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kissed the side of her neck. “But you wouldn’t want to go where I’ve got to go now.”
He hugged her tighter, then his arms relaxed and finally dropped to his sides. He left her, entered the darkened room, and closed the door behind him.
Gif had brought in Chinese. They divided the cartons and sat around the dining table to eat.
The cookbooks, Drex noted, had been ripped apart. Pages from them formed a snowbank in a corner of the room. Nodding toward it, Drex said, “Nothing?”
“Not a single notation,” Gif replied. “And we went through each book page by page. Nothing glued into the backings. We turned up nada.”
“Some of the recipes look good, though,” Mike said. “I saved those.”
“You can add that to the paper pile.” Drex pointed his fork at the phony manuscript he’d set on the bar when he’d come in. It had been included in his belongings that Mike and Gif had brought from the garage apartment. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”
“Did you actually write all that?” Talia asked.
“I had it copied from a paperback book.”
“Elaine told Jasper it wasn’t very good.”
“Pam will be crushed,” Mike said as he polished off an egg roll.
Talia looked at Drex. “Pam?”
Drex shot Mike a warning look. “A woman at the office typed it for me. I never even read it, only messed up the pages to make them look authentic.”
“You had me fooled,” Talia said. “That day I came over to the apartment and asked…”
Becoming aware that Mike and Gif were listening with rabid interest, Drex said, “That was the point. To fool you.”
After that, conversation lagged, and they focused on eating. When they were finished, they made quick work of cleaning up then chose their seats in the living area. Mike claimed the largest chair, Gif straddled one of the dining chairs, Talia curled up into a corner of the sofa. Drex perched on the opposite arm of it.
He had decided how he was going to call the meeting to order, despite how tough it would be on Talia. He had to be straightforward, perhaps even harsh, because it was essential to erase any lingering doubts in his partners’ minds about her culpability.
“Talia?”
She took a breath and let it out slowly. “This is the ‘I want to hear it all later,’ isn’t it?”
“Yes. Speaking for all three of us, we need it explained how you couldn’t have known that you were married to a psychopath.”
It was the opening Mike had been waiting for. “When I saw you in that picture taken at Marian Harris’s party, that did it for me.”
“And you haven’t changed your mind,” she said.
“Say you didn’t meet your husband that night—”
“I didn’t.”
“—and that everything else you’ve told us is true, didn’t he ever strike you as not quite right in the head?”
“I’d like to hear that myself,” Gif said, quieter and less judgmental than Mike.
“Yes, I sensed something wasn’t quite right,” she said. “But I couldn’t isolate what it was. You three think in terms of criminology and psychopaths every day. That’s outside my realm. So, no,” she said, addressing Mike, “it didn’t pop into my mind one day that my husband was a serial killer.”
“Okay,” Drex said. “Take a breath. This isn’t an inquisition. We’re trying to analyze and understand him more than we are you. What first sparked your feeling that something was off?”
“It didn’t spark. It came on gradually. Initially, I talked myself into believing that it was the difference in our ages. Three decades’ difference.”
“But you married him anyway,” Drex said.
