Mania (24 page)

Nick took the call. “Sara, thank God it’s you,” he said into the phone, practically shouting. “It’s Sam. He’s been stabbed. Send an ambulance now, please. We’re on the waterfront, just beneath Pike Place Market. Hurry, please. Hurry!”

Nick was sitting in the same place ten minutes later, bent over Sam’s body, watching his brother bleed to death, when the scrape of footsteps on the gravelly pavement echoed across the parking lot. Beneath his hands, Sam was gasping for air, whimpering and crying as he died. Behind him, Nick became aware of the waves splashing against the waterfront and the occasional sound of boats and voices over the bay.

Nick looked up at the indistinct figure emerging from the fog and shadows encircling the parking lot.

Nick opened his eyes.

The darkness resolved itself improbably into one of the lavish bathrooms in the Hamlins’ Bellevue estate. The marble floor was unforgivingly hard underneath him, and the porcelain edge of the toilet was digging into his shoulder.
What was he doing there?
His vision blurred, and the bathroom disintegrated into millions of tiny black-and-white dots.

Nick was sitting in the familiar, beaten-up front seat of his old Toyota. He opened his eyes wider, trying to figure out where he was, trying to make sense of the buildings and people surrounding the car. His eyes were drawn to the red glow of the traffic light across the intersection. Then the light became a smear as Nick’s eyes focused instead on the white-faced skyscraper looming behind it: the Four Seasons Hotel. Nick leaned forward in his seat, his hands wrapped around the thin plastic steering wheel. He was trying to get a good view of Sara through the misty windshield as she stepped from her Mercedes. A tall doorman from the hotel, dressed in a long black coat and top hat, stepped smartly around her car and opened her door, then helped her to her feet. “Good morning, Ms. Hamlin,” the doorman said. “Welcome back to the Four Seasons Hotel.”

As the traffic moved, Nick’s eyes were drawn to the unexpected figure of a man approaching Sara from where he had been hidden, beneath the canopy sheltering the hotel’s carriageway. The doorman was leading Sara around her imposing car, and he blocked Nick’s view just as the man stepped from the shadows to greet Sara. Nick watched as Sara’s hand fell intimately to the man’s waist. The man tried to find her lips with his own, but Sara pulled away from him, glancing back over her shoulder. She took his hand instead, and playfully pulled him with her toward the hotel entrance, eagerly anticipating the sex that would follow. Nick hadn’t once seen the man’s face. Still, Nick would have recognized the man anywhere. He knew this man better than he knew anyone else on the face of the planet.

Sara had snuck out of the apartment that morning not just to be with another man, she had slipped out to make love to Sam.

The light was switched on inside the huge bathroom at the Hamlins’ Bellevue estate, blazing into Nick’s retinas with the intensity of sunlight. He squinted, trying to decipher the shapes around him. The room was more than twenty feet wide, luxuriously appointed with its own fireplace. A series of recessed canister lights above the long mirror at the double sink shone down onto the floor. Nick couldn’t move his arms to shield his eyes. Sweat broke out on his forehead. A rope bound his arms and his legs, pinning them together. He tried to struggle, straining against his bonds. Finally, realizing that he couldn’t free himself, he gave up.

When he laid his head back on the hard floor, he became aware of the voices. Clenching his teeth, he raised his head off the floor again and squinted in the direction of the conversation.

Nick was standing in the kitchen in the house on San Juan Island, hypnotized by the moonlight dancing on the curtain above the open drawer. “Take that one,” Sara said to him. She was standing beside him, pointing toward one of the knives in the drawer. Nick turned to face her, surprised to see her next to him. “That one, darling,” she said again. “The largest carving knife in the drawer to the left of the sink. The carving knife with the Japanese writing on the blade.” He lifted a couple of utensils from the drawer, then grasped the knife and held it in front of his face, twisting it from side to side in the moonlight. “Follow me, Nick,” Sara said. “We have an important job to do.”

Nick’s hand rested on a heavy brass doorknob. He was aware of its weight as he turned it. “Go on,” Sara said. “Open the door.” The catch unlatched with a satisfying click, and Nick pushed the door open. He paused to pass the carving knife back to his right hand, then took a step inside the large room. When Hamlin moved in the bed, Nick’s eyes tracked the sound. Sara laid a hand on Nick’s shoulder to reassure him. The pressure of her fingers sent shivers of pleasure radiating through his body. Sara had told him that she loved him. Jason Hamlin was threatening her. He had raped her, and now Sara was asking Nick to protect her. Nick shifted the heavy, balanced knife from one hand to the other. He would do whatever Sara asked him to. He took a step closer to the bed. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet.

