THEY BROUGHT IN a small flat-screen television and a DVD/ CD player. And a video camera that must have cost a thousand dollars.
“Oh, no. Not again!” Kayla cried.
Victoria smiled. “You didn’t like it? Maybe these two won’t be as critical.”
“I can’t see that again,” Kayla whispered.
“Then don’t watch, sister dear.”
Victoria positioned the screen where everyone could see it. She said, “I think you’ll find this interesting. But first—something of an explanation so you’ll understand what you’re seeing. Like so much of life, context is everything.”
Winter folded her arms and smiled at me, a spooky grin that made her face look skull-like. Something wasn’t right about her, other than the obvious, which was that she was a fucking maniac. It was that reptilian blink rate. Eerie goddamn kid. She needed to spend some quality time in the lockdown ward in a mental hospital. Like about fifty years.
“Jonathan Sjorgen raped Jacoba,” Victoria began. “He and David Milliken.” Her voice was all frost and death. “They took an innocent retarded girl for a ride in Jonnie’s shiny new automobile and raped her, thinking they could get away with it because she either wouldn’t tell, or couldn’t tell. She was too dumb. They could grope her, fondle her, run their engorged cocks into her with impunity, come in her, and no one would ever know.
“Smug bastards, so very rich and smart. They had everything. They’d never wanted for a single thing their entire lives, never known the least privation. To them, the retarded girl down the street was a joke, a toy, just part of what the world owed them, nothing but a warm body, a receptacle, a dumb object without feelings.”
Her words shriveled me, the venom in them, the depth of hatred that spilled out into the room. And the madness in her eyes, a live thing, as poisonous as cyanide. I couldn’t decide which of them was more demented, Victoria or her spooky kid.
“But they were caught,” Victoria went on. “Their fathers had to deal with Edna. She took Wendell Sjorgen’s house and large sums of money from both families. She also sent Jacoba away, to live with her sister, Jewel, in South Carolina.”
Her eyes softened briefly. “Edna did it for Jacoba. She was very old-fashioned, of course. She was sixty years old. She did what she thought was best. She was born in 1917. It was all she knew—one sends the pregnant child away, removes her from the heat of scandal, protects her. But even if Jacoba had stayed, she couldn’t have interpreted the stares or comprehended the words. In that regard, Edna was wrong, but she did what she thought was best.
“In due course, I was born. By the age of six, I was the mother, Jacoba was the daughter. Jewel was never a mother to either of us. She was nothing but a guardian, in the strictest sense of the word. She put a roof over our heads, paid for by Edna. Jewel was a cold woman, bitter and utterly humorless. She did only what she perceived to be her duty, nothing more. Jacoba and I had only each other. I loved her. God, how I loved her.”
“Then she died,” Jeri said. “In a bathtub.”
Victoria looked at her. “Yes. Two months after my fifteenth birthday. I heard her yell, fall. Her neck was broken. It was so sudden, the most terrible moment of my life. I was miserable, and I hated Jewel. I made a lot of trouble. She had to send me away, back to Edna.
“I hated it here too, in Reno. At the time, I’d never heard of Jonathan Sjorgen or David Milliken. But I was”—she turned and gave me an indescribable smile—“relatively normal, whatever that might mean in this day and age.”
“Does that mean you know you’re not the least bit normal now?” I asked.
She ignored me. “In all the time I’d lived at Jewel’s, all my life, no one ever mentioned my father. Jacoba, of course, didn’t know. I asked Jewel, once I was old enough to realize people had fathers, but she told me she didn’t know, which was absolutely true. She didn’t want to know. She would never have asked Edna. She told me to hold my tongue, not to ask questions about such nonsense. The subject was utterly taboo.
“It was early summer the year I came to Reno. I roamed this house from top to bottom, with no specific purpose at first, other than boredom and loneliness. I missed Jacoba so very much. But in time it occurred to me that she had once lived in this house, that somewhere in here I might learn the secret of who my father was.
