He goes into the kitchenette and makes himself a cup of instant coffee. He drinks it standing at the doors out onto the balcony, far enough back that—should anyone look over—they will see nothing but shadow. It is cold in this apartment. The body in the bedroom would likely not announce its presence for a couple of days, by which time he hopes it will all be done. Hunter doesn’t know how often the maid service operates, however. It could be that at 8:00 A.M. sharp tomorrow some poorly paid Mexican woman will be opening the door to this apartment. Her response to a dead body is unlikely to be restrained.
Hunter worked out pretty quickly why Warner had given him Phil Wilkins’s name. Partly as the real target was already beyond his reach, but also because Warner hoped a confrontation between Wilkins’s widow and Hunter would send a message to the real people Hunter is here to find. He was ready to sacrifice Hazel, in other words.
Unfortunately, Warner was right—or he will be, if people find out what happened in this condo that afternoon. It doesn’t surprise Hunter that Warner would have been prepared to sacrifice someone, and he feels he owes it to Hazel Wilkins that her death not be a matter of fulfilling someone else’s plan. She cannot just be David Warner’s Post-it note or ploy, and so he needs to come up with some other way of letting this play out.
Which means he needs to move her body.
But first he needs to check if there is anything here in this apartment, anything from which he can learn.
It soon becomes clear that, wherever the bulk of this woman’s stuff is, it isn’t here. Either she’s divested herself of a lot of the past, or it’s stored elsewhere.
He checks the shelves, the drawers, the closets. There’s nothing except the big framed photograph of her and Phil, holding cocktails and grinning on the balcony of this very apartment on some long-ago sunny afternoon. He saw the picture on his previous visit. He recognized Phil Wilkins, recognized him as someone he’d thought of as, if not a friend, then a more than casual acquaintance. Realizing that this had been a lie, even so long after the fact, was part of what led to the unraveling of his discussion with the widow. Given how many lies we tell other people and ourselves, it’s funny how much those of others hurt.
On the upper story of the duplex—a small adjunct up a narrow stairway, holding a second bedroom and bathroom—he finds a storage area. This is home to nothing but a couple of suitcases, both empty. It’s beginning to look as though all he’s going to come away with is the names she gave him that afternoon. She tried to give them early, too. It needn’t have gone the way it went, that was the worst of it.
Except . . . once he had pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, saw her read the signs and come back with recognition in her eyes, it had already been heading down a one-way road. She’d started trying to talk, to tell him things, to name names, as if to unburden herself. He’d stopped listening, however.
He can still hear the sounds in his head, remember the frenzy of movement. There were a couple of moments when it seemed like it was another woman in front of him, just as old but fatter—a woman whose heart gave out. Memories leaking sideways, as they sometimes do.
At last, as he tramps back down in the living area, he spots a ruffle in the valance of the sofa. He reaches underneath and finds a laptop. Not hidden, merely stowed out of sight, Hazel having been of an era that regarded computers as machines—like a vacuum cleaner or ironing board—to be brought out, used, and returned to steerage, not tolerated as part of a room’s decoration.
Bathed in the screen’s dim cold light, he soon realizes that, though the pickings may remain slim, this is how the woman stored her past. There are a lot of photographs, some child having been diligent in digitizing Mom’s visual history for her. He sets his back against the wall and starts to go through the files.
By 4:00 A.M. he has only one image pulled aside. It is a shot of David Warner with both Wilkinses, taken in some bar on an evening many years before, and it seems to Hunter that Hazel doesn’t appear entirely comfortable. Warner has his arm around her shoulders and is grinning like a shark. The older woman has a fixed smile. This picture is not much help, though, as everyone in it apart from Warner is now dead.
Then he comes upon a final photograph. This has more people in it, and by the time Hunter has absorbed the content, his hands are trembling. He closes the laptop, but it makes little difference. The image burns in his head like a flare. The photograph was taken, presumably, by the woman lying dead in the bedroom. She’s not in it, at any rate, though her husband is. It shows a table in the sidewalk area of the Columbia Restaurant on St. Armands Circle. The cloth is strewn with plates of half-eaten food and jugs of half-drunk sangria. Candles and lamps are lit— it’s midevening, middinner. Phil Wilkins is in the center, next to a young-looking Warner, with another two women and two men, most of whom Hunter half recognizes. They look happy and full to the brim with confidence and joie de wealth and circumstance, their shared grins, teeth, and tans impregnable as a fortress: except the couple in the middle, whose smiles look a little forced, as if there’s something on their minds.
Behind and to one side of the table, at the edge of the range of the camera’s flash, is another man. He’s looking down as he locks the battered car he’s just arrived in. He’s totally unaware of the Kodak moment twenty feet away. The man is John Hunter.
At the moment the picture was taken, they didn’t even know he was there. He remembers the night, however. About thirty seconds after this picture was snapped, he noticed Phil Wilkins at the table, and Phil stood up and—in retrospect—took care to come over to Hunter rather than let it happen the other way around.
They had a brief conversation. Though Hunter knew a couple of the others by sight—and had met Warner a couple of times—none appeared to pay him any attention. His mind had been on other things in any event. He was keen to go meet his woman. He waved vaguely at the table and hurried away. He arrived at a much cheaper restaurant on the other side of the Circle to find that his date hadn’t arrived yet, and was relieved.
He was less relieved when, an hour later, she still hadn’t shown up. He eventually left alone.
Yes, he remembers this night. It was his last as a free man. It was the night before the cops found the mangled body of the only woman he’d ever really loved, and blamed her murder on him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I woke with a cricked neck and a head that felt very terrible. I was sprawled on the floor, face pressed into the rug, forcing my head at a right angle to the direction it usually faced. My neck had clearly been unhappy about this for a while, and got straight onto announcing the fact now that I was awake. Opening my eyes made everything much worse immediately. The room was full of morning light streaming from the glass door onto the balcony. It smelled of ash and wine.
I blinked and focused and saw my phone lying on the floor near my head. The screen said 7:35. The panic this induced had me sitting upright, very suddenly.
Cassandra’s bedroom door was shut.
I had time to feel a beat of relief that I hadn’t made a
Then I noticed that the bathroom door was closed, too, and that there was now a word on it. The word was scrawled in letters that had dripped and run like spilled red wine.
The word was modified.
Someone was banging on the front door.
I scrambled to my feet, pushing myself upward via the sofa, meanwhile stepping on the saucer Cassandra had been using for an ashtray, flipping it over, and spreading ash and lipsticked butts everywhere.
I grabbed my phone. I lurched over to the bathroom door. The letters there had not been written in wine, of course. Wine would have simply run, leaving nothing but a faint residue. These letters had dripped more slowly, viscously. The red was browner, matte where it had dried. It was blood. It had to be blood.
I pushed the door open. “Cass?”
Just the bathroom. The shower cubicle. Water dripped from the fixture slowly. No one there.
More banging on the front door. I turned toward the bedroom. My head was pounding and I could feel sweat popping out all over my body and scalp.
I pushed the bedroom door. It opened six inches, showing me a strip of the far wall.
“Cass? You in here?”
There was no response, so I said it again, fighting against the climbing volume of the hammering coming from the front door and against the knowledge that I was going to have to go into the bedroom.
“Cassandra?”
