Sleep No More

Chapter 18

The morning sun was already high when Waters started up the back stairs to his office, his eyes burning from fatigue. After their discussion the night before, he and Lily had decided to put Annelise in their bed, and her constant shifting made sleep almost impossible. Likewise, Lily had decided to keep Ana home from school for the day. She didn’t want her vulnerable to Mallory in any way while Waters tried to manipulate Mallory into Sybil.

Waters paused at his office door, started to go down the hall to Cole’s, then went into his own. If he went into Cole’s office and found only his friend and partner, he did not know if he could keep his emotions in check. To see Cole unaware of the dark presence submerged beneath his conscious mind would be like talking to a friend who did not know he was dying of inoperable cancer.

Waters walked to his desk but did not sit down. Turning to the picture window, he opened the door that led to the balcony and went outside. The river flowed gunmetal gray today. Usually a rusty brown, it now looked dead and deep, like it could swallow anything dropped into it without a trace. The twin bridges moved with desultory traffic, log trucks and big diesels mostly. Some steel was being replaced on the eastbound span. Antlike workers crawled over the girders with surprising speed, and for fifty yards there was nothing but a makeshift guardrail to keep you from dropping eighty feet to the river below if you drifted over the line.

That’s what I’ve done, Waters thought. Drifted over the line. And now I’m a few short steps from prison. That he had been pulled over the line would be a fact only in his own mind, not those of the jurors who would convict him. All that his recitation of the “facts” as he saw them might accomplish would be to get him sentenced to the state mental hospital at Whitfield rather than to Parchman Prison in the Delta.

“Johnny?”

He whirled and found Cole standing three feet behind him, clean-shaven and dressed in wool trousers, a custom-tailored shirt, and a silk tie. This and his use of “Johnny” made Waters think he was facing Mallory, but he wasn’t sure enough to open a dialogue based on that assumption.

“Hey, Cole,” he said in a casual voice.

Cole’s smile disappeared. “Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“You know it’s me.”

Waters looked into the smoldering eyes. “I didn’t know for sure.”

“Now you do.”

He turned back to the rail and gazed over the river to Louisiana, flat farmland stretching to the horizon. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“I want you to decide today,” Cole said. The hand squeezed his shoulder with a near-painful grip. “By the end of the day, Johnny.”

Waters turned to face his partner. “I’ve already decided.”

Cole’s finger went to his neck as though to twist his hair, but there was not enough hair to twist. “Who?”

“Sybil.”

The big man’s shoulders sagged with relief. “I’m so glad. I thought you might be thinking of someone else.”

“Sybil makes the most sense. She has no family to ask questions. No one that I know of, anyway.”

“She has an aunt in Houma. And a half-sister in Boutte. But she’s not close to either of them.”

Waters nodded. “I guess that’s it, then.”

An unfamiliar vulnerability entered Cole’s face. “Is that all you have to say? ‘I guess that’s it’?”

“You’re right. There’s a lot more. There’s Eve’s murder. Lily and Annelise. The EPA investigation.”

Cole huffed with exasperation. “Are you going to be in the office all day?”

“Except for lunch, I guess.”

“Good.” He leaned toward Waters’s face, then stopped himself. “I want to kiss you, Johnny. But I know it would make you uncomfortable.”

“Sybil won’t make me uncomfortable.”

Cole laughed softly. “I had a feeling she wouldn’t.”

Waters passed the remainder of the morning by pretending to work, mostly to keep up appearances for Sybil and any visitors who might stop by. Things needed to appear normal to the very end. Tragedy should appear to strike in the midst of humdrum existence. Oddly, he saw no further sign of Cole. Around noon, he heard his door open and looked up to find Sybil standing in it. She was smiling, and her eyes sparkled.

“What is it?” he asked, trying not to look her in the eye.

“I just wondered if you wanted me to keep holding all your calls.”

Waters nodded, doubting what she said was true. Sybil was practically glowing-she wanted to tell him something. But he could hardly look at her. Twenty-eight years old. Beautiful. Her whole life ahead of her. Why did she deserve to die more than Cole, who had squandered almost every blessing he’d ever been given? Because Waters hadn’t taken the time to get to know her well?

“Why do you look so happy?” he asked at last.

Sybil bounced on her toes like a giddy cheerleader. “Oh…I don’t know. It’s just a good day.”

A hollow feeling spread through his chest. “Anything to do with Cole?”

She looked at the ceiling, but her smile only broadened. “I don’t know what I should say.”

“It’s all right. Nobody’s getting fired, Sybil.”

