back into the living room and surveyed the scene. Exactly seven minutes had passed since she pulled the trigger, propelling the slug into her unsuspecting . . . pie-wanting . . . TV-WATCHING . . . husband. It was important to get on with it. The pool of blood around his head would congeal, and her story would not seem so plausible. She knocked the contents atop the coffee table to the floor. Using her hip, she pushed over a potted button fern. A trickle of black soil scattered over the rug. A drawer in a sideboard was pulled to the floor. Knives fell like gleaming Pixy Stix.
It looked like a struggle. Not much of one, but one that could have taken place in the moments that she’d later describe.
Next, she put on a second rubber kitchen glove—the long kind that ran from fingertips to elbow—and picked up the gun. She was grateful for all the things that money could buy just then. Pilates. Yoga. Tai chi. She’d taken all those courses with the other rich bitches. They never accepted her, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t there to get to know them. She was there to limber up. She bent down and twisted her shoulder as she pointed the gun at her leg and fired.
She didn’t cry out.
Instead, she bit her lip and started toward the door. She was no longer concerned about blood and where it fell. In the throes of her imagined escape, there could be blood anywhere. His or hers. She left the door open, and started to pick up the pace by the koi pond that had been a labor of love, apparently, of the previous owners. She didn’t love anything or anyone. Except, of course, a brimming bank account. She bent down, her nightgown now more red than white. She’d missed her femoral artery, of course. But she hadn’t expected that much blood.
Good thing Darius is still up, she thought, looking up the walkway of the property across the street. The violet light of a TV slashed through the manicured foliage framing the window.
She tucked the gun into the plastic bag, dropped in a three-pound lead weight, and deposited all of it between lily pads in the pond. She dropped the bag containing the gloves into the storm drain on the street—it was a risk, but one that she’d take.
Each time she moved her leg, she let out a yelp. Then a scream. Finally she turned on the tears.
One notch at a time.
She caught a glimpse of a figure between the house and the hedge, and she smiled.
Lainie’s eyes fluttered, struggling to open, weary slits reacting to light they wanted to avoid. She looked at her phone. It was now 4:00 A.M. She felt the chill of the early morning air and pulled up the sheet. Groggy from the pill, she had a million things to do in the morning ... and she was going to look like hell. She reviewed her list as she tried to find her way back to slumber. Just fifteen minutes more. Only fifteen. There was an interview to conduct for an article she was writing for a blog, an overdue errand to the dry cleaner, and a ferry ride over to meet with the high school class reunion committee in Port Orchard. She exhaled, closed her eyes.
The dream shook her. They always did. Dark. Violent. Specific and ambiguous at the same time. They always led back to thoughts of her sister. Her heart pounded. She knew her dream had been a nightmare, but there was no way to analyze what it might have meant. If, that is, she was still the kind of woman who would do that sort of thing. She could not recall much about it . . . except the gun, the figure running . . . and the face that was hers when she looked in the mirror.
CHAPTER THREE
Tacoma
Police and ambulance sirens serve to warn others that danger is near. Stay away. Move aside. Let us through. Get the F out of here! In truth, the shriek of the siren only ensures that people will congregate toward the commotion. A siren is like a rising curtain and the switch on the panel of stage lights. There is no stopping the casual onlooker when the siren screams. People can’t help themselves.
Everyone wants to see what the fuss is all about.
Everyone wants to see the show.
It was surely that way that cool spring night in Tacoma when Tori Connelly and her bloody nightgown arrived on the front porch of Darius Fulton’s North Junett Street home. Without waiting for a second, Darius reacted with the instinct that comes with the injection of adrenaline into the bloodstream. He comforted her and dialed the police, who in turn called the paramedics.
Darius had flipped the switch.
Woman injured. Shot. Bloody. Hurry.
“When will help get here?” Tori had asked over and over.
She’d only been in his house five minutes. If that. But she was slipping away.
“Hold on,” Darius said, cradling the limp Tori in his arms, now on the sofa. “I hear help now,” he said, speaking to the 911 dispatcher as much as to the now nearly unconscious woman who had bled all over his sofa.
“You can hang up,” the dispatcher said. “They’re in front of the house now.”
Darius snapped his phone shut, slid a pillow from the sofa under the woman’s head, and flung open the door as a team of young, jacked-up, soul-patched paramedics swept inside.
“Hurry,” he said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”
“What’s her name?” asked a young man with a port-wine stain crawling from under his bright white T-shirt collar.
“Tori Connelly. She says her husband’s been shot, too. You got to get over there. Across the street. There’s a madman out there somewhere.”
“Already on it, sir,” he said, as two other paramedics ran her vitals.
Darius stepped back to give them room. “I hope she’s going to be okay. I didn’t know how to stop the bleeding.”
“You did fine,” the first paramedic said. “Wound looks worse than it is.”
The second paramedic nodded. “Color’s not so good, but she’s stable. Let’s transport her now.”
Tori murmured something unintelligible as they rolled her out the door into the strobe of the aid cars and police.
“Take care,” Darius said.
In less than two minutes, the living room that had been the scene of the unthinkable was empty. Drops of blood still freckled the floor, the sofa, and the pillow that Darius had offered Tori. The TV droned with an infomercial for a chamois. Adrenaline still routed through Darius’s veins, but with less intensity. It had gone from chaos to quiet.
A light switched off.
He stood in the foyer facing a pair of cops, one middle-aged, one younger. Both rightly grim-faced. As they prompted him for details, Darius Fulton gave a statement about what had occurred. How he’d heard the knock, saw the terror on Tori’s face, and the story she’d conveyed about the intruder.
“Did she say anything about the man who shot her?”
“No. Just that he shot her husband, too.”
The younger cop noted the info on a pad.
“Who was shot first?”
Darius didn’t know
