To my horror, he walked straight to Margaret’s table. They embraced. I couldn’t let Larry have a date with Margaret Haze! I knew far too well how her dates turned out. And Larry was famous for his television advertising and personal injury suits—too close a connection to Margaret’s headline-greedy attorney father. I thought she had been trying to finally extinguish her father’s memory when she’d murdered Brooks. I didn’t want her working out her issues on Quinn too.
I whipped out my phone and found Larry’s number. I heard it ringing from my end but not in the restaurant. Was he carrying his phone or was it simply silenced? Then he pulled it from a pocket, glanced at the display, and put it down. Damn. I didn’t want to make a scene in the restaurant, but I would if I had to. Quinn wasn’t leaving with her. I quickly typed out a text message. Do not leave with that woman. Murder investigation. Danger.
A few seconds later, Quinn picked up his phone. If he’d read my message, it didn’t show. He returned the phone to the table next to his plate. A waiter appeared and they ordered. Quinn had one drink before he got up. He didn’t look at me on his way out but my phone vibrated almost as soon as he’d stepped onto the street.
“What the hell, Keye? You know how long it’s been since I had a date?”
I watched Margaret gathering her things to leave. “You’ll thank me one day, Larry.”
He cursed. I snapped my phone shut.
Haze stopped by the bar and touched my arm, squeezed it affectionately as if we were old friends. “Might as well go home, Keye,” she whispered. “Looks like I’ll be working late. Seems my date had an emergency.” She glanced at the glass in front of me. Her green eyes lit up. “Don’t go back there, Keye. Drunks are no challenge.”
I lifted the fluted whiskey glass to my lips. It was heavy and felt right in my palm. More right than anything had in a while. I left it on the bar. The ice was beginning to melt into the remains of my Diet Pepsi.
In the evening, the elevators at 303 Peachtree, SunTrust Plaza, require a key card. The elevators and elevator lobbies on all floors are equipped with security cameras. Getting to the elevators requires signing in or out at the guard station on the main lobby level. Margaret was accustomed to this routine, as were most of the occupants—investment bankers and attorneys whose jobs necessitate long hours. She knew most of the guards by name, was always careful to be pleasant, to take a moment to speak, to remember them on holidays.
Behind the desk at the guard station, a row of monitors displayed shots of the elevator lobbies from all fifty-three floors. Usually, one guard watched the monitors while another handled the sign-in sheets and traffic. Margaret had studied their routines carefully, had asked about the building’s security systems and how they worked, where the cameras were located. All in the interest of safety, of course, since she was a woman who, on many occasions, worked long after others had gone home to their families. She had quietly picked the guards’ brains over the last couple of years, and they had taken her concerns seriously, happily answering questions to make her feel more comfortable. Margaret Haze was, after all, one of the most famous criminal attorneys in the city and also one of the best tippers. Each and every security guard and cleaning person had received an envelope from her last Christmas.
Margaret had taken a break, enjoyed a drink, then greeted the guards downstairs with small talk upon her return. She wanted them to remember her tonight. She carefully signed back in at 8:52 before taking the elevators to her fifty-third-floor office.
It was a weekday evening and the fifty-third floor was empty. The lower floors, occupied by the hundreds of young lawyers and legal assistants, would still be humming, but tonight she had fifty-three all to herself.
In about an hour, she knew, the cleaning crew would begin to arrive, having entered through the loading docks and parked in the basement. One person would sign in for the entire crew, then they’d all come into the building via the freight elevators, which were located away from the main elevator lobbies in a hallway on each floor. Their routines, uniforms, and the tools they used had all been of great interest to her.
The freight elevators’ location on the main floors had made it easy to slip out of her office wearing the blue scrubs of the crew, flat shoes, head down, no makeup, hair pulled into a bun and hidden under a bandanna. Many of the cleaning women wore them that way to keep their hair out of their faces while they worked. She could come and go using the loading docks while still signed in at the guard station in the main lobby. Later, when she was finished with her work on the outside, with the thing that drew her, called her out into the city, she could return. She could change back into her corporate clothes and leave through the main lobby. She’d done it many times.
