by Greg Iles
Waters smashed his fists into Cole’s forearms, knocking them from the chair arms, and jumped to his feet. “Goddamn it, why?”
“John-”
“Just tell me one thing, you son of a bitch! Is Lily involved in this?”
Cole stood up, his face bright red. “Not anymore. But why do you even care about that?”
“Why do I care? Lily is all I care about. Lily and Annelise.”
Cole looked suddenly bereft. “Don’t say that.”
“Compared to Lily, you think I give a shit about you and your problems? You made a good living from this company, and you pissed it away on gambling and God knows what else. Now you want to take me down for murder so you can steal the company and get your ass out of a hole you dug yourself? And you use my wife to do it?”
Cole’s lower lip quivered, and the hurt in his eyes dwarfed the pain Waters had seen at the country club the previous day.
“You don’t understand!” he cried, taking Waters by the arms. “You’ve got to listen to me.”
Waters tried to pull free, but alcohol and dissipation had not completely sapped the strength of the old athlete in Cole.
“Let go, goddamn it!”
He was about to slam his knee into his partner’s groin when Cole sobbed and drove him back against the office wall like an offensive lineman. Waters’s head hit the painted bricks hard enough to blind him. The first thing he saw when the stars cleared was Cole staring at him like a madman begging for understanding.
“You don’t know anything about Lily!” Cole shouted. “You think you know her, Johnny, but you don’t!”
Johnny? Waters tried to think through the blur in his brain, but Cole kept talking, his face wet with tears and mucus, his right arm across Waters’s chest, pinning him to the wall. “Listen to me, Johnny. I’m trying to do what you told me to. But you don’t even care!”
Waters remained frozen.
“You lied!” Cole screamed. “You said you’d give up Lily and come to me if I went into another woman. But you were lying!”
Waters’s heart stuttered, then kicked off again with an arrhythmic beat that he feared would not sustain consciousness. He shut his eyes against confusion so profound that it felt like psychological whiplash.
“Say something!” Cole demanded. “Look at me!”
Waters opened his eyes. His partner’s face, livid a moment ago, was now pale, and his mouth worked in a silent struggle between rage and despair. Even as Waters’s emotions tried to convince him that Cole was only playing another scene in a drama written to deprive him of his sanity, cold reason forced him toward the awful truth. Cole was not that good an actor. He could dissemble in front of husbands whom he had cuckolded, but the pain and confusion in his face now were utterly foreign to the man Waters had known all his life. Cole Smith simply did not panic, and to mimic it like this was beyond him.
“Oh God,” Waters breathed. “No…”
A strange light suddenly shone out of Cole’s eyes, and his lips curled into something like a smile. Horror unlike anything Waters had known in his life turned his bowels to water. This morning, while he was talking to Penn or giving blood to the police, Mallory had followed his order of last night in a way that must have given her savage pleasure. As Lily, she had seduced Cole, and by this single act had both violated the wife Waters loved and robbed his best friend of his mind. The image of Cole thrusting inside his wife drove Waters to a point of fury that bordered on madness. He rammed his knee into Cole’s testicles, then slammed an uppercut into the soft area under his jaw. The big man fell back, gasping for air, and Waters retreated behind the desk. Two blows wouldn’t stop a man of Cole’s size for long, so he reached into Cole’s drawer and brought out the Magnum.357.
“Tell me what you did!” he shouted, aiming the gun at Cole. “You made Lily sleep with Cole, didn’t you?”
Cole tried to straighten up but could not. The blow to his groin had effectively crippled him. But he did raise his face, and when he did, Waters saw the light of triumph in his eyes.
“It wasn’t”-Cole gasped-“wasn’t like it was the first time they’d done it. It didn’t take much convincing to get your partner over to your house, Johnny. It took even less to get him to provide service in the bedroom. Lily bought a fifth of Johnnie Walker to warm him up. Then she fluttered her eyelashes and shed a few tears, and he was on her like a hound dog.”
“Lily never cheated on me with Cole!”
“Not after you were married. But Cole has very fond memories of Lily as a college freshman. Mostly because she’s your wife, I think. Lily wasn’t anything special in the sack, but she was young and firm. A nice diversion on a Friday night.”
Waters hoped this was one of Mallory’s lies, but the sick feeling in his stomach told him it probably wasn’t. He choked back a response and cocked the pistol’s plowshare hammer.
“And neither one of them ever told you about it,” Cole said. “The whole time you were falling in love with her, showing her off, telling Cole how great she was, he was thinking about the times he did her. That’s friendship, isn’t it?”
A strange sense of relief rolled through Waters. By trying so hard to damn Lily and Cole, Mallory had made him realize that both were innocent of anything beyond a college fling. There was no scam, no conspiracy. Both were pawns in Mallory’s twisted plan. Lily probably wouldn’t even remember having sex with Cole. Unless…like Eve, she had “awakened” to find herself naked and under Cole-
“Where’s Lily?” he asked. “Right now? Did you hurt her?”
“Why would I hurt her?” Cole asked. “What happens to Lily later doesn’t interest me, but I don’t want you to feel any guiltier than you have to when you come to me.”
