Now that the accusation was out there, Kat knew it was true. The resigned look on Sally’s face erased any lingering doubts.
“What’s she talking about, Sal?” Zoe said. Her voice was high and shrill, and the color had drained from her face.
Sally stared at her sister, her face bleak.
“Tell her she’s wrong,” Zoe demanded, planting her hands on her hips. “Tell her you didn’t kill John.”
Sally shook her head. “She’s not wrong.”
Zoe’s eyes widened. She stumbled backward, falling onto the bed when her legs hit the mattress. Her half-packed suitcase tumbled to the floor, clothes and toiletries spilling all over the carpet.
Sally sighed. “I did it for you.”
Zoe pressed her palm to her chest. “Me?”
“He was taking advantage of you, and you were too lovesick to notice or care.” Sally’s eyes flicked to the silver necklace around Zoe’s neck, and her jaw tightened. “He was using you, Zoe.”
“You don’t know! He loved me.”
Sally scoffed. “Don’t be so blind. You were just a diversion for him. Watching you with him was like watching you with that loser Tim all over again. Face it, Zoe. You don’t know how to pick men. You don’t know what’s good for you.”
Zoe rose to her feet and glared at her sister, a spark igniting in her eyes. “You have no right to say that. And John—” A strangled sound emerged from her throat. “You had no right!”
“I was protecting you.”
“By murdering the man I loved?”
Zoe’s composure unraveled, and she collapsed back onto the mattress. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed, tears leaking between her fingers and dripping onto her lap.
Sundae meowed from inside the bathroom. Sally whipped around, her eyes landing on Kat.
Kat took a step forward. “Sally, you need to turn yourself in.”
Sally swung her head from side to side. “I’m not doing that. I’m not going to jail over some worthless womanizer.”
“That worthless womanizer is dead because of you,” Kat said, trying to project a calmness she didn’t feel.
Zoe let out an anguished cry. Sundae howled in response.
Kat kept her eyes trained on Sally. “You broke the law, and you need to own up to that.”
“I couldn’t just stand by and watch him take advantage of Zoe,” Sally said. “As the older sister, I have an obligation to look out for her.”
“You killed a man, Sally. There’s no justification for that.”
“And what was his justification for using Zoe?” Sally’s face fell. “You should have seen what he did to her. Every time she came home after seeing him she would be destroyed, emotionally wrecked. He kept promising to divorce Marta so he could be with her, but it was all talk. He was never going to trade Marta for Zoe. She was just a toy to him. People like John, they think they own the world. They think they’re entitled to take whatever they want with no consideration for anybody but themselves.”
“John loved me,” Zoe cried, jumping off the mattress.
Sally looked ready to spit. “You kept telling yourself that, and look where it got you. He sucked your spirit away, bit by bit until you had no life left in you. You were miserable.”
“I’m miserable because of you,” Zoe countered, rushing across the room and sticking her finger in Sally’s face.
Oddly enough, Zoe’s anger seemed to calm her sister. When Sally spoke next, her tone was much softer. “I couldn’t stand to see you coming home heartbroken after every date you had with him. I tried to tell you to let him go, that he was never going to give you what you wanted. You wouldn’t listen.”
Zoe drew in a breath, her hand reaching for the necklace again. “Is that why you came with me this weekend? To kill him?”
“No. I came because I knew you’d need me. I knew when you saw him with Marta or hitting on those other girls he strings along that you’d end up in tears.” Sally let a pregnant pause elapse. “Which is exactly what happened.”
“That’s not true,” Zoe said, but her voice held no conviction.
“Yeah?” Sally challenged. “Then why did you come running up to our room an hour into the auction?”
“I came up here because I needed . . . I needed some space.”
Sally didn’t say anything, but the set of her jaw told Kat she wasn’t buying Zoe’s excuses. This argument was undoubtedly similar to many others they’d had in the past.
“And besides,” Zoe continued, squaring her shoulders, “even if John did make me cry, that’s no reason to murder him.”
“I snapped, okay?” Sally gazed past Zoe’s shoulder. “After I saw you fleeing the party, I was going to join you up here, to comfort you. I went to fetch my coat, and as I was reentering the hallway John was coming out of the bathroom. I didn’t think, I just stormed over and told him he’d better stay away from you or I would find some way to destroy his career. But he was more worried about somebody overhearing us than about your happiness.” She scoffed. “He even had the nerve to tell me to calm down.”
Kat winced. Telling an angry woman to calm down was a surefire way to enrage her even more.