Two nights ago she had walked right past Detective Velazquez and he hadn’t even looked twice. Just another cleaning person. Nobody special. Idiot.
My phone rang and I saw Balaki’s number on the screen. I thought about Rauser. I missed his calls. I’d never told him that I chose Aerosmith’s “Dude” for him or that it made me laugh every time he called.
“Keye, go home and get some rest. Me and Williams got this. And Bevins is at the hospital with the lieutenant, so everything’s handled.”
I looked at the dashboard clock. Ten-thirty-six. “Andy, I don’t how to tell you guys how much I appreciate what you’re doing—”
“Listen here, girl,” Andy Balaki interrupted in his South Georgia drawl. “He’s our family too.”
I didn’t argue with him. I wanted to go home, needed to rest. I hadn’t been there since early that morning, just a quick visit to feed the cat, scoop the box, change clothes, and shower. Diane had made a midday visit to White Trash to help relieve my guilt.
Traffic was at a trickle. Lamp-post wreaths lit up Midtown and reminded me again that Christmas was coming. I flipped on the gas in the brick fireplace in my bedroom, turned out the lights, and curled up with White Trash and Dexter on Showtime. It took me no time at all to fall asleep. This was normal. The problem usually came in staying asleep.
It was White Trash who first alerted me. With a strange low growl deep in her throat, she scurried over my head and leapt off the bed, nudging me awake.
Then a darting prism of reflection. The streetlights filtering through my cracked curtains had caught something, and when I realized what it was, when I understood that the light had reflected off a knife blade, when it hit me that Margaret Haze must be standing over me, she struck me hard, with something heavy. My whole world went abruptly cobalt blue. Pain tentacled out of every nerve. Hurt. I hurt. I fought to keep from losing consciousness.
She slid gracefully onto my bed, straddled me between her knees, leaning so near my face that I smelled her coffee breath. What was she doing? I struggled to get my vision, my senses back. What the hell had she hit me with? She was on top of me, bending over me. My body hurt. It was the lamp. She’d hit me with my bedside lamp.
Then raking pain—a cold, thin wire digging into my wrist. I needed to get my bearings, needed to get free. Wire, my fuzzy brain kept warning me. Wire, struggling, ligature abrasions, the victims, Rauser telling me they all had the abrasions. I was going to die. This silent killer was wrapping wire around my wrist and fastening me to the slats under my bed.
Too late, I started twisting and bucking, desperate to get her off my body, desperate to find some strength. I hit at her with my one free hand.
Margaret pressed down on me. She was watching me as the reality fought its way past the blow she’d delivered, watching as each thought, each realization, each new terror crossed my face. She knelt over me, studying me as if I were a laboratory experiment. Nothing I could say now would touch her, would alter her plan in any way. I wasn’t human to her anymore. Not real. Just a thing to be toyed with.
Then she leaned over me and reached for the wrist she had already wired to my bed, and in one precise stroke, she sliced it with her knife. Jagged pain like a saw splitting my skin cut a headlong path to my nerve end
ings. Blood poured from my wrist and spattered off my fingertips.
“Can you feel her power now, Keye? And mine?”
I was beginning to shiver. My lips were tingling. I knew what it meant. I was losing calcium and blood too quickly. How quickly, I couldn’t be sure. It’s impossible to keep that kind of time.
She hit me hard again, and the room spun. I thought I was going to vomit in terror. “You never took me seriously,” she said, and I saw her pick up a spool of wire and with great efficiency slice off a section with her knife.
“You?” I gasped.
I had changed my locks to protect myself, then given her a key. Jesus.
She leaned forward to pull my arm up and get her wire around that wrist too, and I struck her with every bit of force I had left inside me. She tumbled off me and hit the bedroom floor.
“Diane, why?” My voice was a mutilated whisper. “Why would you do this?” Blood and saliva gushed out of my mouth.
She was on her feet, screaming at me. “Because you fucking won’t stop, will you? Not until you ruin everything!”