She looked him in the eye, unable to contain her news any longer. “I’m seeing him tonight.”

Waters tried to keep his face impassive.

“John, he’s leaving his wife. He’s finally doing it!”

In that moment, Waters almost cracked. He had a sense that Mallory had told Sybil this out of cruelty, but then he reconsidered. Soldiers sometimes offered a doomed prisoner a cigarette or told him a joke before shooting him in the back of the head. A small kindness before the end.

“I’m glad for you, Sybil. I hope it’s the right thing for you.”

She nodded with the excitement of a young bride. “It is. I know it is.”

Waters could think of nothing to say.

“It is for him too,” Sybil added with sudden severity. “He’s been unhappy for so long.”

“Yes. He has.”

“Well…I guess I should get back to work.”

She smiled and went out, closing the door softly behind her.

Waters put his head down on his desk, already grieving for Sybil and for himself. Tonight. He had not expected Mallory to move so fast. If he went through with what he and Lily had planned, tonight he would lose a part of himself forever. Just as he had when he committed adultery with Eve. Only this time would be different. Not long ago, he had questioned his belief in an immortal soul. Today, he felt for the first time that his was in mortal peril.

He could remain in the office no longer. He stood, took his keys from the drawer, and walked down the hall to Cole’s office.

“I’m going home for lunch,” he said as he walked in.

Cole did not respond. He sat with his head on his desk, snoring loudly. Waters sensed that if he woke Cole now, he would find his old friend looking out of the familiar eyes. But he could not be sure. And if all went well, Cole would be himself again by tonight. That thought pushed Waters across the room to Cole’s side of the desk. He felt strangely compelled to lay his hand on his old friend’s shoulder, to give some parting gesture while Cole was actually Cole. He extended his right hand, then froze.

The desk drawer stood open about six inches, and Cole’s right hand lay in it. The fingers of that hand gripped the finely checkered butt of the.357 Magnum Waters had seen yesterday.

The thought that Cole might be this close to suicide stunned him. If he and Lily carried through with their plans for Sybil, and then Cole took his own life…the irony would be unendurable. But was it suicide Cole was planning? Perhaps he was holding the gun for protection. Maybe he was too afraid of Vegas enforcers to sleep without a gun in his hand. But somehow, Waters didn’t think that was it. Instinct told him that his friend, already stressed to the breaking point by his debts, now had blackouts, memory loss, and exhaustion to contend with, just as Lily had. Beyond this, Cole had knowingly slept with his best friend’s wife. If he had not been too drunk to remember this, even Cole would suffer intense guilt over such a transgression. Taken as a whole, all this might be enough to drive him to suicide.

Waters was thinking of trying to remove the gun from Cole’s hand when he saw an ugly scab on the inside of Cole’s left wrist. Bending at the waist, he saw that the scab was one of several wounds there, some so fresh the blood was still drying. At the center of the web of cuts were three deep, parallel gouges, much like those he had found beneath Eve’s watch. Only these were far worse.

The sight of those wounds caused a profound change within Waters. Though inflicted by Mallory, they seemed emblematic of the pain Cole had been carrying with him for the past several years. By choosing Sybil as their surrogate for Mallory’s murder, Waters and Lily had spared Cole. He would live on, making the same mistakes he had always made, searching for happiness and never finding it, and probably die young of a heart attack, or from the complications of the diabetes he so religiously ignored. It suddenly struck Waters how simple it would be to lift Cole’s gun hand, put the barrel of the Magnum to his temple, and pull the trigger. By the time Sybil came running in, Waters could be on the other side of the desk, gaping in shock and weeping genuine tears of grief. Mallory would be dead, and Cole’s death would be ruled a suicide. Hell, with Cole’s money troubles well known in town, no one would even question it. Cole kept a couple of Polo shirts in the closet across the room. Just to be safe, Waters would wrap his hand in one before he fired, to keep any powder residue off his hands.

He looked from the scars to the gun, then at the back of Cole’s big head. The growing bald spot there looked almost pathetically human. Cole’s got life insurance through the company, he thought. He had verified this himself, along with all other policies, after Cole had let the liability premium lapse. If the $500,000 death benefit were used to pay off Cole’s Vegas debts, that would leave a $150,000 balance, which Waters would have to pick up. He would also have to pay substantial sums on a regular basis to keep Cole’s wife and children living in even a shadow of the style to which they were accustomed. If I pull that trigger, he thought, that’s the least I can do.

Somehow, this thought did not revolt him as he knew it should. The simple fact was, if he killed Mallory now, the danger to Lily and Annelise would end immediately. Cole would probably lose several years of life, but there was a strong chance that he might not live more than a few days anyway.

