I got Steph to try calling Karren back, but there was no answer. There was nothing I could do before I got there, so I just drove, fast, and on the way learned from Stephanie that Nick had started being attentive almost from the day he joined the magazine, that she’d politely resisted all this time, and it was only the pictures she thought I’d taken of Karren—and a lot of wine—that had broken her resolve yesterday afternoon. Nothing had actually happened, nothing would have happened, she said. I believed her, at least ninety-nine percent. I was certainly prepared to believe by now that all it took was a couple of tiny modifications, for someone to move the walls just a little, for a life previously solid to look like it had been made of cardboard all along.
Karren’s apartment was in a development a couple of streets back from the bay, half a mile north of downtown, an area favored by young professionals with money to spend and no kids to get to school. It was a three-story block, the building surrounded by small but well-tended gardens and angled so the upper stories got half-decent views of the bay. Karren had got into the development early. A smart buy. She was a smart woman. I knew the place a little, having once sold property in it.
As I parked in the lot, however, I realized I didn’t know the number of Karren’s apartment.
“Come into the driver’s seat and lock the doors,” I said. I reached into the footwell on her side and picked up the gun. Steph stared at it.
“How have you got a gun, Bill?”
“Long story.” I got out. “You see anybody approaching, anyone at all, just drive. Get away from here, okay? When you’re safe, call me. Okay?”
Steph didn’t move. I stuffed the gun down the back of my jeans, the way I’d seen Emily do it. Thus ended my entire knowledge of firearms. “Honey, are you hearing me?”
She jerked back to life.
“Yes,” she said. She was lost in a combination of fear and dopiness that was hard to know how to deal with. “But I’ll move over slowly, okay? I really ache. All over.” She sounded about eight years old.
“Sure, honey. Of course. I’ll be back soon. I’m going to shut this door now. Lock up after me, okay?”
She nodded. I shut the door. She locked it. We gave each other a thumbs-up.
I trotted across the lot, glancing back when I got to the entrance to the building. Steph was laboriously hoisting herself into the other seat. I felt a twist of love for her that was so deep and sharp it hurt, and I wondered if I shouldn’t leave Karren to sink or swim. She was just background, after all. Part of the filler God provides so you’re not so aware of the joins and silences. But I thought back to the younger man I’d been—or hoped I’d been—and knew I couldn’t leave without at least checking whether she was okay.
At the entrance to the building I realized there was another method of finding which was her apartment. I didn’t know the number—but I could work it out. I changed course and went around the side of the block instead. When I got there I walked quickly backward into the grassy area, looking up at the windows.
I’d seen pictures of this structure recently, of course. The earliest photos in the sequence planted on my laptop had been designed to establish the environment, to make it look like the work of a voyeur homing in on his prey. The rear face sloped back, floor by floor. The window shown in the pictures had been on the extreme right middle floor. Now that it was in front of me, I recalled Karren extolling the virtues of a corner balcony, of having bought that apartment off-plan.
And there it was. There was a light on, but it was dim. I watched the windows as I tried calling her number again. She still wasn’t picking up.
I ran back around to the front of the building. I didn’t know what else to do but start pressing buttons on the entry phone. The first one with a 2 at the front was 201. A man’s voice answered, and was quick to tell me he wasn’t Karren. So then I tried the last number that started with a 2—204, which I hoped would be at the other end of the floor, thus at the other corner.
It rang, but nobody answered.
So maybe that was hers. But now what? I glanced back at my car and saw Steph in the driver’s seat. Her head was bent forward, and I thought once more—Christ, just leave it. It’s not like Karren was involved—why would they need to do anything to her? I could call her again and leave a message saying I’d gone out of town, that if she was concerned about anything she should call the cops (the ones in Sarasota, not Longboat, and certainly not Sheriff Barclay) and lock her doors and take care and blah blah blah. It wasn’t as if I was going to be able to offer her more than that, anyhow.
Would that do?
Could I just leave it at that and live with myself?
I was on the verge of deciding I could when a pair of car headlamps swept into the lot from the main road. I took a couple of hurried steps into the shadow of a knot of palms by the entrance. When the car was parked I saw that the occupant was a large, harried-looking man in a suit, carrying a folder stuffed with papers. He saw me.
“Help you?”
“Hope so,” I said, reaching for the persona I’d used in countless meet-and-greets, good old Bill, the chap you’d trust to find you and your newly pregnant sweetheart somewhere perfect and yet affordable to start living your dream. “Supposed to be picking Karren up for drinks. I know she’s in, but she’s not answering.”
“Karren? Karren White?”
“Right. I’ve tried calling up from the back but she’s got music on loud. And we’re running late.”
The guy looked at me. “You her boyfriend?”
“Hell no.” I laughed. “See the car over there? That’s my wife. Karren and I work together. Far as I know she doesn’t even have a boyfriend right now. Waiting for Mr. Right, you know how it goes.”
The man smiled, evidently cheered by the prospect of his neighbor being as single as he’d let himself hope, during long evenings alone in his apartment surrounded by paperwork and the remains of microwave meals.
