The semifamiliar voice, which was not Rod’s, was speaking in low tones, so it was more difficult to get a read on the speaker. “That’s good. Just keep looking forward and give me your phone.”
Give him my phone? This guy wasn’t just a dangerous person with a gun in his hand; he was completely insane. Asking a Jersey girl to hand over her phone is tantamount to asking a Texan to stop wearing a large belt buckle or a Canadian to admit that baseball is a better game than hockey. It’s just not going to happen.
“No,” I said in a conversational, bland tone. “You can shoot me in the street, but I’m keeping my phone. What if I get a text on the way to the hospital?”
“If I shoot you, you’re not going to make it to the hospital,” the man said, just as casually and just as calmly. That made it scarier somehow. “Now give me your phone.”
Okay, so I’d give him my phone. After I pressed “1-1,” something I was hoping I had done without looking at the touch screen.
Apparently my aim was off because the phone made a rude noise, and the guy snatched it out of my hand with his right. He was holding the gun in his left hand. I wondered if that was significant.
Mostly I was pissed off at myself. I hadn’t done anything wrong, no too-stupid-to-live move that I’d have avoided at all costs in one of my books. Yeah, I could have called the cops earlier, but would they be here by now? Probably not. What if Sgt. Phil Dougherty was leading the charge? That wouldn’t have helped.
No, I’d played it smart, and I still had a gun in my back. Life ain’t fair.
“Feel better?” the guy behind me asked. “You didn’t have to give me the phone; I just took it.”
“Yeah, I hope that makes it into my obituary.” Maybe I shouldn’t have given him any ideas, but I doubted the pistol in my back meant he just wanted to get to know me better as a person. My snarky side comes out whenever my life is threatened. “So you can sneak up on a girl on a dark street. Is this how you shot Michelle Testaverde?” Guns, Poughkeepsie . . . it seemed a pretty decent bet I was dealing with Michelle’s killer. If I was a gambler, I would have bet heavily on that assumption.
“I didn’t shoot Michelle,” the guy said. “I loved Michelle.” Now you know why I’m not a gambler.
“So who did?” I asked. If I was going to get shot, the least the guy could do was answer my questions.
“Walk toward the house,” he said. Apparently he didn’t want to do the least he could do. The cad.
“Why? So you can shoot me there? I don’t think I want to help you.”
“Do it, because if you don’t, I’m going to shoot you here, and if you do, maybe I won’t shoot you at all.”
Finally, a reasonable argument. I started walking toward the house.
“Slowly,” said the guy with the gun. He didn’t want the pistol visible. That left it open to me to decide whether I wanted to obey his command and probably get shot in the house or take a chance and almost certainly get shot on the street.
This was not like deciding whether Duffy Madison the character should be driving a Honda or a Hyundai, and that choice took me three days to make. (He ended up driving a Prius c because that was the car I knew best.)
In the end, I just walked to the damn house. It wasn’t even really a conscious decision so much as it was a reaction to my primal fear of getting shot. If I could put it off even for a minute, that was worth doing.
“Nice and slow,” the guy said. It wasn’t a warning, just a reminder. But the way he said it made me want to bolt for the door at top speed just to thwart his wishes.
I was getting a little irritated, in case you hadn’t caught that bit of subtlety just yet.
We got to the front door of Rod Wilkerson’s house about an hour later, it felt like. Once at the threshold, however, we stopped, and the guy behind me didn’t say anything. I wondered whether I should knock. I mean, who wants to barge in on somebody and get shot in the back at the same time?
“What do you mean, what?” I wasn’t giving him any ideas. If he wanted to turn back now and forget the whole thing, it would certainly be all right with me. You grab on to somewhat unlikely scenarios when you’re desperate.
“Open the door.” Like it was obvious that was what I should do.
I figured that meant I didn’t need to ring the doorbell, so I reached for the doorknob and turned it. The door swung open into the house. I really didn’t want to look, having heard that gunshot only a few minutes before. (Really? That wasn’t three days ago?)
But all that was inside the house was furniture. The same furniture I’d seen when we’d interviewed Rod twice before, once with Duffy and once with Ben. No bloodstains on the rug. No corpse on the couch. The TV wasn’t even on.
“Where’s Rod?” I asked.
“Go in.” I didn’t see how that was helpful.
Inside, without the ambient noise of the street, the gun guy’s voice was just a bit more familiar. I knew I’d heard it recently but couldn’t place it exactly. Did it have something to do with these two murders? That seemed fairly obvious. But it definitely wasn’t Rod, and it certainly wasn’t Walt Kendig. I’d spoken to Sgt. Dougherty only briefly a couple of days ago, but somehow the back of my brain was telling me that wasn’t his voice. Should I turn around and look?
I followed his instructions and walked into the room, then sort of felt the movement of his right foot pushing the door closed behind us. The gun never left that spot on my back.
Now I was exactly where I wouldn’t want a character to be, inside and out of sight of the street with a ruthless killer (or maybe a ruthful killer; what did I know?) holding a deadly weapon to my back. I think it was the unfairness of it all that overwhelmed me. If I was going to get killed, at the very least I was going to know who killed me. It was small comfort, but you set the bar pretty low under such circumstances.
I took two steps into the room at a faster pace than I’d been using, which meant I actually broke physical contact with the barrel of the gun. Then I spun around to face my assailant.