Waters prodded Cole’s shoulder.

His partner groaned but did not move.

With a strange sense of detachment, Waters went to the closet, took a red Polo shirt from it, wrapped it around his hand, and went back to the desk. Cole was still snoring.

Bending his knees, Waters laid his cotton-swathed hand over Cole’s and lifted the.357 into the air. There was a hitch in Cole’s breathing, but the snoring resumed. Very slowly, he moved the barrel against Cole’s temple and slipped his own finger inside the trigger guard. This close to his partner, he could smell Cole’s distinctive odor, a mix of sweat and aftershave and cigar smoke that Waters would know anywhere with his eyes closed.

God forgive me, he thought, and began to squeeze the trigger.

Before he applied sufficient pressure to break the trigger, Waters saw a vision of a room filled with people. Older people mostly, row upon row of them, and a man in black was speaking about God. As he droned on, Waters turned in his pew and saw a lone boy like himself sitting between two adults. The boy was Cole Smith, a freckled thirteen years old, but his face held enough empathy for a man twice his size. The empathy was for John Waters, who had just lost his father.

Waters froze with the trigger near to breaking, and in that horrifying lacuna of time, he heard Sybil coming up the hall.

“Cole?” she called. “Hey, sleepyhead!”

He dropped Cole’s gun hand back into the drawer and tossed the Polo shirt under the desk.

“What are you doing?” Sybil asked from the doorway.

Waters nearly jumped out of his shoes. “Trying to be quiet. Cole’s still sleeping.”

“He’s been asleep half the morning.”

Waters quickly crossed to the door. “Maybe he drank too much last night.”

Sybil frowned like a future wife. “He’s not drinking tonight. He says things he doesn’t mean when he’s drunk. And I’ve had it with that. Tonight I’m getting the truth.”

Waters wanted to pat her arm, but he could not bring himself to touch her. He slipped past her and went into the hall. “I’m going home for lunch. I may not be back.”

Sybil nodded and peeked into Cole’s office. “Maybe I should wake him up.”

Waters looked over her shoulder and tried to calculate the probabilities of what would happen if she did. Who would awake? Cole? Or Mallory?

“I’d let him sleep,” he said, catching the scent of perfume from Sybil’s neck. “You want him rested and clearheaded tonight.”

She gave him a preoccupied nod. “You’re right. Hey, what were you looking for?”

“Oh…I lent him my dictation recorder yesterday. No big deal.”

She nodded again. “No scotch for that boy tonight.”

Leaving Sybil standing in Cole’s door, Waters walked to the back stairs, his mind focused on Lily and Annelise. That was the only way he would survive the night’s work.

Waters drove slowly through the darkness of North Union Street, Lily rigid in the seat beside him. Annelise lay asleep on the seat behind them, a gun under the seat beneath him. Large Victorian houses lined both sides of the road, their gingerbread trim strangely threatening in the night. He wasn’t driving his Land Cruiser or Lily’s Acura. An hour ago, Lily had dropped him a quarter mile from an oil field equipment lot on Liberty Road, where an old four-door pickup always sat with a key under the mat. It belonged to a well-checker Waters knew, a man he hadn’t spoken to for more than two years. That was one virtue of small towns. Things changed little, and when they did, they changed slowly.

He braked on the 1200 block, scanning the house fronts for numbers. Sybil Sonnier lived in a detached apartment behind one of the larger Victorians on North Union. Many single people preferred to live in these cozy quarters rather than take apartments in the homogeneous complexes around town.

“There it is,” Lily said in a taut voice. “Twelve-sixty-six.”

Most of the houses here stood fairly close together, but 1266 was surrounded by more than an acre of land, and a second driveway led beneath twisted old oaks to a faint streetlight behind the main house. That light marked Sybil’s apartment. Waters had scouted all this during the afternoon. No one could ask for more isolation in the middle of town, except perhaps at Bienville.

There was only one light on in the main house. The third floor. A bathroom, Waters guessed.

“Park a couple of blocks down,” Lily said. “Like we planned.”

Waters swerved right, turned into the driveway, and headed straight toward the streetlight behind the main house.

“What are you doing?” Lily whispered.

“This is better. If you sat on the street, a random cop could come by and talk to you. Even if you ducked down, he might check the truck because it’s unfamiliar or because the plate’s out of date.”

Lily looked at him a moment longer, then nodded.

