“I live next door,” he said. “Ambulance is on its way. Take a minute.”
But I couldn’t. Leaning over Russell’s still form, I willed him to breathe. I tipped his head back and made sure his nose and mouth were clear, then loosened his shirt. I didn’t want him to be dead. But he sure looked it.
His eyes popped open, blue as the night sky. His pupils were huge black holes without bottoms.
“Russell,” I said urgently. I might never get the answers I needed. “Russell, why?”
His sigh was like steam escaping from a kettle. “I didn’t want to…”
“To what?”
“I begged her. She…wouldn’t listen. A keepsake. I loved—” His head lolled to one side.
An ambulance had pulled up, and suddenly the EMTs were pushing me aside, checking his vitals. I sat on the concrete, trying to catch my breath.
“You found him?” one of the paramedics asked me.
I nodded mutely.
“Looks like he took something first, then set himself up in the garage to finish the job. Well, they will do it.” He was whistling lightly under his breath as he started an IV.
I turned away. A police car rolled to a stop in front of the house. The neighbor was explaining everything. In a minute, an officer came and talked to me. Her questions barely registered, and my responses sounded as if someone else were speaking. She nodded and took notes.
“Will he make it?” I asked her.
She closed her notebook. “We’ll be in touch.”
They’d loaded Russell into the ambulance by now. I watched the taillights get smaller as it sped away, siren wailing, then drew a shaky breath.
It was all over.
Like a drunk from the Tailwinds Bar and Grill, I staggered back to the VW and climbed in. For a moment I leaned against the seatback, wondering what continued to drive my pulse at a frenzied pace. I told my heart to stop racing, waited for the adrenaline to cease its reckless coursing through my veins. A sheen of perspiration lay on my face like a cold dew. Surely I could afford to relax, let it all go. Maybe Stacy was right and I needed to take up meditation.
Stacy.
What had Russell said? “I didn’t want to…”
Didn’t want to what?
The rear wheels nearly lost traction as I pulled out of the driveway and pressed the gas pedal to the floor, driven by a sense of urgency I didn’t stop to analyze. A voice in my head relayed a message over and over. Home, it said. Go home. Now.
I rolled through a four-way stop at Sixth and Pine. At the crest of the hill, I swung left across traffic, earning me a couple of irate honks. Now I was climbing Fickle Hill, the air-cooled engine laboring in third gear as I kept my foot to the floor. Home. I had to get home.
Chapter 32
Two blocks to go. I screeched right on Shirley, then turned again, onto Fickle Court. The street was dark and still. A lone streetlamp flickered and went out.
A maroon Subaru wagon was momentarily lit up by my headlights, parked in front of Josie and Phyll’s. Obeying a gut feeling, I shut off the engine at the top of the street and rolled to the curb, pulling up just behind the strange car. I was fairly sure I knew where I’d seen it before.
I slipped out of the driver’s seat and eased the door shut, then headed across the street. The house was dark and still. Max wouldn’t be back from the movies until late, close to midnight. I climbed the wooden steps as noiselessly as possible and tested the front door. Locked.
Part of me wanted to breathe a sigh of relief. Everything was fine. The neighborhood was quiet, peaceful. Except that it wasn’t. The quiet was unnatural, the air oppressive with menace. Instead of digging out my key and opening the door, I took out my phone. Then I hesitated. Time was everything. I turned around and retraced my steps, this time taking the path around the house. When I reached the corner, I stopped, listening. Nothing. Ever so slowly, I eased forward. The back porch was dark. I could just make out the bulky rectangles of the washer and dryer where they sat to the right of the door.
There was a light on at Stacy’s. Feeling that this was where I was meant to go all along, I stepped carefully along the path. The dim glow was coming from her back porch. I rounded the back of the studio and there she was, sitting in her rocking chair. Her booted foot was propped up on a cassock and her crutches leaned against the back wall. She looked at me but said nothing.
