Takeover (19 page)

For now, she’s sleeping in my bed and I’m on the floor. Maybe I’m too accommodating, but I can’t be sure that she hasn’t had a more stressful day than I have. Okay, maybe the “stress” from her day was due to her decision to commit a felony, but still. My back is kind of sore and the firmness of the floor is helping.

I fall asleep, but it’s one of those alcohol meets exhaustion kinds of sleep where I’m half-aware of every noise from outside but way too out of it to understand what those sounds could possibly mean. I don’t know whether my sleep deepens and I lose a lot of time or whether it actually happens this quickly, but the next thing I know I can hear James yelling downstairs.

I get up as quickly as I can, but I’m still drunk enough that it’s a bit of a process. My mind is swimming with alcohol and my head is pounding, but whatever this is, it can’t be a good thing.

I look to the bed, but Sam’s not in it. James is still yelling, but I don’t understand what he’s saying. I stumble my way out of the bedroom and down the stairs. The living room is dark. James must be in the kitchen. I have no idea where my brother could be.

When I finally make my way to James, I can hardly take a step in the room. The volume of his voice is too much for my hungover brain. “James,” I say, barely above a whisper. “James?”

He finally turns to look at me and he keeps yelling, but my throbbing head is beyond overloaded by the sheer decibels coming out of his mouth.

“You’re going to have to calm down,” I say, my eyes half-open, only partially aware that something must be really wrong for him to be acting this way.

“Calm down?” he screams, and I plug my ears. It doesn’t help very much. “How do you expect me to calm down when—” he says a lot more, but I can’t process it.

“James,” I say again, quietly. “Could you repeat that again, only a lot quieter?”

He finally takes a deep breath and lowers his tone, but from the look in his eyes, his self-control isn’t going to last very long. “How do you expect me to calm down when,” his voice rises with every syllable, “there’s a fucking body on my kitchen floor!”

“What?” I walk closer to him and look where he’s pointing. There’s the body of a man, dressed in black, wearing a ski mask with a knife sticking out of his temple. He had been hidden by the countertop before, but now I’m screaming.

There’s so much blood. I can only imagine how much has been soaked up by the mask and his clothes, but it’s all over the floor, puddled thick and dark. I can’t tell if it’s dry or not, but that’s not really what’s pressing in my mind right now.

“Where’s Sam?” I ask.

“Who the fuck is Sam?” James screams at me. “God, I can’t believe this! I can’t fucking believe this! I can’t—”

It’s not the nicest thing that I’ve ever done, certainly not the most understanding, but if James is going to stand here screaming while I’m trying to figure out just what the hell happened, he’s going to get slapped. My hand hurts, and James’s face is already going red. “You need to calm down,” I say. “Standing here screaming at me isn’t going to do you, me or anyone any good, do you understand me?”

“How the fuck can you be so calm?” he asks. I don’t particularly like his tone, but at least the volume is down.

“Who is he?” I ask.

“How the fuck should I know? I can’t—”

“Where is Andrew?”

“He’s waiting out front for the cops. They should be here any minute.”

“When did you find the body?”

“Just barely!” he says, his voice starting to rise again, but I cock my head a little and he takes another deep breath.

I look over at the clock on the microwave. It’s not quite five. I’ve only been asleep for a couple of hours and there’s a dead guy on my floor. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. He’s crying. My frustration starts to melt away as the reality of the situation sets in. I put my arms around James.

“Did you see anyone else?” I ask. I’m pretty sure I know exactly who did this. To think, I almost told her to stay away from my house.

“No,” James says. “I woke up and came in here to get a glass of water and he was just there.”

“Was he breathing when you got in here?”

“No,” he says, “I don’t know. I haven’t moved since I saw him.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to hide my own fear. If Sam hadn’t escaped from the courthouse today and looked me up, chances are, I’d be dead. How the hell did she know that he was in the house?

James and I hold each other and continue to stare at the lifeless body of the masked man. Whoever this is, he came here to kill me. For a moment, I start to think that it might be Mr. Waite, but he would never do his own dirty work. I’m more convinced than ever that he has something to do with all of this, but the man on the floor has to be someone else.

“James, I need you to grab the handle of the knife.”

“What?”

The front door opens, and I hear a lot of footsteps coming through. I turn to James and I can only hope that he understands what I’m telling him, because I’ve never spoken so quickly in my life. “I’ll explain later, just wipe the handle and grab it with your right hand. I know who did this and if it wasn’t for her, we’d all be dead right now, or at least I would. He’s in our home, he’s wearing a mask, and he was obviously wearing it when he was stabbed, so you did this to protect yourself and this home. You’re not going to get into any trouble for this, it was self-defense. Do you understand me?”

