Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

35

Sitting there with the contents of Maxie’s bag spread out on the floor, a suffocating wave of panic overwhelmed him. Not guilt. Panic. He was faint, nauseated, breakfast forcing its way back up into his throat. He was sweating, too, through his shirt so that it was clinging to the lining of his sports jacket. He opened a window and sat back on his knees. He sucked in hungry lungfuls of cold air until he could push the panic back down. And when he’d gotten control of the nausea and the light-headed feeling had gone, he sat back against the wall. The icy air from the window hit the sheet of sweat on the back of his neck, giving him the chills.

Killing Maxie had been easier than he anticipated it would be. How odd, he thought, given how he’d once been so obsessed with her that he could not get her out of his head. How at times he’d risked everything just to catch a glimpse of her from across the street or to smell her too-sweet perfume or to brush against her in passing during a “chance” encounter at the market. And God, when they finally got together — Maxie having approached him — it was like nothing he’d ever experienced, not before and not since. She had once been a fantasy to him. Then she was everything to him. But she just had to ruin it, pushing him too hard to do things he wasn’t ready to do. She was like that, always pushing for more. More was the only language she had seemed to understand. If she’d only been a little patient and let him get his legs underneath him, it might’ve worked. Patience wasn’t one of Maxie’s virtues.

No, he was long past the guilt. Maxie’s blood on his hands was of her own making. If she hadn’t forced him away with her crazy demands, there might have been a future for them both, a way to see each other and still get on with their lives. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but Ginny’s vanishing the way she had had been a kind of blessing. It had gotten Maxie out of town and removed the dangling sword from over his head. But no, she had to come back, climb the ladder, and rehang the sword. That’s why it had been so easy to snap her neck, drive her farther up the Bluffs, and push her body down onto the beach. All the years of yearning and resentment were sufficient to make him want to end her, but when she degraded herself in front of him, calling him Loverboy — how could she do that after twenty-five years? — he wanted to rip her to pieces. How could she think he would want her? She was nothing but a pathetic old whore with her satin panties, stinking of perfume and desperation.

He closed the window and crawled on hands and knees to where the contents of Maxie’s bag were laid neatly out; he went over each of them again as he had already done three times before. He turned her empty bag upside down and shook it so that his shoulders ached. Nothing. He turned the bag right side up, stared into it. Empty. He rubbed his latex-gloved palms along the inside of the bag, feeling for a hidden pocket, for a slight rectangular bulge, for something, anything. But again, there was nothing. No matter how many times he went through her things or searched her bag, he could not find the one missing letter. That damn letter, written in his moment of despair and pain, was the only thing that tied him to her. She had promised to bring it. All the others were there. Now they were gone forever. Shredded. Burned. Nothing more than ashes and smoke. But the one missing letter would be enough to ruin him and bring what little was left of his world crashing down around his head.

He had been concerned about her cell phone, too, but those fears proved to be unfounded. Over the years, there had been the occasional late-night call to his house, the number blocked. When those calls went unanswered, no messages were left. When his wife picked up, the person at the other end would hang up. The number of calls had dwindled, averaging maybe one or two a year for the last five years or so. Maxie had an old-style flip phone and it was easy enough to scroll through her call records. He was relieved to see that none of her recent calls were to any of his numbers. He was even more relieved to see none of his numbers were listed in her phonebook. There was little doubt Maxie’s death would be declared a suicide, so it was unlikely the cops would dig into her phone records. And even if they did, so what? He could explain those calls away easily enough if he had to. Now her phone was history, too. Crushed beneath the wheels of his car, its pieces scattered along the road to Boston. No, it was that damned letter he had to worry about. That was on him.

There was a knock at his door.

“Give me two minutes,” he said, collecting the contents of Maxie’s bag and shoveling them back inside.

“There’s someone here to see you.”

“Two minutes,” he repeated.

“Okay.”

In a day or two, under cover of darkness, he would drive back up to the Bluffs and leave the bag in a nook between some rocks for the cops or a passerby to stumble on. In the meantime he slid the bag in a drawer and locked it. He sat at his desk for a few seconds, trying to regroup. It was only when he stood to open his office door that he realized he had been holding Maxie’s satin panties against the freshly shaven skin of his cheek. In that moment he realized both the depth of his obsession and hatred where Maxie Connolly was concerned. To be human was to be a contradiction. He threw her panties in the same drawer as her bag, but even as he did he knew he would have a much more difficult time leaving them somewhere to be found by a stranger.