For several long seconds no one moved.
“Let her go,” Pete Kelsey said softly but firmly. “Let Erin go.”
“No. I won’t,” Jennifer answered stubbornly, stepping backward and dragging Erin along with her. “She’s coming with me.”
“Let her go!” Kelsey repeated.
Despite Jennifer’s warning, Pete and I both took a cautious step forward. We were only ten yards or so away now, close enough to see the wild desperation on Jennifer’s face and the abject terror on Erin’s.
“Stay back!” Jennifer ordered.
Pete stepped forward again as though he hadn’t heard her. “Why?” he asked. “Why are you doing this?”
Jennifer stared hard at him, her eyes focused on him alone. “To get even.”
“For what? What did Erin ever do to you?”
Taking advantage of the byplay between them, I edged away from Pete’s side so Jennifer wouldn’t be able to see us both at the same time.
“Not her,” Jennifer spat back at him. “You! You took everything we had. You left my mother pregnant with no husband, no job, no nothing.”
“How could I?” Pete objected. “I never knew your mother. I didn’t take anything.”
We both inched forward again, closing the distance between us and the girls.
“You did,” Jennifer insisted. “You killed my father, stole my sister, and destroyed my mother. She never got over it. Never! Not until the day she died. I was there, but it was always the other one she wanted. This one. The one she lost.”
Jennifer tightened her grip on Erin’s shoulder and shook her for emphasis while her eyes remained fixed squarely on Pete Kelsey’s face.
“I didn’t kill your father, Jennifer,” he said gently, soothingly. “He died in a knife fight in Mexico with some of his drug-dealing friends. And Marcia and I kept Erin because we didn’t want her raised by the kind of person your mother had become.”
“Liar! They weren’t like that, you know they weren’t, and my father wasn’t a drug-runner, either! He was a kind, wonderful, loving man. Mother said so. He would have given me anything I wanted if you hadn’t murdered him. I saw the police report, I know what it said, but you’re the one who did it, and that’s the truth.”
By now there was a distance of only five or six feet between us and the girls.
“What other fairy tales did your mother tell you?” Pete asked softly.
The question threw Jennifer Lafflyn over the edge.
“It wasn’t a fairy tale!” she exploded. “It was the truth. You stole my future from me and gave it to your precious Erin. You gave her everything and left me with nothing. Now you’re going to pay. Do you hear me? You’re going to pay the same way I paid.”
Pete Kelsey never lost his cool, never raised his voice. “How did you pay, Jennifer?”
“That’s not my real name, but real names don’t matter, do they?”
“How did you pay?” he repeated.
“I lost everything, and you will too. If you just would have come into the office that night, the way I planned, it would have been all over, and it would have been just you and Marcia. You could have saved your precious Erin and your house, too. At least she would have had a place to stay, which is more than you left me, but now it’s too late.”
She started to laugh then, the same maniacal laughter both Pete and Erin must have heard before. It was chilling. Terrifying.
Suddenly she jerked Erin to one side and headed for the guardrail. I knew if she once reached it, we’d lose them both, that they’d fall to their deaths among the hundreds of parked import cars on Pier 91 far below us.
I leaped in from the side and grabbed for Erin’s arm. As soon as my hand closed around her wrist, I dragged both of them back toward the centerline. For a long moment we hung there, caught in a desperate tug-of-war. I heard the sickening pop of joint and tendon and knew we’d dislocated Erin’s shoulder. She yelped with pain, but even as she did, we tumbled back into the center of the roadway. I had managed to pry Erin loose from Jennifer’s deathlike grip.
“Put down the knife, Jennifer,” Pete Kelsey ordered quietly, calmly. “You need help. We’ll get it for you.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
Warily Jennifer backed away from him, swaying back and forth like some cornered wild animal, her eyes locked on him and him alone. One hand still held the menacing knife while the other lovingly caressed the guardrail.
“Daddy, be careful,” Erin sobbed. “She’s crazy. She’ll kill you. She said she would.”
Just then, Jennifer Lafflyn sprang forward, holding the deadly knife in front of her. Pete Kelsey jumped back and dodged to one side, but not quite fast enough or far enough. The knife plunged into his side and he crumpled to the ground.
Shoving Erin away, I went to help, but before I could reach them, Jennifer Lafflyn vaulted over the guardrail.
Her terrible scream keened up to us from the enveloping darkness. It was a long, long fall, and the piercing cry seemed to go on forever, ending with the sickening crunch of metal and explosion of glass as she crashed into the roof of one of the Nissans parked far below.
Jennifer Lafflyn died instantly, taking an unsuspecting thirty-five-thousand-dollar sports car with her, but for long moments afterward, echoes of her piercing scream reverberated off the walls of the bluffs around us. The gruesome sound of her going seemed to linger forever.
In my worst nightmares, I hear it still.
I’m sure I always will.
Chapter 29
The doctors at Harborview Hospital removed Pete Kelsey’s damaged spleen, and by nine o’clock that night we knew he was out of danger. George and Belle Riggs took Erin Kelsey, her shoulder bandaged and her arm in a sling, home with them. Nobody said much about Jennifer Lafflyn.
While I was at the hospital, Kramer had gotten a search warrant and gone through Jennifer’s apartment. I wanted to wait up and see what he found, but I was too damn tired. I dragged the beat-up old body home and put it to bed.
The next morning, when I climbed out of bed, I ended up hopping on one foot. During the melee on the bridge, I had reactivated my bone-spur. It’s hell getting old.
I was slogging my way through reports when Detective Kramer showed up. “Want to take a trip down to the evidence room and see the jackpot?” he asked.
“Good stuff?” I asked.
“Good enough,” he returned. “Her real name is Julie McLaughlin, by the way. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police up in Vancouver came up with that late last night after you went home.”
We went down to the crime lab, with Kramer dashing off ahead and me limping along behind. At Kramer’s request, the evidence clerk brought out a stack of several boxes. The first contained half a dozen framed pictures- the missing ones from Marcia’s office. On each, the glass had been hammered to pieces, and all faces in the pictures themselves had been totally obliterated by smears of red ink.
When we took the top off the next one, it contained nothing but wastepaper. “You brought the trash along?” I asked. “Isn’t that being a little compulsive?”
“Some trash,” Kramer said. “It’s all Marcia Kelsey’s. Notes, correspondence, grocery lists-things she tossed in her office trash can without thinking about them and which were rescued and studied by Julie McLaughlin as she was making her plans.”
“So this wasn’t something she dreamed up overnight.”
“Hardly. She’s been working on it for a long, long time with single-minded determination, probably since her mother died. Maybe since before her mother died. Look at this.”
