Chapter 50
I’D BEEN INSIDE the pool house for only a couple of minutes, and in another two or three, I was going to be obstructing justice. It wasn’t going to take a forensic genius to figure out what had happened here, but I wanted Sci to see the scene anyway.
I left the changing room the way I found it, went back out to the larger room, where Hal had draped his large sloppy self in a lounge chair and was looking at the view. The sun was going down leaving a bloody swath of sky.
I came up behind him and said, “Hal, tell me what happened.”
He spoke without turning. I had to strain to understand his slurred speech.
“She said she was thinking about my heart. That she visualized it before she went to sleep every night. That she could see all the arteries and where they went into the valves and she could see the scars where the arteries were stitched into place.”
He turned to look up at me over his shoulder.
“You see what she was doing, Zhack?
“She said she was picking at the scars every night, pulling the tissue loose. She was going to pull out the arteries with her mind. She could do it. She was a wicked girl.”
He rubbed his chest with the hand that wasn’t holding the tumbler of alcohol.
“She was harassing you, you’re saying? She was trying to frighten you to death.”
“That’s it. She was trying to kill me, one night at a time. And she was going to do it, Jack. And that’s why I had to put her down.”
There was still time for Sci to get here, same for Cruz. But what the hell could any of us do? I’d rarely seen a crime so open-and-shut, but still, I was amazed that a big, rich, powerful man like Archer had resorted to killing an unarmed and helpless woman.
I took out my phone. I have Chief Mickey Fescoe on speed dial. I punched the number.
Hal suddenly became alert. “Who are you calling?”
“Friend of mine. Chief of police.”
“Nooooo,” Hal shouted.
He stood up, grabbed the chair for balance, and dropped his glass. “No, no, no. Make this mess go away. That’s what I hired you to do.”
Hal flailed out to grab me, but I stepped out of his reach, said into my phone, “Mickey, I need you to send some people to sixty-five forty-seven Donovan Drive. Hal Archer’s place. Go to the pool house in the back. Yep. We’ve got a dead body. I’ll be here.”