“You swear she’s all right?”
“I don’t want to talk about her!” Cole snapped. “You told me you’d leave her, but she’s all you care about! You lied.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Waters replied calmly, trying to get his thoughts back on track. He let down the hammer and set the pistol on the desk. “What did you expect me to do? You’d blotted out my wife’s mind. You threatened my daughter’s life-”
“You threatened me first! You said you’d act like I was dead!”
You should be dead, Waters thought. “This is just like twenty years ago, Mallory. You don’t trust me to love you. You think you have to make me love you. But you can’t make anyone feel love. Love doesn’t work that way.”
“I know how love works!” Cole screamed. “I know how you felt with me when I was in Eve. You were lost inside me! You loved me then. And you will again.”
Waters wasn’t about to argue. If Mallory decided to hurt Lily and Annelise, he had no way to stop her. Certainly the police could do nothing to prevent it. He slid the.357 back in the drawer, closed his mind to the male face across the desk, and spoke as tenderly as he could.
“I always loved you, Mallory. And you always sabotaged us with your paranoia. But now…now I see that you’re doing what you promised. You left Lily alone, and you’re going to go into someone else. And I intend to keep my part of the bargain.”
Cole wiped his eyes and walked toward the desk. “But how long is it going to take? Who am I going to go into?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to find a woman I think I can live with.”
“What about Sybil?” Cole said, his eyes suddenly bright. “Cole already sleeps with her. Or he did until a month ago, anyway. She’s pretty, she’s only twenty-eight, she’s got a wonderful body…and no husband or kids to worry about. Nobody to ask questions. She’s perfect. I even know she’s fertile.”
“How do you know that?”
Cole’s face articulated pure sadness in a way that Waters had not seen since Cole was a child. “She got pregnant when she was in high school,” he said. “Her parents made her get rid of the baby.”
Waters didn’t want Mallory thinking about abortion. “Sybil could be the one,” he said. “But I don’t know yet.”
Ask what? Waters wondered, realizing the answer even as he asked the question.
“Unless,” Cole said softly, “you don’t mind the idea.”
Cole took hold of his hand, and before Waters could overcome his shock, Cole kissed his wrist, then slid his tongue along Waters’s inner forearm.
Waters jerked his arm free with a cry.
Cole laughed. “I knew you’d be like that. Oh, well. Men can’t bear children, anyway.”
Waters’s stomach churned with fear and revulsion. “Tell me one thing before I go. When you told me how you moved from person to person, you said it took you a while to control people’s minds. How are you doing it now? To people you just entered?”
Cole smiled cagily. “I learned a lot in ten years, Johnny. And some people just aren’t very challenging. Lily is depressed. She still blames herself for her miscarriages. Basically, she’s just weak. Cole is a burnout case. Eaten up with guilt about his debts, insecure about sex with his young conquests. His mind is a nest of snakes drowning in scotch. He takes Viagra to cheat on his wife, for God’s sake. There’s not enough of the original Cole left to resist me.”
Waters shook his head. The parallels to virus transmission kept hitting him; when a person’s resistance was down, the virus gained a foothold and grew exponentially.
“The people in your life are empty,” Cole said. “They could never make you truly happy. But I can. You know I can.”
Cole pressed a button on his desk phone. After a moment, Sybil said, “Yes?”
“Could you come in for a minute, Sybil?”
“I’m pretty busy.” Her voice was clipped and cold.
Cole chuckled and whispered, “She’s pouting.” He raised his voice. “Come on, Syb. It’ll only take a sec.”
He turned off the intercom. “Take a good look, Johnny. I like her.”
Waters stood mute as Sybil walked in wearing a classy skirt suit. Her hair was pinned up, showing her long neck to advantage, and her smoldering Cajun eyes settled on Cole with open resentment.
“What is it?” she asked. “Hey, John.”
Waters only nodded, knowing he could never make his voice sound normal under such stress.
“Damn, I forgot what I called you in for,” Cole told her. “My mistake. I’ll remember what it was in a minute.”
Sybil expelled air from her lips with obvious anger, then turned and marched out. Cole’s eyes followed her tiny waist and shapely hips as she went through the door.
“What do you think about her?” he asked. “Cole may be a mess, but he does have an eye for beauty.”
“She’s beautiful,” Waters replied. “But I’m going now. Tell me, will Lily remember having sex with Cole?”
“Probably not. Of course, she’ll always remember the first times they did it. Nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid.”
Waters bit off his reply and turned to go.
“What about Sybil?” Cole called after him.
Waters paused in the door but did not turn.
“Maybe. I have to think about it. Right now I have a date with the police.”
“A lot of clocks are ticking, Johnny. Don’t take too long.”
Chapter 17
The police grilled Waters for sixty-four minutes. They would have gone on longer, but as the questions became aggressively repetitive, Penn protested that the interrogation was bordering on harassment of a model citizen who had cooperated from the beginning. If there were new questions, Penn told them, he would get the answers from Waters and relay them to police headquarters.