“Stacy,” I said. “You’re okay. I thought—”
I stumbled to a halt. Stacy was flicking her eyes over her shoulder, as if she’d suddenly developed a neurological disorder. The night beyond the light’s dim glow wasn’t quite black. Something stirred: a shape, darker than the dark around it. Slowly it moved into the light, the amorphous outline taking on human form. One hand held a gun.
“Is that you, Wanda?” I said.
She pointed the gun at me. “Drop your phone.”
I’d forgotten it was in my hand. I let it fall to the grass.
“So how’d you know?” Her face was a pale oval in the murky light. A dark knit cap was pulled down over her chestnut hair. She was dressed all in black, like a cat burglar.
“Lucky guess. Have you met my sister?”
“Let’s not waste time on formal introductions,” she said. “That might make it harder when I have to kill you both.”
Stacy gave a little squeak.
“Listen,” I said, my heart beating a tattoo against my ribs. “You can leave Stacy out of this. She doesn’t know anything.”
The barrel of the gun shifted to Stacy. “That true, sis?”
“No,” Stacy said. “Sam’s told me everything. Almost everything.”
I rolled my eyes. “For God’s sake.”
“Gotta love siblings,” Wanda said. “The ties that bind, am I right? But no sense arguing over who’s the nicest. You were both at Distant Horizons earlier. I was parked in the lot, and I saw you. So that pretty much seals the deal, as they say in your dismal profession.”
“You have something against real estate agents?” I eased forward a fraction of a step.
“Not agents in general. You in particular. I knew you were trouble the minute we met at the open house. Pushy. Nosy. Couldn’t leave well enough alone. But now that you mention it, I’ve always found agents to be a royal pain in the ass. Always calling, emailing, sticking their damn cards in my face. Did you know there are over four hundred of you in this county alone? One less won’t even make a dent.” She wagged the gun at me. “I’ll ask you one more time: how’d you know?”
“The carpet. It was in perfect shape when you were there for the open house. It was only after you left that—well, some stuff happened to it. But when I saw you Wednesday, you mentioned it needed cleaning. You must have been in the house at some point after the open house. Searching it. Until the neighbor showed up.”
“Scared the hell out of me when he burst in, babbling about some goddamn trees. Chalk that one up to collateral damage. I didn’t set out to kill anyone, you know. I’m a pretty nice person.”
“Nice people don’t murder their sisters.”
Stacy sucked in her breath.
“She had to die,” Wanda said. “My parents loved her best.”
Her voice shook, not with sorrow or regret but white-hot anger. “Ruth was plain as a piece of toast, and sickly. But they doted on her. I was invisible. Then they died and left her the house and their savings, because she was so good with finances. After my divorce, I had to move in with her, had to live off handouts.”
“So you decided to give her arsenic.”
She shrugged, a tiny movement of her shoulders. “It’s amazing what you can buy on eBay these days. Ruth always had trouble with her stomach. Gastritis, bleeding ulcers, Crohn’s disease. Have you heard of Crohn’s? I hadn’t. I looked it up. It’s a fancy name for the runs. God. Who would want to live like that? Her doctor tried her on this and that, but nothing seemed to help. She had to stick to a bland diet, and she hardly ever left the house. Killing her was
a kindness, honestly. I put the arsenic in her rice cereal that I made for her every day. Of course, I didn’t do it all at once. I learned that from the Internet. You have to space the doses out over a few weeks. Her doctor never suspected a thing, just signed the death certificate so Ruth’s grieving sister could make funeral arrangements.” Her voice faltered. “That’s where things started to go wrong, I suppose. I cut some corners on the service. There were…objections.”
I shifted my position again. “Her fiancé. Russell Wellburn.”
