Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (2 page)

One enterprising reporter turned up a couple of young men who characterized feeding Roofies to Maureen as overkill. Reading between the lines, she got the message that you didn’t have to drug Maureen to get in her pants, didn’t have to get her drunk, didn’t have to swear undying love. All you had to do was take out your dick and wave it at her.

Well, she thought, why not? The girl’s dead, so let’s all tell each other what a whore she was.

But she didn’t spend too much time thinking about that part of the story, because there were other more important elements to consider. The drug rendered Maureen not altogether comatose but unfocused and acquiescent, a willing if not particularly active participant in what followed. One of its effects would have been retrograde amnesia, so Maureen very likely wouldn’t have remembered what happened to her, but she never got the chance to find out. Peter Fuhrmann had his way with her, and during a lull in the proceedings he paid enough attention to his silent partner to realize that she was no longer breathing.

If he’d been the least bit resourceful, she thought, he’d have got her back into her clothes, slung her over his shoulder, and left her under a bush in Van Cortlandt Park. Instead, after an unsuccessful stab at CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he’d picked up the phone and called the police.

Because it was obvious to him what had happened. He’d dosed the poor girl with a powerful drug, and it had stopped her heart and killed her.

“You called 911 right away,” she said. “You didn’t even call your lawyer first.”

“I called a lawyer later on, from the police station. I knew I’d need assistance with the plea bargaining.”

“You confessed.”

“I did it,” he said. “How was I going to say I didn’t? It was completely unintentional, I’d never heard of anybody having a bad reaction to Roofies. Maybe a headache and a hangover the next day, but you’d get that from the alcohol, wouldn’t you?”

“Normally,” she said, “it would just keep a girl from resisting. Or remembering.”

“If I could go back in time,” he said with feeling. “And wipe it out, the way the drug wipes it from a person’s memory. But you never can, can you?”

Because he was quick to confess, because he was prepared to enter a plea, the state didn’t have to knock itself out preparing a case. The post-mortem examination went looking for Flunitrazepam, and that’s what they found. They had no reason to look further, and death was accordingly attributed to cardiac and respiratory failure caused by the drug.

When she read about it, sitting in an Internet café in Ohio, she looked at a photograph of Maureen. She pictured the girl walking home with Peter, pictured her holding a glass of vodka. Pictured her dead.

I did that,
she thought.
I killed you.

Because, if they’d thought to look, they’d have found more than Roofies in Maureen’s system. She couldn’t even remember what she’d used, but she’d emptied the contents of a glassine envelope into a bottle of vodka before leaving Peter’s apartment. She’d hoped it would kill him, but had considered the possibility that someone else might be the first to sample the vodka. A woman, a male friend, even a tippling cleaning woman, raiding the liquor cabinet for a mid-afternoon bracer.

What did it matter, really? She’d liked the idea of leaving behind something that would kill someone, without knowing—or caring, really—who she killed, or when. A couple of times she ran scenarios in her mind, imagining what might happen, and it was exciting enough, but she’d never felt the need to find out what really did happen.

And time passed, and she more or less forgot about it.

She’d been different then. Well, no, that wasn’t it. She’d been the same person, she’d always been the same person, but her mission had been much less focused in those early days. She liked to pick up men and go home with them and have sex with them—though the sex in and of itself was never really the point. And she liked to end those evenings with more money than she started out, because you could almost always walk away with a few hundred dollars, and sometimes you scored big and left with a couple of thousand, and that made life easier and gave you a sense of accomplishment—but the money in and of itself wasn’t really the point, either.

And she liked to kill.

No question, right from the very first time she liked to kill. It really got her motor going. The sex was a whole lot hotter when she knew she was going to kill the guy, and the money was more gratifying when she could think of it as a sort of bounty that was hers for taking her partner off the board. Sometimes she got off on the terror, when they saw it coming, and sometimes she killed them in their sleep and they were dead before they knew it, and either way it worked for her.

But there was no real purpose to it back then. It just sort of
was
.

Consciously, anyhow. Because it seemed to her now that she’d been trying to accomplish something all along, even though she had never spelled it out for herself. And then the day came when she just plain got it: she wanted to so arrange things that there was no man alive who’d been with her, no man who could tell his friends about her, no man left to sit around remembering what he’d done with her.

