The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Thirty-four

For that day and the two days following, he never left the house. He spent hours at the computer, checking every site that might conceivably have news of the murder-suicide on Stapleton Terrace. There wasn’t much news, and it was always the same.

And if there was a break in the case, he wouldn’t learn about it on his computer. There’d be a knock on his door.

That’s what he was waiting for, a knock on the door. A couple of cars outside, one from the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office, another from the state police.

Maybe a whole fleet of them. Men standing around looking grim, wearing vests, holding automatic rifles.

Or maybe it would just be Radburn, all by himself, with nothing but the holstered Colt he wore on his hip. Just stopping by with a couple of questions...

Because one thing was sure. He wasn’t going to get away with it.

He was so sure of this that his behavior might have been designed to make it come true. Waiting for them, anticipating their arrival at any moment, he kept changing his mind about the nature of his eventual response.

At first he planned to meet them at the door, hands out in front of him, waiting for the cuffs. The words playing in his mind were variations on a theme, all of them admissions of guilt. “I did it.”

“Okay you got me.” And, as the hours stretched, “What took you so long?”

At some point during the evening of the first day, he went to the closet and came back with the Smith & Wesson revolver. He made sure it was loaded and put it on the table to the right of his computer. His hand found the mouse and he checked a website; when he found nothing of interest, his hand moved of its own accord from the mouse to the gun butt.

He took the gun along when he stationed himself in front of the television set. He watched a local newscast, then turned to TCM, where they were showing D.O.A. He’d seen it several times over the years, with Edmund O’Brien unforgettable as the doomed poisoning victim who walks into the police station to report his own murder.

It matched his mood even if it didn’t help it any, and as he watched he toyed with the gun like a monk with a string of worry beads.

When he went to bed he put the gun on the night table. He didn’t expect to fall asleep, and the next thing he knew the room was bright with dawn. He bolted out of bed, reaching for the gun with one hand while the other groped for something to cover himself from the watching eyes.

But there were no eyes on him, no invaders in his house.

Nor was the gun where he’d left it, and that gave him another moment of panic until he located it under his pillow. Sometime during the night he’d evidently felt a need to have it closer.

He swung out the cylinder, confirmed that the weapon was still fully loaded. He closed the cylinder and put the gun under the pillow, then moved it to the night table. Neither place seemed right to him, and he carried the thing into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the sink while he showered.

And kept an eye on it while he shaved.

When he moved to the computer, the gun went with him. When he split an English muffin and dropped it in the toaster, the gun was a few feet from his hand.

A little later, when he heard a car on Osprey Drive, he grabbed for the gun and held it with his finger on the trigger. The car pulled into his driveway, and he took a step toward his front door, determined to hold onto the gun but not yet sure what he was going to do with it.

The car backed out, headed off in the direction it had come from. People lost their way in the maze of creek-bound culs-de-sac, and now and then one of them used his driveway to turn around.

He walked to the door, opened it, looked around. Nothing, nobody.

Two hours later he remember the muffin and plucked it out of the toaster. It had reached just the right stage of doneness, but was cold and hard. He dropped it in the trash and left the room.

At the computer, he tried to compose a note. He opened a new document in Word and typed I did it.

Edmund O’Brien, after that long walk through the halls of the police station, had spun out a tale that lasted close to ninety minutes, clear to the end of the movie. And all he could seem to manage was three little words.

I did it. He looked at what he’d written and tried to think what else he could add. Tell them how he’d done it? How he’d waited for Ashley Hannon, how he’d moved in behind her when she entered the house, how he’d clapped a hand over her mouth and wrapped an arm to catch her neck in the crook of his elbow. How she’d struggled against the choke hold. You weren’t supposed to use it to subdue criminals, because now and then it worked a little too well, inducing a sleep from which the subject never awakened.

His was a good choke hold, easily maintained until her struggles ceased and she went limp in his arms. She was still breathing, and there was no visible bruising to her throat. That wouldn’t show up until later, if at all, and there would be other bruises to eclipse it.

Should he write all that down?

He grew weary at the thought of it. The worst part of being a cop, he’d often thought, were the reports you had to write, and the most important consideration, as he’d learned early on, was CYA. The report could cover any number of topics, but what you really had to do was Cover Your Ass.

But how did you do that in a confession? When you led off with I did it, weren’t you essentially uncovering your ass? Wasn’t that the point?

A little later he got the Ruger from the kitchen cupboard, loaded the magazine, and jacked a round into the chamber.

Doak “Two Guns” Miller, he thought.

He’d used an automatic and a revolver on Stapleton Terrace, and left them both there. Now he was sitting in his house with an automatic in one hand and a revolver in the other, and no clear idea what he wanted of them.

When they came for him, he could go out in a blaze of glory. Suicide by cop, they called it. You had a gun in your hand and you were firing at them, and the cops had no real choice in the matter. They fired back, and generally emptied their guns in the process, and even if they were lousy shots you were pretty much certain to wind up with a tag on your toe.

He looked down at his feet. He was wearing cargo shorts and a tee shirt, and his feet were bare, and he pictured his big toe with a tag on it.

Saying what? Use No Hooks?

Suicide by cop. In the movies, the bad guy would snarl his intention to take as many cops with him as he could. That might make a kind of emotional sense if you hated cops, but Bill Radburn was the closest thing he had to a friend in the whole state of Florida, so why would he want to kill him? Or anyone else who might come through the door?

I did it.

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Like you’re telling them what they don’t already know.

After he’d choked her unconscious, after he’d moved her to where he wanted her, there was a question of timing. Ideally, he’d hold off on the next step until just before Otterbein’s arrival, but you couldn’t set your clock by the man, could you? Say he waited until he saw the Lincoln’s lights in the driveway.

The choke hold wouldn’t keep her out forever. And how long would it take Otterbein to make his way from behind the wheel to inside the house?

He waited as long as he dared. Then he heard her breathing change, and the next thing would be her eyes opening, and he couldn’t let that happen. If he had to look into her eyes—

No.

He got his hands around her throat, and every image came flooding in at him. Phyllis, that dizzy bitch: “Choke me, will you? Come on, how tricky is that?” And Roberta, with his hands on her throat, hands that wanted so desperately to tighten, until he willed them to move from throat to abdomen.

And the story he’d told to Barb Hamill, with the girl a combination of both women, an unmarried and pregnant version who liked to be choked but got more than she bargained for: “And what I do, I just keep squeezing. Both hands, as tight as I can make them, and she starts twitching like a fish on a line...”

Yeah, pretty much like that.

I did it.

Only one reason to write it down, whether it was three words or every detail he could remember. All it could be, long or short, was a suicide note.

Suicide by cop?

He didn’t need to wait for a cop to turn up. He was a cop himself, wasn’t he?

Had been, anyway.

Now he was a murderer.

Two-Gun Miller, with a revolver in one hand and an automatic in the other. If he waited for them, the best he could hope for was to go down shooting. If he surrendered, if they captured him alive, the death sentence was a foregone conclusion. He’d killed two people in a particularly vicious fashion, and it would be hard for any lawyer with a straight face to argue mitigating circumstances.

And why fight the death sentence? Whatever cocktail of drugs they fed into your veins, it had to be better than life without parole. And can we skip the appeals? Florida was pretty good at killing people, and he’d make it as easy for them as he could.

Still, it wasn’t the Old West, they didn’t find you guilty on Tuesday for what you did on Monday, then drop a rope around your neck first thing Wednesday morning. Even if he greased the skids, he was looking at a year or more in a cell.

Wouldn’t welcome that.