Thirty yards from the small two-story structure, Waters pulled behind a pile of old tires, then shut off the engine. He had no idea what the tires were doing there, other than collecting nesting water for mosquitoes, but they provided excellent cover. They sat in the punctuated silence of the ticking motor, watching a dim yellow glow in the second-floor window of the apartment. The pickup smelled of stale crude oil, cigarettes, and diesel fuel.

“Look,” said Lily, pointing toward the first floor. “There’s Cole’s Lincoln.”

Waters recognized the tail end of the silver land yacht sticking out past the far corner of the apartment.

“And there’s Cole,” she said.

Light speared into the night as a door opened on the second floor. Then Cole’s bulk blotted out most of it. He seemed to stagger on the landing of the outdoor stairwell, but then he caught himself and turned back to the door. A much smaller form stepped into the light. Sybil, wearing a transparent gown with nothing underneath. As she reached up to Cole’s neck with both arms, Waters cranked down his window and heard the tinkle of laughter. Cole bent and kissed her for a while, then slapped her on the rump and started down the steps. Sybil stood in the light, watching him go.

“How can we be sure Mallory went into her?” Lily asked. “If the woman has to climax for the transfer to be made…”

Waters had asked the same question that afternoon. Mallory had called and told him to come to Sybil’s house after midnight, where they would have their first celebration. When Waters asked how she could be sure the transference would happen the first time, Mallory had replied, If I were Cole, I might be worried. But I’m not, am I? Tonight will be the best sex Sybil ever had, and she’ll have no idea that it’s because I’m a woman.

“You’ll have to say something to her,” Lily said. “See how she reacts. If she’s Mallory, you’ll know after the first few words. The second you do-shoot her.”

The stately rumble of Cole’s Lincoln filled the night, and then the bluish glow of headlights arced into the dark from behind the apartment. Sybil remained on the landing, watching to be sure her lover made it to the street without difficulty. Cole must have been drinking after all. After a few moments, the Lincoln backed up, stopped, then shot forward on the little drive and rolled past the pile of tires, headed for North Union Street. Sybil waited until Cole made the turn, then closed her door.

“Now we wait,” Lily said, glancing at her watch. “One hour.”

Waters sighed and looked into the backseat at Annelise. An hour seemed an eternity when you were sitting on someone else’s property with a pistol under your seat. What if the owner had seen him pull in? What if the police had already been called to check out the suspicious vehicle?

“Take it easy,” Lily said, laying her hand on his thigh. “We’re fine.”

“I know.” But he didn’t feel fine. He had wanted to leave Lily at home with Annelise. Then his wife could swear that he had been home with her while the murder took place. But Lily had insisted on coming. Without her there, she feared, his nerve might fail. A moral man was bound to question himself during such a terrible act, perhaps even hesitate at the moment of truth. She wanted him to know she was absolutely committed to perpetrating this crime in order to save her family.

Lily’s presence made their alibi more difficult to carry off, but Annelise would save them. Lily had put her to bed at home at her regular bedtime, but not before slipping a good dose of Benadryl into her Sprite. All Ana would remember in the morning was going to bed at the usual time in the usual way-nothing of a midnight truck ride and certainly nothing of a murder. Before leaving the house, Waters had also ordered a Pay-Per-View film on a satellite channel. The film lasted two and a half hours, and he and Lily had both seen it during its theatrical release. By the time it ended, they would be back home again, their work done.

The wild card was Cole. Waters believed that once Cole was himself again, Lily’s story would make him see the necessity of what they had done, and that he would support whatever story they told him was required. But even if he didn’t believe them, what choice did he have? With Sybil dead, he would be in more desperate need of an alibi than anyone, and should he balk, they could easily frame him for her murder. All it would take was an anonymous call to the police. They would check Sybil’s apartment for hair, fiber, and fingerprint evidence, and Sybil’s body for Cole’s semen. Cole rarely practiced safe sex with regular lovers. An anonymous tip would doom him as surely as Waters was doomed for Eve’s murder. Much easier for Cole to swear he had been watching a Pay-Per-View movie at Linton Hill with his friends while their daughter slept upstairs.

Their only real problem was time. If Cole went to a bar now instead of going home to his empty house (Jenny had taken the kids to her mother’s in New Orleans), it would greatly complicate Cole’s alibi. But Waters had a plan for that too. A deep gully ran very close behind Sybil’s apartment. From his childhood, Waters remembered steep, heavily wooded banks along the edge of the ravine, and he had verified the accuracy of his memory during this afternoon’s ride, by traveling along a parallel street. If he dumped Sybil’s body down that kudzu-choked bank, it might be several days before she was found. Forty-eight hours, at the very least, unless animals dragged her body into the open. Fixing an exact time of death would be problematic at that point, even with the highly efficient methods of an FBI forensic unit.