Which gave her work to do. First she had to remember them, and then she had to find them, and then, finally, she had to do what she should have done in the first place.

She had to kill them.

How?

There was a cab waiting when she left the prison, and the driver took her to a motel about a mile away. The office smelled of curry, so it was no great surprise when the manager turned out to be Indian, but how Sanjit Patel and his wife had wound up playing host to prison visitors in the middle of nowhere was one of life’s great mysteries.

The room was clean, if a little shabby, and the shower was hot and the TV got sixty channels, so it would be no hardship to stay there while she worked out a plan. And that might take a while, because she didn’t know where to start.

She was on the approved visitor list, which meant she was entitled to sit across from him with nothing between them but a thick pane of glass. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t pass anything to him, and couldn’t even have on her person anything that wouldn’t get through a metal detector, and pass the scrutiny of the prison matron. There was no way she could get a weapon in with her, and even if she could, what possible good would it do her?

If she had a gun, and if she were proficient with it, and if she could sneak it in there, and if by some chance the glass wasn’t bulletproof, as she rather suspected it was, then she might conceivably be able to put a bullet in him. But she couldn’t possibly get away with it. They’d have her in custody before he fell off his chair.

So what did that leave?

The trailer was an Airstream, its sculpted silvery exterior badly pitted by the elements. It was small, designed to be towed behind a car, not moored permanently in a trailer park. Inside, thick dark curtains covered the windows. The maroon carpet was stained, and you could smell the toilet.

An unpainted plywood box held a mattress a foot off the floor. The sheets were not visibly soiled, and the stack of towels beside the bed were neatly folded, and apparently clean.

The fuck truck.

“You don’t have to go through with this,” Peter Fuhrmann said.

“But I want to.”

“Really?”

Did she? Well, it was a pretty sordid space for a romantic encounter. And Peter, dressed in his orange jumpsuit and wearing his hangdog expression, didn’t exactly set her pulse racing. But she was here, wasn’t she? And he was one of only three names left on her list, and, well—

“Right off the bat,” she said, “I can think of one thing that’s definitely worse than having sex here.”

“And what would that be?”

“Being here,” she said, “and
not
having sex.”

That at least got a smile from him. “It’s no place for state dinners,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”

“Or intimate conversations.”

“Or curling up with a good book.”

“Or even a bad one. Peter? Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“When was the last time you were—”

“With someone?” He avoided her eyes. “I haven’t been with anyone since . . .”

He couldn’t say the name, so she said it for him. “Since Maureen.”

“Yes.”

“You never—”

“No.” He was silent for a moment. “I couldn’t even think about it. It’s as if that part of my life ended when—”

“When she died.”

“Yes.”

“And in prison—”

“People find outlets,” he said. “Men hook up with each other. That’s of no interest to me. And there are screws who can smuggle a woman in for the right price. Screws, that’s what they call the guards. What
we
call the guards, I should say.”

“But that’s of no interest to you either, is it?”

“No. I don’t even—”

“Don’t what?”

“Masturbate.”

“That’s what I thought you were going to say. You don’t?”

“No.”

“And when the urge comes—”

“It doesn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Audrey, the last time I had sex with a woman, she died.”

“It wasn’t the sex that killed her.”

“No, it was the drug I gave her.”

No, sweetie, it was the poison I gave her.

“And here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever said to another human being. See, there’s no way to know exactly when she died. Was she already dead while I was—”

“Still fucking her.”

He winced at the word, then nodded. “I’ll never be able to know, and I don’t even want to know, but I can’t get the notion out of my mind. And I can’t bear to think about it.”

Actually, she thought, the whole idea was pretty hot. But that wasn’t something she was prepared to share with Peter.

Instead she asked him why he’d agreed to visit the trailer with her.

“Because I didn’t know how to say no,” he said. “Isn’t that a hell of a reason? And I thought maybe, oh—”

“Maybe you’d wind up wanting to.”

“I guess.”

“But you don’t.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t—”

“Be able to do anything? Is that why you gave girls Roofies? A sort of Viagra by proxy? The girl takes it and you get a hardon?”