I expected worse.
I was prepared for a whole mess of blood. I expected to find Holly’s head bashed in-for some reason, that’s how I thought she would be killed-but I was wrong. Holly’s wrist and ankles were bound, and she was gagged. Duct tape. She was sitting on top of the washing machine, not the dryer, and her pose was absurdly proper, significantly less erotic than the laundry room loop that had been playing relentlessly in my brain.
A Walkman hung from the waistband of her skirt, earphones in place on her head.
Gibbs? She sat across the room in an alcove barely large enough for an orange plastic chair that would have been labeled for a buck at a yard sale and would probably have gone unsold at the end of the day. Her legs were crossed, left over right. She was gripping a kitchen knife with a five-inch blade-a good knife, she’d probably brought it from home-in her right hand. A cell phone rested on her lap.
She looked as lovely as she had the first time I met her. But that didn’t matter to me at all this time. Not a lick.
Right.
“Let me go, Sam,” she said. It was as though Carmen and Holly weren’t even in the room.
Gibbs had two handguns pointed at her chest-mine and Carmen’s-and yet she’d managed to make her request sound perfectly mundane, like she and I were out on a date and she was wondering if I’d mind getting her a beer.
“Drop the knife, Gibbs,” I said. I’d like to say I barked the order. Or yelled it. But I didn’t. I merely said it.
“If you don’t let me go, Sam, I’ll kill myself. I will. I’ll plunge this right into my chest.”
Where did my head go at that moment? For some reason I thought about those crazy people who destroyed art treasures in museums. Like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo’sPietà. I thought,Gibbs, no! You can’t!But I also knew-instantly-that my silent protest wasn’t about Gibbs, the person. It was about Gibbs, the lovely art.
Crazy.
“Drop the knife, Gibbs,” I said.
She purred, “Come on, Sam. Hey…”
Carmen joined the discussion. She crowed, “Jesus H. Christ,” took a little skip-step into the fray, and swatted the knife out of Gibbs’s hand. The blade clanked against the wall and tumbled to the floor. “Cut herself? Shit! This princess? She wouldn’t even use the wrong eyeliner on herself.”
I kicked the knife even farther from Gibbs. I was feeling kind of stupid.
“So she gets to live,” Gibbs said.
I assumed she meant Holly but didn’t say anything at first. I thought it might be wise to leave the next move to Carmen.
Carmen immediately started the you’re-under-arrest process with Gibbs, cuffing her and searching her and reciting Miranda to her like a bored schoolgirl spitting out the Gettysburg Address to a class full of kids who didn’t really care.
I began the process of gingerly removing the tape from Holly’s mouth. It wasn’t coming off easily.
Miranda complete, I asked, “Why, Gibbs? Why does she get to live?” Part of me cared about the answer, part of me was trying to cover my embarrassment over the knife thing. All of me knew that whatever Gibbs said in reply would just be noise.
“Because you got here first. That’s the only reason. If I had called you five minutes sooner, you would have rushed back to Colorado to save me. You know you would have, Sam. But you came in the house, you came down here… Timing. It was just a problem with timing.” Her voice trailed away. “She wanted Sterling, you know? They all did. That wasn’t the deal. One time only, that was the deal.”
Suddenly I got it. I faced her. “Were you in the basilica that day, Gibbs? At Notre Dame? Up in the choir loft?”
Carmen stopped what she was doing.
I glanced at Holly. Above the duct tape, her eyes were wide.
Gibbs smiled. She actually smiled. “Of course I was.” She looked right at Holly. “Chanel suit? Purple? You remember me? She wanted him to come back again. She e-mailed himagain. That wasn’t the deal. She knew the deal. She’d agreed to it.”
I got it all. Every bit of it.
“The deal?”
“Yes. The deal.”
That’s what I meant about the noise. My phone rang.
I checked the caller ID. Alan.
“Yeah,” I said.
Alan’s voice was full of rookie-cop wonder. “I’m at my office with Sterling Storey, Sam. You’re not going to believe this: He says he thinks Gibbs has been killing all those women.”
“Just a sec.” I turned to Gibbs. “Guess what? Your husband survived the Ochlockonee. He’s in Boulder, and he just gave you up to your doctor. Is that romantic or what?”
An army of footsteps erupted above my head. The locals had arrived to take over.