Lily touched his shoulder and pointed into the backseat at Annelise’s prone form. “She’s why we’re doing this,” she said softly.

“I know that.”

“I know it’s hard to wait. Think about something else.”

“Like?”

“The future. Life is going to be different after this.”

He swallowed. “No doubt about that.”

She leaned close so that he could see her eyes in the dark. “Not like that. Not bad. I’m going to start taking care of you again. No more distance. No more coldness. Life is too precious for that.”

“You’re right. And we’re about to take it from someone.”

Anger tightened Lily’s face. “Do you know what will happen if we don’t? Mallory will kill her anyway. If you spare Sybil now, with Mallory inside her, you’re not sparing her anything. It’s the same as letting a truck run over her. Mallory wouldn’t leave anything of her. She’d gradually devour her mind, like a swarm of locusts nibbling away.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right.”

He expected Sybil’s upstairs light to wink out, but it didn’t. He took this as a sign that Mallory had succeeded. If Sybil were still Sybil, and had just made love after a romantic dinner, he would expect her to be asleep by now. At least watching TV in her bed. But he didn’t see the flicker of a television through any of the windows. He had a feeling that Mallory was sitting in the silent house, waiting for him.

“I’m going,” he said, reaching under the seat for the gun.

“It hasn’t been an hour,” Lily protested.

“I don’t care. I’m doing it now.”

The gun felt cold in his hand. It was an old Smith amp; Wesson.38 Special that an uncle had given him when he was a teenager. His uncle bought it at a lodge auction, with no records of any kind made.

Lily watched him check the cylinder. He had driven here with an empty chamber under the hammer, but now he took a shell from his pocket and filled it.

“Here,” she said, dropping a pair of latex gloves in his lap. “Put these on.”

“Where did you get those?”

“My makeup box. They came with some hair coloring, but they’ll do the job.”

The gloves were too small, but he pulled them on anyway.

“Keep them on until you get back here. Someone might be able to take fingerprints from the inside of the latex.”

Her attention to detail amazed him. He nodded, then reached for the door handle, but Lily grabbed his shoulder and peered urgently into his eyes.

“Don’t think of her as Sybil. You have to see her as Mallory.”

“I know.” He pulled the handle and kicked the stubborn old door loose from its frame. “When you hear the shot, start the motor.”

“I love you, John. This is the only way.”

He pulled himself free, opened the door, and climbed down from the truck. Despite his efforts to be quiet, the door screeched when he closed it. He winced but did not hesitate, running low and quick across the open ground to the first floor of the apartment.

Through the nearest window, he saw a combination den/living room with a kitchenette against the far wall. A staircase went up one wall on the inside. Good. He reached down and tried the window. Locked. There were three more on the ground floor. He moved to the next one and pulled. The window shifted in its frame. Setting the pistol on the ground, he put both hands on the sash and pulled up with a steady pressure. The window gave and slid upward.

In seconds he stood inside the dark room. He smelled vinegar. Probably some sort of salad dressing. Meat too. Glancing toward the kitchenette, he saw dirty plates with the remnants of rib-eye steaks on them. Sybil didn’t seem the type to leave dirty dishes out, and he took this as another sign that Mallory had succeeded.

Drawing a deep breath, he moved to the staircase. The steps were carpeted, but he still put a foot on the second step and tested his weight. It didn’t creak. If Mallory was upstairs, there was no reason to be quiet, but he couldn’t shake the fear wrapped like tentacles around his heart. Gripping the gun with his finger on the trigger, he started up.

Lily sat in the pickup, listening to Annelise breathing. Once, the respirations got so faint that she reached over the seat and put her hand on Ana’s chest to feel the reassuring rise and fall. For a few panicked seconds, she wondered if she had used too much Benadryl-then the inhalation came, weak but there.

Where was John now? On the porch? In the apartment? She prayed that he had the nerve to go through with it. Her husband had great compassion; that was one reason she had married him. Now compassion was his enemy.

“Hurry,” she murmured. “Don’t think. Just do it.”

She had been sitting in the truck, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The cloak of night parted to reveal a yard with a swing set, seesaws, and a rose garden by Sybil’s apartment. Lily could imagine Sybil out there on Sunday mornings, alone, doing her best to make her apartment seem like a home. That simple thought pierced her heart, but she shut her mind to empathy. It wasn’t too difficult. All she had to do was focus on an image of herself dangling a butcher knife over her own daughter’s head. Superimposed on this horrifying scene was another: naked figures thrashing in ghostly green light, her own face clenched in ecstasy as she demeaned herself in ways that nauseated her now. Mallory Candler had done all that.

