The Triple Threat Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  “His head,” Clark moaned. “Most of it was just—gone.”

  Would he never shut up? What was past was past. You couldn’t change it. So there was no use thinking about it. She had learned that long ago.

  “You had to do it, Clark. It was like putting down a rabid dog. If you hadn’t done what you did, he would have killed me.”

  Clark continued droning on as if Elizabeth hadn’t said anything. “I’ll never be able to forget what he looked like.”

  It was like listening to Eeyore. Who wanted to hear someone who wouldn’t stop moaning about how miserable he was?

  “Look. You saw what he did to me. The marks that he left on me. On my body.” Elizabeth leaned down to whisper in his ear, her breath stirring the hairs on his neck. Maybe she could distract him. “You saved me.”

  “The cops will find me,” he moaned.

  “No, they won’t.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes. Couldn’t he stop fussing?

  “They’ll find the shell casings. I didn’t even pick them up.”

  “So? Those only help if they have a suspect. Which they never will. You didn’t even know Joey. And let me tell you, there’re a lot of people who would want Joey dead. A lot of people.” The more Elizabeth talked to Clark, the more real her version of Joey became.

  “Maybe I didn’t even kill the right guy.”

  She stiffened and lifted her hands away. “What are you talking about?”

  “He called you . . .” Clark’s voice caught. “He called you Sissy.”

  “It was just a nickname he used,” Elizabeth said, and forced her hands to resume rubbing in slow circles. Her lips found a lie. “Whenever I cried after Joey hurt me, he used to call me a baby and a sissy.” It seemed so real to her that tears of sympathy sprang to her eyes.

  But Clark continued to complain. “I don’t feel right about this. What we did was wrong. Every time I look at you, I think about what we did.”

  It wasn’t like Clark was going to change his mind, Elizabeth realized. It wasn’t like he was going to just forget. No way. And it would only get worse once they started talking about it on the news. He would continue to get wound up in his own thoughts. Obsess about it more and more. It would eat at him at night. And in the daytime he would go to work, and people would ask him what was wrong.

  And someday he might tell them.

  She was going to have to put a stop to this. It was intolerable. For both of them. Really, Elizabeth would be doing him a favor.

  “Look, Clark. I know a way to make you feel better.”

  Clark levered himself up on one elbow. His eyes were red and lost, like a child’s. Couldn’t he ever be a man? Couldn’t he ever stop looking for direction, for love, for reassurance? Couldn’t he, just once, make a decision on his own?

  “You do?” His face brightened.

  Elizabeth opened her mouth and the words slid out. Clearly, with Clark, it was time for the final stage of The Game.

  “Last year I was in therapy to help me learn how to deal with what Joey did to me. My counselor taught me this one special technique. It helps you forget about the bad things that have happened in the past and focus on the present. It makes the past be a memory instead of letting it torment you. And it’s easy.”

  Clark swung his feet to the floor. “Can you show it to me? Because I need to forget. I can’t live with the guilt.” He scrubbed his face with open palms, then slid his fingers up to tug the hair at his temples. “I just keep seeing his face when he begged me not to shoot him.” His voice dropped. “And what his head looked like—like—afterward.”

  “Well, first you need to write down all the negative things in your life. Everything that’s wrong with it. Especially things that you have done wrong. But just make a list of anything that’s making you depressed.”

  “Okay.” Clark started to move toward his laptop.

  “No. On paper. If it’s in your own handwriting, it helps you make a stronger connection with it.” Elizabeth almost laughed. She was practically fooling herself.

  He took out his sketch pad and turned to a blank sheet. “Should I write down everything? Like how I . . . I killed him? How I killed him because you asked me to?”

  Elizabeth hid her annoyance. She hadn’t asked Clark to kill Joey. It had been as much his idea as hers.

  “Yes. But the thing is, you need to take responsibility for just your role in it. That’s part of the therapy. You can only write down what you did. You can’t rely on saying that I talked to you about killing him. Because ultimately you made the decision to do it.” She made an effort to leach the anger from her voice.