When the moon peeked from behind the clouds, the shadows directly in front of Nick shifted, and Jason Hamlin’s silhouette became visible against the wall behind his large, antique bed. Hamlin cleared his throat. “Sara?” he said in confusion, peering vaguely into the moonlit darkness. “Jillian?”

Nick felt Sara’s hand on his shoulder, urging him forward. Hamlin’s eyes opened wide in shock. They seemed to be focused on something specific. At first Nick thought it was the knife in his hand. Hamlin was looking past him, though. Nick followed the older man’s eyes. The blade of a second knife, identical to the one in his hand, glinted in the moonlight. Jillian emerged from the shadows.

“You hold on to Nick,” Jillian ordered Sara. “Don’t let him get in the way.” She reached the bedside before her husband was able to react. Sara clamped her arms around Nick, wrenching him to the ground. Nick heard Jillian’s knife plunge into Hamlin’s chest. The man didn’t make a sound. He fell back onto the bed in a torrent of blood. Nick watched from the floor as Jillian savagely ripped her husband’s throat from ear to ear.

“Bring Nick here,” Jillian instructed her daughter. “We need to get his hands wet with this blood.”

Lying with his head on the marble floor, Nick tried to focus on the reflections in the large mirror above the sink. Sara and her mother were standing on the far side of the bathroom.

“We’ve got to be careful,” Jillian was telling her daughter, “to make sure that we don’t bruise his wrists and ankles with that rope. This has to look like a suicide.”

“We’ll do it now while he’s still unconscious,” Sara said. “No one is going to question this, Mom. The whole police department knows he’s insane.”

Nick strained to raise his head off the floor, and bit by bit he brought the two women into focus. “You poisoned me,” he said. His lips were so chapped that they split as he spoke, and the rancid flavor of his own blood filled his mouth.

The bathroom fell silent. Sara and her mother exchanged a meaningful glance. Then Sara turned to her lover, and their eyes met across the huge bathroom in the house she had inherited upon her stepfather’s death.

Slowly, a lurid smile spread across her face.

Nick became aware of his cell phone in the back pocket of his jeans. His mind was hazy, working laboriously. His hands were roped tightly together, but, struggling hard, he could move them side to side. He fought to lift his head, working to bring the huge bathroom back into focus. He must have blacked out again.

Sara had left the room, and Jillian was washing her hands at the sink, a look of concentration on her face. After toweling dry, she slipped on a pair of latex gloves, then crossed to the far end of the bathroom and dimmed the lights. Nick twisted to one side, straining to reach his phone. The rope cut sharply into his wrists, and the hard, cold floor dug into his hip. He gritted his teeth and found the edge of his back pocket with his fingers, then clamped down on his abs. At last, the phone was in his hand.

Holding it at his side to keep the light of its LCD display hidden, Nick flipped the phone open. Nick had programmed Stolie’s number into the phone’s memory some time back, and he brought the number up with the press of a few digits. His thumb was on the send button when Sara stepped back into the bathroom, carrying a knife from the kitchen. He was aware of the echo of her shoes on the marble floor before he saw her. He pressed the button, then kept his fingers over the phone’s earpiece, muffling its sound. As Sara addressed her mother, he could hear Stolie’s voice faintly on the other end of the line, and his heart leapt with relief. After a few seconds, though, Nick realized that the detective hadn’t picked up the phone after all. The call had gone straight to the policeman’s voice mail. A jolt of panic coursed through Nick’s body as he remembered that Stolie had told him earlier that day that he was heading back up to San Juan Island.

He didn’t have much time. Sara and her mother were conferring across the bathroom, preparing to kill him in cold blood, just as they had killed Jason Hamlin. His mind was reeling. His wrists were aching beneath the knotted ropes. He had to act now.

Fumbling the small phone in his hands, he used his thumb to press 9–1-1 into the keypad. His fingers were tingling. The nylon rope was beginning to tear his skin. The phone was slipping from his hand. He made one last effort to hold onto it, but it slid free, and he let it go. It dropped down next to him noiselessly, tangled in his T-shirt, just out of his reach. Nick lay back hopelessly on the floor. He didn’t know whether he had hit the send button. The last thing he was aware of as he lost consciousness was the beat of Sara’s footsteps approaching him, echoing against the tiled walls of the bathroom like footsteps in a crypt.

