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“Lindsay?”
“I’ve been thinking that they’d shot Paola because she’d witnessed Madison’s kidnapping.”
“Makes sense.”
“But if Madison witnessed Paola’s murder . . . they’re not going to let the child live after that.”
Part Three
THE ACCOUNTING
Chapter 49
CINDY THOMAS LEFT her Blakely Arms apartment, crossed the street at the corner, and began her five-block walk to her office at the Chronicle.
Two floors above Cindy’s apartment, facing the back of the building, a man named Garry Tenning was having a bad morning. Tenning gripped the edges of the desk in his workroom and tried to stifle his anger. Down in the courtyard, five floors below, a dog was barking incessantly, each shrill note stabbing Tenning’s eardrums like a skewer.
He knew the dog.
It was Barnaby, a rat terrier who belonged to Margery Glynn, a lumpen, dishwater-blond single mother of god-awful Baby Oliver, all of them living on the ground floor, usurping the back courtyard as if it were theirs.
Again, Tenning pressed on his special Mack’s earplugs, soft wax that conformed exactly to the shape of his ear holes. And still he could hear Barnaby yappa-yappa-yipping through his Mack’s.
Tenning rubbed the flat of his hand across the front of his T-shirt as the dog’s brainless yapping ripped the fabric of his repose. The tingling was starting now in his lips and fingers, and his heart was palpitating.
Goddamn it.
Was a little quiet too much to ask?
On the computer screen in front of him, neat rows of type marched down the screen — chapter six of his book, The Accounting: A Statistical Compendium of the Twentieth Century.
The book was more than a conceit or a pet project. The Accounting was his raison d’être and his legacy. He even cherished the rejection letters from publishers turning down his book proposal. He lovingly logged these rejections into a ledger, filing the originals in a folder inside his lockbox.
He’d get his laugh when The Accounting was published, when it became a critical reference work for scholars all over the world — and for generations to come.
Nobody would be able to take that away from him.
As Tenning willed Barnaby to shut the hell up, he ran his eyes down the line of numbers — the fatal lightning strikes since 1900, the inches of snowfall in Vermont, the verified sightings of cows sucked into the air by tornadoes — when a garbage truck began its halting clamor up the block.
He thought his fricking skull would crack open.
He wasn’t crazy, either.
He was having a perfectly reasoned response to a horrific assault on the senses. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the squeals, screeches, galvanized shimmies, came through — and they set off Oliver!
The goddamned baby.
How many times had he been interrupted by that baby?
How many times had his thoughts been derailed by that shitty-ass rat dog?
The pressure in Tenning’s chest and head was building. If he didn’t do something, he would explode.
Garry Tenning had had it.
Chapter 50
EVEN WITH QUIVERING FINGERS, Tenning quickly tied the laces of his bald-treaded Adidas, stepped out into the hallway, and locked the apartment door behind him, pocketing his big bunch of keys.
