Chapter Nineteen
Los Angeles, the present
Henry didn’t bring a change of clothing with him, so he stripped down to his birthday suit before using the chisel and hammer on Gail Hawes, and since he had positioned Hawes on her belly and she wasn’t going to be able to see his nakedness, he didn’t have to worry about feeling immodest. When he was done, he found a full-length mirror in her bedroom and checked himself over. Not a single drop of blood or piece of gore had splattered on him, leaving him impressed over how careful he’d been, especially given that it was such messy work.
He returned to the living room where Hawes’s remains lay, and saw that two of her cats had surfaced. He recognized them from her Facebook photos as they stared at him with their accusatory pushed-in faces. Hermione and Ginny, with Professor Snape still in hiding. He noticed her laptop then on the dining room table (the room he was in was a combination living room and dining room) and an alarm went off in his head as he saw that it had been powered on.
He opened the laptop up and his heart turned into a cold, queasy mush on reading a Facebook post she had added about how she was going to be late for lunch because she had met up with a friend’s secret lover.
Oh jeeze, he thought, realizing that she must’ve typed it up while he was using the bathroom.
For a long moment he stood stunned as he thought about the consequences of what she had done, then he broke out of his stupor and deleted the post. Even though it was now gone, Hawes’s Facebook friends could’ve already seen it, including Susan. And even if they hadn’t, and even if he had deleted the post, it still might exist somewhere on Facebook’s servers. He didn’t know how that stuff worked, but he knew that once something showed up on the Internet, it never fully disappeared. He had to assume that the police would eventually see it. Even though Hawes’s post fortunately didn’t include his name or (thank God!) a picture of him, it would provide the police a link back to him, as fuzzy as it might be.
What’s done is done, Henry whispered to himself. Because of that annoying-as-heck Gail Hawes, he was going to have to do something now that he’d pretty much decided he didn’t want to do. For a long moment he was seized with the idea of posting a photo of Hawes in her current state as a fitting final status update for her, but then shook himself out of that thought. It would be incredibly stupid to do something like that. As it was, it might be days before the police discovered her body, but if he were to do something that childish and petulant, they’d be here in minutes. He had to calm down and act smart. As long as he did, that post wasn’t going to help the police, assuming that they ever found out about it.
Henry took a deep breath, and held it until he calmed down. Then he took the hammer and chisel to the bathroom and scrubbed them clean. After he had them wrapped up in cloth rags and stored away in his briefcase, and the duct tape cut from Hawes’s wrists and the sock removed from her mouth, he put his suit back on and used one of the cloth rags to wipe fingerprints off anything he might’ve touched. He noticed that Professor Snape had finally made an appearance, and that all three cats were sniffing around the lumps of Hawes’s brain that he had dug out. If he left them alone, they’d probably be eating it soon. He thought about grabbing them and locking them in Hawes’s bedroom, but then he decided so what. Why should he care what they ate?
He looked out of the peephole on the front door until he was sure the coast was clear. Something made him turn around, and he saw that Professor Snape was staring at him in this most curious way.
“Bon appétit,” he told the cat before slipping out of the apartment.
* * *
“I’ve got to tell you, sugar lips, I’ve been going nuts all day thinking about your long beautiful legs and what it would feel like having them wrapped around me.”
Henry held his breath as he waited for Susan’s response, because she might’ve seen Gail Hawes’s Facebook post, and if she did, she’d be asking questions about it. He had already figured out what he would say, but fortunately she didn’t bring it up.
“So you’ve recuperated then,” she said, her voice sultry.
“You better believe it. Right now I feel like I could go for hours. It’s going to be torture waiting for you.”
“Are you in the area?”
“Not too far away. I could be at your place at the drop of a hat.”
“You might not have to wait then. Hold on a minute.” It took less than a minute for Susan to get back on her cellphone and tell Henry that it was dead at the boutique and her boss gave her the okay to take off for an hour. “That should give us enough time for some serious afternoon loving,” she said in that same sultry voice from earlier. “I’ll meet you at my apartment in ten minutes?”
“You better believe it!” He hesitated, then added, “As long as you still haven’t told anyone about us. My lawyer called today warning me that he was within a day of settling the divorce, but that I had to be careful.”
“I haven’t told anybody anything, I promise, Howard.”
“Except for your friend yesterday.”
“Well, I didn’t tell Gail anything. She figured it out, the snoop! But she’s not going to tell anyone anything.”
That was truer than Susan could’ve realized. “I want you so bad right now,” Henry said. “Seeing you naked is all I can think about. But I got to be careful with the divorce almost done. You didn’t tell your boss why you’re taking off for an hour?”
“I told her I needed to do some shopping, that’s all.”
“Then let’s do it! I think I might explode if we don’t.”
“Oh, you’ll be exploding all right.” She giggled at her joke. “Several times in fact.”
This was what Henry was counting on, and he was calling Susan from a lot closer than she could’ve guessed—almost right across the street from her boutique. At that hour it would be too risky to meet her at her rented town house, but he had already located where she had parked her car in the garage near where she worked, and at least five minutes ago there was nobody anywhere near it.
After he got off the call with Susan, he moved swiftly back to where her car was parked, and was relieved to see that there still wasn’t anybody around. It didn’t take Susan very long at all to hurry to her car, and she appeared breathless as she took her keys from her pocketbook. Henry waited until she clicked her door unlocked before emerging from where he was hiding and slamming her head against the door frame. The impact was violent enough to have killed her, but in case it didn’t, he used his powerful hands to snap her neck. One look at her face left no doubt that she was dead.
He used her key to click open her trunk, and then he put her body inside of it. He had to bend her almost in half to get her to fit, but with a little elbow grease he was able to close the trunk lid shut. He felt some remorse killing her this way since he had already satisfied his latest Skull Cracker killing, and he had grown to like her over the last three weeks, more than he had even realized until just a few minutes ago. But he’d had no choice. He was convinced the police would uncover the deleted Facebook post, and then they’d find Susan. Even if she didn’t know Henry’s real name, they’d find him once she gave them a description. He grimaced hard enough that his cheek muscles began to ache. This was all Gail Hawes’s fault, no one else’s.
Even in death, Hawes was annoying as heck!