by Greg Iles
Her movements became disjointed, as though she were having a seizure rather than an orgasm. In the moment that doubt truly entered Waters’s mind, her spastic movements drove him past the point of no return. All that remained of his conscious mind shot out across light-years of space and time, while the animal in him ejaculated with withering force. Eve faded, flashed, and then his mind went black.
He awoke facedown on the bed, shivering like a wet dog. At some point while he slept, the wind had driven the rain across the balcony and into the suite. The bed was drenched, and him with it. He lay half across Eve, his hips between her legs, his torso to the right of hers. He tried to pull off the wet covers, but the twisted sheet was pinned beneath her.
“Hey,” he said. “Wake up.”
Even before the silence stretched into eternity, he sensed something wrong with her skin. It felt only slightly warmer than the sopping bedclothes. He recoiled and threw himself onto the floor.
At first he could not bear to look at her, to confirm with his cerebral cortex what his medulla already knew. Kneeling beside the tall tester bed, he reached out and placed the tip of his forefinger beneath her jawbone. There was no pulse beneath the bluish skin, only a waxy resilience that had nothing in common with the rich pink tissue he had kissed a short while ago, soft skin animated by thrumming nerves and oxygenated blood.
In death, Eve finally looked her age. The breasts that had piqued Lily’s curiosity now lay flat on her chest like Baggies half-filled with water. Her face was stiller than a statue’s, for statues are sculpted to look alive, and Eve had lost all semblance of life. Her mouth hung open as though gasping for air, and around her eyes were small pinpricks of dark blood. Something ticked in Waters’s brain at this sight, something from a film or novel, and he remembered that such small hemorrhages were petechiae, telltale side effects of strangulation.
He looked at Eve’s neck.
The skin there was bluish red, bruised from pressure and abrasion. She had definitely been strangled. This realization led to another-I was alone with her-and nausea hit him in a sickening wave. He staggered into the bathroom and emptied the contents of his stomach into the commode, the spasms racking his body down to his cramping groin muscles.
“Jesus God,” he croaked, hugging the toilet.
He got to his feet, washed his face, and went back into the bedroom. A thousand irrational thoughts assailed him, but the cold center of his mind knew there was only one thing to do. Taking a wet rag from the bathroom, he methodically wiped down every surface in the suite that he might have touched. He didn’t look at the corpse on the bed. If he stopped to think about what he was doing, he might pick up the phone and call the police. With Lily and Annelise to think about, he could not risk that.
After wiping down the room, he searched for anything he might have left behind on previous visits. Socks, underwear, a scrap of paper. Finding nothing, he went back to the bathroom. There was something here, he knew. Something dangerous. His vomitus? No. The drain trap. He had showered here every night before returning home. There would be hair in the drain, hair that could be matched to that on his head with a hundred percent certainty. He crouched in the shower stall and examined the drain. It was held down tight with tiny Phillips screws. He had no screwdriver with him. Not even a pocketknife.
Cut me, Eve had begged.
What had she wanted him to use? He walked back into the bedroom and searched her purse. Sure enough, he found a small pocketknife inside. A Gerber. He took it into the bathroom, but its thin point made no headway with the Phillips screws. Digging into the purse again, he found a scrap of blue notepaper with his home phone number written on it. As he put the paper in his pocket, he saw a small flat case made of faux leather. Inside he found a mini tool kit, and one of the tools was a screwdriver. Not a Phillips head, but a standard one that would probably do the job. He went back into the shower stall and removed the drain trap, dug the hair and funk out of it, then flung the mess off the balcony onto the rain-slicked parking lot. As he screwed the drain back down, he felt his composure fragmenting. It was time to leave.
Holding the doorknob with a washcloth, he looked back at the suite one last time, not out of sentiment, but because he had left evidence here that he could not destroy. Inside the body on the bed. Inside Eve. It might be possible to destroy that evidence, he supposed, or at least corrupt it (an image of a maid’s cleaning cart came into his mind), but he was not up to that task. The best he could manage was hanging a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outer doorknob.