“So I began to look. Down here”—she indicated the room with a wave of her hand—“in all the rooms, every closet, through the dust and spiders and heat of this place. Finally, up in the attic, I found a trunk. It was locked. I broke into it with a hammer when Edna was away and inside I found papers, signed confessions. Sjorgen’s and Milliken’s, witnessed by attorneys and their fathers and a few others. In the documents I found the concessions and payoffs that had been made to keep it all quiet, every last detail.”
And then she’d gone nuts. Snapped. Something in that already unsettled mind had torn loose, frayed bloody neurons whipping in the hurricane force of her fury. Jacoba, her beloved mother, had been raped, and she, Victoria, was the result of that rape.
“Raped!” Victoria said, her voice shrill. “By savages!” Spittle flew from her lips. “By vermin, by filth, by sickening, pampered scum.” For a moment she lost it completely. Her eyes jittered. Her hands trembled. She looked down at them and curled her fingers into hooks, then slowly, with much effort, she got herself under control again, more or less.
“I found the two of them,” she said, and the memory seemed to calm her further. “Hunted them. It was the easiest thing in the world. They stayed right here in Reno where they had connections—college educated, untouched by what they’d done. All had been forgotten, buried. Jacoba was dead, but they didn’t know, nor would they have cared if they had. I was alive, but they didn’t know that either, didn’t even know I existed. They’d had their fun, shot their sperm into my mother, and there’d been a moment of trouble, possibly a few days of concern, quietly handled by their daddies, and their lives were perfect again, untainted. Jonathan was a businessman, on the city council. Milliken was a lawyer, a rising star in the district attorney’s office.
“Jonathan was my father, I knew. It was obvious the instant I saw him. I decided to kill him. I made plans to kill him, detailed plans. I very nearly carried them out. It was so close. But then—” Something filled her eyes, a memory perhaps, a feeling. Whatever it was, its reflection in her eyes was a thing of perfect evil—or perfect madness.
“I provided him the opportunity to rape me,” she said. “As he raped my mother.”
“Nutso, schizo, whack job,” Jeri said.
Victoria whirled on her, then turned and glared at Kayla. “Call it inspiration. It seemed so wonderfully fitting. I made myself available. Do you think your father rejected me, Kayla, dear? Do you think he made the slightest effort to put me off, evade me, walk away, tell me no? Me, every bit as much his own daughter as are you?”
Kayla stared at her, horrified.
“Answer me!” Victoria screeched.
“No,” Kayla said.
“No. That is correct. He did not.” Her eyes glittered murderously. “He pursued me, in his way. His eyes hungered for me, swallowed me. I was fifteen. I looked fifteen. I wore a short skirt and smiled at him, spoke to him, stuck out my chest, and he flirted with me right there on the street in front of the old courthouse on Virginia Street, cautiously perhaps, but he unquestionably knew exactly what he was doing. He was in his mid-thirties at the time. He was an adult. With little more than a word I let him know he could have me. He didn’t know who I was, didn’t sense it. Would it have mattered to him if he did? I doubt it. It was dusk. I asked him if he’d give me a ride in his nice new car, and he literally jumped at the chance. In the car he touched my thigh, rubbed it. I let him. There were a few words during which we reached a kind of understanding, then he drove me up to Truckee on I-80, then to a motel in Tahoe City. That vile monster practically tore his clothes off in his eagerness, my clothes too, then he fucked me in the darkness in a cheap room, grunting, sweaty, sick with fear for his precious career, afraid for his life, knowing exactly what he was doing.
“I wanted to tell him who I was right after he climaxed and then kill him—God, how I wanted that! It’s what I’d intended all along. No one knew I was in that room with him. I even had a .38 revolver within reach in my purse that I’d found when I searched the house. It belonged to Edna’s husband, Herman, my grandfather. I found it in an old trunk with a bunch of his things.
“I could have killed him. I wanted to tell him who I was and gut shoot him while he was inside me, watch him die slowly, miserably, knowing he’d just raped his own daughter, knowing who had killed him, and why. But right then, at that moment, I realized it was exactly the right time of the month for me, that I might become pregnant as my mother had, that without consciously thinking about it, I might have planned it that way all along. And in that instant I knew—if I were to kill him and then find out I was pregnant, he could never be confronted with his child who was also his grandchild—Winter.”