Tom Jackson handled the interrogation, flanked by a silent partner with a pockmarked face who glared at Waters as though he held some personal grudge against him. Waters decided it was class resentment. Both detectives seemed uncomfortable in the upscale law office of Penn Cage’s friend. Most of the questions were about Eve Sumner, the rest intended to uncover the current state of Waters’s marriage. Where Eve was concerned, Waters mostly lied. He denied ever having had sex with her. As for the videotape of his Land Cruiser by the Eola Hotel just prior to the murder, he explained that the EPA investigation of his company had been giving him sleep problems, and that he had recently done a lot of late-night driving. Tom Jackson was forced to admit that he’d stopped Waters late one night in the act of doing just that. On the night of the murder, Waters told them, he’d driven downtown with the idea of having a gin and tonic at one of the bars near the Eola, but the rainstorm made him reluctant to get out. He’d turned onto Pearl Street with the intent of going home via Franklin Street. At that point he saw the crowded accident scene, and decided to back up and take a different route home. He couldn’t tell what Jackson thought of his explanation, but it was clear that Jackson’s partner thought he was lying. Still, no one placed him under arrest.
After the police left the law office, Waters gave Penn an inquiring glance. Penn shook his head, as if to say, “Not until we’re outside.”
Once they were in the Audi, Penn started the engine and turned to Waters with curiosity on his face.
“You’re a hell of a liar, John. I think you could have passed a polygraph if you’d been hooked to one during those questions.”
“My family’s at stake,” Waters said quietly. “It’s really that simple. I’ll do whatever I have to do to save them. You’d do the same.”
Penn looked as though he was recalling something troubling, and Waters suddenly remembered that the lawyer in Cage’s novel had lied to the police about several important events.
“You have done the same.”
“Lying to police is tricky business,” Penn said. “They tend to get pissed off when they find out you did it.”
“But you said-”
“Nothing,” Penn finished. “Nothing at all.”
He pulled into the street and headed toward Waters’s office. “When the DNA match comes in and you recant your statements, I presume your position will be that you concealed adultery to save your marriage?”
“Does it matter? At this point, I don’t really care.”
“That worries me, John.”
“Don’t give it another thought.”
Penn stared but said nothing else as he drove down Main Street. In the parking lot of Waters’s building, Waters shook his lawyer’s hand, then got into his Land Cruiser and headed for home, his mind on the videotape that now rested in the glove box. The next few hours would be the most difficult of his life.
Waters found Lily asleep in the master bedroom and Rose sitting on the back steps, watching Annelise ride her motorized scooter on the patio. He sat beside Rose and watched his daughter make circle after circle on the stones, waving and smiling each time she passed them.
“Something ain’t right with Lily,” Rose said. “She usually goin’ like a top from the time she wake up till she lay down at night. You know that.”
Waters nodded soberly. “I think she’s been a little depressed lately.”
“Depressed? That girl been depressed since she lost them babies. You knows that too. What’s really going on, Mr. John? You playing around on that poor girl?”
“No.”
“You’d best not be. You need to get Lily to Dr. Cage. He’ll fix her up quick, or else get her to a specialist who can.”
“I may do that, Rose.”
“You promise?”
Rose’s words reminded him of the promise he had made Mallory so long ago. “I think I know what’s wrong, Rose. And I don’t think a doctor can fix it. I have to fix it.”
The black woman turned and looked deep into his
eyes. “You sure you ain’t been goin’ in the street with somebody?”
“I’m sure.”
She shook her head in surrender, as if to say, “White people’s problems,” then grunted and stood and waved at Annelise. “I’m going on, girl. Your daddy got you now.”
“Bye, Rose!” Ana yelled. “See you tomorrow!”
“Mmm-hmm.” Rose waddled up the steps and into the house.
Waters let Annelise make a few more circuits of the patio, then took her inside and fed her the supper Rose had left in the oven. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli, and salad. Ana skipped the salad, but she put away two chicken legs and three helpings of potatoes and gravy. Waters wondered where the food went; his daughter still weighed only fifty pounds.
When he finished rinsing the dishes, Lily had still not appeared, so he took Ana into the den and listened to her read aloud from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers. She had quickly graduated from the Harry Potter series, and now loved nothing more than hobbits and elves. As the struggle of good versus evil played out in his ears, Waters realized he had rarely looked at his own life in those terms.
Despite all Mallory had done in his distant past, he had never attributed the word “evil” to her. But now…an image of Lily dangling the butcher knife over Annelise’s head flashed into his mind, and he knew in his bones that Mallory would not stop until Lily and Annelise had been wiped from the earth. He could see only one solution: Mallory had to be destroyed. And yet…she could not be killed without killing the innocent person who contained her-
“John?”
Waters got to his feet as Lily walked into the den in an old blue housecoat. Her eyes were puffy from sleep, and her newly cut blond hair was pressed flat against the left side of her face. Annelise looked up from her book, and her eyes went wide.
“Mom?”
“Sit down, babe,” Waters said, leading Lily to the sofa. “Do you feel all right?”
“Not really. I’m exhausted. I have been all afternoon.” She looked at Annelise, whose eyes were filled with confusion. “Hey, baby.”