The Blonde

12:28 a.m.

Basement, Edison Avenue

Tool time. Kowalski found oversized Glad freezer bags in a kitchen drawer; the Hunters liked to freeze large slabs of meat. Inside their 20.3-cubic-foot Frigidaire freezer chest, he founds whole chickens, legs of lamb, pork chops, flank steaks, you name it. They probably belonged to a warehouse shoppers’ club. Kowalski wondered if Katie would have tried to talk him into something like that—something that went against his longtime ethos of spare, frugal living. Then again, with a baby on the way, it would have been different. Hard to scrounge a diaper at the last minute. You needed stacks of those on hand. Or so he’d heard.

Stop that shit. Get the head, get out.

The freezer bags were the perfect size for a human head.

Down in the basement, Kowalski had his pick of gym bags in a cedar closet. He chose the blandest and sturdiest: a small Adidas Diablo duffel with an easy-access U-shaped opening at the top.

In a cabinet beneath a worktable, Kowalski found a cheap but usable hacksaw. The blade looked like it had never been used.

He’d hoped for a power tool of some sort, but nothing doing. Ed wasn’t into home repair, obviously.

Kowalski’s arm was going to be sore later. He just knew it.

As for destroying the house—and what a shame; it was a nice house, with hardwood floors and a kidney bean-shaped pool out back, complete with hot tub, surrounded by pine trees—that was easy enough. It was a stand-alone, so no neighbors to worry about. The explosion could be devastating, and it would stay limited to these grounds.

He’d use his favorite: the timed-spark gas-line burst. Enough accelerant spread around here and there, the structure would be obliterated within minutes. As would most forensics. Not that it mattered; nothing here could be tied to Kowalski. He was an investigatory dead end. A ghost.

As Kowalski walked upstairs, he thought about Claudia Hunter and how she’d fought her own death. She’d so desperately wanted to live. And for a strange moment, Kowalski found himself weak. Did Katie fight like this, at the very end? he wondered.

He looked at framed photos of Ed and Claudia. She was the strong one, no doubt about it. Ed looked vaguely uncomfortable in every shot, as if he were thinking, Do I really have to be here for this? And Claudia was kicking him in the shins, telling him, You not only have to be here, you have to fucking look like you’re enjoying it.

Ed, kissing a stranger at the airport, hoping for a quickie instead of working shit out at home with his wife.

Kowalski carried the Adidas duffel, Glad freezer bag, and hacksaw into the bathroom. It was time to see how thick Ed Hunter’s spine was.

The skin and muscle were easy. Sawing through the neck bone was a real effort. With every push and pull of the hacksaw, Kowalski found himself silently repeating a sentence, one syllable at a time. Can’t [push] be [pull] lieve [push] I [pull] do [push] this [pull] for [push] a [pull] live [push] ing. …