For how long had I suspected it? Only minutes? Or much longer? Perhaps I’d caught a whiff of it in Myrtle Beach. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that this revelation came as no big surprise. It might have been the dementia circling in Victoria’s eyes like smoke, a feeling that nothing she’d ever done had the power to surprise me. She’d captured us, stripped us, tied us up in this dank, modern-day dungeon. She’d killed Jonnie and Milliken and Greg—horribly. Beheaded them all, hacked off sex organs, removed brains. In her madness she was capable of anything.
“Oh, how I wanted that, as soon as the idea came to me,” Victoria went on. “I wanted it so much…my God, you wouldn’t believe. The rapist and bigshot city councilman knocking up his own daughter! The thought was amazing, fantastic. He came in me three times that night, then drove me back to Reno and let me out a block from the bus station at four in the morning, begging me not to tell, shaking with fear. He gave me three hundred dollars to keep me quiet, the same way he’d treated my mother—the Sjorgen solution to everything. And it wasn’t long before I knew I was pregnant, less than a week. I knew. I told Edna. I said I wanted to go back East again, back to Jewel’s.”
“After murdering Wendell Sjorgen,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes. Oh, yes-s-s-s. Granddad. Another monster. To protect his beloved son, he abandoned my mother—and me. He paid tens of thousands of dollars to rid himself and his son of us. He buried my mother’s rape, turned it into something that never happened.”
“As did Milliken’s father,” I reminded her.
“Victor Milliken died when I was ten years old. But David Milliken paid for what he did. You found his head. He got what he deserved. But Wendell was Jonathan’s father, my grandfather. He bought Edna’s silence like he bought everything that was inconvenient, without so much as a passing thought about Jacoba and me. But he knew who I was at the end, in that alley. He knew exactly who I was, and he very much regretted what he’d done. It wasn’t murder,” she added. “It was an execution. Slower, messier and more painful than the state would have done, I must admit, but nothing he didn’t deserve.
“I gave birth to Winter, Jonathan’s child…and his grandchild. My daughter, and my baby sister.” She put an arm around Winter’s waist and drew her close.
No wonder they’d looked so much alike when I’d first seen them. Not only were they mother and daughter—they were also sisters.
Kayla stared at them in horror. Jeri, however, was sizing up the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the ropes that held her, everything. She gave me a grim smile, still tough, still searching for a way out. Something in her eyes said don’t you dare give up.
In Conway, South Carolina, Victoria raised her daughter-sister, told her who her father was, taught her to hate, to loathe beyond all reason, to want to kill, and finally to want to hold steaming loops of Jonnie’s intestines in her hands, to hear him scream as she pushed red hot nails into his eyes. All that by the age of six. By the time she should’ve started first grade, she was already a monster, destroyed. She couldn’t go to school, couldn’t be around normal children. If the authorities had found out, they would have locked her in a juvenile detention facility and tried to save her with years of therapy. They would have tossed Victoria in prison. Keys would have been thrown away. In order not to lose Winter, Victoria had to keep her isolated at home, away from the rest of the community, watch her every second while she continued to teach her to hate. With Jonnie in mind right from the start, she taught Winter how to fence, starting at age four. And she taught her all about men, their bodies, their weaknesses, their wicked goatish lusts.
“You came back,” Jeri said to Victoria. “You had Winter rape Jonnie, didn’t you?” She’d been paying attention, even as her eyes were taking in every detail of the room.
“Jonathan raped Winter,” Victoria hissed. “His own grandchild.”
“Yeah, right,” Jeri said.
“Dressed up like a hot little whore, no doubt,” I added.
She whirled. “She was his granddaughter. That inhuman beast climaxed inside his own grandchild. How she was dressed was of no consequence, none at all. She was fifteen years old and looked it.”