The anger resurfaced, spattering like hot fat from a skillet. “Russell. He made me feel like I was the only woman in the world. He was falling for me, I’m sure of that. I told Ruth to invest in real estate, and after a while I was handling all the details. I made sure we used Liberty Financial exclusively. Russell took me to lunch a few times. Then he stopped by the house last winter to get some signatures, and…that was it. What he saw in her I’ll never understand. He said she was brave. And kind.” She shook her head. “It was our parents all over again. The last straw. Russell called me afterward. He was crying, for God’s sake. He wanted a big service, a visitation. And he asked for her engagement ring back, to remember her by. So I called the cremation place. That’s when the dope who runs the place told me there’d been a breach of security.”
I could see that Stacy was struggling to keep up with all these revelations. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What kind of breach? And why the big deal?”
“The finger,” I said. “Probably I forgot to mention it.”
“Finger?”
“Two of them, actually.” I glanced at Wanda.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Might as well spill your guts while you can.”
I took a deep breath. “My boss’s ex-wife, Marian, had been nursing a grudge for years. He has that effect on women. So she decided to bring him down. Easy enough to start a fling with him, because he’d always been half in love with her. She sent emails to herself from his computer that violated some pretty serious real estate laws. Then she thought it’d be even more fun to make him a murder suspect. At the very least, when no body turned up, it would ruin his reputation. She scoped out a couple of funeral homes and settled on Distant Horizons, a one-man operation. Once she’d sweet-talked Harold into leaving her alone in the workroom, she used her garden nippers to steal a finger. Ruth’s, as it turned out. She painted it to match her nails and left it at her house on McMillan, making sure it would be discovered. My guess is she swapped rings, hiding Ruth’s and substituting her own from her marriage to Everett. Wanda here couldn’t afford for the finger to be found and tested, and she needed that engagement ring back.”
Wanda snorted. “After that dope Hilstrom called, I went down to the crematorium and got the story out of him. He’d managed to match her to her picture in the paper. So I spent a few days tailing her, trying to figure out what her game was. She seemed to spend most of her time up in Campus Heights with Baldy, so I figured that’s where I should look. When she stopped at the Sidewinder for a drink Saturday night, I followed her and sat next to her at the bar. It was easy to spike her glass, and later help her out to her car. But there was nothing in her bag. Except for this.” She waggled the gun. “I drove her to McMillan, then found she didn’t even have a set of house keys. Of all the rotten luck. My whole night was a wash.”
“Don’t forget the part where you strangled her. With my boss’s tie.”
She shrugged. “It happened to be on the passenger seat. Along with some pruning shears I put to good use. I still had the problem of getting into the house, so I stopped by the next day and boosted your keys from your jacket, then returned them after I had a copy made.”
I remembered how I’d found the keys to McMillan in the wrong pocket. “Why’d you take Marian’s finger?” Just saying it made me queasy again.
“Camouflage. One finger, one fingerless body. Figured no one would question it. No one but Miss Inquisitive here, apparently. I tied a rock to the extra digit and chucked it in the bay. Got unlucky there, too. After that, I was in full damage-control mode. There were too many loose ends that could lead back to me. Hilstrom was one of them.” She shook her head regretfully. “Sad to say, Russell turned out to be another one. And here I thought he was my everything.”
“So you met him after work tonight and arranged for him to take the blame.”
“I’m tired of talking. Come closer. Next to your sister.”
Obediently, I stepped up on the deck. Stacy’s face was white, all expression stricken from it. I wanted to pat her shoulder, but I didn’t dare move without permission. Instead, I tried a reassuring smile. It caught on my lips and turned into a grimace.
“Good God,” Wanda said. “What happened to your hair?”
“You don’t like it?”
“You look like a freak. I hope you didn’t pay full price for that.” She sniffled, then wiped her nose on her sleeve. Remorse?
She caught my look. “You got a dog? I’m allergic to dogs.”
I stole a glance at my outfit, still plastered with corgi hair. “Nope. Just a cat.”
“Cats don’t bother me at all. Weird, isn’t it?”
“Very,” I said politely.
