Killer Move - Michael Marshall [128]
I took another slow, silent side step. I stood motionless for half a minute, listening. There was the sound of a car on some road, followed by a horn, even farther away. Both had a clarity, despite their evident distance, that made me wonder if the doors to the balcony were open. I hadn’t noticed from outside. I put my other hand around the handle of the gun, the way I’d seen Hallam do it. I took the final step to the side, and looked through the gap in the wall.
The living room. A couple of dark red couches, three lamps, a coffee table partially obscured from my position by a big easy chair. Pale carpet. There was a bookcase against the wall on the right, with more books than I would have expected. Everything was very tidy.
There was nobody there.
Now what? Should I call out? Would that be sensible or dumb? How was I supposed to know? I opened my mouth, took in a couple of long, slow breaths. All I could hear was a ringing in my ears.
I took a step forward, to the threshold of the room. I noticed something on the near end of the coffee table, now revealed from behind the chair. A couple of small rectangles of cards, a few other pieces of paper, and Karren’s cell phone.
I thought maybe I should call out. If Karren was in the apartment, in the kitchen or bedroom or bathroom, she’d be scared witless to see a man coming into her living room—especially if she’d already started to become nervous about things happening in her life. But if she was here, why hadn’t she responded to the last call? And even if she was shocked to see someone here, she’d realize soon enough that it was me.
But I couldn’t get a call to come out of my throat. I took another couple of steps into the room instead. From there I could see that the things on the table looked like photographs: three stubby rectangles, like Polaroids. The other pieces of paper had the thin, curling shape of cash register receipts.
I moved diagonally toward the table, one step at a time, keeping my eyes—and the gun—trained on the door on the right, gateway to the rest of the apartment. I could see a kitchen, a couple of dim underlighters, a corridor that would lead to the bedrooms.
I got to the table, glanced down. Then looked again, properly. The receipts were for credit card transactions. I recognized the number, the last four digits. It was the number of my Amex card—the one I’d used in Jonny Bo’s with Hazel—the card Sheriff Barclay already told me had been cloned to buy the gun that had killed his deputy. One of the receipts was for several hundred dollars, from a store called Hank’s Sporting Goods. It seemed likely that was the one. There were a few more, for similar sums, but I didn’t get as far as logging where they’d been spent, because I saw what was in the photos.
In the first, my swimming pool, taken from the living room of the house. In the second, the mangled body I’d seen floating there. In the third, that body, naked and facedown on a floor, before someone had undertaken the work of removing pieces of it.
Only someone who was part of the game would have access to these things.
I realized then that Karren White had been on the edges of everything that had happened in the last week. She worked in the same office. She knew my movements, was party to everything I did in working hours every day—and for months and months before.
She was the person who took the first alleged meeting with David Warner, and was then removed from the scenario to make way for me—dressed up such that I’d be only too pleased to step into her shoes.
She was the person who’d been conveniently in position at her window for someone to take the pictures.
I’d even phoned her a couple of times over the last forty-eight hours, handing her up-to-the-minute information about where I was and my state of mind.
I realized that it was possible I’d maybe been very dumb indeed, and that maybe Karren hadn’t called me here because she was scared.
“Hey, Bill,” said a voice. “Cool gun.”
I jerked my head up to see