When Hurley finishes questioning Gina, he offers to have one of the officers drive her somewhere. She protests at first, saying she wants to stay in her own home. But when Hurley explains to her that the house will need to be closed up until it is cleared as a crime scene, she gives in and decides to stay with a friend for a few days, until she can figure out what to do.
The press has already sniffed out the story, most likely by picking up the dispatch on a police scanner, and an officer posted at the entrance to the Carrigan driveway has been working steadily to keep the reporters at bay. Of course, that doesn’t stop Alison Miller, who takes off on foot and hikes up to the house through the neighboring woods.
“Yoo-hoo! Stevie!” she hollers as she approaches the front of the house. Hurley and I are sitting side by side on the front stoop and Alison stops in front of us, sparing a spiteful glance at me before she turns her smile back on for Hurley. “This is just awful,” she says. “Is it true that Sid Carrigan is dead? That he shot himself?”
Hurley stands and takes Alison’s arm, dragging her off to one side. I look away, trying to act indifferent though I keep sneaking peeks at them from the corner of my eye as I struggle to overhear what they are saying.
“Look, Alison. This is a delicate situation just now,” Hurley tells her. “I’m still processing the scene and trying to figure out exactly what happened. If you’ll be patient and let me finish here, I promise you I’ll give you the whole story.”
“When?” Alison asks. “The Monday edition gets put to bed at eleven tonight and this should really be in there. This is hot news.”
“I’ll try to get it to you tonight, Alison. But no promises. Give me a couple of hours, okay?”
“Okay,” she says, flashing him a coquettish smile. “Thanks, Stevie.” She stands on tiptoe and plants a kiss on his cheek. Then, after shooting a smug glance at me, she struts down the driveway.
Hurley walks over to me while I do my best impression of someone who hasn’t seen or heard a thing. I keep my eyes diverted, afraid to look at him. “When was the last time you ate anything?” he asks.
“I’m not sure. Breakfast I think. But I’m not hungry.” An historic moment.
“You should eat something anyway.”
“Maybe later.” I am pouting and determined to disagree with whatever he says, angry over the cutesy little exchange I observed between him and Alison.
“Okay,” he says with a sigh. “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”
“Thanks, but I can drive myself. Besides, I don’t want to leave my car here.”
“I can have one of the uniforms drive it for you.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’m fine. Really.”
“Then I’m going to follow you home.”
Obviously he doesn’t realize that I’ve already made the burgundy-and-gray van and know he’s been having me tailed for the past several days. Still, when I think about him following me home tonight, I find I kind of like the idea. “Okay,” I say, giving him a tired smile.
The sight of Hurley’s headlights in my rearview mirror makes me feel warm and tingly all over. I imagine what might happen when we get to the cottage. I’ll invite him inside, of course. Good manners dictate as much. After that, who knows what might happen. And if he wants to call and talk to Alison Miller, I’ll find a way to let her know where he is. In fact, maybe I’ll encourage him to call her from my place so I can hear every word he says.
But my fantasy blows to pieces as I pull into my driveway and watch Hurley drive on by, honking once as he passes. He’s probably on his way to meet Alison, I think, and the idea crushes me.
Once inside, I decide a nice, hot, soothing bath sounds wonderful, so I strip out of my clothes and put on my robe. The pile of dirty clothes in the corner of the bedroom is getting pretty high, so I throw a load into the washer. Then, rationalizing that I need something cold to balance out the heat from the bath, I dig a new carton of Cherry Garcia out of the freezer and settle in on the couch with it and a spoon.
Inevitably my mind wanders back to the afternoon’s events and the image of Sid sitting in that chair, his head in his hands, his posture slumped and defeated. That image is in stark contrast to the man I knew, the man whose vivacious humor and gentle manner have charmed me for years.
Then I flash on the empty, dull-eyed expression I saw on Gina’s face as she sat in the same chair and, oddly, this disturbs me even more. Something about the way she was sitting there seems wrong. I can’t put a finger on anything specific, but it keeps nagging at me.
I try to shake it off by focusing on Rubbish instead, who is playing with a mangled tampon he most likely fished out of the bathroom garbage. I laugh as he bats the tampon across the rug and hunkers down, his pupils huge and dark, his little ass wiggling. Then he springs in for the kill, grabbing the tampon between his feet and rolling with it. He tosses it away, hunkers down again, and repeats the attack. At one point he manages to push the tampon under the corner of the rug, where he then spends several minutes trying to get at it from above. Finally he gets wise and burrows his way under, creating a tiny, wriggling hump in the rug.
And that’s when it hits me. It’s not the way Gina was sitting in the chair that bothers me, it’s what happened when she got out of it.
I have to go back to the house. I run into the bedroom to dress, only to realize all of my bras are in the washing machine. After digging around in the few clean clothes I have left, I choose the loosest-fitting top I can find, not wanting to advertise the fact that I am braless. Minutes later, I am headed out of town, stopping briefly at the Quik-E-Mart to buy a disposable camera.
The Carrigan house is dark when I pull up out front but there is a police car parked in the drive. Sitting inside it is Brian Childs. The front door to the house is sealed shut with crime scene tape. Brian gets out and walks over to me as I climb out of my car.
