She parked on the street and dragged herself to the door, bone weary and heartsick. She’d lick her wounds, fall into bed, decide what to do about her failing career and her broken friendship tomorrow. Everything would look better in the morning. At least, she hoped it would.
Maggie took the key from her pocket and raised it to the door, her eyes bleary from fatigue and tears.
That’s when she started screaming.
Chapter 27
The doorknob was wet and sticky. Maggie snatched her hand away and wiped her fingers on her pants, a terrible habit Fiona never cured. Then she saw the hamster.
The small rodent hung over the peephole, obscuring the tiny glass. It had been impaled with a screwdriver, mating the animal not only to her door, but also to a glossy 8x10 photo of herself, running alone on a wooded trail. It was the same photograph that accompanied the craigslist ad promoting her supposed escort services.
Blood was trickling down the door. Not much, but more than zero, which was what Maggie considered the appropriate amount of blood on her front door.
Maggie fought to bring her terror under control. Her entire body shook as she stood at the door, staring at the carcass dangling from its makeshift kabob skewer. The animal looked like Miss Vanilla. But it couldn’t be. Miss V. had been in Constantine’s pocket just that morning. Or was that the day before? Or the day before that?
Maggie tried to remember the last time she’d seen Miss Vanilla. She shook her head, trying to clear it. She couldn’t remember.
The blood from the doorknob dripped from her hand onto the porch, staining the entrance with blobs of red that flattened and smeared. She stumbled down the stairs, grabbed a handful of tall grass beside the porch, pressed it against the doorknob and turned as she twisted the key in the lock. It opened and she staggered inside, slamming the bolt into place.
Maggie ran to the bathroom, half-sobbing, half-whimpering. She bumped the faucet on with an elbow and scrubbed the blood from her hands with soap and scalding-hot water. She washed until her own skin nearly started bleeding, then toweled off on a soft cloth she typically reserved for drying the Studebaker.
Still shaking, Maggie went to the kitchen and retrieved a plastic grocery bag and a pair of dishwashing gloves. She walked to the door and peered through the peephole. Maggie squinted hard, trying to see around the shadow of the impaled animal. Nothing but the sun’s halfhearted light filtered through. She held her breath, waiting, sure that he was there, waiting as well.
Five minutes crawled by. Then two more. Put your big girl panties on, she told herself. But she couldn’t make her hand close around the door’s handle and turn. She yanked a large black umbrella off the entrance coat rack and felt its heft. Not a baseball bat, but better than nothing.
Maggie opened the door a crack. Silence beckoned with the promise of nothing and no one. She opened the door wider. More silence. She stepped out and looked at the hamster hanging on the door like a macabre doorknocker. She wrenched the screwdriver free and the animal fell into the open grocery bag she held beneath it. She examined the animal briefly. It was smaller than Miss Vanilla and darker. It wasn’t her.
The photo of her jogging, now smeared with blood and gristle, still stuck to the door. Maggie pried it off and stuffed it into the bag, considering for a moment that she might be tampering with evidence of her own future murder. She shivered, tied the plastic bag shut and went inside.
She was considering where and how to dispose of the animal when her phone pinged merrily in her pocket.
The reminder app.
Her stomach cramped, a fresh burst of acid streaming into it. She tried to swallow. It felt as if she’d been sucking cotton balls. She extracted the phone and looked at the screen.
Zartar’s face, lovely and dark and mysterious, gazed back.
Chapter 28
Maggie felt as if someone had yanked the earth out from beneath her feet. Her knees buckled and she slid to the floor. “No,” she moaned. “Please, God, no.” Her mind’s eye saw the digitized faces of Elsa, Carson and Mia. The newspaper articles intoning the details of their deaths.
Run over. Entombed in a car. Stabbed in the street.
She clicked the app.
MEETING REMINDER
TIME: 12:15 p.m.
The time on Maggie’s phone read 12:10.
Maggie exited the app and frantically scrolled through her contacts.
Come on. Come on. Why do you have to be at the end of the alphabet? Zartar’s magic digits finally appeared and Maggie clicked to call.