She paced for half a minute, then fixed her eyes on me. “Jonathan hadn’t changed. He was still a vile beast. He was fifty-one years old when Winter approached him in a parking garage downtown. She was a ninety-pound schoolgirl, extremely pretty, but young, obviously too young. She barely spoke to him and he was ready, salivating in his desire to be with her.”
Divorced from his first two wives, unaware of the satanic soul burning brightly in the girl sitting next to him in his new Jaguar convertible, Jonnie had driven her not to Lake Tahoe but over Donner Summit and all the way to Auburn, a town in California a hundred miles away. He’d grown more sophisticated over the years, more discreet, or maybe more frightened, more aware of how far off the reservation he’d strayed and what would happen if he were caught. He pulled into a motel off the freeway, paid cash for a room, sneaked Winter inside under the cover of darkness. He stayed with her most of the night and got her pregnant, as he had Jacoba and Victoria.
“Believing she was only fourteen,” Victoria said, “which is what she told him as soon as he’d entered her. Knowing it was statutory rape, he kept going, finally coming in her with no thought that his sperm might live on, creating new life.”
“Miranda,” I said. The story was recycling itself, becoming as tiresome as it was horrible, Jonnie’s unwitting multigenerational rape of his own offspring, choreographed by Victoria’s insanity.
“Yes,” Victoria said. “Yes-s-s-s, Miranda.”
“Then the two of you went back to Myrtle Beach again,” Jeri said. “Back to your lair, talk about complete raving fucking lunatics, Jesus H. Christ.”
“To have Jonathan’s great-grandchild,” Victoria said.
“Fuckin’ loonies,” Jeri muttered, scanning the walls, yanking on her ropes.
Victoria’s emphasis of the word “great” was an indication of the depth of her psychosis. She’d grown obsessed with Jonnie’s rapes and with the awful, tangled lineage he was creating. Miranda was a living, breathing symbol of Jonnie’s turpitude. Miranda was his daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, all in one. She was Victoria’s sister and her grandchild. In Victoria’s deranged mind it was all Jonnie’s fault. But the endless layering of Jonnie’s genes had finally caught up. Genetically, Miranda was fully seven-eighths Jonnie. She was retarded, but for a vastly different reason than was Jacoba.
“I waited too long,” Victoria said. “We should have come back to Reno sooner, but I’d hoped Miranda would be a little older when we finally went public. At least six years. And Winter was growing more skillful with the foil every day, all the better to deal with Jonnie when the time came, and…well, I simply waited too long.”
“So which was it?” I asked. “What was the big plan? Were you going to expose these so-called rapes of his, or kill him?”
“So-called?” Victoria screeched. Cords stood out in her neck.
“Actual, then,” I said in a caustic tone, fed up with this obscene woman and her sick machinations. “Sure-enough, honest-to-god, boy-howdy rapes, have it your way.”
She stared at me, hands clenching and unclenching, as if trying to decide which of my body parts to cut off first. “We were going to crush him publicly,” she said at last. “Utterly, thoroughly, crush him, the great mayor, so handsome, so admired. DNA tests would have proved what he’d done. Everyone was going to know what kind of an animal he was, and I mean everyone. The entire world was going to look at him in disgust, spit on him. People were going to recoil at the sound of his name. And after he’d acclimated to that, as he would in time, we were going to kill him.”
“But you didn’t do that,” I said. “You didn’t expose him, you didn’t humiliate him. You murdered him right away. And Milliken.”
“We couldn’t. I found out I couldn’t let the world know about him the way I’d intended. The statute of limitations on statutory rape hadn’t run out. Not with Miranda. If his rapes were reported, it was all but certain that Jonnie would’ve gone to prison.”
“Out of reach,” Jeri said.
Victoria nodded. “Yes. And, well…there were other reasons.”
“Like little psycho Winter getting loose one night with a sword and killing a boy not far from where you lived in Conway,” Jeri said. “Exposing Jonnie would have focused national attention on you and Winter. Her fencing skill might have been discovered. She might have been found guilty of murder. You couldn’t risk that.”
