Killer Move - Michael Marshall [129]
It was Cass.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I stopped being aware of my hands, my feet, my body. I was merely eyes.
“Whoa,” she said with a delighted laugh. “That is even better than I hoped. You totally look like you’re going to fall down or something. Priceless.”
“Cass?”
“Glad to see the facial recognition software is still functioning. After such a hard day, too. You rule.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
“That’s okay, take a moment,” she said. “You want a drink or something? There isn’t much. Though it could be after last night you’re avoiding alcohol, right?”
I tried to rethink everything since I got back to my house that afternoon. Since even before that—from the moment I’d woken in this woman’s apartment to find a word daubed on her bathroom door, in what I’d thought had been her blood. I even took a faltering step to the side, to check I was seeing what I thought I was, not some ringer in makeup, that the effect worked from a different angle, that I couldn’t see through her. That she was real.
“How are you not . . .”
“Look again at the photos.”
I looked at the pictures on the coffee table. I saw my pool. I saw the floating body. Then I saw the naked back in the third picture, and realized I perhaps should have wondered why someone might bother to strip a body before reclothing it in a black lacy blouse—a garment distinctive enough to make a man jump to the wrong conclusion when confronted with a corpse in his pool.
“That wasn’t you.”
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“So who . . . ?”
I put my hand over my mouth, suddenly convinced I was going to throw up.
“You can’t guess?”
Who else was there? Whose apartment was I standing in? My voice was a croak between my fingers.
“Karren.”
“Yes. It is she. Target for your twisted affections, et cetera. I called her at your office this afternoon, saying I was a friend and that you were in trouble. She came running. Bitch was strong, though, when she realized none of the above was true. Scratched me quite badly.”
“But . . . why did you kill her?”
“Me? I haven’t killed anyone.” Her voice sounded brittle, false. She stepped back from the door, gesturing for me to come through. “Want to see who did?”
The door to the main bedroom was open. On the floor lay plastic sheeting covered in blood. Stained woodworking tools were scattered across it.
A man was tied naked to the bed. He seemed to realize that someone had entered the doorway. He raised his head an inch groggily. His eyes found mine. I could not tell what I was seeing in them, if anything.
“David Warner,” Cass said. “You meet at last. Though to be honest, he’s not at his best.”
Sprays of blood were all over the walls of what had been Karren’s bedroom. A place she’d gone to sleep, night after night. Read the books out there on her shelves. Given her e-mail a last check for the day.
And died.
I heard Cassandra walking away, back to the living room. I followed her. “And Karren had nothing to do with any of this?”
“With what?”
“With the game the Thompsons were playing.”
“Nope.”
“What about the other one?”
“There is no other one. This whole sorry mess was a diversion played by oldsters with too much time and money on their hands. A jaded parlor mind game over brandies and margaritas that got derailed when an old victim came back to even the score.”
“Bullshit. I talked to the Thompsons just before Hunter got to them. They were scared to death. They knew something else was going on. Tony said he thought Warner had been putting parts into the scenario that they hadn’t known about, trying to get back at them over some development deal they’d cut him out of.”
Cassandra shrugged. “Okay, so you know more than I thought. There may have been something along those lines. But no, Ms. White wasn’t involved on either count. In fact, I think she may even have been carrying a little torch for you. I found a few pictures in a drawer here. Nothing too stalky—just snaps of the handsome Realtor at parties, events,