She waited three rings. Four. Six. Then Zartar’s voicemail clicked on, greeting her with a friendly, slightly pornographic invitation to leave a name and number.
She was talking before the beep ended. “Zartar, it’s Maggie. Call me as soon as you get this message. It’s urgent. I mean it, Zartar. Call me now.”
Maggie’s heartbeat had tripled. Each beat seemed to urge her to action. Do something. Do something. Do something.
She scrolled through her contacts again, landing on Constantine. Voicemail, this time with Constantine impersonating Jack Nicholson. “You can’t handle the voicemail!” his recorded voice shouted.
Dammit. She hung up, in too much of a hurry to leave a message. He was probably mad enough to avoid listening to her voicemail.
Maggie tried Ethan. No answer. She hung up.
Finally, she called Roselyn. “It’s Maggie. Do you know where Zartar is? I really need to talk with her.”
“Zartar? She left work right after you did. I’m not sure where she went. She said something about a meeting. She seemed pretty uptight about the whole thing. Like she wasn’t supposed to say but also wanted me to know what it was. Classic Zartar.”
“Who was she meeting? Where?”
“I’m not sure. Like I said, she was pretty secretive about it. She did say she needed to run home first. Not sure that helps.”
“Rozzie, give me Zartar’s address.”
“Can’t you just look it—”
“Now, Roselyn. Please.”
Maggie waited in agony as Roselyn looked it up, then read it slowly, as if performing the announcer voiceover for a commercial advertising hearing aids. Maggie thanked her and hung up the phone.
She dialed Constantine’s cell again as she started the Studebaker and slammed it into gear. Panic built inside her like a wild animal scrambling to get out. She waited for the beep. This time she’d leave the damn voicemail.
“It’s me,” Maggie paused, gathering her thoughts. “Something very bad is about to happen. Or has already happened. I need you to call me. Right away. Please. I need you.”
Maggie sped to Zartar’s neighborhood nestled in the city’s next great place. Local clothiers, organic food carts and hipster galleries sprouted like weeds between the cracks of tumbledown houses and dilapidated office buildings. Old churned beneath new in a boiling architectural mulch that made Maggie feel like she was walking into a Tim Burton movie.
Zartar’s apartment was smack dab in the middle, a trendy little flat on the trendiest block. Maggie parked and tried Zartar’s phone again. When she got no answer, she got out of her car and locked it. She reached into her purse, suddenly wishing she had a gun or a knife, and pulled out a half of a piece of gum. Right. She’d freshen the murderer’s breath. Disgusted, she crammed it back in her bag.
She walked up the stairs to Zartar’s second-floor apartment and stopped in front of a door guarded by twin statues of naked men holding baskets of plastic fruit at groin level. She rapped sharply on the door. Then pressed the buzzer.
Somehow, she knew there’d be no approaching footsteps. No “just a sec.” No curse words on the other side of the door as Zartar arranged her kimono and prepared her complaints.
Maggie tried the door handle. It turned easily. She pushed the door open. The light in every room in the a
partment seemed to be illuminated.
“Zartar?” she called softly. “Zartar, it’s Maggie. Can I come in?” Maggie’s heart pounded sickly in her chest, and Maggie hoped she’d be able to hear her friend over the blood that roared through her ears.
Maggie stole through Zartar’s living room. Chintz pillows in chartreuse and persimmon reclined on a heavy Persian rug. An oak coffee table bedecked with more plastic fruit surrounded by a moat of fun-size candy bar wrappers stood in the center of the room.
It was like the Ropers’ apartment from Three’s Company had bred with a World Market sale circular.
Maggie paused by a giant faux fig tree. She smelled something. Something hot, acrid and metallic.
She moved like a sleepwalker from the living room into the kitchen. On the stove, a saucepan of hardboiled eggs had boiled over and burned down to a shallow pool of water which was now cementing the overcooked eggs to the bottom of the pan. Maggie flicked off the stove and surveyed the kitchen. A jar of mayonnaise. A plate of toast. A small puddle of something sticky oozing down the Formica.
