Killer Move

“How are you not . . .”

“Look again at the photos.”

I looked at the pictures on the coffee table. I saw my pool. I saw the floating body. Then I saw the naked back in the third picture, and realized I perhaps should have wondered why someone might bother to strip a body before reclothing it in a black lacy blouse—a garment distinctive enough to make a man jump to the wrong conclusion when confronted with a corpse in his pool.

“That wasn’t you.”

“Well, yeah, obviously.”

“So who . . . ?”

I put my hand over my mouth, suddenly convinced I was going to throw up.

“You can’t guess?”

Who else was there? Whose apartment was I standing in? My voice was a croak between my fingers.

“Karren.”

“Yes. It is she. Target for your twisted affections, et cetera. I called her at your office this afternoon, saying I was a friend and that you were in trouble. She came running. Bitch was strong, though, when she realized none of the above was true. Scratched me quite badly.”

“But . . . why did you kill her?”

“Me? I haven’t killed anyone.” Her voice sounded brittle, false. She stepped back from the door, gesturing for me to come through. “Want to see who did?”

The door to the main bedroom was open. On the floor lay plastic sheeting covered in blood. Stained woodworking tools were scattered across it.

A man was tied naked to the bed. He seemed to realize that someone had entered the doorway. He raised his head an inch groggily. His eyes found mine. I could not tell what I was seeing in them, if anything.

“David Warner,” Cass said. “You meet at last. Though to be honest, he’s not at his best.”

Sprays of blood were all over the walls of what had been Karren’s bedroom. A place she’d gone to sleep, night after night. Read the books out there on her shelves. Given her e-mail a last check for the day.

And died.

I heard Cassandra walking away, back to the living room. I followed her. “And Karren had nothing to do with any of this?”

“With what?”

“With the game the Thompsons were playing.”

“Nope.”

“What about the other one?”

“There is no other one. This whole sorry mess was a diversion played by oldsters with too much time and money on their hands. A jaded parlor mind game over brandies and margaritas that got derailed when an old victim came back to even the score.”

“Bullshit. I talked to the Thompsons just before Hunter got to them. They were scared to death. They knew something else was going on. Tony said he thought Warner had been putting parts into the scenario that they hadn’t known about, trying to get back at them over some development deal they’d cut him out of.”

Cassandra shrugged. “Okay, so you know more than I thought. There may have been something along those lines. But no, Ms. White wasn’t involved on either count. In fact, I think she may even have been carrying a little torch for you. I found a few pictures in a drawer here. Nothing too stalky—just snaps of the handsome Realtor at parties, events, plus one of the two of you standing together at some tennis event. Sweet, huh.”

“But why did you let him kill her?”

“Containment. I didn’t know what you’d told her, or if she could put you at the wrong place at the right time or just generally cause trouble and stop this thing being neatly put to bed. Though to be honest, using her as set dressing for your pool wasn’t actually my idea.”

“So whose was it?”

She shrugged again, with an insolent little grin, a willful, gleeful child getting off on the power trip of screwing with an adult’s mind. I decided I didn’t have to understand what was going on. I started toward her.

“Don’t,” she said. The emo chick disappeared, turned off like a light, and she aged ten years in front of my eyes. She now had a gun in her hand.

I remembered I had one in my own. I looked down at it.

“You won’t,” she said.

“People keep telling me that,” I said thickly. “Sooner or later one of you is going to be wrong.”

“Nah. From what I gather you’ve already had a chance to kill someone today, a guy who’d done you manifest harm. You didn’t do it then. You won’t do it now.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said impotently.

“I’m sure. You’ve been modified, but not that much. The weird thing is that kind of means you win. In a way. Were it not for Hunter getting this thing so fucked up, you might be walking away from the game a richer man, friend of the Thompsons and lord of glorious new domains.”

“Where did all the blood come from? In the bed in your apartment?”

“Previous occupant.”

“Who was that?”

“Kevin.”

“That was Kevin’s apartment? But, but you said . . . you said it was him who called you. While I was there.”

“I lied. The man I work for gave Warner my phone number and told him I’d help. He left a message.”

“Why would you kill Kevin?”

“He got a little too intrigued with what was happening to you. Ironically, he thought it would be a good excuse for trying to get to know me better. He called, I went around to his apartment, and . . . well, stuff happened. Though not in the way he’d hoped.”

“I thought . . . I thought all that blood was from you.”

“Sweet. No. I just used it to write you a message before I left to fetch Warner off the beach. You know, on the bathroom door. Funny, huh? Did you laugh?”

“Who are you? You’re not part of the Thompsons’ game, are you?”

“No. Nor Warner’s, either. David had anger-management issues even by the standards I’m used to. His diminishing level of control had caused concern among acquaintances of his. They do not like any kind of attention being paid to their members. I was put in place here three weeks ago to keep an eye on him, and then— bang—the whole thing just darn explodes. Messy. Time to tidy up and put away.”

“Are you . . . Is this the group that Barclay told me about? The Straw Men, whatever?”

Any trace of levity left the woman’s face very suddenly. “Barclay said what?”

“Who are these people?”

“Nobody. They don’t exist. Just an urban myth. A cracker sheriff getting things all mixed up, bragging on stuff he doesn’t understand.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you like. But sometimes in life we pass by the side of things, Mr. Moore, like standing in the shadow of monsters in the night. Better to leave them be. Keep on going, don’t look back. Lest you be turned to stone. Or dead meat.”

“What—now you’re going to kill me, too?”

“Well, actually, there’s the question.” She dangled her gun from one finger. “My original plan was that you’re found here, a suicide surrounded by evidence, appalled by the magnitude of the things you’ve done. Barclay will be dropping the gun by later, the one you ‘bought’ and ‘used’ back at your house. With everything that’s been going on today down at the Circle, it will be a couple days before you’re found—by which time Warner will have expired as a result of unnatural causes.”

“But why?”

“The trail has to end here.”

“I’m supposed to have done all this? Killed Karren, and Emily, and Hallam? Left Warner to die?”