Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (36 page)

“Mostly. A few gaps, like was Frank Ganim blackmailing you, and did you finish him off with that choke thing to make sure it looked like he died from the antifreeze? And if that hadn’t worked, what was your follow-up plan?”

While I talked I stepped a little to the left, instinctively coming between Owen and the gun. Mallory didn’t seem in a hurry to take the next step, or act like she was even sure what the next step was. I took advantage of that assumption, poking at her pride. It was certainly useless to try to pretend I didn’t understand what was happening.

“But it doesn’t sound like you, Mallory, trying to off Owen with Joe around. Did you have a short window, between Annette leaving and Joe arriving? Get the timing wrong?”

She was very careful to shake her head only slightly so as not to throw off her aim. It wasn’t an admission as much as it was letting me know she wasn’t going to be sucked into answering my questions no matter how much she wanted to. But she couldn’t keep her mouth shut altogether.

“I tried, Brigid,” Mallory said. “Remember I tried to talk you out of going to that dog thing so you wouldn’t even meet the Neilsens. Right after I saw your office. Remember? But noooo, you had to come and meet the Neilsens. Whatever happens next is your own damn fault.”

The tone of her voice sounded just like the Mallory who had been my friend instead of my killer. Even knowing what I did about her, this moment felt strange, like we were playacting at being enemies, like she would fire blanks and I would pretend to die.

I tried stalling for some time until I could figure out how to get my own weapon. “So how did you get Joe drunk and into his own pool?”

Mallory swallowed before she spoke, and in the hollow way her words came out I could tell she was nervous, that the casual tone seconds ago had been put on, like everything else about her. “You know I always love our chats, but I think we need to move the agenda a bit, darling.”

I did a quick calculation of Mallory’s distance from me, where the gun was pointed, how quickly I could move, and whether she could hit a vital organ before I got to her. I figured the chances were against it.

“Well, go ahead. Shoot me,” I said, feeling my muscles galvanized to dive across the bed, taking Owen’s body with me.

Mallory’s eyebrows raised as she appeared to consider that option. Almost as if leaving it up to me she said, “If I shoot you here I’ll make sure I kill you. Then I’ve got nothing left to lose. So then I call Annette and tell her I won’t be needing her for a week. I cut out of town. Owen slowly starves to death.”

We both looked at the man on the bed. Owen’s eyes had moved to the right, in my direction. He was begging me. The beeping of his heart monitor told me his pulse had climbed over the safe point. This was his life and he wanted to keep it.

One more idea: Remembering that Mallory had likely put something in my coffee, and something stronger in the whisky, I brushed the back of my hand against my cheek. I swayed. I swooned. I dropped to the white carpet next to the bed. Knocked my head on the frame as I went down, but that only made the fall seem more realistic. Let’s see what she would do now.

If she had put something in my drink, though, Mallory had more sense than to get close to my body to see if I was actually gone. I felt her giving me a wide berth as she walked to the other side of the room.

Next I knew a book landed on my head. One of the big neurology textbooks, I thought, from the weight of it. When I opened my eyes to look I noticed it was the same pumpkin orange book Gemma-Kate had ordered to learn about serotonin syndrome. I wondered if they would think to look for fingerprints on the pages in question after I was gone. There was still Gemma-Kate, after all, and she was a cop’s daughter.

I heard Mallory say, “You idiot, it was only supposed to make you disoriented. You’re faking. Get up.”

I started to, but the knock to my head in combination with the activated charcoal and whisky triggered a wave of nausea and I threw up on the white bedroom carpet. The vomit was frighteningly thick and black, likely from the charcoal. Gemma-Kate didn’t say anything about throwing up. That must have just been me and the way I’d been feeling lately anyway.

“Oh, gross,” Mallory said. “What is that?”

“Activated charcoal,” I said, pulling my face away from the sludge. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and studied the residue there. Right now, Mallory with a gun. But I wasn’t all that worried yet. I’d been in worse fixes. I knew I was more fit than she was—at least I used to be before I’d been poisoned. All I needed was an opportunity. Plus I remembered my own gun was only ten inches or so from my fingertips.