Maggie bent to examine it. The smell, more pungent than before, assaulted her nostrils. Blood.
Maggie whirled around, her heart pounding so hard she thought it would explode. Blood was everywhere. A smear on the cabinet. A spatter on the chandelier. Thick globs on the floor leading down the hall.
She pressed nine and one on her phone, her index finger hovering over the final one, then followed the globs down the hall to a small pink powder room.
The door was ajar. Maggie stood at the threshold for a moment, straining to hear the evil that lay in wait on the other side. Then pushed gently against the rose-painted wood.
The door swung wide, exposing a bathroom replete with volumizing hair products, makeup and a fuzzy toilet seat cover. Zartar’s lifeless body lay in the center of the tiny room, her head haloed by a pool of blood.
A sound something like a moan escaped Maggie’s lips.
She fell to her knees, the phone skipping across beige tile. She turned Zartar over and felt for a pulse. Her skin was cool and still, the arterial echo of her heart silenced.
Zartar stared blindly at the ceiling, her mouth gaping in an endless scream. Her left temple had been crushed, leaving a caldera ringed by bone and the indentation of something heavy and jagged. Zartar’s peasant blouse bloomed with crimson fleurettes that turned the white shirt into a riotous floral print. A trinity of stab wounds in Zartar’s chest gaped accusingly. A gash at her throat where the point of a knife could be used to control and coerce wept quietly onto the floor.
“Zartar.” Maggie’s voice broke in a choked sob. “Oh, God, Zartar, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t get here in time. I’m sorry I was too late. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh, God, I’m sorry.” The mindless apologies poured out of her like a prayer. She rocked back and forth, holding her friend’s head, and the prayer became a low, wordless keening.
Panic took hold, tearing through her mind. She had to get out. She had to get away. She had to escape the blood and the bone and the smell boring into her brain.
Maggie fumbled for her phone, dropped it again. It bounced against the commode and next to Zartar’s body. She snatched the phone from beside her friend’s leg and crab-walked backward towards the door, her stomach lurching with terror. She became entangled in one of Zartar’s bathrobes hanging on the back of the door. Maggie slapped the silky kimono from her skin as if it were a venomous snake, then found her feet and fled for the door. “I’m sorry, Zartar.” She sobbed as she took one final look at the motionless form on the floor. “I will stop them. I will make them pay.”
Chapter 29
Maggie ran into the hall, knocking a scarf-festooned lamp onto the coffee table, which shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. She kept running, not bothering to shut the front door as she bolted from the apartment. She looked over her shoulder, silently bidding Zartar one final anguished goodbye as she tore down the stairs and raced over the narrow walkway—and right into the spindly form of a middle-aged man.
She took in his shock of dark hair, his hunched frame, skin so white it brought to mind albino spiders that spend their whole lives beneath rocks. His shirt was embroidered with Ivanovich, Manager.
“Hey,” he said irritably, bouncing back a bit from the impact. “Watch where you’re going.”
“Sorry,” Maggie muttered, the latest in her endless litany of apologies. She pushed around him and ran toward her car. She chanced a glance his way as she unlocked her car. He was watching her from the sidewalk, scrawny arms folded across a narrow chest.
Maggie flung open her door and clambered inside. She cranked the key, threw the gearshift into first and stood on the gas pedal, steering with her knee as she entered the final digits to complete 911.
“911, what’s your emergency?” the dispatcher said. Maggie’s throat felt as if it were swelling shut. She took a great, gasping breath, struggling against lightheadedness. “Your emergency?” the dispatcher asked again, more sharply this time.
“There’s been a mur…a woman is hurt,” Maggie cried into the phone.
She was suddenly unsure whether Zartar was really dead. Maggie was no doctor. Maybe there had been a pulse. Slow, weak. Easily missed.
“What are the injuries?”
Maggie gulped, trying to squelch her sobs and the scream that seemed to build somewhere inside her. “She’s been stabbed,” Maggie finally managed as she turned the Studebaker onto an old county highway. “She’s bleeding. Oh, God. So much blood. Please hurry.”
