Killer Move - Michael Marshall [111]
The damage to the front was far more frenzied, especially over the chest. They’d taken her face, too. Someone had gone at her face with instruments I couldn’t imagine. An ax, hammers, a saw. There was nothing left but holes and insides.
Something changed forever inside me then. Hazel’s body had looked strange but somehow okay, part of a story we never want to hear but that death is always going to whisper to us someday. We die, it happens.
Cass’s body said more than this. It said God was dead, too, and that he’d always hated us anyway.
“Bill.”
Emily was pointing at the wall of the pool area, at a two-foot smear of dried blood. “And there.”
Another smear, on the floor toward the side. This was what the forearm had been used for. Someone had held one of the cut ends against these surfaces and dragged a trail of evidence, to make it that bit harder trying to hide it all. Were these smears just down here? Or upstairs, too? Were they in the bed, under it? In drawers, in the roof?
Emily looked sick. Evidently even her experience in the Gulf was not enough to make this okay.
“This isn’t a game,” I said.
“No. Nothing like this was ever in the plan, ever even hinted at. You think I’d be here if it had been?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I had tears running down my face and appeared powerless to stop them. “I mean, how could anyone think of this as a game? I mean, what kind of person could even do this?”
“Warner? From the sound of it he was someone with—”
“He’s been AWOL since yesterday evening. Hunter said he was injured, and I saw the chair he’d fallen in, too. I was with Cass after that.”
“Right.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve only got my word for that.”
She shook her head. “You were seen on the Circle last night with her, late—by me, remember? I’d started to realize things were fucked up by then, but I was still holding the role. When Brian failed to show later I got properly nervous, and then I was at her apartment first thing this morning. I know it wasn’t you. You didn’t have time, and you were the most freaked-out and bewildered man in the world. And you’re . . . you’re just not that guy.”
“What about the things Hunter said? Asking how much I actually knew about you?”
“I guessed that would come up again.” She held her gun in my direction, handle first. “You want to take this?”
“Of course not. I have no idea how to even use it.”
“Just trying to show you can trust me.”
“It might not even be loaded, for all I know. So—did you come into Cass’s apartment while I was unconscious on the floor, kill her, hand the body off to someone to do all this to it, and dump it here? Then fake the chase afterward to make me believe you were on my side?”
“No.”
“This isn’t still part of the game? The script playing out? You earning your final payout?”
She held up her mangled hand. “Hard-earned, if so.”
“Yes, you got hurt, but Hunter was the wild card nobody expected. He’s the thing that screwed up their game, and Warner’s, too. You weren’t to know about him, either—and that could be the only reason you got injured.”
She shook her head, and I thought I believed her—but part of me didn’t know.
“Still hearing your thoughts loud and clear,” she said. “The answer’s no. But it strikes me that Marie Thompson went to some pains to tell you to come back here. Made it look sincere, too.”
That had just occurred to me. “Maybe in the hope I’d be caught red-handed with the body.”
“We should go,” she said. “Now.”
“Bandage your hand. I’m going to grab a couple of things.”
She headed back into the kitchen. I stayed a moment longer, wiping my face, looking at the sinking body in my pool, remembering swimming there with Steph late on the night of our anniversary, floating in the aftermath of sex and food and thinking how fine everything was.
Four nights ago. That’s how long all this had taken.
“I’ll get them,” I said to the body. My voice was thick, throttled, quiet. “I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I will.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
By the time I got back into the kitchen, Emily was wrapping a bandage around her hand. I