Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [92]
“She must have wanted to be caught. That’s the only thing that makes sense. You were her first connection to the real world since Milton Corley. You made her realize what she’d become.”
The room was suddenly too small. I couldn’t breathe. I walked to the balcony door, opened it, and went outside. It was late afternoon. The roar of rush hour was just tuning up.
Ames continued, his voice carrying above the noise of the traffic. “Her mother was right to have her committed. She was right, but for the wrong reason. Anne Corley was two different people, Beau. The one is here, on these pages, cold-blooded and ruthless. The other Anne Corley loved you very much.” He reached down and pulled a legal-sized packet from his briefcase, the same briefcase from which he had removed the manuscript hours earlier.
“The other Anne Corley is here, in these pages. It’s her will, Beaumont. She left you everything. That’s why she had me come up on Wednesday. She wanted her will redrawn.”
I heard what he said. I drew only one conclusion. I strode back into the room and hauled him to his feet. “Then you did know, you sorry son-of-a-bitch. You knew she was planning something like this.”
“No, Beau. Honest to God I didn’t. Not until yesterday on the plane, and even then she seemed so happy I never dreamed—”
I shoved him back onto the couch. His head whacked the wall behind him. “Goddamn you,” I bellowed. I had to vent my rage on someone. Ralph Ames and Peters were the only ones there.
“If I just could have convinced her to turn herself in, she could have pleaded insanity.”
Ames’ voice came to me from a long way off. “She had already spent a third of her life in one of those hellholes,” he said gently. “She’s better off dead.”
I made it to the bedroom before the sob rocked me. I couldn’t argue the point. I knew he was right.
Epilogue
We buried Anne Corley Beaumont in her blue silk suit on the bluff of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, as close as we could to Angela Barstogi. She wore the gold wedding band. I put mine in the velvet box along with the engagement ring and put the box back in my bottom drawer.
Ames handled everything. He managed to track down the minister in the pea green Volkswagen to conduct the funeral service. Ralph is nothing if not thoughtful. He squelched the assault charge Maxwell Cole was getting ready to file and handled all the details of both the Snoqualmie investigation and the departmental review. He saw them through to completion, when all charges were dropped and my record at the department had been cleared. He contacted all other jurisdictions, closing the books on other cases involving Anne Corley.
Ralph took me down to the Four Seasons and showed me Anne’s suite. Those elegant rooms and I were kindred spirits. Once we had both been full of Anne Corley. Now we were empty. Vacant. There was a difference, though. The rooms were made up, awaiting someone else’s arrival. I wasn’t. I made Ames take me home.
Peters continued working on the Angela Barstogi case, tying up loose ends. When the final count came in, he discovered Angela had been Kincaid’s third victim, all of them picked up by his unusual telephone number. He had a notebook with the names and numbers of children all over the state of Washington. Speaking as a cop, it was lucky for those other kids that Anne killed Kincaid when she did.
I operated in a haze. I developed an infection. For the better part of two weeks, I wasn’t connected to what went on around me. It was probably better that way. By the time I rejoined the world, the worst of the difficulties seemed to be over except for figuring out how to go on living without Anne. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
The day I came out of the fog was the day Ames announced we needed to go pick out Anne’s headstone. “Where do we have to go?” I asked, thinking about bus schedules.
“I checked on the map,” he said. “It’s somewhere up Aurora.”
We got in the elevator. I pressed Lobby, and he pressed Garage.