And found myself looking into Barry Spader’s eyes.
Honest to goodness, I actually said, “What the—” and stared.
“That wasn’t smart,” Barry snarled at me. “You’ve seen my face.”
I managed to regain the power of speech. “Yeah, like you weren’t going to shoot me anyway. But you’re in Arlington, Virginia! How’d you get here so fast?”
“Take three steps back,” he said, gesturing with the pistol.
That didn’t sound good. “Why?” I asked. My voice wasn’t nearly as defiant as I’d hoped it would be.
“Because I’m not going to shoot you right now unless you make me, and I want you in the center of the room where I know there won’t be any surprises.” Okay, that was fair. I took the three steps back and avoided a side table by inches. It was the part about not shooting me now that made me feel better about being compliant.
“Arlington, Virginia,” I reminded Barry.
His mouth flattened into an expression of utter contempt. “I was never in Arlington,” he said. “I was never in any of those places they thought I’d gone. I left this town, and I lived in the city for a few years.”
The city. “Manhattan?” I said. If I could keep him talking for just a few minutes, Ben would get here, figure out I was in the house, and possibly even prevent me from getting shot. That would be good.
Barry nodded. “I had a nice place on the Upper East Side,” he said. “Selling the bar gave me enough for a big down payment, and the mortgage wasn’t too bad. It’s the co-op fees that really get you.”
Maybe that was why he’d come to Rod Wilkerson’s house—to discuss real estate. “I know,” I agreed. “Prices in the city are out of control.” Why not? If I could find common ground, agree with Barry on a thing or two, the whole shooting thing could become less certain. It was hard to think of much else, especially since the pistol was still pointed at my midsection.
“But I saw you in Arlington on my laptop only a few hours ago,” I said.
“You saw me at a friend’s place in New Rochelle. I could have told you I was anywhere.” He was enjoying the idea of fooling us, reveling in the idea that it was so easy to have convinced Ben, Duffy, and me he’d been in Virginia. I decided to start detesting Barry Spader right now.
“If you didn’t shoot Michelle Testaverde, what’s all the cloak and dagger?” I demanded. Well, asked. “What’s the whole point of manufacturing evidence and framing Duffy if you didn’t do anything wrong?” And before it was out of my mouth, I knew what it was all about, at least up to a point.
Sure, Barry hadn’t shot Michelle. He loved Michelle. Know who else loved Michelle?
Damien Mosley.
I didn’t say it. I wasn’t stupid enough to say, You shot Damien! But Barry probably saw the look on my face and determined exactly what I was thinking. I make up stuff for a living, but I’m not the best liar you ever met in your life, and I’m not great at hiding the thoughts and feelings running through my brain. So it was a decent bet I was showing a certain growing understanding of the situation in front of me.
“I never said I didn’t shoot anyone,” Barry said.
But it didn’t add up: If Barry had killed Damien Mosley, he did that in North Bergen, New Jersey. If he hadn’t shot Michelle Testaverde, there was no crime to cover up in Poughkeepsie, New York. So what was the missing piece I wasn’t thinking of right at the moment?
I’d never seen the door open when I was outside. I was looking at the house from an angle from which the front and side doors were visible. If there was a back door and Barry had used it, I should have seen him walking around the house to come up behind me. So that meant Barry hadn’t been in the house before he’d ambushed me in the street; he’d been coming from somewhere else. I might not have been part of the plan at all.
That left me with a bad feeling that wasn’t alleviated when Barry motioned me to a chair with the pistol.
“I have to go outside for just a minute,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want you taking the opportunity to leave before the party’s over.” Why do people with guns always talk like that? I thought it was just a movie thing, but apparently Barry really did want to sound like an evil genius. Or he’d just seen the same movies and figured that was what he was supposed to say.
I didn’t move, but he pulled back the hammer on the gun, and I realized he didn’t actually need me alive.
“Sit,” he said. So I sat.
He continued to aim the gun in my direction while reaching into a side table drawer and pulling out some duct tape with his left hand. It wasn’t the kind of table you’d expect to house home maintenance supplies, and this wasn’t Barry’s house—as far as I knew—so that led to the conclusion that he’d planned to tape someone into a chair tonight. But he hadn’t been expecting me.
At least he didn’t put tape over my mouth. If nobody in the neighborhood had called the police when there was a gunshot, there was no reason to think my shouting was going to be interpreted as anything but a TV show being played far too loudly.
Barry finished encasing me in the tufted chair and then put the tape down on the table and put the gun in his jacket pocket. Then, whistling (I swear!), he walked out the back door and disappeared.
Was this somehow an opportunity? I couldn’t get out of the chair, certainly, and it did seem useless to scream, but could I crab-walk the chair through the front door? Suppose Barry had been lying about coming back. That would be a positive in that he wasn’t actually shooting me, but it would leave me in a very difficult position and would not help Ben and Duffy find me.
None of that mattered because it was clear in seconds that Barry would be back, and soon. I heard a car door open in the driveway near the back of the house, then I heard a grunt, and the car door slammed again. There was some more grunting, someone exerting himself, and after a short time, the back door opened again.
Barry walked back into the living room with something slung over his left shoulder. Something large and heavy, based on the noises he made walking into the room. I couldn’t see him until he was entirely back in the living room, and then I saw him unload his burden and lay it on the carpeted floor.
It was Duffy Madison. And he wasn’t moving.