  “When you’re done making your list, then I’ll show you the other half of the exercise. And it will make you forget all about the bad things. It will make you feel good again.” She got up and stretched. “While you’re doing that, I’m going to take a walk around the block.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will.” Once she was out the door, she took Joey’s wallet and cell phone from her purse. She ripped up and smashed what she could, then deposited the resulting pieces in a half dozen different Dumpsters.

  When she came back twenty minutes later, Clark was waiting for her. Already looking like he felt a little better.

  “Okay, I’m done.”

  She looked over his shoulder so he wouldn’t hand it to her. She wanted just his fingerprints on the paper.

  Clark had neatly numbered the list.

  Things that make me depressed:

  1. My skin is terrible. People don’t want to look at it, and when they do, I can see in their eyes that they are grossed out.

  2. I only have one real friend. All the people I hung out with in high school seem to have moved on.

  3. Even though I tell my parents I’m saving money for college, it’s not really working out that way.

  4. I don’t draw nearly enough, and when I do, I worry that it’s not very good.

  5. I keep planning on getting in shape, but instead I just watch TV. And I’ve been drinking a lot of beer.

  6. But the thing that is worst of all, far worse, is that I am responsible for the death of another human being. I shot and killed a man in Forest Park. I keep seeing his face. He told me I shouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. And I still shot him. Right in the face. And it wasn’t anything like killing a deer.

  Number 2 gave Elizabeth pause. Was there someone Clark was confiding in? Had he already run to them, spilling his secrets? “Who’s your friend?”

  He looked shocked. “You are. I meant you.”

  “Oh. Of course.” Forcing a smile, Elizabeth found an explanation. “I guess I expected you to call me your girlfriend.”

  Clark bit his lip. “I’m sorry. I can change it if you want.”

  “No, no. That’s fine. The list is only for you. And we both know what I am.” She kissed him on the cheek.

  Pulling back, he looked at her. He offered her a trembling smile. “So now is it time to show me how to change my focus?” His voice arced higher, as if he were holding back tears. “To show me all the good things?”

  “First we have to do a trust exercise. Do you know what a trust fall is?”

  Clark nodded. “You close your eyes and you cross your arms over your chest and you fall backward into a group of people and they catch you. We did it in middle school.”

  Hard to imagine why they hadn’t just let him fall.

  “Well, it’s like that, but different, since there’s only one of me.” She shook his pillow out of the case. “Put this over your head.”

  “And then what?” His eyes were wide and wet.

  “You’ll see. That’s where the trust part comes in.”

  As soon as the pillowcase covered his eyes, Elizabeth took the cord from his laptop.

  “Like this?” Clark shimmied his shoulders and pulled at the edges of the pillowcase until it was just below his elbows.

  “That’s perfect.” She wrapped the cord around both hands.

  Now that C
lark couldn’t see her, Elizabeth could let her mask slip. Her lip curled back when she looked at him. He sat on the bed, slumped forward, looking ridiculous. Looking pathetic. Like a stupid sack of potatoes. She was doing him a favor, really.

  She sat behind him on the bed. He turned his head toward her. “Now what happens?” He sounded excited. As if. Well, now was the time to nip that in the bud.

  She looped the cord over his head and yanked it back viciously.

  Clark managed to get out a strangled cry. “What?” Or maybe “Why?” His feet kicked out, connected with nothing.

  He swung his right elbow back, but Elizabeth was out of reach. His hands reached up, clawed at his own throat under the pillowcase, but the cord was biting too deeply. And already he was growing weaker.

  Finally, it was done. She poked him a few times to be sure, but he didn’t move at all, didn’t even twitch. When she put her ear against the part of the pillowcase that covered his mouth, she heard nothing.

  Elizabeth took the cord and tied it to the bed rail with a double knot. Then she let the body roll off the bed. And that’s how she thought of Clark now. As the body. As it. Its head and shoulders were suspended in midair by the cord, while the butt and legs rested on the floor.

