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“Go into the bedroom, both of you,” she heard Parrish say. “And don’t do anything stupid, like trying to jump one of us. I can’t tell you how very painful it is to be shot, but I’ll be forced to demonstrate if you don’t cooperate.”
Why was he making them go to the bedroom? She had heard enough to know that she was the one he really wanted, and he seemed to be concerned about the documents she carried.
If Parrish wanted the documents, all he had to do was say so; he was her boss, and she worked on the assignments he gave her. It would break her heart to give up the tantalizing papers, but she couldn’t stop him from taking them. Why hadn’t he just called, and told her to turn them over tomorrow morning? Why had he come to her house with a gun in his hand, and brought two armed thugs with him? None of this made sense.
She started to walk quickly back to the Siebers’ house, but impulse led her around the corner of the house to where she could look into the bedroom window. She waited for the light to come on, waited to hear voices in the room, but nothing happened, and abruptly she realized Parrish had taken them to Bryant’s bedroom, on the other side of the house. Given the configuration of the house when they had divided it, Bryant’s bedroom was at the back of the house with the kitchen. Parrish would have had to take them up the hallway to the front of the house, then through the connecting door into Bryant’s part of the house and back to the bedroom.
As quickly as possible Grace retraced her steps, taking care to remain in the deepest shadows. A water hose was curled like a long, skinny snake around the protruding outside faucet; she skirted it, and also sidestepped a big sifting board one of the men had propped against the house. This was her home; she knew all its idiosyncrasies, the little traps for the unwary. She knew where the squeaks in the floor were, the cracks in the ceiling, the ruts in the yard.
Light was already shining from Bryant’s window. She pressed her back against the wall and sidestepped until she was right beside it. She moved her head around, slowly, trying to move just enough that she could see inside.
One of the men stepped to the window. Grace jerked her head back and stood rigidly still, not even daring to breathe. He jerked the curtains together, shielding the window and darkening the spill of light.
Blood thundered in her ears, and sheer terror made her weak. She still couldn’t breathe; her heart felt as if it were literally in her throat, suffocating her. If the man had seen her she would have been caught, for she couldn’t possibly have moved.
“Sit on the bed,” she heard Parrish say over her pounding heartbeat.
Grace’s lungs were finally working again. She gulped in deep breaths to steady her nerves, then once again shifted position.
The curtain hadn’t quite fallen together. She moved so she could see through the slit, see Ford and Bryant—
Parrish calmly lifted his silenced pistol and shot Ford in the head, then quickly shifted his aim and shot Bryant. Her brother was dead before her husband’s body had toppled to the side.
No. No! She hung there, paralyzed. Somehow her body was gone, vanished; she couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t think. A dark mist swam over her vision and the unbelievable scene receded until it was as if she saw it at the end of a long tunnel. She heard them talking, their voices oddly distorted.
“Shouldn’t you have waited? There’ll be a discrepancy in the times of death.”
“That isn’t a concern.” Parrish’s voice; she knew it. “In a murder-suicide, sometimes the killer waits awhile before killing himself—or herself, in this case. The shock, you understand. Such a pity, her husband and brother conducting a homosexual affair right under her nose. No wonder the poor dear got upset and went a little berserk.”
“What about the friend?”
“Ah, yes. Serena-Sabrina. Bad luck for her; she’ll have an unfortunate accident on the way home. I’ll wait here for Grace, and you two wait in the car, follow Serena-Sabrina.”
Slowly the mist cleared from Grace’s vision. She wished it hadn’t. She wished she had died right there, wished her heart had stopped. Through the gap in the curtains she could see her husband sprawled on his back, his eyes open and unseeing, his dark hair matted with… with—
The sound rose from her chest, an almost silent keening that reverberated in her throat. It was like the distant howl of the wind, dark and soulless. The pain ripped out of her. She tried to hold it back with her teeth, but it boiled out anyway, primitive, wild. Parrish’s head snapped around. For a tenth of a second—no more—she thought that their gazes met, that somehow he could see through that small gap into the night. He said something, sharply, and lunged for the window.
Grace plunged into the night.
Chapter 2
SHE NEEDED MONEY.
Grace stared through the rainy night at the ATM; it was lit like a shrine, inviting her to cross the street and perform its electronic ritual. It was thirty yards away, at most. It would take her only a couple of minutes to reach it, punch in the necessary numbers, and she would have cash in her hand.
She needed to empty out the checking account, and probably a single ATM wouldn’t have enough cash on hand to give her that amount, which meant she would have to find another ATM, then another, and every time she did the odds that she would be spotted would increase—as well as the odds of being mugged.
The ATM cameras would all film her, and the police would know where she had been, and when. A sudden image of Ford blasted into her brain, paralyzing her anew with shattering pain. God, oh God. The inhuman, involuntary keen rose in her throat again, rattled eerily against her clenched teeth. The sound that leaked out made a prowling cat freeze with one paw uplifted, its hair standing out. Then the animal turned and leaped and vanished into the rain-washed darkness, away from the crouched creature who emitted such a ghostly, anguished sound.
Grace rocked back and forth, pushing the pain deep inside, forcing herself to think. Ford had bought her safety with his life, and it would be a betrayal beyond bearing if she wasted his sacrifice by making bad decisions.
A slew of late-night withdrawals, all after the estimated times of death, would cement her appearance of guilt. Kristian would know what time she had left the Siebers’ house, and Ford and Bryant had been killed at roughly that time. They had both been partially undressed, and in Bryant’s bedroom. Parrish had set up the situation with his usual thoroughness; any cop alive
would believe she had walked in on a homosexual encounter between her husband and her brother, and killed them both. Her subsequent disappearance was another point against her.
The men with Parrish had been professional in their manner; they wouldn’t have done anything sloppy like leave fingerprints. No neighbors would have seen strange cars parked at the house, because they had parked elsewhere and walked to the house. There were no witnesses, no evidence to point to anyone except her.
And even if by some miracle she convinced the police she was innocent, she had no proof Parrish had killed them. She had seen him do it, but she couldn’t prove she had. Moreover, to the cops’ way of thinking, he wouldn’t have had a motive, while she obviously had plenty of motive. What could she offer as proof? A batch of papers written in a tangle of ancient languages, which she hadn’t even deciphered yet, and which Parrish could have gotten from her at any time simply by telling her to turn them over to him?
