Chat - Archer Mayor [111]
Joe stoked the mood of the moment. “You were like sisters,” he suggested.
She nodded. “After we dropped him into the water, we hugged and laughed. It was the best I’d felt in years.”
Joe knew he should probably get as much detail as possible—the gap between using the Taser in the motel and subsequently drowning Metz miles away suggested a horrifying picture of many repeated electrical impulses in order to keep the man subdued. But he wasn’t sure how much longer this moment would last. It had come about spontaneously, and could just as quickly vaporize. These kinds of confessions were tricky enough in the best-planned environments, let alone something like this.
He forged ahead to get as much as he could. “But by the second time, things had changed.”
Her face fell. “Yes,” she conceded. “That’s when I realized how wrong I’d been. Such a fool. I should have thought of that. We planned it together, worked out all the details. But when it came down to actually doing it, Wendy balked.”
Joe was watching her every gesture, every shadow that crossed her face. She was discussing this as if she’d chosen the wrong dress for her daughter’s coming-out party—an important glitch in an otherwise well planned event. The fact that they were discussing a double homicide had slipped into irrelevance.
Not that Joe was outwardly behaving much more rationally. Since Sandy Gartner had brought herself to this level of reality, Joe wasn’t about to disabuse her.
He glanced quickly at Leppman, who seemed almost catatonic by now. “So, you had to act on your own,” Joe suggested helpfully. “Is that why you left him in the motel room instead of taking him somewhere else, like you did the first guy?”
Gartner nodded. “Yes. It all happened at the last minute. Wendy came with me, but then she wouldn’t get out of the car. She was supposed to open the man’s door, carrying the cookies. She’s so much prettier than I am—and younger, of course, which was the whole point. Fortunately, that part didn’t matter. He was so hot and bothered, I could have talked him into anything.”
“What did you say to him?” Joe asked. “He was expecting a fourteen-year-old.”
She looked straight at him and smiled sadly, her head slightly tilted to one side, as if mystified by every aspect of her own tale. “I offered him one—I showed him Gwennie’s picture and told him she was waiting for him.” She paused and leaned forward in her chair, her body language seeking confirmation. “And she was, wasn’t she?”
He was hard-pressed to argue, while at the same time wondering how many people might have seen her ploy as victimizing Gwennie all over again. It wasn’t lost on him that at the very same moment, Wendy had sat in the car, traumatized and guilty, feeling that she had let mother and sister down, alike. “I guess so—as things turned out.”
John Leppman, however, was having no more of it. Mirroring the apparent family tradition of impulsive rashness, he suddenly stirred from his torpor, pushed himself up from his chair, and launched onto his wife, flailing with both fists and knocking them both onto the floor in a struggling heap.
Gunther pushed backward in surprise, smacking against the wall behind him, and scrambled to his feet, trying to circle his desk to intervene.
Almost predictably, the gun went off as he was halfway there. There was a startled cry from Leppman, and he rolled off his wife, clutching his left upper arm, just as Joe arrived over them both.
Sandy Gartner, her eyes wide, focused suddenly on Joe and brought her gun to bear on him next. He struck out with his right foot and caught her straight on the wrist, sending the pistol skittering across the floor.
With a yelp of pain, she curled into a ball, striking a curious counterpoint to her husband, who was doing much the same thing a few