Standing frozen in the hallway with his umbrella, he saw his journey to the first floor as fraught with peril. The hallway. The elevator. The mezzanine. The staircase. The lobby. The security guard. For a moment he considered going back into the suite and trying to climb down the outer balconies to the parking lot, but that was ridiculous. They were slick with rain, and even if he didn’t kill himself, anyone passing on the street below could easily see him climbing down.
Move! shouted a voice in his head. Do you want to lose your wife and daughter? Do you want the remainder of your sex life to happen in Parchman Prison?
He put out his right foot, halted, then began to walk briskly toward the elevators, his eyes watching the carpet. His mind was already two blocks away, at his car. See it, said the voice. All you have to do is get your body to the place where your mind is already. He opened his umbrella as soon as he reached the lobby, and used it to conceal his face from the security guard. When he hit the street, rain whipped him like a vengeful spirit, and thunder reverberated off the walls of the hotel, buffeting the air in his lungs. He clutched the umbrella close over his head and began to run.
Chapter 11
A hotel maid discovered Eve Sumner’s body just after noon. The news didn’t travel quite as fast as the news of Danny Buckles’s molestations at St. Stephens, but by 2:00 P.M., buzzing telephones and flying e-mail had informed most of the Natchez business community of her death. Shortly thereafter, Sybil came into Waters’s office with a stunned expression on her face and told him that “that real estate lady, Eve something” had just been found dead in the Eola Hotel. Raped and murdered, her throat cut, said the rumor. This distortion helped Waters put on a show of shock, but when he asked Sybil for details he found she had none.
When she closed the door, Waters got up, walked out onto his balcony, and stared across the river at the Louisiana lowlands. His vision seemed unusually acute. Last night’s rain had knocked the dust out of the air, and behind it came the cold telegram of approaching winter. In the bracing wind, his body felt numb, disconnected, as though his mind were trying to leave it behind as part of a survival strategy. A sense of inevitability permeated his consciousness, a dark conviction that during his presence in the hotel room last night, distant stars had shifted position, forever altering his fate, and that the millstones of the gods were aligning themselves to grind another mortal to powder.
His sense of time had fled him. During the two weeks of his affair with Eve, he’d had difficulty keeping track of the days, largely due to sleep deprivation. But when he returned home after fleeing the Eola, he’d had to stop the Land Cruiser at the head of the driveway and pick up the newspaper to learn what day it was. His last coherent memory was of Tuesday, but the top line of the paper said it was Thursday. He felt like a coma patient waking up to find himself in a different year than the one in which he’d had the accident that put him in the hospital. He had lost himself in a dream, and he had awakened to fear. Cold, nauseating, sphincter-twitching fear. All that he’d risked like so many plastic poker chips now filled his mind with heart-wrenching clarity.
Exactly what had happened last night, he was still unsure. He felt like the hapless senator in The Godfather Part II who went to bed with a laughing girl and woke up with a dead whore. Only in the real world there was no Tom Hagen standing by to make everything go back to the way it was before. In the real world, you were left alone with your horror and guilt, desperately needing to tal
k to another human being but afraid that any confession-even to a priest-could set you on a road that ended in the barred hell of Parchman Farm, strapped to a padded table while white-coated technicians helped you ride the needle down into the smothering dark.
Despite these anxieties, some part of Waters’s brain continued to operate in survival mode, the way a soldier with a blown-off arm remains cogent enough to search for his bloody limb, then carry it back to the aid station with blank doll’s eyes, instinct driving him forward long after his higher brain functions have shut down. Waters was pretty sure no one had seen him leave the hotel. The security guard was sleeping, and the raging thunderstorm had cleared the streets. As he ran across Main Street toward his car, he did see a distant figure down near the bluff, a man with an umbrella standing over a urinating dog, but he didn’t think the man saw him. Even if he had, he would not have recognized Waters from so far.