“What are you doing back here?” he asks.
I show him my camera. “I need to get some shots of the den,” I tell him. “For Izzy.”
“We already took a bunch,” he says. “Can’t you use those?”
“I suppose we can, but Izzy likes to have his own. And this way, we don’t have to wait for you guys to make copies,” I explain. I hold my breath, hoping Brian will go for it.
“Okay,” he says with a shrug, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I follow him onto the porch, where he slices through the tape and peels it away. “I’ll replace this when you’re done,” he says. “And I’ll have to record that you were here,” he adds. “Scene preservation, you know.”
“No problem,” I tell him. If my suspicions are right, by the time anyone else learns I was here, it will be a moot point. As soon as he has the door unlocked, I scurry down the hall and enter the den. I grimace at the lingering scent of dried blood that hangs in the air, and when I flip on the light switch, I see that the room doesn’t look any different than the last time I saw it.
I turn back to Brian, who has followed me. “I need to close the door so I can take a shot of this end of the room,” I tell him, and as I hoped, he backs up. “It’ll only take me a minute,” I promise, closing the door before he has a chance to come inside.
Immediately, I move over to the chair, standing in front of it and digging into my memory. Just as I thought, the edge of the Persian rug is up against the front legs of the chair. But I’m certain that when Sid was sitting there, the chair had been angled toward the desk, the two back feet resting on the hardwood floor, the two front ones resting on top of the rug. I remember how Gina nearly fell when I helped her up because her foot became entangled in the rug’s edge. And I remember how the curled-edge fell back down, stopping in the position it’s in now.
Obviously, the chair had been moved between the time I saw Sid in it and the time I saw Gina in it. I recall the noise I heard not long after Gina entered the room, the faint thump sound that spurred me to action. I suppose the noise could have come from Gina collapsing into the chair, b
ut that would have moved the chair backward, away from the rug. How had it ended up closer?
I reach down and pull back the edge of the carpet, peeking underneath. There, about a foot and a half from the edge, is a small defect in the hardwood, a metal ring set into a hollow in the floor. I kneel down and study the ring more closely, realizing it’s a handle. When I grab it and pull, a six-board section of the floor opens up, revealing a large, velvet-lined space beneath. Molded into the velvet are three imprints, each one bearing the recognizable shape of a gun. Next to the empty imprints is the real thing: a cold, deadly-looking pistol.
A loud noise out in the hallway startles me and I jump, letting the section of floor fall back into place. I hear the door to the den open and start to turn, but I’m not quick enough. From the periphery of my vision I see something coming toward me just before I feel a crashing pain on my head. For an instant I see a flash of bright, blinding light, but after that, there is nothing but darkness.
Chapter 34
I can’t remember ever feeling so cold. My teeth are rattling and every muscle in my body is trembling as I try to shiver my way to warmth. I am curled into a fetal position and I try to tighten it, to pull all my parts closer together so they can warm one another. But the movement sends shock waves of pain from my head down my neck and back, making me moan.
“Ah, good. You’re awake.”
Slowly, carefully, I open my eyes, wincing as the room’s light pierces its way through to my brain. Fuzzy shapes come into view, familiar shapes. Sid’s den. I place one hand on the floor and, bracing myself against the pain, I push myself into a sitting position. Gina is standing in front of me, a gun in one hand. It doesn’t take me long to figure out where she found it or what she intends to do with it.
Seeing the direction of my gaze, Gina holds the pistol up for a moment, eyeing it appreciatively. “Is this what you were looking for?” she asks.
“Apparently,” I mumble.
“Too smart for your own good, aren’t you?” she sneers. “I knew you would figure it out sooner or later. That’s why I came back here to watch the house. I thought you might show up.”
“Brian…” I mutter, my head pounding in pain.
“Oh, he’s out there in the hallway,” she says. “But if you think he’s going to help you, you’re sadly mistaken. I’ve taken care of him.”
I take a moment to mourn Brian and to allow my head to clear. “It was you,” I say, all the pieces finally clicking into place. “You killed Karen and Mike.”
“I had to. That Owenby bitch just refused to listen to me. Kept insisting she was going to milk Sid and me for every penny she could get. So I had no choice. I shot her.”
The cold indifference in her voice makes me shiver even harder.
“The next morning,” she continues, “when Sid told me how he’d run into David the night before, I realized what a perfect setup it was. I figured David was probably somewhere between here and that sleazy motel around the time of Karen’s death, so he wouldn’t have any alibi. And I knew all about him and Karen—hell, half the town knew. They were together all the time at the hospital until David broke things off with her. Then she started getting desperate and stupid, chasing after him, making threats, picking fights. Several people at the hospital witnessed it. It made him the perfect fall guy. All it took was one anonymous witness to get the cops sniffing at his door.”
“It was you who made that call.”
Gina smiles broadly.
“Pretty coldhearted.”
“Hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
“But why? Why did you have to kill Karen?”