“My, aren’t we the quickest little genius on the block?” Victoria said, staring at Jeri.
I stared at her, too. She’d picked that up from the little Kennedy had told us? Or had she somehow put two and two together, being an actual PI while I was just a pretend PI?
“We killed him,” Victoria replied slowly. “Jonathan. We watched him, hunted him, then captured him, let him know what he’d done, then killed him.”
“We didn’t just kill him,” Winter said, speaking for the first time in twenty minutes. Her voice was like arctic wind hissing through old canted tombstones. “And that other guy, Milliken.”
“No,” Victoria responded. “No, we didn’t. It wasn’t that easy for them. Killing is what one does to flies. Death will take us all one day. Jonathan owed us much more than that.
“Grabbing them was no trick at all,” she went on. “Milliken was still a pig, and he lived alone. I took him myself. Nothing could have been simpler. Later that evening, Winter took Jonathan. He didn’t recognize her after all that time, five years, and she wore a wig. She took him to a motel room. He trailed along like a horny ape. I was inside, waiting. He woke up in this room, naked—like you.” Her eyes passed over me. “And every bit as unhappy. We drove their cars to a hotel by the airport and left them there, while Reno’s honorable mayor and district attorney”—Victoria smiled wickedly—“hung around.
“Jonathan found out who we were, Winter and I. He became terribly eager to please us. After all these years he finally called us what we were—daughter and granddaughter.” Victoria paused. “And lover. He called us that too, with a little encouragement.” She smiled at the memory. “We had him recount what he’d done to us in great detail. Made it into a little video. A documentary, if you will. Which will be revealed to the public sometime in the future. I’m still thinking about how to do that. Toward the end, Jonathan shared his thoughts with us, what was going on inside his head as he fondled us, groped us, climaxed inside us, mere children, fifteen years old. He watched his good friend David Milliken die, with the knowledge that he would die the same way. And in the end…well…” She held up the digital camera. “These things are amazing, so versatile. We made a fun little movie. Watch.”
She hit the play button on the DVD player.
As images jerked to life on the screen, words Fairchild had spoken earlier went through my head again: Family. The ones who know you best…
* * *
Jonnie was barefoot, nude, standing slump-shouldered and wary at one end of the room we were now in. He held a sword awkwardly in one hand—a deadly looking number with an ornate, cuplike guard at the hilt. He was untied, free to move about. He was staring at something in front of him but off camera, eyes wide, hunted.
The camera zoomed back, sliding Winter into frame. She was topless, wearing the black thong she’d been wearing the first day I’d seen her. She was barefoot, a slender waif of a girl holding the twin of Jonnie’s sword in one hand, facing him at a forty-five degree angle, nothing the least bit awkward about her stance.
Jonnie coughed once, nervously, facing his murderous daughter-granddaughter. The sound was hollow, echoey, but the picture was clear enough.
Victoria paused the action. “In some countries their swords might be called rapiers, a most appropriate term under the circumstances, wouldn’t you say? These were imported from Italy. Unlike a classic foil or epee, the rapier has both a point and a single razor edge. Forty-five hundred dollars apiece. Beautiful weapons, perfectly balanced.”
She hit the play button. The action moved forward again.
Winter held her rapier at an angle in front of her face, said, “En garde,” then lowered the tip until it was pointed at Jonnie’s heart. She took a step forward. The camera was behind her, off to one side. In that thong and nothing else, she looked entirely naked. All I could see was the slender black strap of the thong around her waist.
Jonnie lifted the point of his sword uncertainly. Winter flicked his tip aside with the middle portion of her blade, spun his blade away with a deft circular motion, and stabbed him in the torso, inches from his belly button. The whole thing took less than two seconds. She stepped back as Jonnie stumbled backward and slammed into the wall behind him. He lowered his sword in shock, staring at his stomach, at blood running down into his pubic hair. Winter lunged forward and stuck the tip of her sword half an inch deep into his left biceps.