We can’t have more than a few seconds before the officers come into the room, and I can’t imagine that Sam was wearing gloves when she did this. I may not have owed her anything before, but I sure as hell do now.

“James,” I say in a quiet, forceful voice and in a moment, he’s leaning over the pool of blood, wiping the handle down with his shirt sleeve. He just manages to get his fingers on the handle of the knife when the cops come into the room.

“Freeze!” one of them shouts melodramatically, and James stands up straight.

“I was—” James stammers. Come on James, you can do this. He looks at me and back at the officers. “I was checking for a pulse.”

I don’t know if I’d call it relief, but my heart rate does drop by a couple beats per minute.

“What happened here?”

My brother is behind the officers. I didn’t have a chance to ask James what he had told Andrew. James says, “I came in here to get a glass of water.” He looks at me. “I don’t remember,” he says. “I mean, it all happened so fast.”

I look over toward the officers, and I’m not sure why I’m surprised that the same detective who had me in cuffs a few days ago is the one doing all of the talking. “Sir, you need to tell me exactly what happened,” the detective repeats, putting latex gloves on his hands and approaching the body.

“Like I said,” James says, looking back at me, “I came in here for a glass of water and he was here.”
James, please stop looking at me right now.

“What do you mean ‘here’?” the detective asks, reaching two fingers out and feeling the neck of the man on the ground.

“I mean he just—” James breaks into tears again. “He just came out of nowhere. I don’t even remember exactly what happened. All I know is that he was here and the next thing I knew, he was on the ground.”

“Well,” the detective says, “he’s dead.”

“Oh my god,” James says as if he didn’t already know. Actually, I think I understand his reaction because hearing those words has me bending over the sink, vomiting.

I can hear the detective sigh in the background, but there’s not much I can do about anything right now. “Can you guys get your pictures so we can get the mask off this guy?” the detective asks as I continue to refund the contents of my stomach.

I manage to turn the water on, and I straighten up slowly. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“You know something, Pearson?” the detective asks. He points at me. “
You
are bad luck.”

“What do you—”

The sound of the camera clicking is enough to make me feel nauseated again, but I manage to keep myself from a return trip to the sink. “People have a way of ending up dead around you, and I’m going to find out why.”

“Please,” I say, not acting. “Please do.”

After the photographer has gotten his pictures of the scene, the rest of the men make their way to the body. The detective asks James and I to leave the room a few times before the request reaches either of us.

We make our way to the living room and Andrew’s on the phone with Jillian.

“No,” he says. “I don’t know what happened, but the guy was inside the house, wearing a black ski mask.” He listens for a moment. “No, the knife went through the material. Whoever it is, he was wearing it at the time.”

“What’s going on?” James whispers to me.

“I don’t know,” I whisper back.

“You just had me put my own fingerprints on the handle of a knife in some guy’s head, you’ve got to do better than ‘I don’t know,’ Rose.”

I take a second before I answer to let one of the officers walk through the living room on his way outside. “I know who killed him, but I don’t know who
he
is. I don’t know why he was trying to kill me, I don’t know why anyone would try to kill me. The only thing I can figure out is that it has something to do with my boss.”

“McDaniel?” he asks.

“Actually, I think Waite is much more likely.”

“Waite?” James asks and then holds his tongue as that officer comes back through the front door. “Why would he have anything to do with this?”

“All I know is that before he took over, nobody was trying to kill me.”

“Who killed the man?”

“I can’t talk about that right now, but I promise I’ll tell you everything when all of these people are gone.”

“All right,” Andrew says to the receiver on his phone, “I’ll tell her. Love you. Bye.” I look over at my brother and he says, “Jillian says that between what happened with the car and the fact that this guy was inside your home, wearing a ski-mask, you guys are going to be all right. No charge for defending yourself, James.”

“Well that’s good,” I say, disconnected.

“She also says that maybe it would be a good idea to go to a hotel and check in under an assumed name for a few days, at least until the police can figure out what the hell is going on—”

“What’s going on,” the detective says, coming around the corner into the living room, “is that we’ve got someone dead in your house, and I want to know why.”

“So do I,” James and I say in almost perfect unison.

The detective chuckles. He’s carrying something in his hand, it’s a digital camera. “Do you recognize this man?” he says, holding it out toward me, not James. “They’re getting ready to remove the body, and I wanted to get a snapshot of the guy without his mask. It wasn’t particularly easy, given the fact that I didn’t want to remove the knife yet, either.”

I take the camera, but as soon as I look at the screen, I’m vomiting again. Somewhere, off in the distance of what seems like another reality, I hear James saying, “Oh my god.”

“What?” Andrew asks. “Who is it?”

I’m still heaving, so James has to answer for me. “It’s Mark,” he says, taking a deep breath. “It’s your brother.”

###

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