“Your name?”
Faces swam before Maggie. Elsa. Carson. Mia. Zartar. She could feel the horror bubbling up again. “She’s at 1914 Westview, apartment number five.”
She hung up and dialed Constantine. Straight to voicemail. When it beeped for her to leave a message, her voice was a strangled gasp. “Gus. Call me. It’s—”
The yelp of a siren cut off Maggie mid-sentence. She peered into her rearview mirror. Red and blue lights rotated atop an unmarked patrol car.
What?
Maggie pressed the End button and dropped the phone onto her lap. She pulled the Studebaker onto the shoulder.
Why was she being pulled over?
She couldn’t think clearly. She felt as if she’d been cleaved in two, her sane, rational self trying to shout through an ocean of murky water to her bewildered self, which was floating away.
Suddenly she remembered the apartment manager she’d run into as she fled Zartar’s home. He could have seen her leave Zartar’s apartment. He could have known what she’d done—or what he thought she’d done, guilt radiating off her like the stench of death.
Maggie checked her rearview mirror again. The patrol car, a nondescript Crown Victoria, had pulled in right behind her, nearly touching her bumper. The interior of the police car was partially illuminated, silhouetting the man inside as he spoke into his radio.
Maggie dragged her nose across the back of her hand. She detected the scent of something acrid and recoiled. She looked down at her hand. It was sticky, still smeared with Zartar’s blood.
Zartar’s silent scream, her missing skull, crowded into Maggie’s mind. Adrenaline pumped into her bloodstream. The shaking returned.
She reached into her purse and rooted around until her hand closed around a small plastic packet. She pulled it out, dispensed three Handi Wipes and began scrubbing the skin.
The rap of a flashlight against her window made her jump. She slowly rolled down the window.
The officer put his hand on the door and leaned into the window. His face was flat and broad, marked by a red mustache that looked like it had been placed there during a game of Pin the Facial Hair on the Cop. He was young, twenty-four, twenty-five tops, and he frowned as if to make himself look older, more in charge. “Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked.
�
��No,” Maggie said. Her voice sounded funny, high and breathless, even to her. “Was I speeding?”
The man looked at her sharply. He waited expectantly, as if giving her time to come up with the right answer. Maggie aimed for a pleasant smile and said nothing.
The cop considered her for a moment, then jerked his head toward the phone that lay dormant in her lap. “Cell phone. Against the law to dial and drive.”
Right. The phone.
“Plus your headlight’s out,” the cop continued. “Imagine it’s hard to find for a car like this. What is this, a Rambler?”
“Studebaker.” Maggie relaxed a little. Car talk. A good sign. “1960. I restored it with my dad.”
The cop gave a low whistle. “It’s a beaut, I’ll say that. But I still gotta cite you.” He shrugged an apology. “Sworn to uphold the law and all that.”
A burst of static blasted through his radio, followed by a garbled voice Maggie couldn’t understand. The officer, J. Nehl, according to his name tag, pressed the button on a transmitter cuffed to his shoulder. He furrowed his brow and looked at Maggie. “Say again?” he said. More garbled messages. A glance at Maggie. “Affirmative.” J. Nehl held up his hand at Maggie as if he were instructing obedience school. “Stay here.”
J. Nehl trotted back to his car, the sound of boots on asphalt ricocheting off sleeping hills. Maggie watched in the rearview mirror as the cop dropped onto his seat and worked a small computer on his dash. Nehl looked up at Maggie’s car. Then back down at his dash. He picked up his radio again.
Outside her car, traffic continued to stream by, the drivers blind to anything but the asphalt artery that pulsed with the cars before them.
Panic sparked anew in Maggie’s chest. A snarl of panicked thoughts flooded her mind.
He knows. They’re telling him who I am and how I was the last person to see Zartar. That I ran from her apartment, my hand covered in her blood. That I know too much about Mia Rennick’s last, violent moments. They’ll say I killed her. Them. Then they’ll lock me away. If whoever killed Mia and Zartar don’t get to me first.
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