Heads You Lose - Lisa Lutz [91]
When Lacey glanced up from her paper, she noticed that Egan was gone from his booth. She figured he was in the restroom and waited. When fifteen minutes passed and he didn’t return, she checked the parking lot for his car. It was still there.
Lacey approached a waitress and asked if she had seen the man who’d been sitting in the corner. The waitress said she thought he had gone to the restroom. Lacey waited another minute and knocked on the men’s room door. She knocked again. She shouted Egan’s name. Then she checked the handle. The door was open, so she entered.
Inside, Egan was sprawled out on the floor in a thick pool of his own blood. His throat had been slashed; his lips were already blue; his eyes stared frozen at the ceiling.
Lacey screamed for help, but no one could help Matthew Egan. He was most definitely dead.
NOTES:
Hi Dave,
I bet that was a surprise. I’d like to say that I was planning on killing him all along, but we both know that’s not true. You put the idea in my head, so I guess I should thank you. I’m assuming Egan got beat up in the casino parking lot because of a gambling situation. But now we’ll never know. Let’s be honest, even if I let him live, we’d still never know.
Lisa
P.S. Keep Irving missing, if you know what’s good for him.
Lisa,
You’re right; I am surprised. I never thought you’d sacrifice one of your own. But I guess when you find one tool that feels good—in your case, killing anything that presents a problem—there’s no impetus to consider other tactics. What happened to you? Your previous books didn’t hint at this brutality. But I’m done complaining. If you really want to become the Pol Pot of mystery writing, I can’t stop you.
As for the reasons behind Egan’s casino beatdown, let’s just say your predictable assumption is nowhere near what I had in store. But as you noted, you’ll never know.
Dave
P.S. About your stable of would-be collaborators, I don’t doubt that all of those authors are adept at building and resolving intricate mysteries. But I’d argue that bringing a psycho to justice on the page and cowriting a book with one require different skill sets.
CHAPTER 28
Sheriff Cole Staley, head of the Birkton branch of the county sheriff’s office, looked around at the swarm of crime-scene workers in Verducci’s and shook his head in disbelief. Four murders in sixteen days, and the mayhem now seemed to be spreading geographically. His fear wasn’t great enough, however, to completely blot out an irritating thought, which he related to one of his deputies: “Great. Now I gotta call Ed.”
A few years back, when Sheriff Ed Wickfield was painstakingly building the case for a major coke bust in the area, Staley had run some smaller raids that yielded some minor convictions but also ruined Ed’s chances of nabbing the region’s main supplier. Relations between the two offices had been chilly ever since. Nevertheless, standing in Verducci’s, Sheriff Staley called Ed out of professional courtesy, politely declining any help from Mercer in the investigation, saying the crime scene was busy enough as it was.
Ed didn’t fight him to get involved in the new killing because he knew once the FBI came barging in—and if this last killing didn’t guarantee that, nothing would—both of them would be lapdogs for the Feds. Instead he called Paul and asked him to drop by the station immediately.
Halfway through the short drive to the station, Paul found himself suddenly nauseated and pulled over to the shoulder. It hadn’t occurred to him right away, but now he was sure of it. He’d failed to protect his sister again, and she was gone. Why else would Ed call him in so urgently? He should have packed up with Lacey and left at the first sign of trouble. Or the second or third one. He opened his door to throw up but nothing came.
Inside Sheriff Ed’s office, Paul refused to sit down. Even after Ed had provided a summary of the afternoon’s events, it took Paul a moment to realize his sister wasn’t dead. Then he sat down.
“No one is accusing Lacey of murder,” Ed said. “But she