Sara was leaning over him, the knife in her left hand, her right hand gloved in latex, clasping his wrist. She had lifted his arms and was examining the damage Nick had caused himself with the nylon rope. His skin was broken, and Sara was wondering whether a forensic investigation would be able to reveal that he had been tied up. Halogen light reflected off the thin silver chain around Sara’s neck, stinging Nick’s eyes. “How are you doing, darling?” she asked when she realized that he was watching her.

“You poisoned me, Sara,” he said.

“I know I did.”

“What was in it? What did you put in my champagne?”

“What do you think, Nick? I didn’t want to add a new drug to the cocktail in your system. It wouldn’t do for the police to become suspicious.”

“And now you’re going to kill me.”

“Shhh.” She held an index finger dramatically to her lips. Despite himself, Nick could not believe how beautiful she was. “Soon enough, my darling,” she said. “Very soon.”

“Why?”

Sara laughed. She looked around the palatial bathroom. “You have to ask me why, Nick?”

“Why
me?
”

“Because you loved me,” she responded. “Because you’re a fool. And because you had a brother jealous enough to kill you himself. Sam was the one who suggested I pick you up at the coffee shop. Have you figured that out yet? You and I didn’t meet by accident. This whole thing was Sam’s idea. And he was right, Nick. You made the perfect sacrifice.”

“You killed Jason Hamlin,” Nick said, trying not to slur his words. “You killed your own stepfather. And now you’re going to make it look like I committed suicide. That’s why you bailed me out. Just to kill me. You knew I’d begin remembering.”

Sara caressed her fingers through his hair as she might a sick child’s. “Now, you go on back to sleep, Nick,” she said. She gave his forehead a light kiss, then stood up, putting the knife down on a marble counter. “It will all be over soon.”

When she turned to her mother, Nick once again felt himself lose consciousness. The drugs were heavy in his blood, and he couldn’t keep his mind focused. He was reeling backward, spiraling into a bottomless black void.

The sound of heavy masculine footsteps revived him, dragging Nick from his daze. It could have been moments later, or hours. Nick’s mouth tasted bitter, and he realized that he had vomited. He opened his eyes as the lights flared onto their brightest setting. Impossibly, Stolie strode into the room in a blaze of fiery whiteness. As though he were surrounded by a white-hot halo, Nick thought, flying in on Icarus’s melting wings.

Nick felt a wave of relief rise in his chest. His 911 call had gone through. The precinct had gotten the call and made sense of the conversation he had been having with Sara. They had tracked Stolie down, and, unbelievably, he had made it here to the house and forced an entry just in time.

Nick struggled to raise his head off the floor. “Stolie,” he managed to say. His voice cracked. He was barely able to speak above a hoarse whisper. But it didn’t matter now. The detective was here, and he would rescue him and arrest Sara and her mother.

When Stolie stopped to speak to Sara and Jillian, Nick was overcome with alarm. The detective hadn’t drawn his gun. They would trick him. They would try to convince the policeman that he was delusional, and then the moment the detective turned his back on them, they would stab him. Sara was so beautiful, Jillian so refined. How could anyone believe them capable of such a brutal conspiracy? Who wouldn’t believe them? But then Nick realized how foolish he was being. Stolie had seen him lying on the floor, his hands and legs bound with nylon cord. There would be no way for Sara and Jillian to explain this away.

Their voices seemed to reach Nick from a distance. Desperately clinging to his precarious consciousness, Nick tried to make sense of what they were saying.

How long has he been here like this?

Two hours.

The rope cut his wrists. They’re bleeding, and bruised, I think.

I’ll take a look. In the meantime, why don’t you start filling the bathtub?

Nick twisted around. What was happening? Why was Stolie asking them to fill the bath? Had they somehow convinced him that they didn’t intend Nick any harm after all? Nick struggled to lift his head. “You don’t understand,” he managed to say. “They’ve been planning this for years.” He was desperate to make himself understood. “Sara seduced Jason Hamlin. That’s why Hamlin married Jillian, he wanted Sara. They planned this from the start. To get his money.”

From across the room Nick saw smiles appear on Sara’s and Jillian’s faces, and the look of disgust on the detective’s. When Stolie crossed the floor, the cadence of his footsteps catapulted Nick abruptly back to the night that Sam was killed.

Nick was hunched over Sam’s body, watching his brother bleed to death, holding him as still as he could. Minutes had passed since he had spoken to Sara on Sam’s phone, and Sam was fading. The gravelly scrape of footsteps echoed hollowly across the parking lot, and Nick looked up into the shadows.

