I DISAPPOINTED HER. SHE WANTED A REACTION AND I SIMPLY didn’t give her one. Not, I must admit, because I was too drained and dispassionate and dull to be surprised, but because I very simply did not believe her. It was too obvious a line.
“You really are immune, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“My mistake, then. I should have told you in bed. That was my Sunday punch; I was saving it from the minute you started asking, and I thought I’d hold it right until the end, but-”
“Earlier,” I said, I might have believed it.”
She took a step back, placed her hands on her hips, and flashed me an astonished smile. “Oh, beautiful,” she said. “You don’t believe it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then maybe you’re not immune after all.”
“You’re wasting your time, Linda.”
“Am I? Okay, killer, let me cite chapter and verse. Easter time, the same year you killed the girl, Gwen told you she was going with me to see Uncle Henry, who was supposed to be dying. He wasn’t. The same weekend your friend MacEwan had a convention in St. Louis. He didn’t You can even check all of this out you silly bastard. About a week after their weekend Gwen didn’t come home one night She said she was with me; I was drunk and trying to kill myself. You offered to come over and she wouldn’t let you. MacEwan had a story for Kay that night, too. Then a week after that-”
She went on, and she documented everything quite perfectly, and after a while I stopped listening. I felt strangely numb. I wanted to go away. I wanted to be alone someplace dark and quiet and warm.
“Still think you’re immune, killer?”
I looked at her. “Get dressed,” I said “You look lousy naked.”
“I asked you a question.”
I turned from her, walked toward the door.
“Do you think he framed you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just can’t admit that you killed those girls yourself, can you?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t say anything. I opened the door, I walked outside into fresher air, I closed the door after me. And walked down the path to the sidewalk with the sound of her laughter ringing metallically in my ears.
I must have walked around blindly. I thought I was taking the right route back to the train station, but evidently I made a wrong turn somewhere and wound up lost. By the time I realized this my sense of direction was completely out of whack, and I ultimately circled around half the city and came up behind the railroad terminal from the far side.
Which was just as well.
Because I had made one mistake. I had never thought to rip the bedroom telephone out of the wall, or to incapacitate Linda, and she had decided to use the knife one final time. There were police cars all over the place.