Jonnie yelled, spun away, almost fell down. Winter gave him a moment to recover, then came at him again, batting the tip of his rapier around, scoring points. In seconds, Jonnie was bleeding from the right thigh, right forearm, left foot, and had a cut beneath his left eye. His wild hair and the blood gave him a ghoulish appearance. Winter danced back, giving him time to think about what had just happened. The camera circled as Victoria sought a better angle.
Winter began to toy with him in earnest, lunging in, batting the tip of his sword aside, sticking him here and there, inflicting pain but no significant injury. Turning Jonnie into a human pincushion.
“The opportunity to practice on a live subject with full contact like this is exceedingly rare,” Victoria interjected. “She could have killed him in the first second.”
“Yeah, but can she arm wrestle?” I said, figuring I didn’t have much to lose at that point.
Jeri lifted an eyebrow at me.
“Hard to arm wrestle with your dick in your mouth, cowboy,” Winter said coolly, standing no more than three feet from me.
Okay, so I was wrong about having nothing to lose. I shut up.
On screen, Winter continued to toy with Jonnie. This went on for a while. He’d long since given up any attempt to hide his nakedness, and had begun to try to parry her thrusts and even to attack, thrusting, slashing wildly, but nothing worked. His chest heaved and blood coursed down the front of his body from dozens of puncture wounds. His breathing grew labored, coming hollow and heavy out of the speakers. He slipped and fell a few times. The floor was red, slick with blood. As I’d thought, the drain was a real plus in this place.
Finally Winter paused, then darted forward and stuck the point of her blade an inch deep into Jonnie’s left eye. He screamed and dropped his sword. He stumbled against the wall then sank to the floor, writhing, holding his ruined eye, shrieking.
After watching this for a minute or so, Winter stuck the tip of her sword into his rib cage, aimed at his heart. He stared at her through his one good eye. “Just do it,” he whispered. His words were slurred. He’d bitten his tongue. Blood was spilling from his mouth.
Winter stared at him. “Say please, Daddy.” “Do it.”
She looked down at him, pitiless, silent, as if he were a bug, a roach, a gnat.
“Please,” Jonnie whispered. “Please.”
Winter backed away and changed swords, trading the rapier for one of the slender foils that had been on the wall above her bed, a quarter inch thick at the hilt, tapering to a needle point. She rested the tip in Jonnie’s belly button for a moment, then lowered her center of gravity a few inches for leverage and shoved the foil entirely through his body. The tip exited out his back.
It took several minutes for him to die, writhing with the sword in his guts, keening, then at last he went quiet. His lips worked silently as he gazed up into the camera. Finally he bled out internally and it was over.
* * *
Victoria turned off the DVD player.
I felt sick, down deep. Had Jonnie deserved to die that way? I’d never witnessed anything so deliberate, so terrible and one-sided. He hadn’t had a chance. Truth was, I’d never seen anyone die before, other than metaphorically with the IRS. I’ve led a sheltered life. Victoria and Winter had produced what amounted to their own private snuff film. No doubt they watched it every night before going to bed, then dreamed sweet dreams. Ghouls.
“The whole thing took two hours,” Victoria said in a voice so calm it took my breath away. “I edited out the more tedious parts. And I had to change memory cards in the camera and put in a new battery, but, well…you get the idea.
“I think it’s only fitting that at least one of you should die like Jonathan.” She looked at each of us in turn. “And I think that someone should be”—she spun in place, considering the available options—“his lovely daughter,” she said. “The one whom Jonathan called ‘daughter’ all these many years.”
“No!” Kayla said in a thin voice. “Oh, God, no.” She wrenched at the ropes, then sagged on them, crying when her legs gave out.
“The one,” Victoria went on calmly, “who didn’t have the wits to stay in Ithaca, where death would have been so much faster, relatively painless.”
“Please, no,” Kayla wailed. “I can’t.”
“But of course you can,” Victoria said. “You’re a bright girl. You can do anything you set your mind to. Surely your loving father taught you that.”
Kayla continued to cry weakly. It was terrible to hear. I tried to close my ears to it, but couldn’t.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll fight her.” Tough words, but in fact it was a coward’s way out. I wanted this to be over and that was one way to accomplish it.