Lily actually remembered Mallory from St. Stephens. Like Cole, Mallory had been a senior when Lily was in the ninth grade. Her clearest memory of Mallory was a tall, proud, and stunningly beautiful girl moving through the halls of the school, leaving a wake of staring boys behind her. Lily had been a gangly freshman then, obsessed with long-distance running, though in her secret heart she knew she used running as an excuse not to deal with her insecurity about boys. Someone like Mallory Candler was beyond her understanding, a girl so radiantly desirable that grown men fawned over her whenever she was around. Lily had once seen her own father become tongue-tied in Mallory’s presence. Having experienced that reality, it was hard to imagine Mallory as the obsessively jealous psychotic her husband described. Yet she knew it could be true. What would it feel like to be such a creature and be denied something after so many years of having everything?

Lily went rigid, gooseflesh covering her skin, her eyes and ears alert. Something had snapped outside the truck. She didn’t think an animal had made the sound. A large deer perhaps, but she was downtown, and her senses told her it had taken more weight than that to produce the sound she’d heard. She peered toward the main house, then the apartment, but she saw nothing. What would she say if the owner of the house suddenly appeared at her window with a gun?

Hi, I’m Lily Waters. My husband had to stop off and tell his receptionist something. I hope we didn’t scare you in this awful truck. John had to go out and check a leak at one of his wells on the river…

“That’s exactly what I’ll say,” she whispered.

And if a shot rang out while the owner stood there? What then? Would John have to kill him too?

Yes, said a voice inside her. That’s what happens when you start this kind of madness….

Annelise stirred in the backseat. Lily reached back and rubbed her shoulder, praying she would not wake.

Halfway up Sybil’s stairs, Waters stood motionless against the wall. He had heard something. A groan or a snore, perhaps. But only one. He had to keep moving, yet something held him where he was.

Go, he told himself. Don’t stop.

But his feet remained still. The gun had felt so natural in the truck. Now he wanted to throw it on the floor. He knew what horror awaited him upstairs. That was how he thought of Mallory now-not as a person, but as a thing. There was no human pity in her, no real love. He had no choice but to go on. Yet the image of Sybil smiling in his office today would not leave him. So young, so trusting. She had trusted Cole Smith with her heart, which was the height of lunacy. But she was not the first young woman to do it.

Waters shut his eyes and tried to visualize himself shooting her. If you can’t see it in your mind, you’ll never do it in life. A popular New Age platitude. And why should it be difficult? After all, he’d already killed one woman. At least his hands had killed her. But killing was not a thing of hands. It was a thing of the mind. Killing in cold blood demanded a cold mind. A gun made it easier, a matter of a momentary trigger pull rather than the eternity of crushing hands and bulging eyes it had taken to end Eve Sumner’s life. But for a man with a conscience, a single finger’s pull could be more difficult than lifting a mountain. Would shooting Sybil from behind make it easier? It seemed the act of a coward, but wouldn’t it be better for her if she never saw it coming?

That’s how I’d want it, he thought. None of that life-passing-before-your-eyes bullshit. If you saw it coming, those last seconds could dilate into a lifetime of regret and self-recrimination. But with a bullet through the base of your brain, there would be none of that-no white light or angel choirs either-only instant and utter darkness.

He gritted his teeth and forced himself up to the next step. Then the next. There was a small landing at the top. Two doors led off it. The one on the right led to a bathroom. He saw light reflecting off a stainless-steel leg bracing the sink. The other door, only slightly open, would be her bedroom. Yellow light trickled onto the landing as though in invitation.

Why is she up here? he wondered. Why isn’t she waiting downstairs with a bottle of champagne? Maybe she was sitting naked on the bed in her favorite position, legs crossed yoga-style, silently awaiting the lover she had fought for a decade to reach. But then he remembered Cole, fast asleep at his desk that afternoon. Maybe Mallory was at this moment struggling to take control of Sybil’s sleeping mind. If so, it was the perfect opportunity to destroy her. Before she had a chance to plead for mercy or fight back. Only if she was asleep…how could he be certain Mallory was inside her? He concealed the.38 behind his back and slipped into the bedroom.