Mallory nodded, impressed at my attempt to beat her at her own game. “How did you know about the charcoal?”

I almost mentioned then that Gemma-Kate and I were in cahoots, but it was important that Mallory think that no one else knew about her. In case I didn’t make it out of this alive, Gemma-Kate would be the next at risk. And maybe Carlo, too. “Old undercover trick,” I said.

“I tried to warn you,” Mallory said. “So many times I told you to stop the investigation.” She looked a little sad. I wondered even then if she might actually feel that way or if the show was a habit. Then she frowned, and I knew it was a show when she said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever get that out of the carpet. I’ll stop and get a throw rug to cover it so Annette doesn’t notice.”

I felt my fingers creep toward the gun under the bed, but I had to hand it to her, she was on top of things. “I said uh-uh,” she said. “Roll away from the bed. About halfway to the bookcase. On your back.”

I obeyed, and stopped in the middle of the big area between the bed and the window where there was nothing to use as a weapon. I stayed there on my back. Amazing how after you’ve thrown up not even a gun pointing at you is more troublesome. “What was supposed to happen?” I asked.

“Just the usual. I dissolved some of the antidepressant in the coffee. The whisky was to increase the effect. Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“On a hike. You like hikes, don’t you? I’m sorry I always preferred shopping.”

“What about Owen?”

Mallory rolled her eyes. “Oh good Lord, how that man hangs on. He should have been gone months ago. People his age don’t survive this long with locked-in syndrome. Unless I want to keep killing people I’m going to have to take care of him soon, before the next person starts nosing around in my business.”

“How did you kill Joe?”

“The kid bragged about drinking, but he couldn’t hold his liquor to save his life. He came up a few times, but it was easy to hold him under with the pool strainer.”

“Jacquie was right.”

Mallory shrugged and tilted her head toward Owen. “For now he’s not going anywhere.”

She might have been doing her best to be all tough gal, but I knew her well enough to know she was nervous. The roll of her eyes was to cover up the fact that they were jumping. Her whole body was kind of jerky, not the usual fluid moves I had been accustomed to. I didn’t think she was nervous at the thought of killing, just nervous about the possibility of making a mistake that would get her caught at it. Afraid the killing might fail somehow.

Still, for all her nervous twitches she had enough wits about her to stay far enough away so I couldn’t grab the gun, but close enough so that I could tell she could hit a vital organ. She’d been a nurse; I figured she knew anatomy well enough.

She told me to stay where I was, and she stepped close to the bed and kicked the gun further under the bed. She pulled the tote out with her toe and reached down for it, still keeping her own gun trained on me. Good balance; she was a dancer, after all. She sat on the edge of the bed and reached around inside the bag while I kept my eyes on her. I could feel Owen’s eyes on her as well, while I think both of us willed to be able to move just a little, and fast enough, to knock the arm that held the gun. She was a rightie, and made sure she kept her gun in that hand while she felt around inside the bag with her left. The first thing she found was my cell phone. Keeping both her eyes and gun trained on me, she was able to turn it off. Then she found the car keys and tossed them to me. I caught them neatly.

“Okay, let’s go for a drive,” she said. She gestured with the gun for me to finally stand, and I did so. I looked over at Owen. His eyes had moved as far to the right as he could manage, trying to see me.

“Sit tight, Owen. I’ll be back for you,” I said.

Mallory didn’t bother to laugh. “Owen will be too busy. We have a date to play the Choking Game now that I know how well it works,” she said. “Out the door. Keep your arms by your sides.” With a sense born of long experience I could feel the gun trained on my back, so one well-aimed bullet would sever my spinal column, and if not that, at least hit something important on either side of it so a second shot would finish the job.

We walked through the living room and out the front door. When we got into the front yard I glanced around, but everything was customarily quiet. No one passing by on the street way down the steep drive could see us from where we stood in front of her house. When we got out to the car she made me go around to the back and open the trunk.

“Get in,” Mallory said.

“I still don’t know why you don’t just shoot me,” I said again.

