The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [27]
“It’s exquisite,” Charlotte said, moving in closer to admire the luster of the hand-tooled brown leather and the brass work.
“I see the trunk is locked. Is there a key or …”
“Yes. Obviously there’s a key.”
“For three thousand dollars, I’d like to look at the inside if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, really!” Amy said, expelling an exasperated sigh. “I’ll have to see if it’s in the drawer here.”
Turning her back, she began sorting through a drawer of neatly rolled up, hand pressed, $350 silk underpants.
Charlotte slid the poker out from inside the yoga mat in her bag.
“I’m going to have Vuitton make me …”
Charlotte grinned as the heavy brass poker slid ever so smoothly into the back of Amy’s neatly groomed head. A startled “Oh” of surprise, a whoosh of bad breath, and the woman crumpled to the floor. Charlotte hit her again.
When the jerking stopped, she crouched down on her well-toned haunches and gave the body a quick kick. A single tear spilled down an implanted cheek. Both eyes were open. Walking into the bathroom, Charlotte removed a Handi Wipe from her bag, turned on the faucet, and rinsed the poker in the tub. She also checked her garments for blood. Certain that she hadn’t touched anything but the poker with her bare hands, she shut off the faucet with the Handi Wipe, and trotted back into the dressing room.
As she crept around the pool of blackened liquid that had begun to soak through the white wall-to-wall carpet, the deep richness of the color reminded her of those luscious old oil-based Dutch enamel paints. You couldn’t even buy them anymore in New York. “People worry about the fumes,” some guy at the Janovic paint store had told her with a shrug of his shoulders. She had to order them from England now. Tugging on the handle of the Vuitton trunk, Charlotte sighed. “What a waste! There’s no way I can heave this home alone.” Instead, Charlotte picked up the vanity case, slung her bag over her shoulder, and casually retraced her steps to the foyer. The phone was ringing.
Within hours, this place would be crawling with cops, gaping at everything from the marble staircase and 16-foot Flemish tapestries to the deserted chintz-filled salons. Cops who, if they were lucky and worked hours of overtime every week, just managed to pay the mortgages on ranch houses in Jersey and on Long Island. As they fumbled through layers of frilly $350 silk underpants, would they think of their own tired, frazzled wives? Wives who could only afford to dream of a long three-day weekend in Cancun? Charlotte imagined the cops going through the motions more meticulously than usual due to the victim’s identity.
Paper bagging her hands, they would hope that she’d fought off her assailant and that her fingernails would reveal traces of blood or hair. They’d check the drains, the traps in the bathroom and run the tapes from the security cameras. All for nothing, Charlotte had left a message on the woman’s cell phone. True. But that was two days ago. Who saves messages for two whole days? And she’d called from a payphone, anyway. They’d dust for nonexistent prints, get a hold of the woman’s land-line phone records, and take a million digital photos of the “crime scene.”
Hell, they might even haul out the tub and rip off the metal section of the door frame downstairs, looking for “ridge detail prints.” She’d read about that in the Post after the murder of Linda Stein, the punk rap manager turned Realtor to the stars. She’d been killed by her own personal assistant, news that Charlotte believed had come as a terrible shock to everyone in the city except the thousands of other personal assistants who dreamed, daily, of doing the same thing.
But Charlotte respected these cops. Unlike the rest of humanity, these detectives would spend days trying to get under her skin and inside her head—to walk around in her shoes. If they were smart and dedicated, they would get closer to her than anyone else. Because the toughest, most successful cops were also brilliantly intuitive and empathic.
Using the sleeve