  Everything in the apartment told a clear story. Clark, depressed, had flirted with suicide. Maybe he hadn’t even completely meant it.

  But then suicide had given him a big juicy kiss in return.

  Elizabeth looked around the room, making sure she had left nothing of herself behind. The few times she had been in the apartment, she had always been careful what she touched. She wiped down only a few spots. Although she doubted that the authorities would look closely, too many places where surfaces were wiped clean might raise some questions.

  Mentally, she dusted her hands. There. Done and done. And done and done and done.

  Joey was dead. Sara and Noah were dead. Jenna was dead. And now Clark was dead. And there was no way to tie them back to her.

  Clark was the last link.

  And now he had been snapped.

  The cops might wonder why Clark had killed a stranger. And why that stranger had killed Sara and her kid. Or about what had happened to Jenna. But the connection from one person to the next was so tenuous that no one would be able to recreate it and trace everything back to Elizabeth. No one would ever suspect her.

  And now she could go back to the life she deserved with Ian. The one where he didn’t have any distractions other than wondering what Elizabeth’s lingerie looked like. The one where he spoiled her. In a few months, when Ian got over whatever sad feelings he would have about his ex-wife and kid, then they could get engaged.

  Elizabeth clapped her hands just thinking about it. Now where would she want to go on her honeymoon?

  CHAPTER 48

  FBI Portland Field Office

  Nic and Leif had spent the afternoon interviewing Ian McCloud. He had professed bewilderment.

  “I came home last night and Sara and Noah were gone, no note, no nothing, and she never picked up her cell when I called her. What you’re accusing me of is ridiculous! Why would I open my home to her if I wanted to kill her?”

  “You would know where she was,” Nic pointed out, but the argument sounded weak, even to her.

  “And you think that’s a good enough reason to spill the blood of my ex-wife and my son in my very own home?” His lip curled in disgust. “You should look at the same people who they were looking at for the arson—her neighbor, her last boyfriend. Look, I have a girlfriend, so I’ve clearly gotten over Sara. And Sara is the one who wanted the divorce in the first place, not me. She was cheating on me.”

  “Really.” Nic nodded, and she and Leif exchanged a glance.

  She knew he was remembering how Sara had said exactly the opposite. Ian was so good-looking, so smooth, that Nic found herself believing Sara. But maybe he was telling the truth. Or perhaps both of them were.

  The interview had ended with none of them feeling very happy.

  Toward the end of the day, Cassidy had called to request an emergency meeting of the Triple Threat Club. After Nic hung up, she called her mom.

  “Can you watch Makayla for a little longer this evening? I’m going to meet with Cassidy and Allison for a quick dinner.”

  “Of course,” Berenice said. “But I made peach cobbler, so be sure to save room.”

  Nic was sure the peach cobbler—a decadent family tradition made with peaches canned in heavy syrup, and lots of butter and sugar, then topped with whipped cream—was meant to tempt her into lingering once she stopped by her parents’ house. Ever since she had found the lump, Nic had barely said two words to them.

  Berenice had a sixth sense for when things were wrong with her kids. Even Nic’s game face—which she had been perfecting for years— could fail before her mother’s intense gaze. But as much as she wanted to collapse wailing into her mother’s arms, Nic planned to keep her cancer to herself for a little while longer. Peach cobbler or no peach cobbler.

  As she drove to HUB—Hopworks Urban Brewery—Nic wondered what Cassidy wanted. She had almost turned her down. Cassidy’s idea of an emergency usually involved her pumping Allison and Nic for info on a story. But then Nic had realized how much she needed a distraction, any distraction. Tomorrow she was meeting with the surgeon to discuss the next steps in treating her cancer.