We went to the door together. He let himself in, and let me follow. I thanked him without making a big deal about it, and as he went to the mailboxes I ran up the stairs, thinking: this is how people get killed, sometimes—someone is helpful to the wrong guy.
Up on the second floor I hurried to the far end. Two things about the door to 204 were immediately obvious. First, it was open, hanging slightly ajar. Second, there was a piece of Shore Realty letterhead taped to the door. Someone had written a single word on it in big clear capitals. And underneath they’d put a smiley face.
I stared at it. The three dots and a little curved line. The word MODIFIED.
There was no doubt now, but I could still go forward, or back. I could push open the door, or I could back away and run.
I reached behind and pulled out the gun. I gently pushed the door. Beyond was a short wide hallway. It was dark. I stepped in, leaving the door open behind me. On the left, the hall dead-ended after a couple of feet in a wall with a couple of hooks on it. A smart blue jacket, a purse I semi-recognized. Both Karren’s.
I looked the other way. There was a doorway on the left-hand side, four feet away. I crept along to it. A glance showed it was a half bathroom. Small, no windows. It smelled operating-room clean.
I backed over to the other side, keeping close to the exterior wall. I moved sideways along the corridor, heading toward the point where it hit the end wall and where there was a wide gap into the main apartment.
I flashed back in my head to the visit I’d made to a property in this block. It hadn’t been a corner property—so the layout might not be the same. Given the length of this hallway, however, and how close I’d been to the extent of the building when I got to Karren’s door, I thought the gap I could see likely opened onto the main living space, a large room with double aspect glass doors onto the wrap balcony I’d seen from the gardens below.
I took another slow, silent side step. I stood motionless for half a minute, listening. There was the sound of a car on some road, followed by a horn, even farther away
. Both had a clarity, despite their evident distance, that made me wonder if the doors to the balcony were open. I hadn’t noticed from outside. I put my other hand around the handle of the gun, the way I’d seen Hallam do it. I took the final step to the side, and looked through the gap in the wall.
The living room. A couple of dark red couches, three lamps, a coffee table partially obscured from my position by a big easy chair. Pale carpet. There was a bookcase against the wall on the right, with more books than I would have expected. Everything was very tidy.
There was nobody there.
Now what? Should I call out? Would that be sensible or dumb? How was I supposed to know? I opened my mouth, took in a couple of long, slow breaths. All I could hear was a ringing in my ears.
I took a step forward, to the threshold of the room. I noticed something on the near end of the coffee table, now revealed from behind the chair. A couple of small rectangles of cards, a few other pieces of paper, and Karren’s cell phone.
I thought maybe I should call out. If Karren was in the apartment, in the kitchen or bedroom or bathroom, she’d be scared witless to see a man coming into her living room—especially if she’d already started to become nervous about things happening in her life. But if she was here, why hadn’t she responded to the last call? And even if she was shocked to see someone here, she’d realize soon enough that it was me.
But I couldn’t get a call to come out of my throat. I took another couple of steps into the room instead. From there I could see that the things on the table looked like photographs: three stubby rectangles, like Polaroids. The other pieces of paper had the thin, curling shape of cash register receipts.
I moved diagonally toward the table, one step at a time, keeping my eyes—and the gun—trained on the door on the right, gateway to the rest of the apartment. I could see a kitchen, a couple of dim underlighters, a corridor that would lead to the bedrooms.
I got to the table, glanced down. Then looked again, properly. The receipts were for credit card transactions. I recognized the number, the last four digits. It was the number of my Amex card—the one I’d used in Jonny Bo’s with Hazel—the card Sheriff Barclay already told me had been cloned to buy the gun that had killed his deputy. One of the receipts was for several hundred dollars, from a store called Hank’s Sporting Goods. It seemed likely that was the one. There were a few more, for similar sums, but I didn’t get as far as logging where they’d been spent, because I saw what was in the photos.
In the first, my swimming pool, taken from the living room of the house. In the second, the mangled body I’d seen floating there. In the third, that body, naked and facedown on a floor, before someone had undertaken the work of removing pieces of it.
Only someone who was part of the game would have access to these things.
I realized then that Karren White had been on the edges of everything that had happened in the last week. She worked in the same office. She knew my movements, was party to everything I did in working hours every day—and for months and months before.
She was the person who took the first alleged meeting with David Warner, and was then removed from the scenario to make way for me—dressed up such that I’d be only too pleased to step into her shoes.
She was the person who’d been conveniently in position at her window for someone to take the pictures.
I’d even phoned her a couple of times over the last forty-eight hours, handing her up-to-the-minute information about where I was and my state of mind.
I realized that it was possible I’d maybe been very dumb indeed, and that maybe Karren hadn’t called me here because she was scared.
“Hey, Bill,” said a voice. “Cool gun.”
I jerked my head up to see a woman in a robe leaning in the doorway to the kitchen. Her arms were folded. She looked relaxed and slightly amused.
It was Cass.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I stopped being aware of my hands, my feet, my body. I was merely eyes.