When Nick saw the uniformed cop emerge from the mist, a wave of profound relief cascaded over him. Sara had called the police, and they had made it in time. The officer’s radio was buzzing, and he reached down and switched it off as he approached. His face was blank, emotionless. Even as confused as he was, Nick understood that something was very wrong. The officer wasn’t reacting with the urgency that the situation demanded. And now that he looked, the officer was familiar to him, and he didn’t belong in this uniform.

“Please,” Nick said. “Can you do something? It’s my brother. He’s been stabbed. We need to do something. We need to get him to a hospital.”

Beneath him, Sam’s head was shaking, jerking spasmodically in his grip. Nick clamped his hands ever more tightly around his brother’s face. Trying desperately to keep his brother alive.

The officer knelt down in front of Nick. “You’re pretty messed up,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

The officer looked at him, then turned his attention toward Sam. “It looks like the knife missed his heart,” he said. “Otherwise your brother would have been dead long ago.” He noticed the knife trapped underneath Nick’s knee and reached to pick it up. He held it in the light for a few seconds, examining its blade. Then Nick watched as Stolie gripped the knife and placed the point directly above his brother’s heart and shoved it into his chest. The rip of the blade slicing through flesh screamed in his ears, and, instinctively, as life escaped from his brother, Nick let go of Sam’s head and grabbed the knife.

“You were in on it from the beginning,” Nick said.

Stolie was kneeling over him, holding Nick’s hands in the air by the excruciatingly tight nylon cord. He shifted his weight at the sound of Nick’s voice. A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth, but his eyes remained hard and emotionless.

“How much have they paid you?” Nick asked him. “How much does it cost to buy a homicide detective?”

Stolie placed a hand over Nick’s mouth and squeezed. His grip got tighter and tighter, until Nick couldn’t breathe.

Sara was standing beside them, opening the taps into the tub. “You’ll kill him,” she said.

The detective glanced at her. “Isn’t that the point?”

“We don’t want to suffocate him.” Nick could hear Jillian’s voice, but he couldn’t see her. “Let him go, Mr. Stolie. We’ll do it the way we planned.”

Nick felt Stolie’s grip tighten on his jaw. Over the length of his arm, the man’s eyes bored holes into Nick’s. Then he let go. He remained kneeling over him, watching Nick gasp for air.

“There,” Sara said. “The tub’s filling up.”

“Let’s get it over with,” Jillian said. “After this, we have a lot of cleaning up to do.”

Stolie leaned forward and scooped Nick into his arms. Nick felt himself being hoisted into the air. The sudden movement dislodged his phone from the fold in his T-shirt, and it clattered on the floor. “What the hell is that?” Stolie said as he set Nick down into the cold water.

Sara snatched the cell phone from the floor. “It’s on,” she said.

Letting go of Nick, Stolie grabbed the phone from her. He examined it for a second, then switched it off. He held it up at Sara and Jillian threateningly. “He called 911.”

The color faded from Sara’s cheeks.

“It was connected,” Stolie said. He tossed the phone onto the counter. “Give me the goddamned knife. Let’s get this done.”

“It’s right there.” Sara pointed at the carving knife she had brought from the kitchen, lying on the counter.

Stolie slid the blade between Nick’s wrists, severing the nylon cord. Then he grabbed Nick’s left hand and turned it palm up. Nick tried to pull his arm away, but he was too weak to struggle. Stolie had only to tighten his grip. He placed the point of the blade down onto Nick’s bared wrist, then, looking blankly into Nick’s eyes, plunged the sharp steel savagely through his skin.

When Stolie let go of Nick’s arm, it fell loosely into the bathtub beside him. Nick watched the blood pump from his body into the water as if it didn’t belong to him. It spread quickly, like some kind of an infection, turning rusty brown against the white porcelain sides of the huge sunken tub. Sara stood next to Stolie, watching Nick die, a strange look of fascination in her eyes. Stolie lifted Nick’s other arm, gripping it roughly in his strong hands, ready again to puncture his veins with the bloody blade of the knife.

The last thing that Nick was aware of as his blood pressure dropped, before a profound coldness overcame him and he lost consciousness, was the silver chain around Sara’s neck. Then the shock that branded her beautiful eyes.

Nick didn’t hear Lieutenant Dombrowski as he stormed the room. He didn’t hear the door slam back against the tiled wall. Nick’s heart was barely beating. He was dying, and he didn’t hear the blast of the gunshot from Dombrowski’s service revolver. He didn’t see the look of agony on Stolie’s face when the first lead bullet tore a hole in his chest.

The second bullet left a circle of blood on Stolie’s forehead, before exploding the back of his cranium and plastering it in bits and pieces against the bathroom wall.