Victoria turned. She smiled. “Ah, a volunteer. Such bravery. Such chivalry. The world is saved.”
It was anything but bravery. I damn well didn’t want to die the way Jonnie had, inch by horrible inch, possibly with steel in my eye. But I couldn’t watch Kayla die like that. Or Jeri. I couldn’t.
“Not him,” Jeri said in a hard, tough voice. “Me. I’ll take on that anorexic little bitch. I’ll chop your psycho slut daughter into pieces the size of scallops.”
Slowly, Victoria turned and stared at her. “My God, we are awash in heroic figures.”
Jeri’s eyes blazed. “If you touch him again, just touch him, I swear in Christ’s name that when I die I will curl up in your brain and leave you with gibbering nightmares until the end of time.”
“Goodness!” Victoria exclaimed. “That sounds very much like love.”
Jeri looked straight at me. “It is.”
For an instant I thought my heart had stopped. My vision blurred, fractured into shards of rainbow-colored light.
“Look,” Winter said, staring at me. “He’s crying. How sweet.” Her eyes, however, were volcanic pools of fury.
“You’re jealous,” I managed to say. “No one gives a fuck about you, kid, including your crazy mama. God, how she must hate you, Jonnie’s kid—”
Winter punched me full in the face, bouncing my head off the concrete wall.
My skull throbbed. A wave of nausea returned, but I managed to grin at her anyhow, tasting blood. “Part of you is almost human, isn’t it? A very small part.”
But already the moment was over. Winter smiled at me, rubbing her knuckles. She arched her back. “When I do you, cowboy, I’ll do it topless in that thong like in the video, give you a real nice show.”
I glanced indifferently at her chest. “Yeah? What with?”
A murderous look filled her eyes. After a sharp word from Victoria, she grabbed the television and video player and carried them into the other room, pausing at the door to give me a long, lethal stare, like a monitor lizard eyeing a rat.
Victoria tilted her head at me. “Was anything…unusual found in Jonnie’s skull? Nothing was mentioned in the news.”
I gave her a blank look. “In his skull? Unusual? Like what?” I wasn’t about to give the fiendish bitch the satisfaction.
“So you don’t…well, I’m not surprised. Winter and I played a little joke.”
“Did you?”
“A symbolic gesture, very appropriate. Nothing important.” She turned away.
“Where is Jonnie now?” I asked. “His body, I mean.”
Victoria shrugged. “Out back with Milliken, buried under newly planted roses beneath a layer of lime and powdered sulfur to keep dogs from showing any interest, not that they would —we put the two of them down deep. The soil digs easily, and we were motivated, Winter and I. By the way, the desert here is alkaline. Sulfur’s good for plants.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “What about my nephew, Gregory?”
“What about him?”
“Did you…how did he…?”
“Die? A lot quicker than Jonathan, but he was much better with the foil. He had intuition and was surprisingly athletic. The best full-contact sparring partner Winter’s ever had, not that he made any contact himself. He was an extremely nosy person, but quite taken with her, the way she was dressed. He came inside for a Coke, and once he regained consciousness from the tap I gave him from behind, she entertained him in this room while I drove his car down to the Peppermill Hotel and walked back. You saw how Winter entertains. In spite of your silly vindictive comments, she has a very nice body.”
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
“We found him on hands and knees at the back of the house, trying to peer through a window into the basement.” She waved a hand, indicating the room beyond the door. “How was I to know what he’d seen? Maybe nothing, but I was most annoyed to find him out there snooping around. One look at Winter, though, and, well, you know the rest. We returned him to his office at three in the morning. His head, that is. The rest is under a honeysuckle beside the garage. It’s doing very nicely, too. Plants like food as much as the rest of us.”
“You’re insane,” I said.
“Oh, I should think that’s perfectly obvious. But at least life is interesting.”
Her eyes took in everyone in the room. “Talk it over. Decide which of you will try their hand against Winter first.”
Then she was gone.