have thought of it before. I didn’t want to do it, but it’d become clear that I was no longer living in a world where what I wanted counted for much. It would also be, in its own horrible way, the smart thing to do. For once.

I hurried over to the big metal gates, pushed them open, and went inside.

When I got to apartment 34, I hesitated. Getting my USB drive back, thus removing the evidence that I’d been in the apartment, was critical—even besides the importance of having copies of the pictures—so I could try to prove to the cops that something was going on. I was going in, no question. But still, I took a moment.

Then I turned the handle. I did so in a firm, even fashion—and pushed the door open, stepping out of sight as soon as I was sure it was on its way. Nothing happened. Nobody came running out, nobody fired a gun.

I cautiously stuck my head around. The door hung open, revealing the corridor beyond, bleached out by the light from the glass balcony door at the end.

I walked down into the living room. Before I stopped in the middle of last night’s cigarette ends, near the two empty wineglasses, I already knew something was different. We ignore smells a lot of the time. We’re all about what we can see and hear. But before either of these cut in, part of my brain had caught onto something else. The place didn’t smell like Cass anymore.

I looked at the bathroom door. It was a little chipped and could do with a lick of paint—but it no longer had a word daubed on it.

I turned on the spot, being careful not to knock over the nearest glass, and stepped carefully over to the bedroom door.

It was here that the loss of scent was most obvious. Whatever it was that Cassandra had worn, probably something cheap, it had gone. The bed had been made, too. Not excessively neatly, either, but exactly how it might have been made by a girl in a rush, setting the room vaguely to rights before hurrying out to a shift she was already running late for. I pulled the comforter back. The sheet underneath was white, a little crumpled. It could not have looked more normal. It was not soaked with blood. It was not suspiciously clean.

Back in the living area the effect remained seamless. A low-rent apartment the morning after two people had made a night of it. Only one thing had been erased from this space’s experience—whatever had happened to Cass.

I’m not dumb. I didn’t doubt my sanity for a second. I knew what had happened. Somebody had cleaned it up, removing all evidence that a murder had taken place—a murder that had been finessed and staged for my benefit.

Suddenly afraid that the cleanup had extended further, I went over to the desk. My thumb drive was still sticking out of the USB port on the side of the laptop, thank god. I stuck it in my pocket.

I took a few steps and sat heavily down on the sofa. I was relieved, terrible though that may sound. Cass was still dead—but I was now the only person who knew this. The evidence had disappeared. Whatever the world and its authorities might want to grill me over in the future, a murder scene was no longer one of them. I’d told Deputy Hallam to come meet me here, but now there was nothing to see.

I wondered—was that why he wasn’t here? I couldn’t imagine the cop being involved in what was happening, but . . . what if his absence hadn’t been caused by his being otherwise engaged? What if he hadn’t come because he knew there was nothing to see?

I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. Or at least I had no evidence for it, and I needed to stick to things that I had some reason to believe or I was going to lose track of everything, including my mind.

I realized that there was actually one other person who knew what had taken place here, and I believed the time she had spoken of had now come. I got out my phone, found her number in the INCOMING log.

“So,” Jane Doe said, when she answered. “Does this mean you’re ready to listen now?”

I was waiting out on the walkway when I saw her pickup park down in the street. It was a little after five and the air was softening. I was out there watching in case Hallam turned up. I was out there to smoke. I was out there because being in Cass’s apartment was making me feel wretched and confused.

The woman walked quickly across the courtyard below without looking up, and I heard her feet pattering up the spiral staircase. The rhythm was even and fast. When she arrived at the third story and strode up the walkway she wasn’t even out of breath.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she said, though her face was pinched and she looked wired. “What the hell happened to you? You didn’t look great this morning, but now you truly look like shit.”

I turned and walked into the apartment. When we reached the living area I stopped and looked at her.

She looked back at me. “What’s your point?”

“Look in the bedroom.”

“No need,” she said. “I trust the guys I put onto it.”

“Pardon me?”

“When you did your dumb split-and-run from Burger King this morning? This is what I was organizing.”

She stuck her head around the bedroom door, appeared satisfied.

