Killer Move

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I stopped being aware of my hands, my feet, my body. I was merely eyes.

“Whoa,” she said with a delighted laugh. “That is even better than I hoped. You totally look like you’re going to fall down or something. Priceless.”

“Cass?”

“Glad to see the facial recognition software is still functioning. After such a hard day, too. You rule.”

I didn’t know what else to say.

“That’s okay, take a moment,” she said. “You want a drink or something? There isn’t much. Though it could be after last night you’re avoiding alcohol, right?”

I tried to rethink everything since I got back to my house that afternoon. Since even before that—from the moment I’d woken in this woman’s apartment to find a word daubed on her bathroom door, in what I’d thought had been her blood. I even took a faltering step to the side, to check I was seeing what I thought I was, not some ringer in makeup, that the effect worked from a different angle, that I couldn’t see through her. That she was real.

“How are you not . . .”

“Look again at the photos.”

I looked at the pictures on the coffee table. I saw my pool. I saw the floating body. Then I saw the naked back in the third picture, and realized I perhaps should have wondered why someone might bother to strip a body before reclothing it in a black lacy blouse—a garment distinctive enough to make a man jump to the wrong conclusion when confronted with a corpse in his pool.

“That wasn’t you.”

“Well, yeah, obviously.”

“So who . . . ?”

I put my hand over my mouth, suddenly convinced I was going to throw up.

“You can’t guess?”

Who else was there? Whose apartment was I standing in? My voice was a croak between my fingers.

“Karren.”

“Yes. It is she. Target for your twisted affections, et cetera. I called her at your office this afternoon, saying I was a friend and that you were in trouble. She came running. Bitch was strong, though, when she realized none of the above was true. Scratched me quite badly.”

“But . . . why did you kill her?”

“Me? I haven’t killed anyone.” Her voice sounded brittle, false. She stepped back from the door, gesturing for me to come through. “Want to see who did?”

The door to the main bedroom was open. On the floor lay plastic sheeting covered in blood. Stained woodworking tools were scattered across it.

A man was tied naked to the bed. He seemed to realize that someone had entered the doorway. He raised his head an inch groggily. His eyes found mine. I could not tell what I was seeing in them, if anything.

“David Warner,” Cass said. “You meet at last. Though to be honest, he’s not at his best.”

Sprays of blood were all over the walls of what had been Karren’s bedroom. A place she’d gone to sleep, night after night. Read the books out there on her shelves. Given her e-mail a last check for the day.

And died.

I heard Cassandra walking away, back to the living room. I followed her. “And Karren had nothing to do with any of this?”

“With what?”

“With the game the Thompsons were playing.”

“Nope.”

“What about the other one?”

“There is no other one. This whole sorry mess was a diversion played by oldsters with too much time and money on their hands. A jaded parlor mind game over brandies and margaritas that got derailed when an old victim came back to even the score.”

“Bullshit. I talked to the Thompsons just before Hunter got to them. They were scared to death. They knew something else was going on. Tony said he thought Warner had been putting parts into the scenario that they hadn’t known about, trying to get back at them over some development deal they’d cut him out of.”

Cassandra shrugged. “Okay, so you know more than I thought. There may have been something along those lines. But no, Ms. White wasn’t involved on either count. In fact, I think she may even have been carrying a little torch for you. I found a few pictures in a drawer here. Nothing too stalky—just snaps of the handsome Realtor at parties, events, plus one of the two of you standing together at some tennis event. Sweet, huh.”

“But why did you let him kill her?”

“Containment. I didn’t know what you’d told her, or if she could put you at the wrong place at the right time or just generally cause trouble and stop this thing being neatly put to bed. Though to be honest, using her as set dressing for your pool wasn’t actually my idea.”

“So whose was it?”

She shrugged again, with an insolent little grin, a willful, gleeful child getting off on the power trip of screwing with an adult’s mind. I decided I didn’t have to understand what was going on. I started toward her.

“Don’t,” she said. The emo chick disappeared, turned off like a light, and she aged ten years in front of my eyes. She now had a gun in her hand.

I remembered I had one in my own. I looked down at it.

“You won’t,” she said.

“People keep telling me that,” I said thickly. “Sooner or later one of you is going to be wrong.”

“Nah. From what I gather you’ve already had a chance to kill someone today, a guy who’d done you manifest harm. You didn’t do it then. You won’t do it now.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said impotently.

“I’m sure. You’ve been modified, but not that much. The weird thing is that kind of means you win. In a way. Were it not for Hunter getting this thing so fucked up, you might be walking away from the game a richer man, friend of the Thompsons and lord of glorious new domains.”

“Where did all the blood come from? In the bed in your apartment?”

“Previous occupant.”

“Who was that?”

“Kevin.”

“That was Kevin’s apartment? But, but you said . . . you said it was him who called you. While I was there.”

“I lied. The man I work for gave Warner my phone number and told him I’d help. He left a message.”

“Why would you kill Kevin?”

“He got a little too intrigued with what was happening to you. Ironically, he thought it would be a good excuse for trying to get to know me better. He called, I went around to his apartment, and . . . well, stuff happened. Though not in the way he’d hoped.”

“I thought . . . I thought all that blood was from you.”

