The 8th Confession - James Patterson [55]
Pet Girl tried to determine which body parts belonged to which person, and when she felt ready, she tugged on her gloves and lifted Vasuki out of the carrier.
The snake, alert to the new environment, tensed in Pet Girl’s hands, and Pet Girl felt Vasuki’s pure lethal power. Like all kraits, Vasuki was nocturnal, aggressive at night. And she hadn’t eaten in three days.
Vasuki’s head swayed as Pet Girl held her over the bed. She hissed — and her steel cable of a body suddenly twisted in her owner’s hands. It took only that one part of a second for the snake to slip from Pet Girl’s grasp, drop to the sheets, and slide between the folds of the bedding.
She was instantly camouflaged. Completely invisible.
Pet Girl gasped as if she were in actual pain.
Vasuki was gone. Her plan had spiraled out of control.
For one crazy moment, Pet Girl imagined turning on the lights to look for Vasuki and making up a story if someone woke up — but Molly wouldn’t buy anything she said.
It just wouldn’t play.
Disgusted with herself, horrified at what would happen to Vasuki if she was found, Pet Girl took a last futile look over the moonlight-washed bed. Nothing moved.
She packed up the pet carrier and left Molly’s bedroom, closing the door again so that Mischa, at least, would be spared.
Outside the house, beginning the long walk down Twin Peaks Boulevard, Pet Girl assured herself that everything would be okay. As awful as it was to lose Vasuki, there was no ID on that snake.
No one could ever tie Vasuki to her.
Chapter 72
MOLLY CALDWELL-DAVIS LOOKED at me as though she were trying to break through a profound case of amnesia when Conklin and I interviewed her in her breakfast room. Her eyes were red, and she croaked out microsentences between long blank moments as she strained to remember the night before.
Conklin said, “Molly, take it slow. Just start at the beginning and tell us about the party last night, okay?”
“I want. My lawyer.”
Footsteps thumped overhead.
EMS had come and gone, but Molly’s bedroom swarmed with CSIs. Also, Claire and two of her assistants waited upstairs in the hallway for CSU to leave so that they could do their jobs.
Claire’s voice floated down over the banister. “Lindsay, can you come up? You’ve got to see this.”
“Do you need a lawyer, Molly?” Conklin was asking. “Because you’re not a suspect. We just want to understand what happened here, you see? Because something did happen.”
Molly was staring over Conklin’s shoulder into the middle distance as I got up from the table and headed for the stairs. Charlie Clapper greeted me in the hallway, nattily dressed, good-natured, his irony freshly pressed this afternoon.
“It’s a rerun, Lindsay. Lotsa fingerprints, no weapons, no blood, no suicide note, no signs of a struggle. We’ve bagged six bottles of prescription meds and some street junk, but I don’t think we’re looking at drug overdose. I think this was either Sodom or Gomorrah, and God weighed in.”
“Honestly, I didn’t know you were so conversant with the Old Testament,” I said while peering around Clapper to better gawk at the vignette on the bed behind him.
“I’m Old Testament on my mother’s side,” he said.
I would have laughed, but my glimpse of the crime scene had suddenly made everything too real. I mumbled, “Keep in touch,” and walked past Clapper into Molly’s bedroom suite, where two naked men lay dead.
The boy was lying on the floor, head to one side, looked to be in his teens. His platinum-blond hair was spiked, and his green eyes were still open. Looked as though he’d been crawling toward the door when he succumbed.
The older man was on the bed in a half fetal position, his apron of belly fat obscuring his genitals. His eyes, too, were open. He hadn’t died in his sleep.
This was what death by krait looked like. Central nervous system shut down, resulting in neuromuscular paralysis. The