“While I was yelling at him, John loosened his scarf,” Sally continued. “I guess the fear of being exposed had made him hot under the collar.” Her narrowed eyes focused in on Zoe. “You want to know what I saw when he did that?”
Zoe flushed crimson and averted her eyes.
“A hickey,” Sally spat. “One you gave him, I imagine.”
A meow interrupted Sally’s tirade. Kat held her breath, silently encouraging Sundae to do the same. She feared the cat’s cries would distract Sally from her story, and she wanted to hear the rest of her confession.
But Sally didn’t give any indication of being aware of Sundae. Her eyes were glassy as though she were getting lost in her own memories. “He told me if I kept making a scene he would walk away, but if I would stop yelling he was willing to continue our discussion in private. That’s exactly how he put it, too—discussion, like we were in the middle of business negotiations rather than talking about my sister’s life. But I agreed. I had to if I wanted him to listen. And since the big bathroom—the one large enough for a wheelchair—was right there, we went inside.”
Kat’s chest constricted when Zoe clapped her hands over her mouth, her head moving slowly from side to side. As terrible as it was for Kat to picture John Sykes’s final minutes alive, it had to be ten times worse for Zoe.
“I tried to reason with him.” Sally turned pleading eyes toward Zoe. “I tried to get him to see how he was tearing you apart. I told him to let you go, that he had plenty of other girls to choose from. But he wouldn’t listen. He said what you and he did together was none of my business, like I was just supposed to sit back and watch him hurt you without saying anything.”
The room grew quiet enough for Kat to hear scratching. She risked a peek at the bathroom door, spotting one of Sundae’s paws sticking through the gap at the bottom.
“I couldn’t stop looking at that scarf, the one he’d used to hide the mark you left on him.” Sally twined her fingers together and stared down at them. “When he turned around to leave, I grabbed it with both hands and pulled.”
A wail ripped past Zoe’s lips. Her eyes were so huge that Kat could see the whites around them.
Sally nodded, her gaze still on her hands. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t need to. Everyone in the room knew what had happened next.
When Sally finally spoke again, her voice was hollow. “After, I was shaking so hard I wasn’t sure I could walk. But I knew I had to get out of there—fast. So I ducked into the stairwell at the end of the hall and made my way back here, to our room.”
“I knew something was wrong when I saw you,” Zoe whispered. “But you said you had a headache and just needed a long bath.”
Sally slowly lifted her gaze up to meet Zoe’s. “I couldn’t face you.”
A loud knock on the door made them all jump. From the startled looks on Sally’s and Zoe’s faces, Kat didn’t think either sister was expecting visitors.
Sundae was the first to break the silence. He released a plaintive meow.
The knock sounded again. “Hello?” a male voice said.
Sally backed away from the door, scanning the room as though calculating the quickest path to an exit. But there was no other way out.
“This is hotel management. Can you please open the door?”
Zoe darted a tentative look at Sally. Deciding neither one planned to answer, Kat did the honors.
The man on the other side wore a suit and an air of authority. He smiled. “Hello, miss. I’m the hotel manager on duty. Sorry to trouble you, but we received a noise complaint from another one of our guests.”
Kat could imagine the shock on the faces of the people next door when they realized they were listening to a murder confession. “Did they call the police?”
“The police?” The manager’s brow furrowed. “Why, I don’t believe so. They merely requested that the cat be quieted.”
“The cat.”
“Yes.” The manager hesitated. “You do have a cat in here, correct?”
Kat nodded.
He straightened. “As you know, we allow pets, but they must be controlled.”
Sundae chose that moment to howl at the top of his lungs.
The manager peered around Kat. “I take it that’s the cat in question.”
Kat didn’t reply. Instead, she looked over at Sally. She had flattened herself against the far wall as though to blend in with her surroundings. Taking in the terror etched across her face, Kat couldn’t prevent the pang of sympathy that pinched her chest. Right now Sally looked more like a cornered mouse than a killer.
But that didn’t absolve her from what she’d done to John.
It took all of Kat’s strength to turn back to the hotel manager. Her limbs felt like dead weights. “Could you please call the police?” The request came out somewhat garbled. Even her tongue felt heavy.
The manager blinked. “Are you sure that’s necessary? Perhaps if you offered the animal some food or attention it would settle down on its own.”
“Please,” Kat said, as firmly as she could.
The manager didn’t look convinced of the wisdom of Kat’s request, but he lifted his shoulder in concession. “All right. If that’s what you truly want.”
“Ask for Detective Milhone, please.” Kat had to struggle to get the words out around the lump developing in her throat. “Tell him there’s been a break in John Sykes’s murder case.”
Behind her, both Zoe and Sally burst into tears.