“Sweet. No. I just used it to write you a message before I left to fetch Warner off the beach. You know, on the bathroom door. Funny, huh? Did you laugh?”

“Who are you? You’re not part of the Thompsons’ game, are you?”

“No. Nor Warner’s, either. David had anger-management issues even by the standards I’m used to. His diminishing level of control had caused concern among acquaintances of his. They do not like any kind of attention being paid to their members. I was put in place here three weeks ago to keep an eye on him, and then—bang—the whole thing just darn explodes. Messy. Time to tidy up and put away.”

“Are you . . . Is this the group that Barclay told me about? The Straw Men, whatever?”

Any trace of levity left the woman’s face very suddenly. “Barclay said what?”

“Who are these people?”

“Nobody. They don’t exist. Just an urban myth. A cracker sheriff getting things all mixed up, bragging on stuff he doesn’t understand.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you like. But sometimes in life we pass by the side of things, Mr. Moore, like standing in the shadow of monsters in the night. Better to leave them be. Keep on going, don’t look back. Lest you be turned to stone. Or dead meat.”

“What—now you’re going to kill me, too?”

“Well, actually, there’s the question.” She dangled her gun from one finger. “My original plan was that you’re found here, a suicide surrounded by evidence, appalled by the magnitude of the things you’ve done. Barclay will be dropping the gun by later, the one you ‘bought’ and ‘used’ back at your house. With everything that’s been going on today down at the Circle, it will be a couple days before you’re found—by which time Warner will have expired as a result of unnatural causes.”

“But why?”

“The trail has to end here.”

“I’m supposed to have done all this? Killed Karren, and Emily, and Hallam? Left Warner to die?”

“It does sound odd,” she said. “But the acts of the deranged often do, at first, until we accept, yes, that’s what they did. And it won’t seem too out of line, in light of your recent Facebook activity.”

“What? I haven’t been on there for days.”

“Right—you’ve been too busy. But, yeah, turns out you’ve been posting a load of subtle crazy shit up there in the last forty-eight hours. How Ms. White was making moves against you behind your back. How your secret friend Mr. Warner had started to give you ideas about how to teach chicks like that a lesson. And how finally you realized you don’t need him anymore, and you can take vengeance on your tight-skirt-wearing colleague by yourself. Kind of dumb of you to have posted up those photographs of Karren this afternoon, but the flamboyantly deranged aren’t always very smart.”

“No one is going to believe I did all this.”

“Actually, they will. People will believe anything that’s lurid enough—we’re all still looking for that sense of wonder. Plus, it sounds like you played the wacko very well in the hospital on the way. That’ll help.”

“Is Nick . . . Which bit of this is he a part of?”

“Nick? I have no idea.”

“You know. You must know.”

“I really don’t. This is intriguing.”

“He . . . he was the guy who was trying to have an affair with my wife. Who was there when she drank the bottle of wine intended for the Thompsons.”

“I got nothing. That must just have been real life, I’m afraid. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

“But . . . who are you? Where do you come from?”

“Out there. In the world.”

“And you’re just going to do this to me, and go?”

“It’s the way it is. I’m sorry. You’re not actually a dumb guy, not totally anyway—you just got modified. I don’t even mean by the old folks here—I mean by life. Everybody does. You start with an open road, but then the walls start to close in—day by day, year by year. There’s no market for who you thought you were, so you become someone else. You get trammeled. You get crucified by the quotidian and you get smaller and smaller every minute until you die. Resisting that? It’s tough. Staying true to who you are is the only real superpower. I have it. You don’t.”

“But—”

“No, my friend, we’re done talking. Are you going to leave the building, or what? I would if I were you, because what I’m offering isn’t in anybody’s game plan but mine. It’s a cheat code, if you like. A secret side door. Who knows what you’ll find on the other side?”

“You’re going to . . . let me go?”

“It’s why the balcony doors are open, dumb-ass.”

I looked across at the doors, but couldn’t work out what she was getting at.

“Could be that you manage to get past me,” she said patiently. “That you flip over the side before I can get a clean shot, and run off into the night.”

“But . . . why would you do that?”

“Why does anyone do anything?” She smiled, wide and innocent, looking for a moment exactly like the girl who’d served me mascarpone frozen yogurt on a hot afternoon not long ago. “To see what happens next. My job was to tidy up the Warner situation and provide whatever collateral muddying seemed necessary or advisable. But as regards you personally . . . I have no instructions. I’m thinking it could be fun to watch. No one’s going to believe a single word you say. About anything. And if they should ever start to . . . well, then I guess I’ll just have to come and find you, right? So what’s it gonna be? Do I shoot you now or later? It’s your game. You choose.”

I walked out onto the balcony. I climbed onto the railing, all the while expecting to feel an impact, and then to die. I dropped down onto the grass, landing heavily, falling on my side. I got up.

Cass was on the balcony, looking down at me.

“I’ll count to a hundred, Mr. Moore,” she said. “Run and hide.”

The car was still there. I opened the driver’s-side door. Steph looked up at me, eyes wide.

“Is Karren okay?”

“She’s fine.”

My wife hauled herself across into the passenger seat. I got in and started the engine with hands that were not shaking and I drove away.