Killer Move - Michael Marshall [65]
Hunter worked out pretty quickly why Warner had given him Phil Wilkins’s name. Partly as the real target was already beyond his reach, but also because Warner hoped a confrontation between Wilkins’s widow and Hunter would send a message to the real people Hunter is here to find. He was ready to sacrifice Hazel, in other words.
Unfortunately, Warner was right—or he will be, if people find out what happened in this condo that afternoon. It doesn’t surprise Hunter that Warner would have been prepared to sacrifice someone, and he feels he owes it to Hazel Wilkins that her death not be a matter of fulfilling someone else’s plan. She cannot just be David Warner’s Post-it note or ploy, and so he needs to come up with some other way of letting this play out.
Which means he needs to move her body.
But first he needs to check if there is anything here in this apartment, anything from which he can learn.
It soon becomes clear that, wherever the bulk of this woman’s stuff is, it isn’t here. Either she’s divested herself of a lot of the past, or it’s stored elsewhere.
He checks the shelves, the drawers, the closets. There’s nothing except the big framed photograph of her and Phil, holding cocktails and grinning on the balcony of this very apartment on some long-ago sunny afternoon. He saw the picture on his previous visit. He recognized Phil Wilkins, recognized him as someone he’d thought of as, if not a friend, then a more than casual acquaintance. Realizing that this had been a lie, even so long after the fact, was part of what led to the unraveling of his discussion with the widow. Given how many lies we tell other people and ourselves, it’s funny how much those of others hurt.
On the upper story of the duplex—a small adjunct up a narrow stairway, holding a second bedroom and bathroom—he finds a storage area. This is home to nothing but a couple of suitcases, both empty. It’s beginning to look as though all he’s going to come away with is the names she gave him that afternoon. She tried to give them early, too. It needn’t have gone the way it went, that was the worst of it.
Except . . . once he had pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, saw her read the signs and come back with recognition in her eyes, it had already been heading down a one-way road. She’d started trying to talk, to tell him things, to name names, as if to unburden herself. He’d stopped listening, however.
He can still hear the sounds in his head, remember the frenzy of movement. There were a couple of moments when it seemed like it was another woman in front of him, just as old but fatter—a woman whose heart gave out. Memories leaking sideways, as they sometimes do.
At last, as he tramps back down in the living area, he spots a ruffle in the valance of the sofa. He reaches underneath and finds a laptop. Not hidden, merely stowed out of sight, Hazel having been of an era that regarded computers as machines—like a vacuum cleaner or ironing board—to be brought out, used, and returned to steerage, not tolerated as part of a room’s decoration.
Bathed in the screen’s dim cold light, he soon realizes that, though the pickings may remain slim, this is how the woman stored her past. There are a lot of photographs, some child having been diligent in digitizing Mom’s visual history for her. He sets his back against the wall and starts to go through the files.
By 4:00 A.M. he has only one image pulled aside. It is a shot of David Warner with both Wilkinses, taken in some bar on an evening many years before, and it seems to Hunter that Hazel doesn’t appear entirely comfortable. Warner has his arm around her shoulders and is grinning like a shark. The older woman has a fixed smile. This picture is not much help, though, as everyone in it apart from Warner is now dead.
Then he comes upon a final photograph. This has more people in it, and by the time Hunter has absorbed the content, his hands are trembling. He closes the laptop, but it makes little difference. The image burns in his head like a