“And still ... this!” He tapped the picture again. “Then,” he added and paused, sifting through his case file until he found another glossy print he pushed in front of me, “this.”
It was another magnified, blurry image extracted from surveillance video. It showed a blond woman with wavy, long hair, wearing sunglasses and dressed in a breezy, sleeveless white dress, knocking on a hotel door. The angle was narrow, but I could still make out the room number, 5003. A diamond ring sparkled on the woman’s left hand. She wore high-heeled, strappy white sandals just like I’d worn yesterday. A wide-brimmed, floppy sun hat conveniently hid her face from thecameras. It was time coded 4:32 p.m., a few minutesafterI had entered the hotel’s parking lot.
The walls started spinning, and I had to grab the edges of the table to keep my balance. That was why Winston had stopped calling and texting me. Not because he’d given up on us. But because he’d been killed. And I was staring at the murderer’s picture.
“That’s not me,” I said, my voice trembling, choked. Realization had hit me like an iron fist, sucking the air out of my lungs. I remembered Claire’s thorough look at me before I’d left her place. How weird that had seemed, how unusual and unexplainable for her to check me out the way she had. But now I understood why. She’d studied what I had on, committing every tiny little detail to memory, and had probably already been thinking what she could wear to pass as me, at least on surveillance video.
“Yeah ... really?” the detective asked, laughing ostentatiously. “You’re wearing that same dress now. The same ring. The same hairdo.”
For a long moment, I was at a loss for words. What could I possibly say for myself and hope that he’d believe? How could I begin to tell him I’d styled my hair like Claire’s on purpose, even before landing in Las Vegas? And the same ring? Had Winston given her one just like mine? The thought was unnerving. But the surveillance photo was grainy, the ring on Claire’s hand nothing but a blur. The rest was in the detective’s imagination.
“I never went upstairs,” I eventually said, as calmly and as convincingly as I could speak. “I drove into the garage, stayed there for about twenty minutes or so, and then went home. Check your surveillance tapes. I never went upstairs.”
“Oh, but you did,” he said, extracting more stills taken from various surveillance videos, showing the woman in the white dress crossing the lobby, taking the elevator, and walking through the long corridors with that hat on and sunglasses on her face.
But my eyes had landed on the next page in the case file. It was the autopsy report. It had the wordPreliminarystamped in red ink across the top of the title page.
Choking on my tears, I asked, “How did he die?”
30
Motive
With a smirk, Detective Stanek pushed the autopsy report in front of me, turning it around so I could read it. Letters and drawings danced in front of my eyes, out of focus. A falling teardrop stained the page right above Winston’s name.
“Massive coronary triggered by an overdose of meth,” Stanek said, tapping his finger against the stained page. “In case you can’t read for yourself.”
I shook my head. “No, this has to be wrong. He wasn’t a drug user. He abhorred drugs.”
“Yes, he did. And you knew that when you spiked his eye drops.”
A cold wave of terror washed over me. “What eye drops?” I asked, my weak voice quivering, while my racing thoughts screamed, although I already knew the answer. TheVisinebottle found in my car. With my fingerprints on it.
A crooked smile landed on the detective’s lips. “When are you going to give up this nonsense? We found the murder weapon in your car, for Pete’s sake.” Visibly frustrated, he pulled out a couple of photos from the bottom of the file and laid them out in front of me. “There! And there!” His fingers stabbed the two photos, one showing a small bottle ofVisinein the pocket of my rental car’s passenger door, theother showing the same bottle, covered in fingerprint dust, enclosed in a sealed evidence pouch. “And guess whose fingerprints are on it?”
Staring at the evidence photos, my stomach twisted, a deep, sinking weight pulling me under. My breath hitched. The walls of the interrogation room seemed to inch closer, the air turning stale, suffocating.
My pulse hammered against my ribs, my hands damp against the cold metal table. I needed to move—to get out. My chair scraped against the floor as I shifted, but there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. The photos stayed in front of me, unmoving, undeniable.
The thought zapped through my mind like lightning. I’d given Claire everything she needed to set me up. Proof that I was seeing Winston, that we were engaged. The place where she could find him after our conversation. Suddenly, her insistence on having me return to Winston’s hotel that afternoon made a lot of sense. A different, terrifying kind of sense.
Panic clawed its way up my throat, dry and constricting, cutting off air. My pulse pounded in my ears, my skin prickling with the desperate urge to move, to get out of this room.
I shot to my feet, the chair scraping against the floor.
Stanek’s fist slammed against the table. “Sit the fuck down!”
My shaky knees gave, and I fell back on the wobbly chair. For a while, I stared at the bottle of eye drops in disbelief, my mouth gaping, my mind spinning in confusion, unable to process the rapid-fire questions I was asking myself.
Yesterday, when I’d been at Claire’s, she’d asked me to put eye drops in her eyes only a minute after she’d seen the pictures of Winston and me together. A minute or two, at the most, perhaps three, including the minute she’d taken to look at the photographic evidence of her husband’s infidelity.
That was how long it had taken Claire to decide to kill him, and to come up with a plan. While I’d been there, waiting, she’d figured out how to get my fingerprints on the murder weapon, and what that murder weapon was going to be. Silent and deadly, like a predator lying inwait under the desert sun, she’d calculated everything in precise detail. And I, like the trusting fool I was, had stepped into every pitfall she’d set in my way.
A sense of hopelessness engulfed me, like I was being trapped at the bottom of a dark abyss. Details of the day before, things I’d thought insignificant at the time, came crashing down on me. Things like how my garage door hadn’t opened when I’d gotten home the other night, forcing me to leave the convertible in the driveway.
So that she could put the bottle ofVisinein without even having to break into the garage.
How the hell did she manage to pull that off when she must’ve been at the hotel, murdering her husband? She must’ve sent someone.