As he drove home, he considered breaking into Eve’s house to see whether she kept anything there that would incriminate him. There was a good chance that she did, but he had never been to her house before. If he was seen trying to get in, tonight of all nights, that would be the end for him, even if there was no evidence inside.
When he pulled into his driveway, he noticed the kitchen light on. It had not been on when he left the night before. Disquieted, he parked the Land Cruiser on the side of the house and walked around to the slave quarters. From there he could look across the patio at the rear windows of the main house. He did not see Lily moving around, and the master bedroom was still dark. He watched the windows for an hour. While he did, the events of the past two weeks played through his head like a surrealistic film, intercut with horrifying stills of Eve’s lifeless body.
When the bedroom light clicked on, he went into the house and put on a pot of coffee, then walked back to the bedroom to check on Lily. She was using the bathroom. Standing by the partly open door, he asked how she’d slept.
“Not too well,” she said in a tired voice. “What about you?”
He paused, waiting for some clue to what she had seen last night, if anything. None came. “I couldn’t sleep again,” he told her.
She said nothing.
“I’ll get Ana up,” he offered.
“Thanks.”
He walked to the foot of the stairs and yelled for Annelise to roll out of bed, then went into the kitchen and began to make biscuits, bacon, and eggs. By the time Lily came out of the back of the house, Annelise was munching on a biscuit and watching the Disney Channel on the satellite.
Sitting in this Norman Rockwell illusion of normalcy, he was nearly overcome with regret. How could he have put this blessed, well-ordered universe at risk? Was he that perverse? Was the memory of Mallory Candler so powerful? Apparently so. But he was not so far gone that he did not see his duty as a father. To protect Lily and Annelise, he would have to construct an unbreakable alibi for last night. He needed to know exactly what Lily had seen last night, but he would have to wait until tonight for that information. Even if she had noticed him AWOL, she wouldn’t bring it up in front of Annelise.
As domestic life unfolded around him, he contemplated grim realities. The stakes riding on his remaining free were incalculable. The EPA could rule against his company at any time, and all his assets could be seized. Lily might retain the house, but she would have no income. If Waters was sitting in prison for murder, he would be unable to generate any, and Lily wouldn’t be able to earn more than thirty thousand dollars in the first year if she went back to accounting, if she could get a job in Natchez’s declining economy. Waters had two million in life insurance, but unless he received the death penalty-and unless it was carried out with unprecedented speed-Lily wouldn’t see that insurance money for decades. His wife and daughter could fall from the affluent middle class to poverty in a matter of weeks. As he passed Annelise jelly for her biscuit, he made a mental note to check the suicide clause in his life insurance policy, and also to see whether it would pay its death benefit if he should be executed by the state. That he had brought himself to a point where this kind of thinking was a necessity left him feeling hollowed out, like a man dying from a wasting disease.
Soon the whirlwind of getting Ana off to school with the proper books, her Coke money, and her ballet things was in full swing. Waters kissed Lily and his daughter, then went back to the master bedroom to “take a shower.” When he heard the Acura roll down the drive toward State Street, he sat down on the bed and began to shake.
His next clear memory was of sitting at his office desk, looking down at a photograph of Mallory. Somehow he had cleaned himself up and driven downtown, but he could not remember doing it. He had to get himself together. If anything should bring him under suspicion-phone records, something inside Eve’s house, a witness he knew nothing about-he would not be able to fool the police for five minutes in this mental state. Of course, if he really came under suspicion, he was lost anyway. The police would sample the semen taken from Eve’s corpse and test that DNA against the DNA of any suspects. With that evidence, nothing else would be required. In the harsh light of hindsight, he cursed his squeamishness. He should have steeled himself and found a maid’s cart with some powerful bottled cleaner, carried it back to the room, and used it to contaminate or destroy that conclusive evidence. But of course he had not. Such was the work of monsters, not men. And yet…the thought was in him.
“Rock Man, are you okay?”
Waters looked up to see Cole’s bulk bearing down on him. He swept Mallory’s photo into the portfolio and dropped the portfolio into an open drawer.
