Killer Move - Michael Marshall [45]
He feels tired and dispirited and angry. He has spent a portion of every day for the last decade turning down the static of thought and character, letting a simpler John Hunter simply be. It has been far harder since he’s been back out in the world, but he had been holding steady.
But now, today, he has broken the spell.
He has Hazel Wilkins’s keys in his pocket. He will have to return to her apartment after dark. Before that, he needs to focus, regroup, and gather himself. He does not want to make any more mistakes.
He doesn’t want to break anything else.
He sits staring out through the windshield at a place made anonymous and dead. After a time he stops seeing this and sees it instead as it was, hears the laughter of a woman he used to come here with, and feels the ghost of her hand in his.
He is not aware of the tears as they run down his face, and by the time he returns to the present, they have dried away in the heat.
As he is driving back down the key, he sees something on the side of the road that interests him. He pulls over, into the front parking lot of the Italian restaurant.
He watches for half an hour. He sees two police cars arrive, along with an unmarked white truck. He sees a third car leave, and then return.
It seems unlikely to him that this level of activity can relate simply to a missing person.
He drives away, knowing that his life is getting more and more complicated. That he must be strong, and fast, and that time is already running out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I got home in twenty-five minutes. You can’t do it quicker than that, midafternoon, no matter how fast you’re prepared to drive—and I drove fast. I parked in the street outside the house—or stopped the engine and jumped out of the door, at least—and ran up the path.
The front door was locked. The interior of the house was also exactly as I’d left it. I ran around calling Stephanie’s name. I checked the ground floor first, then went through the whole of the upper floor. Nobody there, nothing that looked any different from the way it had when I’d left. I came back down, heart thudding. When I reached the living room I turned in a circle before suddenly finding myself in motion again. We had a portable phone, naturally, but because we both have cell phones the handset generally lives on the kitchen counter. I saw that’s where it was now, next to the base. I couldn’t remember whether it had been there when I’d left. It didn’t matter. Whoever had been in the house had evidently been standing right there.
I had a sudden thought and turned to look through the window out at the terrace and swimming pool. Nobody there, either.
Resisting the urge to pick up the phone handset was easy. Would there be fingerprints? Possibly. Would there also be a small black card with the word MODIFIED hidden somewhere in the house? Also possible.
Either would be a distraction from the main point, which was that someone had come into the house with the aim of screwing with my life. It wasn’t David Warner.
So who?
At five o’clock I was still standing at the counter, or rather standing there again. In the meantime I’d searched the house more thoroughly and found nothing. No little black cards, and no missing suitcases or clothes. I hadn’t seriously believed that Steph would just take off, storming down the path like something from act one of a romcom (trials and tribulations lie ahead, constant viewer, though expect reconciliation/redemption before the credits roll). But people do actually do that kind of thing in real life, apparently, and I was very glad not to see any evidence of it in my own home.
I’d thought about calling the cops, of course. I’d thought about it every thirty seconds since hearing the woman’s voice on my phone. I hadn’t done so, because I found it too easy to imagine what the response would be.
Your wife is a grown-up, sir. It’s still within business hours. Plus, you had an argument last night. So, uh, what