She fished a tissue from her pocket. The gun never wavered. “So this is how it’s going to go down. I’ll give you two a minute for some last words. No long speeches, mind you, and no touching. Keep some space between you.”
I stood frozen. Stacy didn’t say a word. We’re really going to die, I thought.
“Uh, ladies? Clock’s ticking.” Wanda blew her nose daintily into the tissue.
“I’m seeing Bernie Aguilar,” I blurted to Stacy.
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Give me some credit for not being a complete moron. I knew from that first day, the day of your open house. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“There never seemed to be a good time.”
She snorted. “And you think this is a good time?”
I forbore to point out that it might be the only time we had left. “I didn’t want to step on your toes, if you, well, wanted to try and work things out with him.”
“Of course we’re not going to work things out,” she snapped. “What gave you that idea?”
“I assumed that was your big plan.”
“My big plan was to goad Lars into proposing. You know, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ and all that shit? Having my ex in arm’s reach didn’t hurt. Even if he’s in love with someone else.”
Love? “He said that?”
“He didn’t have to say it. A woman knows. A normal woman, anyway.”
I took a moment to digest this. “I’m sorry. I mean, that I didn’t speak up.”
“I’m over it. Hey, the man’s got good taste.”
“Thirty seconds,” Wanda said.
My mind went blank. What else could we cover in thirty seconds? “Um…you think eight hundred’s a fair price for the studio?”
Wanda rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Agents.”
Stacy gave me a look, conveying a message. “Yeah. It’s not The Ritz, but it’s cozy. And the neighborhood’s good. At least, until Baby Jane here came along.”
“Ten seconds,” Wanda said, sniffling a little. “Goddamn allergies.”
I could see the sneeze building. Her eyes bulged, and she pinched the base of her nose in a last-ditch effort to suppress it.
Suddenly a jet of water caught her in the small of the back. She shrieked and stumbled forward. The barrel of the gun dropped.
Quick as a flash, Stacy snatched up one of her crutches and swung it hard. The rubber tip connected with Wanda’s wrist and the gun flew from her hand, disappearing into the dark. Wanda turned to look for it and I brought her down with a flying tackle, feeling the satisfying whump of her body connecting with hard earth. I looked up and saw Mr. Bradshaw holding a garden hose.
“I like to do my watering at night,” he said. “It optimizes root growt
h.”
I wanted to thank him but found myself speechless. Plus, he wasn’t wearing his hearing aide.
Stacy rose from her chair and hobbled over to where I had Wanda pinned to the ground. She leaned in close.
“Lady, don’t fuck with the Turner sisters,” she said.
Chapter 33
It was Sunday, and I was back at 412 McMillan Court. My signs were on the street, and I’d put a big bowl of chocolate Kisses next to my flyers. It felt good to be a licensed agent again.
Everett Sweet had called me into his office the day after being released from the Grovedale lockup. He was pale, but his manner was brisk. “I owe you on this one,” he said.
“Really, you don’t. I was just doing my job. Sort of.” I wasn’t altogether surprised to see his toupee back in place, like a thatch of scorched beach grass.
“I think I do. You pulled my cojones outta the fire this time, Sam. What do you want? Name it. Corner office? Your own copier-printer combo?”
I considered the corner office, but I’d have to share it with Biddie, who wasn’t one of my favorite people. Besides, with Carl gone, Gail and I each had our own desk. The office equipment, though, was tempting.
Then I had an idea. “I want another shot at hosting an open house at McMillan. It’s still an active listing, right?”
“Death of the seller doesn’t cancel the listing agreement. You should remember that from your—”
“Got it,” I said. “So I’d like to hold an open house from noon to two on Sunday. And I want you to run an ad in the paper for it.”
“Waste of money. The Giants are playing an away game in Colorado. You won’t see a soul.”
“I’ll take that chance.” I stopped and collected my courage. “And—and if I bring in an offer from the open house I want the buyer’s half of the commission. The full three percent. You keep the seller’s half.”
A Killer Location Page 20