She launched herself at me.
I squeezed the trigger.
In the darkened room, it looked like black oil exploding out of her neck. Blood and tissue sprayed my face and filled my mouth and nostrils. It was rusty and warm. She made a sound like a straw at the bottom of an empty cup, and dropped.
The last thing I remember is my gun, the one I’d pulled from beneath my pillow, hitting the floor.
EPILOGUE
It was the second time I had spent my days with the excellent nursing staff at Piedmont Hospital, courtesy of Margaret Haze. Yes, I blamed her for this and for what had happened to Diane. I knew Haze had manipulated and changed my sweet friend. I felt in my heart that Diane had been a victim too, though I would never have the facts. I’d killed my childhood friend. This wasn’t fully sinking in. It’s no accident you’re alive, Margaret had told me that day in her office. Indeed. I’d fought to live. And why? There were moments now that the emptiness just seemed to sweep me downstream. Diane was dead. Charlie was gone. Rauser was in some terrible purgatory.
I don’t remember that second emergency trip to the hospital, nor do I remember much about my first days here. I’d lost a lot of blood, they tell me. I slept. The great escape.
The scar on my right wrist would be with me forever. There would be no escaping the constant reminder that a killer had come to me in the night with a serrated knife blade and in one merciless, furious movement sliced me open.
Do you feel her power? Yes, I feel it still. But I didn’t think Margaret had ever wanted me dead. She told me in her office that day that she had protected me. She warned me too when I mentioned Diane, but I didn’t get it. You never really know anyone below the surface, Keye. I would have thought you of all people had learned that lesson. I’ve learned it now, Margaret, and learned it well.
The doctors said I had another bad concussion, lots of bruising on my face, some teeth jarred loose that would need attention as soon as I was released. I would be spending some time with chiropractors and osteopaths and oral surgeons. My doctors advised that I should stay for a few days. They wanted to make sure all the wounds were healing properly. But we all have wounds, don’t we? We are all scarred. Wasn’t that Margaret’s real message?
Mother had been to the loft to feed White Trash and had taken her home, something she had been plotting anyway. She was probably calling her Snowflake by now, carefully reprogramming her. I fully intended to take my cat back when I was well, but being well seemed far away right now.
Neil was taking care of the business. Rauser was still in a coma, and I didn’t care if I ever left the hospital. I didn’t know how to go back home. I was so close to him here.
None of this had worked out the way we’d hoped. I suppose the good news was that Chief Connor had finally acknowledged the mounting evidence. He’d authorized a full investigation into Haze. They had located the gun that was used on Rauser, a nine-millimeter that had originally belonged to Cohen Haze, Margaret’s father. She had done a thorough job of cleaning out her home, but the Mercedes she’d left at the dealership tested positive for trace amounts of human blood. The blood matched that of Elicia Richardson, Lei Koto, and William LaBrecque. Haze’s prints were all over Diane’s place. So was Jacob Dobbs’s blood—saturation amounts on Diane’s clothing. The carpet in Diane’s vehicle was also consistent with the fiber found on Dobbs’s body. Diane’s Toyota had Dobbs’s blood and lots of it. APD reasoned that Diane had murdered Dobbs in it. How many other murders she’d participated in or committed herself, no one knew. CSI believed they could figure this out with time.
Personal items belonging to Diane were found at Haze’s Tudor in Buckhead. The affair had been going on long enough for sleepovers. So this was Diane’s new person and the real reason her voice trembled when I warned her that day about Margaret.
Soon after I had regained consciousness, Williams stood next to my hospital bed with a grim expression. “Haze disappeared,” he told me.
Margaret Haze was the FBI’s problem now, and Interpol’s. They would monitor the globe for her signature characteristics. Others would die, I knew.
“She’d been preparing for this for years, siphoning money out of the country every month. Amounts less than ten thousand don’t raise an eyebrow, Keye, and the shit’s been moved so many times now, well, it’s just gone, essentially untraceable,” Williams told me glumly. “She must have had escape passports and identification ready.”