“I could. Enough guns go off in this part of the world that nobody pays attention. And I will if I have to. But I really don’t want to hurt you. I just want to take you somewhere where you can’t do any harm.”

Whatever she said, I didn’t think getting in a trunk was a real good idea.

I turned to run. It’s always better to run because it’s really hard to hit a moving target.

Mallory fired. I heard the sizzle and smelled that combination of what seems like burnt hair and sulphur before I felt the pain. Lucky shot—it barely grazed my left thigh, but the impact made me stumble, and I rolled to a stop just before the driveway descended.

“God damn it, Brigid. Why did you make me do that? If you’re not screwing up one thing you’re screwing up another. Get off the ground.”

“I think I need my stick. It’s in the backseat.”

“That one with the little blade at the bottom? Forget it. Crawl to the car and use the fender to get yourself up.”

I did that.

“Now show me your leg. Does it hurt much?” Mallory took off her Eileen Fisher overblouse and threw it to me. Awfully solicitous, that blouse. Her words reinforced her action. “Tie that around your leg to help the bleeding, and we’ll get it taken care of when we get where we’re going.”

Once I did that, she said, “Now face away from me and throw the keys on the ground behind you. Then get in the trunk.”

Understandably, I hesitated.

“Look, Brigid. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to take you somewhere so I’ll have a head start on whatever you do next. But you know now I’ll kill you if I have to.”

She wasn’t tying me up, and that gave me all kinds of options. Safety latch. Fold-down backseat. Surprise when she opened the trunk. I tossed the keys and got in.

“Thank you,” she said. “You got me into this mess, the least you can do is die quickly.”

She shut the trunk. I immediately felt around. No safety latch in this older model.

Though the breeze outside wasn’t Africa hot, the trunk was. It was also not terribly well soundproofed. She must have picked up the keys where I threw them. I could hear her getting into the driver’s side and turning on the ignition. She spoke, but not to me, practicing her words in what must have been her way long before I met her.

“Yes, she was here, Carlo. She asked me if I wanted to go for a hike, but I didn’t have anyone to look after Owen. She must have left, oh, about three hours ago. I can understand your concern. Would you let me know when she gets home?” She paused as if listening to her own words and then started again. “Uh-huh, she was here, but she left hours ago! I don’t know, maybe three? She wanted me to go hiking, but I couldn’t leave Owen. That idiot, she should have known not to go by herself at her age.” She repeated this second version with a different tone, this one frantic. Then once more, hitting a tone between the first and the second. Only this time, she added the phrase “No, she didn’t say where. She seemed troubled.” Apparently pleased with that, she did what I felt was a neat three-point turn and pulled out of her driveway.

Die quickly,
she had said. Tucked safely in the darkness, in the heat, I figured out her plan. She wasn’t going to road-trip me. She was going to drive around until I succumbed to heatstroke, and dump my body on a hiking trail.

Fifty–four

Cause of death, hyperthermia.

This was what George Manriquez would dictate into his drop-down microphone while doing the external examination of my body during autopsy, if there was one. If I was found before the coyotes had fought over me with the buzzards. Or if I was found still locked in the trunk, the car dumped out in the desert where no one would find it for days. You could do that in the desert and you didn’t have to go far. I imagined my still-unscavenged body lying naked on a gurney under George’s gaze, neither of us finding the situation absurd.

Two possible causes of hyperthermia are excessive heat, causing stroke, and adverse effects of drugs. In the case of Brigid Quinn, a puzzling combination of the two, heat and high levels of tetracycline antidepressants, proved deadly.

Manriquez would have taken blood, and this time would have had a faster analysis done than when Joe Neilsen died. He would mark how I had elevated levels of antidepressants in my system. If they did an investigation, Mallory might helpfully provide information, suggesting that the detectives do a search of my house, that I had been concerned about my niece poisoning me. Carlo would reluctantly corroborate this. The evidence would mount against Gemma-Kate. Anything she said in her own defense, any accusation of Mallory, would just look like more of her lies. Carlo would see this, too. He would be convinced that I had been right all along, and that Gemma-Kate had finally succeeded in killing me.