Michael. I started to dial her back on my mobile, but Lock covered my hand with his.
“It’s no good. She’s turned hers off for now. Michael came out of surgery and is in intensive recovery.”
“And she can’t have her phone on in there.”
“He hadn’t woken up yet, but she said the surgery went well and she’ll call in the morning.”
I nodded, and scowled at the floor. A few twigs had fallen, and it was difficult to keep from picking them up. I needed something to do just then, to keep my mind off of Michael.
“So, what’s next?” Lock asked.
“For you? A change of clothes and sleep.”
Lock waved off both suggestions with one sweep of his arm. “Not tired.”
“You might as well go home and change. I’ve got a schoolmate to babysit, at least until she sobers up enough to tell me her address so I can call her a cab.”
“Leave her here and we can go out searching again.”
“Not a chance. The very last thing I need is to have the daughter of one of my father’s victims die of alcohol poisoning in my house while I’m out.” On cue, Lily groaned and I pushed a still-reluctant Sherlock to my front door.
“Call me the minute you get rid of her? No matter the time. I’m not going to sleep.”
I managed to push him out the door, but by the time I went back in the room, Lily had fallen into some kind of fitful sleep. “Hey, wake up. Give me your address, yeah?”
Lily winced away from my voice and curled up into a ball, this time with her back to me.
I pushed at her shoulder again. “Give me your address. You need to go home and do this. I’m not your nursemaid.”
When she wouldn’t budge, I gave up and lay down next to her on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. I really didn’t have time to waste like this, but I also couldn’t think of what to do next. The app wouldn’t do us any good until the burner phone was turned back on, and our only other lead was the posh boutique that was definitely not going to be open until the morning. I was stuck, and in just a few hours, Constance Ross would be giving a mostly coherent statement to police that she saw me throw my mother’s aikido sword into the Regent’s Park lake. And there was nothing I could do about it.
But there was one thing I could do. I could go back to the hospital to see if Michael was out of surgery. To sit with my family like a caring sister should and wait to see if he would still be himself when he woke up.
“Is this your room?”
I started to shake my head, but decided she wouldn’t want to know that she was sleeping in Dad’s old room, so I nodded instead.
“It’s big.”
I sat up and leaned back against the excessive number of throw pillows Alice had staged against the headboard.
“Are you sober enough to call for a taxi?”
Lily shook her head for a little too long, then held the sides of it, like she couldn’t stop the back and forth without her hands. “Don’t want to go home.”
“You can’t stay here. I have to go to the hospital.”
“For what?”
I ignored her question. “You can’t stay here.”
Lily waved me off. “Yeah.”
She was quiet for a while—a lulling quiet that made me think maybe she’d gone back to sleep. But then she said, “He can’t go free. He can’t get away with it.” She paused. “What if he gets out?”
“I will kill him.” I shouldn’t have said it, of course, but there was something satisfying about saying it aloud. “If he gets out, I’ll finish what I started.”
Lily managed to roll over and face me.
I kept my eyes trained up, but I could feel the intensity of her stare.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
I met her gaze, nodded, and then looked back up at the ceiling.
We lay on Alice’s bed just like that until morning, me staring up at the ceiling and Lily staring at me. When the sun was just starting to lighten the sky, Lily called for a cab. A few minutes later she stumbled out of the room, fought with our dead bolt, and left the house.
The next time I opened my eyes, the sky was a bit lighter and Alice’s clock said it was almost six a.m. I knew I needed to wake up, but my mind was warring for more sleep, right up until I felt a cool breeze blow into Alice’s room.
I sat up and leaned forward to peer into our entry way. The door was open, but only a bit. I moved slowly off the bed, trying not to make a sound, then crept out into the entry until I could just make out a shadowed lump of something pushing through the opening of the door. I was almost on top of it when I realized what it was.
An elbow.
The Lady Constance wasn’t going to make her meeting with DI Mallory after all.
Chapter 22
Her body was draped across our stoop, her right foot hanging over the top step. And she was definitely dead, the Lady Constance of Regent’s Park. The killer had apparently propped her up against the door—a door that must not have been shut all the way when Lily left. And now my accuser had fallen across our threshold, her vacant eyes staring down at the dusty tiles of our entry.