Sybil lay on the bed, the covers pulled loosely over her chest, her lower body exposed in the sheer nightgown. But for her curves and pubic hair, she looked like a sleeping child. She still wore her makeup. Maybe she’d passed out from too much alcohol. He knew he should wake her. If she panicked, she was Sybil. If she smiled and pulled him into the bed, she was Mallory. Simple. But he could not find it in himself to touch her.

Do it! Lily shouted in his mind. Hurry!

Waters picked up a throw pillow and held it over the muzzle of the gun, then held the pillow above Sybil’s face. His right hand began to shake. In his mind, he saw her eyes snap open, as ravenously alive as a vampire’s, filled with hatred and fury at his betrayal.

“Come on,” he whispered. “For Annelise…”

He tried to pull the trigger, but his finger would not obey.

Lily lay shivering in the backseat of the truck, trying to cover Annelise’s body with her own. There was someone outside. Close. Moving carefully. She could hear them through the window John had left open. It had taken all her self-restraint not to start the engine and race away, but she couldn’t abandon her husband. She wished she had brought a gun of her own, but there had seemed no reason. Shielding Annelise with her body seemed an ineffectual act, but she might keep Ana alive long enough for John to save her if an attacker came out of the night. If that happened, she would scream through the window and pray that John heard her. She was holding back a scream when a large black figure loomed in the driver’s window.

“What the hell are you doing, Lily?” Cole asked.

Lily’s throat locked shut.

“Do you think you’re invisible back there?”

As she stared up in shock, Cole began to laugh, a dark, deranged sound that stopped the blood in her veins.

Oh God, she screamed silently, thinking of John and his mission in Sybil’s little house. Oh, no…

Cole’s laughter went on and on.

Waters pushed the shaking gun into the pillow resting against Sybil’s head. She opened her mouth, and he knew from the smell that she had not brushed her teeth. As his finger tightened, she suddenly rolled away from him, groaned, and started to get out of bed. Waters stood silent as a tree as she walked to the door, crossed the landing, and went into the bathroom. The sound of urination reached him, and in his mind he saw his own wife as he had a hundred times, sitting sleepily on the commode, oblivious to the world, utterly and pathetically human.

I can’t do this, he thought. Walk in there and fire a bullet into her face?

As the sound slowed to a trickle, he darted onto the landing and rushed down the stairs.

“Hello?” Sybil called drowsily. “Cole?”

Waters froze on the ground floor. Why did she call out for Cole? Mallory would have said, “Johnny?” Maybe Sybil was stronger than Lily or Cole. Maybe Mallory couldn’t control her as easily-

“Is someone there?”

As footsteps descended the stairs, he folded his body and clambered through the window, then sprinted for the truck, pulling off the gloves as he ran.

He saw the shadow of Lily waiting in the backseat and wondered if Annelise had awakened. Lily would be angry, but she’d have to understand. They’d have to find another way, that was all. He opened the door and jumped into the driver’s seat.

“I knew you couldn’t do it,” Cole said, popping up from the floor of the passenger seat.

Waters tried to bring up his gun, but Cole’s big hand was already pointing a pistol over the seat at Lily and Annelise.

“You could make me kill two babies,” Cole said, “but you can’t kill a secretary that’s too stupid to live. Give me that fucking gun.”

Waters handed it over.

The fury and hurt in Cole’s eyes made him sick with fear.

“You felt pity for Sybil?” Cole said in a cracked voice. “I know it wasn’t for me. If you’d thought it was just me in there, you’d have pulled the trigger without a thought.”

“Mallory-”

Holding Waters at bay with his own pistol, Cole aimed his.357 at Annelise’s head. “I should kill her. It’s only fair, after what you made me do. Besides, you two need to learn a lesson.”

Lily began to cry. Waters wished he had shot Cole that afternoon.

“Shut up! You simpering little nothing. What good are you? You hardly gave him one child. You can’t even make love with him like a woman.”

Lily covered Annelise like a blanket, her face empty of anything but terror.

“Don’t do it!” Waters begged.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“The Mallory Candler I loved would never do that.”

Cole shuddered. “What?”

“The Mallory I knew would never be that cruel. I hurt her terribly, yes. She was heartbroken. But she never really hurt someone physically. You say you’re Mallory Candler. You may have started as Mallory…but in the ten years you’ve been like this, you’ve changed. Something’s twisted you. Mallory loved me. You don’t love me.”

Fury contorted Cole’s face into something horrible. “I love you more than anyone possibly could!”

“No. You want to own me. That’s not love. You don’t want to make me happy. You want me to make you happy. But I can’t. Because you’ll never feel loved enough.”

Cole’s lips quivered.