  Cancer. The word filled Nic with dread. Far better to be at a noisy brewpub with friends than at home with her computer and its overwhelming amount of information, much of it depressing. The night before, Nic had spent thirty minutes reading the blog of a young black woman in Canada who had been diagnosed with the same kind of cancer as hers. A Google search for invasive ductal carcinoma had brought Nic to the beginning of the blog, where the woman had posted her diagnosis. Nic had read forward, scrolling through the months, and with each entry she read of the woman’s story, her feeling of kinship grew.

  At some point Nic decided to skip to the main page for the blog, thinking to read the most recent entry, see how the young woman was doing, and maybe even send her a private e-mail.

  But the last entry on the blog had been six months before. It reported the news that the woman’s cancer was back, and that she would be undergoing a new round of treatments. And then it just—stopped.

  Nic shivered, thinking about it now. It didn’t take a genius to guess what had happened. Ghosts on the Internet.

  At HUB she had to park in the back lot. Even on a Thursday night, the brewpub was hopping. Open and airy, it catered to Portland’s version of bikers—the non-motorized kind—with pizza, organic beer, a kids’ menu, and bikes and bike parts used as part of the decor.

  She found Allison and Cassidy already seated in one of the wooden booths.

  “I was so sorry to hear about Jenna,” Nic said as she slid in next to Allison.

  Cassidy bit her lip. “Yeah, everyone at the station is pretty much in shock. We’re used to making the news, not being it. That’s one reason I wanted to get together with you guys. Jenna’s murder is now a federal crime, right?”

  “Right. The body crossed state lines,” Nic said. “We don’t know if it floated over to the Washington side of the Columbia or got transported over there. They found abrasions on the shoulders and lower legs— looked like they had been made with some kind of rope. The working theory is that the body was wrapped in something and dumped in the water, but the current pulled it loose. It doesn’t matter what the killer’s intent was or where they put the body in the water. All that matters is that Jenna was killed in one state, and her body ended up in another.”

  The waitress came up and asked if they were ready to order. Nic let Cassidy and Allison choose the pizza—she wasn’t even hungry— and while they ordered beer, she just asked for water. Some studies had linked alcohol to breast cancer. In a couple of months she would probably be guzzling wheatgrass juice and eating only raw foods.

  After the waitress left, Cassidy said, “So
could you guys just keep your ears open for any new angles about Jenna’s death? Right now, I’ve just got the same story as every other station. The family is in seclusion and not talking to me, even though they had agreed to before they found the body. I tried to pitch it to them as ‘You can help our viewers remember Jenna as she was, not just as a victim,’ but they were too torn up. And even though Jenna worked at our station, which you would think would give us an automatic angle, we’re coming up dry. We’ve already run the footage we have of her so many times that it doesn’t have much impact. Eric and Jerry are planning a half-hour tribute to her. But I’m the crime reporter, not the lifestyle reporter, and right now not a lot of info is coming out. Of course, I’ll keep you guys in the loop if I hear anything at work—but can you do the same for me?”

  Nic and Allison nodded. There were times that they could share tips with Cassidy, or vice versa. And there were times when they couldn’t. It was a fine line, and one they tried not to cross.

  “I heard there wasn’t any trace evidence on the body,” Nic offered, “other than the ligature marks. The river washed it all away. And they traced that phone call—but it just led to a disposable cell phone bought at Target with cash. They’re seeing if they might still have video from the checkout, but it’s a long shot. So I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help.”

  Cassidy’s hands went to the back of her short blonde bob. Nic didn’t even know if Cassidy was aware of her habit, but whenever she was stymied, she twisted strands of hair at the back of her head—a spot the camera never saw.

  “Yeah. Everything just feels—stuck.” Cassidy picked up a new hank of hair and began to twist it around her finger. “So while I’ve been trying to figure out a new angle on Jenna, I’ve been concentrating on the other story of the day—that guy they found shot to death in Forest Park. What a crazy day! I mean, how often does this city have two murders in a single day?”

  Since it was a city crime, Nic hadn’t heard anything about it. She refrained from pointing out that Jenna’s murder had probably taken place five days earlier.