“Whoa,” she said with a delighted laugh. “That is even better than I hoped. You totally look like you’re going to fall down or something. Priceless.”
“Cass?”
“Glad to see the facial recognition software is still functioning. After such a hard day, too. You rule.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
“That’s okay, take a moment,” she said. “You want a drink or something? There isn’t much. Though it could be after last night you’re avoiding alcohol, right?”
I tried to rethink everything since I got back to my house that afternoon. Since even before that—from the moment I’d woken in this woman’s apartment to find a word daubed on her bathroom door, in what I’d thought had been her blood. I even took a faltering step to the side, to check I was seeing what I thought I was, not some ringer in makeup, that the effect worked from a different angle, that I couldn’t see through her. That she was real.
“How are you not . . .”
“Look again at the photos.”
I looked at the pictures on the coffee table. I saw my pool. I saw the floating body. Then I saw the naked back in the third picture, and realized I perhaps should have wondered why someone might bother to strip a body before reclothing it in a black lacy blouse—a garment distinctive enough to make a man jump to the wrong conclusion when confronted with a corpse in his pool.
“That wasn’t you.”
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“So who . . . ?”
I put my hand over my mouth, suddenly convinced I was going to throw up.
“You can’t guess?”
Who else was there? Whose apartment was I standing in? My voice was a croak between my fingers.
“Karren.”
“Yes. It is she. Target for your twisted affections, et cetera. I called her at your office this afternoon, saying I was a friend and that you were in trouble. She came running. Bitch was strong, though, when she realized none of the above was true. Scratched me quite badly.”
“But . . . why did you kill her?”
“Me? I haven’t killed anyone.” Her voice sounded brittle, false. She stepped back from the door, gesturing for me to come through. “Want to see who did?”
The door to the main bedroom was open. On the floor lay plastic sheeting covered in blood. Stained woodworking tools were scattered across it.
A man was tied naked to the bed. He seemed to realize that someone had entered the doorway. He raised his head an inch groggily. His eyes found mine. I could not tell what I was seeing in them, if anything.
“David Warner,” Cass said. “You meet at last. Though to be honest, he’s not at his best.”
Sprays of blood were all over the walls of what had been Karren’s bedroom. A place she’d gone to sleep, night after night. Read the books out there on her shelves. Given her e-mail a last check for the day.
And died.
I heard Cassandra walking away, back to the living room. I followed her. “And Karren had nothing to do with any of this?”
“With what?”
“With the game the Thompsons were playing.”
“Nope.”
“What about the other one?”
“There is no other one. This whole sorry mess was a diversion played by oldsters with too much time and money on their hands. A jaded parlor mind game over brandies and margaritas that got derailed when an old victim came back to even the score.”
“Bullshit. I talked to the Thompsons just before Hunter got to them. They were scared to death. They knew something else was going on. Tony said he thought Warner had been putting parts into the scenario that they hadn’t known about, trying to get back at them over some development deal they’d cut him out of.”
Cassandra shrugged. “Okay, so you know more than I thought. There may have been something along those lines. But no, Ms. White wasn’t involved on either count. In fact, I think she may even have been carrying a little torch for you. I found a few pictures in a drawer
here. Nothing too stalky—just snaps of the handsome Realtor at parties, events, plus one of the two of you standing together at some tennis event. Sweet, huh.”
“But why did you let him kill her?”
“Containment. I didn’t know what you’d told her, or if she could put you at the wrong place at the right time or just generally cause trouble and stop this thing being neatly put to bed. Though to be honest, using her as set dressing for your pool wasn’t actually my idea.”
“So whose was it?”
She shrugged again, with an insolent little grin, a willful, gleeful child getting off on the power trip of screwing with an adult’s mind. I decided I didn’t have to understand what was going on. I started toward her.
“Don’t,” she said. The emo chick disappeared, turned off like a light, and she aged ten years in front of my eyes. She now had a gun in her hand.
I remembered I had one in my own. I looked down at it.
“You won’t,” she said.
“People keep telling me that,” I said thickly. “Sooner or later one of you is going to be wrong.”
“Nah. From what I gather you’ve already had a chance to kill someone today, a guy who’d done you manifest harm. You didn’t do it then. You won’t do it now.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said impotently.
“I’m sure. You’ve been modified, but not that much. The weird thing is that kind of means you win. In a way. Were it not for Hunter getting this thing so fucked up, you might be walking away from the game a richer man, friend of the Thompsons and lord of glorious new domains.”
“Where did all the blood come from? In the bed in your apartment?”
“Previous occupant.”
“Who was that?”
“Kevin.”
“That was Kevin’s apartment? But, but you said . . . you said it was him who called you. While I was there.”
“I lied. The man I work for gave Warner my phone number and told him I’d help. He left a message.”
“Why would you kill Kevin?”
“He got a little too intrigued with what was happening to you. Ironically, he thought it would be a good excuse for trying to get to know me better. He called, I went around to his apartment, and . . . well, stuff happened. Though not in the way he’d hoped.”
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