“Yes, I was going to kill you,” Waters said. “I honestly thought you would be better off dead. At peace. God forgive me, but you were meant to die ten years ago. Something allowed you to survive…like this. But it’s not natural. It’s not fair for you to steal someone else’s body, someone else’s life, to live out what you think is the life you deserved.”

A tear streaked Cole’s face. “It wasn’t fair for that man to rape me!” As he wiped away the tear, a savage light came into Cole’s eyes. “Who are you to tell me what I deserve? You gave me children and then took them away. You left me an empty shell.”

The gun shook against Annelise’s head.

“For God’s sake, no!” Lily pleaded. “She’s just a child!”

Waters closed his eyes. “I loved you once,” he said quietly. “Show me you’re worth loving again.”

Cole gasped, and his eyes locked on to Waters’s face. “You think I want to hurt her? You’re making me do this! You were going to kill me.”

“What choice did you give me!”

Cole’s left hand rose to his neck as if to twist a lock of hair around his finger, but there was no hair there. He seemed suddenly purposeless, disoriented. Waters was about to speak when Cole jerked the gun away from Annelise’s head and leaped out of the truck.

Lily began to sob in the backseat. Waters cranked the engine and threw the truck into gear, roaring out of the little driveway like a man fleeing the scene of a murder.

When they pulled up to Linton Hill, Lily was still crying. Waters had not dumped the pickup as planned; he didn’t think Lily could handle the logistics in her state. He parked the old Ford behind the house and lifted Annelise into his arms.

“Open the back door,” he told Lily. “Go up and get her bed ready.”

Lily ran to the door and opened it with her key, then disappeared into the house. Carrying Annelise up the stairs winded him, more from his nerves than her weight. As he pulled the covers up over her chest, Lily pulled him toward the door.

“What are we going to do? What can we do?”

Before he could answer, the downstairs phone rang. He bounded down the steps and checked the caller ID on the den telephone: UNKNOWN NUMBER. At 1:20 A.M.

He picked up the receiver but said nothing.

“John?” said a familiar voice. “John? It’s Penn Cage.”

“Penn! What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry to call so late. I’ve been calling for the past hour. I was about to get in my car and drive over there.”

Waters didn’t think it was possible to be more stressed than he was already, but the edge in his lawyer’s voice did the trick.

“What’s happened?”

“Are you on a land line?”

“Yes.”

“The police have a search warrant for your house. I’d expect them there by six a.m.”

Waters felt dizzy. “Why a search all of a sudden?”

“They may have new evidence. There’s just no way to know.”

“Okay,” Waters said, not at all sure what he should do.

“I’m telling you this,” Penn said carefully, “because people often have things inside their homes they’d rather not see made public. Pornography. Recreational drugs. Sexual paraphernalia. Diaries or journals…”

Evidence of murder, Waters thought. “I hear you. I appreciate the heads-up.”

“It won’t do any real good for me to be there during the search, but call me as soon as it’s over. You’re liable to be taken in for questioning again. Things could go south very quickly from here, but stay calm.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Waters hung up.

“That was Penn?” Lily asked from behind him. “What did he say?”

She had wiped away her tears, but she looked as though she might collapse at any moment. He wished he could spare her the truth, but she had to know.

“The police are going to search this house in four hours.”

Lily’s head began shaking like she had Parkinson’s disease. “What are we going to do?”

“They won’t find anything. I’ll-”

“What are we going to do about Mallory?”

He started to go to her, but then he realized that the fear in her eyes had been replaced by fury.

“How could you do this to us?” she whispered. “How did we get here?”

“Lily-”

“You still love her, don’t you?”

“What?”

Lily was nodding, her eyes flicking back and forth, focusing on nothing. “You still love Mallory. You always have.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Her face was so white that he feared she might faint. “How could Mallory have done any of this if you didn’t still love her? That’s what’s kept her alive all these years!”

Waters stepped forward, his hands held out to calm her, but Lily backed away as though afraid he would strike her.

“What kind of husband are you?” she cried. “What kind of father are you?”

“Lily, please. Listen to me.”

“She told me about you getting her pregnant! While you were in Sybil’s apartment. She told me about the abortions. She thinks my miscarriages happened because of what you made her do.”

“That’s impossible.”

Lily’s eyes were wild. “When I lost those babies, I knew there was a reason. I searched for some mistake I’d made…some sin I had to pay for. But it wasn’t my sin, was it? It was yours.”

Before he could reply, she turned and fled the den.

He stood alone in the roaring silence, his options exhausted, his hope all but gone. The second hand on his watch seemed to be flying.