“You followed us here,” I said as I hit the panic button on my phone before I dropped it. It was set to call 9-1-1. I just hoped they got it in time to stop this woman from killing us both.
“Push it over here,” she ordered.
I didn’t have much choice. I slid the phone toward her, hoping that she didn’t pick it up to see who I’d just called. Instead of leaning down, though, she lashed out with her heel and smashed it.
Had the call gone through, or had she killed it just as completely as she’d evidently killed Annabeth Kline?
“Jake, I’m not going to tell you again. If you still have that gun in your hand by the time I count to three, I’m going to shoot your wife.”
He hesitated, and I whispered, “Don’t do it, Jake. She’s going to kill us anyway.”
He stared at me for a brief second, and then he shrugged as he dropped his weapon to the floor. Jake might have just sealed our fates, but at least this way, we might have a fighting chance if my call had gone through. I had all the faith in the world in my husband’s ability to win a shoot-out with the art supply shop owner, but she had the drop on us, and by the time Jake could have pivoted and gotten off a shot, one of us would probably be dead.
“Did you honestly kill her just so you could have Chris to yourself?” I asked her.
“That was part of the reason,” Kerry admitted. “I am so much prettier than she ever was. Why would he want her instead of me?”
“Maybe he was looking for more than just looks,” Jake said.
I saw Kerry’s finger tighten on the trigger, and I knew that provoking her was not the right way to handle this, not if we wanted a chance of getting out of it alive. “Kerry, it’s impossible to know why some people are attracted to others. What I don’t understand is why you asked Annabeth to meet you at the library after hours. Why take the chance of being seen together in public if you were just going to kill her?”
“It’s probably because she hadn’t decided to kill her yet,” Jake said. “You were going to give her one last chance to back off, weren’t you?”
“It was the right thing to do,” I heard the killer say, as if she had any idea what the right thing was any more. “She had talent, money, and Chris. What made matters worse was that she didn’t even want him,” Kerry said, gesturing to the man’s body. The artist hadn’t made a single movement since we’d arrived, and I had to wonder if his injuries were more significant than we knew. He had to get help soon, or he might be dead as well. “When I asked her to give him up, she said he wasn’t hers to give. She told me I was better than that, that I should actually find someone who wanted me, not someone who didn’t care if I was dead or alive. When she walked off, I decided right then and there to kill her.”
“But you weren’t ready, were you?” Jake asked her.
“I was ready. I just wasn’t prepared. I stole this gun from my cousin, and I went to her studio to make sure she didn’t bat those eyelashes at Chris ever again.”
“But you didn’t shoot her,” I said, trying to draw her out as much as I could. Right now keeping her talking was our best option.
“I was going to, but she’d left her door unlocked, and she was so wrapped up in a painting she was doing that she didn’t even see me come in. I grabbed a paperweight and hit her on the side of the head as hard as I could. It had a ninety-degree angle to it, and I was about to leave it when I noticed that it matched the edge of her worktable. I dragged her to where I thought she might fall if she slipped from the ladder she was on, and then I smeared a little blood and hair from where I hit her onto the table’s edge.” She shivered slightly. “It was pretty gruesome doing that, but I had no choice.”
“That wasn’t the first time you wanted to kill her though, was it?” I asked. “I’m willing to bet that if Jake were to check that car’s registration, he’ll discover that it belongs to you, not your sister.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill her then. I just wanted to scare her. That’s why I pushed those boxes over, too.”
“Did you loosen the rung of the ladder, too?” I asked.
She looked surprised by the question. “No, if it’s loose, I didn’t do it. It looked pretty old to me when I pulled it down.”
Most of Annabeth’s clues had been spot on, so it hardly mattered if she’d found the loose ladder rung and had decided that someone was trying to kill her that way.
“What about the art she gave me? You broke into the donut shop, and then you tried getting into our cottage. Why?”
“After I killed her, I saw the notes she made on that butcher paper. I had to wonder what else she might have written, and she’d told me about giving you something that would shake your world up. I didn’t know what that meant, but I had to find out for myself. What was it?”
“I’d show you a photo of it, but you just broke my phone,” I said. Why hadn’t the police responded to my call yet? Were we going to die here in Chris Langer’s studio alongside him?
“Enough talk,” she said. “I’m sorry, but if you two hadn’t been so nosy, you wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place, so in a very real way, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.”
“Do you honestly believe that the police aren’t going to track you down after they discover our bodies?” I asked. The question gave me chills as I asked it. If and when that happened, it would be too late for us, and that was what mattered at the moment.
“They won’t suspect a thing. After all, it’s going to be murder-suicide,” she said with a laugh as though she’d just said something amusing. The woman had really snapped.
“I don’t see it,” Jake said with a frown.
“You confronted Christopho, he shot you both, and then he killed himself,” she said.
“How are you going to explain his caved-in skull?” Jake asked.
“I don’t have to. Let the police figure it out,” she answered. “I’ll be long gone by then.”
I wasn’t sure how long Chris Langer had been awake and listening to us, but he clearly understood that he had to act now or lose the opportunity forever. He reached out for the same baseball-sized rock Kerry had used to bash his head in, and he somehow managed to heave it at her while still lying on his side, suffering from, at the very least, a concussion, and who knew what other damage she’d done on her earlier assault?
She was caught off guard by the rock being heaved at her, and that was all of the distraction we needed. Jake grabbed his weapon, and before Kerry could lift her own, he had her dead to rights.
“Drop it, Kerry. It’s over.”
I saw her hesitate just as the door opened again behind her. There stood a uniformed cop, his weapon drawn as well. “Drop your weapon,” he screamed at her.
It was enough to push her over the edge. I saw her tense as she got ready to fight and die, and then, as suddenly as it had come, she dropped her gun to the floor and started sobbing.
Apparently the killer decided that it was better to be a live coward than a dead martyr to a cause that no one else in the world cared about.