I sat with Rauser every day, reading to him the way Mother and I read to each other when I was a kid. Each day, he got the morning paper with a massive dose of my own personal op-ed. I insisted on keeping him connected to life, to me, to my voice, to news about the city he’d sworn to protect. I’d gotten into the habit of creeping back into Rauser’s room late at night when it felt like everything was crashing in on me—the terrible memories of Rauser’s shooting, of Diane’s voice as she tried to kill me. Because you fucking won’t stop … I’d snuggle up to him and my mind would race back to a million small moments with him. I should have been nicer, I thought. I’d teased him so ruthlessly sometimes. Did I ever even tell him how smart I thought he was or how handsome or how funny or how extraordinarily hot he looked in those stupid wife beaters? Why hadn’t I admitted I was jealous of Jo Phillips? And that Jodie Foster thing, him just going on and on, drove me a little nuts. God, what I would give to have just one of his irritating little quirks back.
I thought about that night at the playground, about Rauser touching his chest, looking so utterly surprised when he realized he’d been shot. Anger and grief knotted my stomach. I should have known. I was the expert, wasn’t I? I could have stopped her.
I slipped out of bed and reached for my sweatpants. I absolutely refused to walk hospital corridors in my pajamas. It was pathetic enough that I had to look like this, bandaged and bruised.
My phone went off. I sighed. My mother had only today unraveled text messaging and unfortunately she was getting quite good at it.
I looked at my phone. Caller ID was showing an unavailable number. It felt like a fist slammed into my heart. Part of me had been expecting this since I learned that Margaret Haze had gotten away.
Shame about Diane. So unstable. How did it feel to watch the life drain from her? Sorry I had to leave so abruptly. New life beginning. But don’t worry about me. They always open the door. M.
I forwarded the message to Williams. The wheels on tracing the text would start turning at once, but I knew she wouldn’t have done it if she wasn’t very sure it was safe.
How does it feel? Like being torn apart, Margaret, that’s how it feels.
I pushed open the door to Rauser’s room and squeezed in next to him. I lay there for a moment, mourning him, and then I whispered, “Nothing makes sense without you.” My heart ached, but I had no tears left.
I missed him so much, laughing with him, talking to him. We had told each other
the stories of our lives, our real lives, the things that marked and changed and elevated us, the stories you save for that one person fate hands you like truth serum. And when that person’s gone, grief wells up without a channel, like a river jumping its banks.
“Rauser, you son of a bitch,” I told him, “if you don’t wake up, I’m going to dedicate my life to making disparaging remarks about Jodie Foster.” I kissed his cheek and brought his arm up around me. Then I closed my eyes.
It was still dark when I woke. Fingers were clutching my shoulder. Strong fingers. This wasn’t the limp arm I’d put around me every night before sleep in the hospital.
I was frozen for a moment, my heart trip-hammering, and then I realized that Rauser was holding me. His chest was rising and falling.
I lifted my head slowly.
“I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to wake up,” he said.
For Anna Scott Williams, my inspiration.
And Donny Kyle Quinn, who helped plant this seed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my friend and consultant, Special Agent Dawn Diedrich, and to everyone at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for your awe-inspiring dedication and compassion for the victims of crime and their families. Thanks to Brent Turvey, MS Forensic Science, for answering all those emails and to Forensic Solutions, pathologist Lisa Lyons, and Special Agent Steve Watson.
Kari Bolin, Deb Calabria, Greg Luetscher, Michal Ashton, Pam Wright, Scott Williams, Adair Connor, Jayne Rauser, Susan Culpepper, Betsy Kidd, Kim Paille, Meredith Anton, Elizabeth Jensen, Fred Kyle and Betty Williams, Diane Paulaskas, Graham Street, Chuck Bosserman, Heather Rouse, and Susan Balasco: Each one of you lent me something for this book. Special thanks to Mary Silverstein for the laptop that set me free. Roy, Jani Faye, Tricia Watson, I hope you’re watching.
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