“Because she was blackmailing Sid, and he, the dumb sonofabitch, was paying her. She discovered him one night at the hospital in an on-call room with Mike. I don’t think she knew about Sid’s little secret before then. No one did. Even I didn’t. I didn’t find out until Karen came to me, hoping to wring even more money out of us with her little blackmail scheme.”
I realize then that Sid must have figured it all out. He may have only guessed at the truth with regard to Karen’s murder, but this afternoon, when I told him Mike’s death was a murder and not a suicide, he had to have made the final connection. It wasn’t guilt over his own actions that drove him to desperation, it was his grief over Mike and the knowledge of what his wife had done.
“So you killed Mike thinking that would put an end to it?” I say.
“Well, it did, didn’t it?” She smirks. “I realized that if I used the same gun on Mike that I used on Karen and tried to make it look like a suicide, everyone would think Mike was the one who killed her. The gun, which came from our stash here”—she gestures toward the floor—“can’t be traced back to me. I’ve had it for years, something my mother picked up from a street junkie.
“So it seemed like the perfect setup. And if someone managed to figure out that Mike’s death wasn’t a suicide, the finger of guilt would still be pointing at David for Karen’s death, and the cops would likely try to pin Mike’s death on him, as well. Just to be sure, I got a couple of hairs from the brush David keeps in his locker at the hospital and left them on Mike’s body. I have you to thank for that idea,” she says with a wry smile. “All that talk about trace evidence the other day at lunch.”
“I was there,” I say, horror dawning in my mind. “I was there in the front of the store when you killed Mike.”
“That was you?” Gina laughs. “If I’d known that, I could have killed you then and saved myself a whole lot of trouble. I thought it was just some customer. I told Mike to get rid of whoever it was or I’d kill everyone in the store. He didn’t know that I intended to kill him anyway and just wanted to be sure there weren’t any witnesses.”
“I suppose you would have killed Sid, too, if he hadn’t gone ahead and done it for you.”
“Kill Sid? Are you crazy?”
Somehow I don’t think the irony of that question will register with her.
“Keeping Sid alive has been my whole purpose, you stupid bitch. Sid is…was my meal ticket. That’s why I had to kill Mike. Sid was in too deep. He was getting ready to throw it all away over some misguided notion that he was in love with that diseased little freak.”
“Did you know that Sid was likely HIV positive, also?”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve never slept together. Our marriage was purely for show. Sid needed someone to make him look legit and I wanted the money and the prestige. His parents were the ones who arranged it all. They basically delivered an ultimatum to Sid: either keep your dirty little secret in the closet or lose the family millions. Though to be honest, I don’t think the money mattered all that much to Sid, the fool. It was the thought of losing his job that convinced him to go along. He loved being a surgeon; it meant everything to him.”
“He loved Mike Halverson, too.”
“That wasn’t love,” Gina spat out angrily. “It was just some stupid middle-aged crisis. He would have gotten over it eventually. If that Owenby bitch hadn’t messed things up, everything would have been fine. Then you had to go poking your nose around.”
“You can’t seriously believe you’ll get away with this, Gina. As it stands now, the cops think Sid killed both Karen and Mike. If you kill me, the cops will know Sid was innocent.”
“It doesn’t matter if the cops know it was me,” she says, making my blood run cold. “I won’t be around anyway. There’s no point in staying. Everything I had, everything I worked for, it’s gone. All of it.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I say, thinking fast. “Surely you’ll inherit some money with Sid’s death. I mean, legally you were his wife, right?”
“Is that what you think this is all about? Money?”
“It’s not?” My head feels like it’s about to explode, and the room keeps spinning. I feel myself growing more impatient and irritable with each passing minute.
“Of course not!” Gina fairly yells, making me wince. “The money
was nothing more than a means to an end. Don’t you understand? People here looked up to me. They respected me. They admired me. I was Gina fucking Carrigan. I was a someone. My face was on TV and in the papers; my voice was on the radio. I was invited to all the major social events and rubbed elbows with some of the richest, most famous people in this country. Did you know I was being considered for a part in a Spielberg movie?”
“Really? Spielberg is putting insane, coldhearted killers in his movies now?”
She flashes me a sardonic grin. “Very funny,” she says. “You’re a real smart-assed little bitch, aren’t you?”
At least she called me a little bitch instead of a big one.
“Go ahead and act smug,” she taunts. “They can carve that into your headstone. ‘Here lies Mattie, smug and catty.’”
She cackles at that and I sense that what little self-control she has left is fading fast. My legs feel a little stronger but my head keeps swimming dangerously and I have serious doubts about my ability to stand. Yet I know that if I don’t do something soon, she’ll simply shoot me where I sit.
“You just don’t understand what it was like for me before I met Sid,” she explains. “My father died when I was a baby and my mother was a drug addict. I was living on the streets by the time I was sixteen, surviving as best I could on my wits and my looks.”
She starts pacing and I take advantage of her inattention to shift my position and get my legs beneath me. I lean forward, putting my weight on my arms. She pauses then and stares at me, a frown on her face. “What are you doing?” she asks, her voice shrill.
“I feel sick. I think I’m going to throw up.” I make a couple of retching sounds and act like I am about to heave.
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