‘Peter? Are you there?’
‘No one would believe it. Not for a second. Not once they find out about you.’
‘And who am I, exactly?’
The wolf, Pete thinks. You’re the big bad wolf.
People must have seen him that Sunday, wandering around the resort acreage. Plenty of people, because he’d mostly stuck to the paths. Some would surely remember him and come forward. But, as Red Lips said, that left before the trip and after. Especially Sunday night, when he’d gone straight to his room and closed the door. On CSI and Criminal Minds, police scientists were always able to figure out the exact time of a murdered person’s death, but in real life, who knew? Not Pete. And if the police had a good suspect, one whose prints were on the murder weapon, the time of death might become negotiable.
But I had to throw the hatchet at him! he thinks. It was all I had!
Believing that things can get no worse, Pete looks down and sees a bloodstain on his knee.
Mr Halliday’s blood.
‘I can fix this,’ Red Lips says smoothly, ‘and if we come to terms, I will. I can wipe your fingerprints. I can erase the voicemail. I can destroy the security DVDs. All you have to do is tell me where the notebooks are.’
‘Like I should trust you!’
‘You should.’ Low. Coaxing and reasonable. ‘Think about it, Peter. With you out of the picture, Andy’s murder looks like an attempted robbery gone wrong. The work of some random crackhead or meth freak. That’s good for both of us. With you in the picture, the existence of the notebooks comes out. Why would I want that?’
You won’t care, Pete thinks. You won’t have to, because you won’t be anywhere near here when Halliday is discovered dead in his office. You said you were in Waynesville, and that makes you an ex-con, and you knew Mr Halliday. Put those together, and you’d be a suspect, too. Your fingerprints are in there as well as mine, and I don’t think you can wipe them all up. What you can do – if I let you – is take the notebooks and go. And once you’re gone, what’s to keep you from sending the police those security DVDs, just for spite? To get back at me for hitting you with that liquor bottle and then getting away? If I agree to what you’re saying …
He finishes the thought aloud. ‘I’ll only look worse. No matter what you say.’
‘I assure you that’s not true.’
He sounds like a lawyer, one of the sleazy ones with fancy hair who advertise on the cable channels late at night. Pete’s outrage returns and straightens him on the bench like an electric shock.
‘Fuck you. You’re never getting those notebooks.’
He ends the call. The phone buzzes in his hand almost immediately, same number, Red Lips calling back. Pete hits DECLINE and turns the phone off. Right now he needs to think harder and smarter than ever in his life.
Mom and Tina, they’re the most important thing. He has to talk to Mom, tell her that she and Teens have to get out of the house right away. Go to a motel, or something. They have to—
No, not Mom. It’s his sister he has to talk to, at least to begin with.
He didn’t take that Mr Hodges’s card, but Tina must know how to get in touch with him. If that doesn’t work, he’ll have to call the police and take his chances. He will not put his family at risk, no matter what.
Pete speed-dials his sister.
33
‘Hello? Peter? Hello? Hello?’
Nothing. The thieving sonofabitch has hung up. Morris’s first impulse is to rip the desk phone out of the wall and throw it at one of the bookcases, but he restrains himself at the last moment. This is no time to lose himself in a rage.
So what now? What next? Is Saubers going to call the police despite all the evidence stacked against him?
Morris can’t allow himself to believe that, because if he does, the notebooks will be lost to him. And consider this: would the boy take such an irrevocable step without talking to his parents first? Without asking their advice? Without warning them?
I have to move fast, Morris thinks, and aloud, as he wipes his fingerprints off the phone: ‘If ’twere to be done, best it be done quickly.’
And ’twere best he wash his face and leave by the back door. He doesn’t believe the gunshots were heard on the street – the inner office must be damned near soundproof, lined with books as it is – but he doesn’t want to take the risk.
He scrubs away the blood goatee in Halliday’s bathroom, careful to leave the red-stained washcloth in the sink where the police will find it when they eventually turn up. With that done, he follows a narrow aisle to a door with an EXIT sign above it and boxes of books stacked in front of it. He moves them, thinking how stupid to block the fire exit that way. Stupid and shortsighted.