“Her smell is gone,” I said.

“Solvents. Blood is a bitch to clean up. They did it right, though, if all you’re noticing is a lack of something else. Seriously, what happened to you? You really don’t look good.”

“I got hit on the back of the head,” I said. “I woke up in a disused building within a few yards of a dead woman. There was a guy with a gun. I thought he was going to kill me, but then he disappeared.”

“What guy?”

“Don’t know. Never offered me his card. He was very informal during the entire encounter. All I know is he killed a woman called Hazel Wilkins.”

“Fuck,” she said urgently, but not in surprise. “What happened to him? Where’d he go?”

“Don’t know that, either.” I remembered full well what had happened when I’d lashed out at her in the lot of the Burger King—otherwise I’d have done it again. “Listen, is it all going to be on a need-to-know basis? If so we’re heading quickly toward another parting of the ways. Either you talk to me or I’m leaving—because there’s other people I want to speak to.”

“The police are not going to be able to help.”

“That’s not who I meant.”

“The guy,” she said. “What did he look like?”

“Slim. Strong in the upper body. Early fifties. Ed Harris with hair.”

“His name is John Hunter,” she said. “I don’t know what he told you, but you’d be wise to disregard it. He just got out of a stretch in jail for murder.”

“He’s already killed again,” I said. “So that doesn’t tell me much I didn’t know.”

“Look, I don’t have the details, but I know he’s a very bad man.”

“Says who?”

“One of the people who employed me.”

“Employed you to fuck me up? Why would I trust them? Or you?”

She pulled out her cell phone. Hit a few buttons, waited, and then held it out to me. “Recognize this guy?”

I saw the face of a middle-aged man, not too slim, dark hair swept back. “David Warner.”

“No. He’s an actor. His name is Daniel Bauman.”

“Well, he’s the guy I met in—”

“I know.”

I opened my mouth, shut it again. I realized that Steph and I were in Krank’s pretty often—and it was all too possible that a stooge could have been told to go there, perhaps even night after night, and wait until a chance came to talk to me: at which point I could be lured on the promise of the sale of an expensive house. It was bait I’d be bound to take.

After which . . . everything else followed.

The actor calls the office. He gets Karren instead of me, plays that out for the initial assessment (about which he doesn’t care), then insists on dealing with me direct. This appeals to my vanity and I’m ready to be convinced to come out to the house, prepared to be left waiting and eventually stood up—setting me up for photographs that make it look like I’ve been peeping at my coworker . . . except that the photos hadn’t actually been taken that night but several days before. In preparation.

“How do you know this guy?”

“I hired him. Have I just watched you work out why?”

“To pretend to be David Warner, to provide a window during which my whereabouts were unknown and in which I could have taken those pictures of Karren White.”

“Good for you. I’d get Bauman on the phone to confirm all that to you, but he’s not picking up. Which is . . . worrying me a little.”

“Who are you? And don’t give me more of the Jane Doe crap—I don’t care about your name. I mean what are you?”

“I’m administrative support,” she said. “Edge work. Cleanup where required.”

“Are you some kind of cop?”

She laughed, a short, sad sound. “No. Ex-army. Left with skills that aren’t valued in civilian life. I bummed around for a while, getting in trouble. Then I was recruited for this.”

“Which is what?”

“I get paid to provide a buffer between certain situations and the real world. Containment, and holding up the scenery. Once in a while I play a part, like being a waitress at some lame-ass restaurant for hicks made good. Have you really got no better idea of what’s going on?”

“I got modified,” I said.

“Bingo.”

“Then what?”

“The plug got pulled.”

“And you don’t know why that happened, or why Cass got killed or by who, and that’s why you’re scared.”

She cocked her head. “Well, well. Maybe you aren’t that dumb at all.”

“Oh, I’m dumb enough. But here’s something else you don’t know. The guy who coldcocked me? He showed me an old photo of a bunch of people. One of them is now dead. Tony and Marie Thompson were in the picture, too. He evidently wants to talk to them real bad. I think maybe he’s on the way to do it right now.”

The woman blinked.

“Sorry,” I said, with bitter satisfaction. “Should I have mentioned that before?”