Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [80]
“So it turns out your wife’s a bitch after all, and you want her dead. That’s so original.” Letty had a strong desire to take the Beretta 84 pistol out of her purse and jam it into Chase’s ribs, make him come along with her, rub his face in whatever he’d done. Instead, she climbed down from the barstool, said, “Have a wonderful night of freedom, Chase. It may be your last.”
Letty parked her 4Runner in the cul-de-sac and walked up the driveway toward the Rochefort residence. The rain had further dissolved into a cold, fine mist, and all she could see of the Victorian was the lamplight that pushed through a row of tall, arched windows on the second floor. At the front door, she peered through a panel of stained glass, saw a sliver of the lowlit hallway—empty.
She knocked on the door and waited, but no one came.
The third window on the covered porch slid open. She lifted the shade, saw the living room illuminated by a sole piano lamp on the baby grand. Climbed over the back of the upholstered sofa and closed the window behind her.
“Daphne?”
The hardwood groaned under her footsteps as she moved through the living room and up the stairs. The bed in the master suite looked slept in, covers thrown back, sheets wrinkled, clothes hanging off the sides.
Letty went downstairs into the kitchen, and as she stared into a sinkful of dirty dishes, noticed the music—some soothing adagios—drifting up from a remote corner of the house.
She walked around the island to a closed door near the breakfast nook.
Opened it. The music strengthening.
Steps descended into a subterranean level of the residence, and she followed them down until she reached a checkerboard floor made of limestone composite. To the left, a washing machine and dryer stood in the utility alcove surrounded by hampers of unwashed laundry that reeked of mildew.
Letty went right, the music getting louder.
Rounded a corner and stopped.
The brick room was twenty-by-twenty feet and lined with metal wineracks, the top rows of bottles glazed with dust.
Beside an easel lay a Bose CD player, a set of Wusthof kitchen knives, and boxes of gauze and bandages. Hanging from the ceiling of the wine cellar by a chain under her arms—Letty’s eyes welled up—Daphne.
Then the lifeless body shifted and released a pitiful wail.
Letty recognized the tattoo of the strangling hands as Arnold LeBreck painfully lifted his head and fixed his eyes upon Letty, and then something behind her.
Letty’s stomach fell.
She spun around.
Daphne stood five feet away wearing a black rubber apron streaked with paint or blood and a white surgical mask, her black hair pinned up except for a few loose strands that splayed across her shoulders.
She pointed a shotgun at Letty’s face, and something in that black hole suggested the flawed philosophical underpinnings that had landed Letty in this moment. No more hating herself, no avoiding the mirror, letting her father whisper her to sleep, no books on learning to love yourself or striving to become something her DNA could not support. She was facing down a shotgun, on the verge of an awful death, not because she was an evil person, but because she wasn’t evil enough.
Letty thought fast. “Oh, thank God. You’re not hurt.”
Daphne said through the mask, “What are you doing here?”
“Making sure you’re okay. I ran into Chase—”
“What’d he tell you? I warned him to let me have a week with Arnold, and then I’d be out of his life.”
“He didn’t tell me anything, Daphne. That’s why I came over. To check on you.”
Arnold moaned and twitched, managed to get himself swinging back and forth over the wide drain in the floor like a pendulum.
“That man was going to kill me,” Daphne said.
“I know, honey. I saved you. Remember?” The smell was staggering, Letty’s eyes