“I know you are.” He slipped an arm around her,
and being careful not to push the knife any further into her, he half-hugged her.
Bell coughed and flecks of blood speckled her mouth and chin and landed on Josh’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I need to tell you.”
“Only if you have to, but it doesn’t matter now.”
“I’m HIV positive.”
A blow, as powerful as the one to the back of his head, slammed him. His arm trembled around Bell’s shoulders in shock. He stared at the pool at his feet, teeming with the killer virus. It was invisible to the human eye, but it was there. He was kneeling in poison.
This woman’s blood had the most devastating disease of the last thirty years. He’d had unprotected sex with this woman.
Am I infected? Is Kate infected? Abby? His thoughts scared him. The ramifications of his possible contraction of HIV were horrific. His death sentence would be the death sentence of the people he loved.
“I was diagnosed in San Diego. I was never going to tell you, but…” Her final words trailed off before she finished them.
He held another dead woman in his arms. He withdrew his arm from around her and got to his feet. His
shoes made sticking noises on the vinyl. He turned to leave.
“I’d prefer if you stayed for a while, Josh.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
James Mitchell stepped out from the shadows, a gun in his hand. “A murdered woman and that blood all over you. That wasn’t very smart, was it now?”
“I suppose you killed her,” Josh said.
Josh wasn’t only angry with Mitchell for killing
Bell, but with himself. It had never occurred to him that Mitchell was at the core of this carnage, but it should have.
“Why did you kill her?”
“Because I need her for this.” Mitchell waved the gun in the direction of the slaughter. “To make your murder more convincing. It would be totally understandable if your blackmailing ex-mistress confessed
your sins to the TV news and your wife, driving you to kill her in a fit of rage. Makes total sense. Don’t you think?”
“How did you know her?”
“Oh, Bell and I have become, or I should say had become, good friends. We had a lot in common—you, for
instance.” Mitchell jabbed the gun at Josh. “She was pissed at you for dumping her. A lot of unresolved issues there.”
“And you call that resolved?” Josh pointed at Bell’s corpse.
“You could say that. You two certainly had a touching farewell.” Mitchell cut Josh off before he asked another question. “What I need before we go any further
is for your fingerprints to be on that knife handle. Then I can get all this wrapped up.”
“What if I don’t?” Josh asked. It was a feeble attempt at resistance, nothing more than a schoolyard
boast lacking any power or muscle to support it.
“I’ll shoot you, drag you over there and stick your hand on the knife.”
Josh studied the floor. It wasn’t much of a choice.
The killer would shoot him anyway. It was just a matter of when. He could either make the hit man’s job
easy or difficult.
“Why did you kill Jenks?”
Mitchell laughed and shook his head like he’d heard an old joke for the hundredth time. “That wasn’t his real name. He was a competitor of mine employed to do my job. Career infighting—you know how it is.”
Josh didn’t. He had no concept of what internal conflicts were encountered in the professional killing industry.
Nor did he want to.
Mitchell’s tone turned cold. “And I’ll be damned if one of my contracts will be taken away from me.
That’s why I killed Jenks. You were lucky you got away, otherwise both of you would have made it on the six o’clock news.”
Josh had guessed right about Mitchell’s intent to kill him along with Jenks, and it still made his gut churn.
Another realization did little to help settle his troubled stomach. If he hadn’t fled the derelict factories, Bell wouldn’t be dead. There would have been no reason to kill her. She’d been a bitch, but she hadn’t deserved to die so violently. Was his life more valuable than Bell’s?
Was it better he lived and she died? Only if he lived through this night and stopped Mitchell from killing anyone else. It was also the only way he could ever forgive himself for Mark Keegan and Margaret Macey’s
deaths. Josh couldn’t let himself be the victim tonight.
“I don’t see your fingerprints on that knife yet,”
Mitchell said.
“So, who’s your employer—Pinnacle Investments?”
“Yes.”
Bob was right. Josh smiled.
“Happy that you know?” Mitchell asked.
“Yeah. It makes sense of all this,” Josh said.
Mitchell indicated Bell with the gun. “So can we get on?”
“Sure,” Josh said, “I just needed to know.”
He turned his back on the killer and faced Bell. He hoped that Mitchell didn’t shoot him in the back of the head before he had the chance to do anything. He took a deep breath before he stepped into the bloody mess to grab the knife in Bell’s chest. He gripped the blade with his right hand. The wooden handle felt comfortable in his grasp. It was the sight of the knife buried up to the hilt in his ex-mistress that was uncomfortable.
“That’s it, Josh, get some nice thick prints on that handle. Come on, do it like you mean it,” his killer said, peering over Josh on tiptoe from the kitchen doorway.
“Are you sure you can make this look like a convincing lover’s disagreement turned murder, story at
eleven?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t believe how I’ll make this look.
You’d be impressed. It’s a shame you won’t see it.”
“So how did you make Margaret Macey’s death
look?”
“Margaret Macey, Jesus.” Mitchell blurted out a
laugh. “I didn’t do a thing. You did it all for me. I wasn’t expecting that, I can tell you. It was a dream come true. I saw you running out and I was worried. I thought you had screwed everything up, but instead you finished my job just as I wanted. It was beautiful.”
Josh glanced over his shoulder at Mitchell. Mitchell’s focus was on the recollection rather than him. His guard was down. He hoped Mitchell thought he was a willing victim who was going to roll over and die for him. Josh pulled on the knife embedded in Bell’s chest.
“What did you do to scare her?” Mitchell asked.
“She thought I was you.”
Mitchell laughed again.
The knife was stuck tight and required more effort than Josh expected. He’d forgotten the blade was in a person until he looked at Bell. Her eyes didn’t register Josh’s desecration. He felt nauseated.
He glanced back at Mitchell. He hoped the killer
