SUDDENLY OVERWHELMED, I BOLTED FROM THE HOUSE through the open back door. I put a hand up against the siding to support myself and threw up. Seeing Kate that way had done more than fuck with my head. My stomach was doing somersaults. When I was sure I was done, I stepped away from the house. But wooziness swept in, and I had to put my hands on my knees and hold my head down for the better part of half a minute.
This was not happening.
Except, of course, it was. There was a dead woman in my kitchen. A woman I had, at least at one point, cared about, been intimate with, shared some small part of my life with.
And now she’d been shot through the head.
I was stunned, horrified. I felt strangely cold, almost shivery, and noticed a tremor in my hands. I was so shaken, it took a few moments before I was able to focus enough to figure out what had happened. Not that it took a rocket scientist to put it together. They—or, more likely, the man known as Eric or Gary—had been here, waiting for me, but Kate had shown up instead.
Maybe the noise of the shot made him panic, think the police might turn up, so he took off, decided he could always try again later.
I stood outside, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t go back in there. I was—and there’s no sense soft-pedaling this—too goddamn scared to enter my home. I couldn’t look at Kate Wood again, see her that way.
When my cell rang, it might as well have been wired directly to my heart, it gave me such a start.
I fished the phone out of my pocket, but my hand was shaking so badly it landed on the grass. I retrieved it, flipped it open, and put it to my ear without looking to see who it was.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice so quiet I could barely hear it myself.
“Mr. Blake?”
Kip Jennings.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m returning your call,” she said. “You have some new information for me or something?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So, what is it?”
I’d been in shock only seconds before, but now my mind was suddenly focused. Think this through very carefully.
There had been several developments in the past few hours:
Syd had been at the hotel, and it now seemed likely everyone who worked there had been lying to me. And to the police, too. Veronica Harp and everyone else had been covering up from the beginning.
Randall Tripe was involved in some kind of human-trafficking scheme, and the fact that his blood—and Syd’s—was on her car connected them.
Andy Hertz was beating the bushes trying to get a lead on this Gary character, who’d not only tried to kill me, but might be the one who’d given Syd the lead on the hotel job.
I’d felt, up until the moment I’d discovered Kate, I was getting close, that I was getting somewhere. It was why I felt the need to finally talk, face-to-face, with Patty’s mother, Carol Swain. Maybe she’d know some small detail about her daughter, or mine, that could end up tipping things in my favor.
What I couldn’t afford was losing time answering questions from the police about how Kate Wood ended up dead in my kitchen.
“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said. “Are you there?”
I had a pretty good idea how Jennings and Marjorie would put this together.
Kate Wood is found dead in my house a very short time after I learn she’s tipped police to what she thinks is suspicious behavior on my part. I’ve told the police she’s a nut. I’m angry, can’t believe she’d point the police in my direction. Kate drops by my house, wanting to patch things up. I’m not interested in an apology. I flip out. After all, look how I reacted when Detective Marjorie suggested I’d killed my own daughter.
They wouldn’t be bringing me in for questioning. They’d be arresting me.
And no one would be looking for Syd. They’d be more than happy to find a way to conclude I’d killed her.
“Mr. Blake?” Jennings said again.
“I’ll have to get back to you,” I said, and flipped the phone shut.
WHEN THE PHONE RANG AGAIN A FEW MINUTES LATER, I checked the ID before answering.
“Yeah,” I said, starting up the Beetle and driving away from my house as quickly as that shitbox would take me.
“Hey, Tim. It’s Andy.”
“Yeah, Andy.”
“You okay? You sound weird.”
“What’s going on?”
“Okay, so, I’m at that place? And I don’t see Gary around. I asked a couple of people who might know him, but they haven’t seen him lately.”
“They know how to find him?” I hung a right, then a left, putting my neighborhood behind me.
“No. But what I thought I’d do is, I’ll hang in long enough to have a couple beers and eat some wings. What I was wondering is, would you pay me back for that?”
Paying Andy’s bill was the least of my concerns. “Sure, whatever.”
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll check in with you later.”
I flipped the phone shut. And then I lost it.