“Why would I not be?”
“Sybil said she told you about Eve.”
“She did. Sounds horrible.”
His eyes alert to the slightest tic in Waters’s face, Cole walked back to the door and closed it, then came and sat down opposite the desk.
“What’s going on?” Waters asked.
Cole took a deep breath and sighed. “This is your partner talking, John. We go way back, right? Way back.”
“Right.”
“Were you with Eve last night?”
“Eve Sumner?” Waters didn’t blink. “Hell no.”
Cole nodded slowly. “You were home with Lily?”
“Of course.”
“All night?”
Waters said nothing.
“Because, if you weren’t,” Cole went on, “if you were…alone, say. You were alone, and you thought that wouldn’t look good to certain people? Well, Jenny went to sleep early last night. She took a pill. So I watched HBO and drank Wild Turkey for most of the night.”
Waters’s mouth had gone dry. “And?”
“I’m just letting you know, before it becomes any kind of thing, that if you needed to be with me last night for some reason…then you were. Capisce?”
Despite the pressure he was under, a preternatural calm settled over Waters. He had always had the gift, in dire circumstances, of seeing to the heart of things. It had saved his life more than once during the years that he studied volcanoes, and also with Mallory. As Cole sat watching him, his face a perfect expression of loyalty, Waters realized two things. First, Cole had offered him the alibi he needed, should he fall under suspicion for Eve’s murder. If Cole swore that Waters had spent the night at his house, then the presence of Waters’s semen in Eve’s corpse could be explained. Yes, he’d had sex with her that day, but he had not been anywhere near the Eola Hotel that night. There would be a scandal. It might even end his marriage. But it would probably keep him out of prison, and he would then have a chance at salvaging his family. However-and this was the mother of all caveats-if he accepted Cole’s offer and went with that alibi, he would be placing his life in his partner’s hands. Cole would own him, now and forever.
“You’ve got that look,” Cole said.
“What look?”
“That deep-shit look. Your cold face.”
Waters had known Cole since he was four years old. They’d e
xperienced the frictions common to any friendship over time, magnified by the tensions of a business partnership, but Cole had never truly screwed him. Waters wasn’t worried about outright betrayal. What worried him was weakness. Cole had vices. All men did, but Cole was exceptionally bad at resisting temptation. He drank, gambled, and chased women, and he was loose with money. In his youth he had been good about keeping his own counsel, but lately even that virtue had begun to erode.
“Let me help you, Rock,” Cole said in a quiet voice. “Everybody needs a little help sometimes.”
“I don’t,” Waters said, suddenly sure. “But I appreciate it.”
He saw disappointment in his partner’s eyes. It was human nature. When we feel weak, it comforts us to know that others share our vulnerabilities. But Waters could not afford to reveal his. Not to Cole. If he needed a confessor, he would have to choose very carefully.
“I need to get to work on that map,” he said. “The one you were after me about last week.”
Cole nodded but did not get up. “Be sure, Rock. Because once you take a fork in the trail, you can’t always get back to the same spot. You know?”
“I’m good,” Waters assured him. “No worries.”
Cole looked far from convinced, but he heaved himself out of the chair and walked to the door. Before he went out, he turned and gave Waters a mock salute that seemed to say, “I did my best. You’re on your own. Good luck.” Then he went out.
The rest of the day passed in a disjointed sequence of detached, fuguelike states interrupted by mundane phone calls. At one point he buzzed Sybil to bring him the newspaper, then remembered that Eve’s body had been discovered six hours after the paper hit the streets. There would be plenty of coverage tomorrow, though. Penn Cage’s girlfriend had probably been working the story like a pit bull from the moment Eve’s body was found. But he needed a faster source of information than tomorrow’s paper. He needed to know what the police knew. Had any hotel guests heard screaming from room 324? Had anyone come forward with knowledge about Eve’s recent activities? What kind of trace evidence had they taken from the scene?