The 8th Confession (17 page)

I sipped from the frosty glass of chardonnay, kicked off my shoes, and sat on the
other
side of the same oversize couch. The tension left my body as the wine slid down my throat, cold and dry and good.

"See, what I'm wondering is, how could this be over?"

Conklin nodded, encouraging me to go on.

"A man is
dead.
There's going to be fallout that Tracchio and Jacobi just don't want to see. Wallis is going to have a family somewhere. There are going to be questions, and we both know, Rich, that Wallis didn't do it. Here's what I think happened: we just contributed to the death of a
red herring.
"

Conklin laughed, said, "You paint a wonderful word picture."

I told him, "And you've got a great laugh, Rich. I love to hear you laugh."

He held my eyes until I blinked first.

The only clock in the room was on the DVR, and I was too far from it to read the flashing digits, but I knew that it was late. Had to be somewhere around two in the morning, and I was feeling keyed up, starting to get some ideas about seeing the rest of Rich's apartment. And maybe the rest of Rich.

My mind and body were overheating, and I don't think Rich meant to cool me down when he went to the kitchen to retrieve the chilled bottle. While he was gone, I undid a shirt button.

And then another.

In the process, I adjusted my position on the couch, felt something hard and sharp down between the cushions. I wrapped my fingers around the object, pulled it out, and saw a hair clip, a rhinestone barrette between my fingers.

The shock of that two-inch sparkler chilled me to the core. Cindy's barrette could have found its way to this couch only if Rich and Cindy had been grappling on it.

I placed the barrette on the coffee table, looked up as Rich returned with the bottle. He saw the barrette, saw the look in my eyes. Opened his mouth to say something—but nothing came out.

I averted my eyes, made sure he wouldn't see my pain.

I muttered that it was late and thanks for the wine. That I'd see him in the morning.

I left with my shoes half tied and my heart half broken. I found my car on the street where I'd left it, and I talked to myself as I drove home.

"What are you, jealous?" I shouted. "Because being jealous is stupid! Attention, brain cells: Rich plus Lindsay? That is really, really stupid!"

B
Y THE TIME Pet Girl arrived at Molly Caldwell-Davis's Twin Peaks house with its astounding city view, the party had been going on for hours. Pet Girl pressed the doorbell, banged the knocker until "Tyco" opened the door and the postdisco camp of the Scissor Sisters boomed out into the night.

Tyco was wearing his party clothes: a feather boa around his slender shoulders, nipple rings, and a black satin thong. He handed Pet Girl a flute of champagne, kissed her on the lips, said, "Hi, sexy," in a jokey way, so that Pet Girl laughed instead of saying thank you.

Pet Girl pushed past Tyco and entered the main room with its dizzying decor: tables and sofas in stepped-Alice-in-Wonderland heights, black-painted walls, leopard-print carpeting, bodies entwined on the floor pillows, the whole place feeling more like a bordello than the home of a girl who worked in a tea shop and had an eight-digit trust fund.

Pet Girl found the tanned and yoga-toned Molly on a low-slung sofa, crouched over a mirrored table, doing lines through a silver straw. Slouched beside her, swaying two beats behind the music, was the legendary fifty-year-old software billionaire Brian Caine.

"Look. Who's. Here," Caine said, giving Pet Girl a look so nakedly sleazy, she wanted to poke out his eyes.

"Molly," Pet Girl said, holding out a sixty-eight-dollar bottle of Moët & Chandon, "this is chilled."

"Just put it anywhere," Molly said, turning away from Pet Girl as Tyco brought over a stack of Polaroids. She shrieked with delight as she pawed through the sex snaps her houseboy had taken of guests frolicking in her bedroom.

As suddenly as Molly's attention had been pulled away from Pet Girl, it boomeranged back.

"Don't you
smell
that?" Molly asked her. "Something's burning. Why are you just
standing
there?"

Pet Girl blunted her expression.

She went to the kitchen, removed the pan of bite-size mushroom quiche from the oven, dumped a tray of Kobe beef on toast—worth three hundred dollars a pound—into the dog's bowl. Then she stomped back into the party.

She called Molly's name, finally catching her unfocused stare beneath her blank, Botoxed forehead.

Pet Girl said, "I fed Mischa. Are you going to remember to walk him?"

"Tyco will do it."

"All right then. Au revoir, babycakes."

"But you just got here." Brian Caine pouted. The front of his black silk pajamas had fallen open, revealing his disgusting, hairy man-boobs. "Stay," he implored Pet Girl. "I want to get to know you better."

"Yeah, right after I figure out how to block my gag reflex," Pet Girl said. She turned on the gold flats she'd bought for this occasion and made her way through the oblivious throng. She stopped to retrieve the bottle of champagne she'd brought, then quickly walked out the door.

I
T WAS ALMOST midnight when Pet Girl got out of the cab and walked four blocks under the stars, the warm, moist air blowing off the ocean as she approached the run-down apartments at the farthest end of the Presidio.

She opened her front door, hung her backpack on a peg in the hallway, and went to the kitchen. There, she used a key to unlock the small pocket door, sliding it into its slot in the wall. Then she entered the long, narrow room that had once been a pantry and was now her private world.

Pet Girl hit the switch, throwing light on the half dozen aquariums stacked on restaurant racks lining the back wall. She sensed her beauties uncoiling their sleek bodies even before she saw them slithering silently across the bark-and-leaf litter—alert, hungry, eager to feed.

Pet Girl opened a cabinet and removed her tools: the tongs with the pistol grip, her steel-toed boots, and the welder's gloves, which were made of deerskin, lined with Kevlar, and thick but flexible, with elbow-length cuffs.

When she was dressed, she stepped over to Vasuki's cage, admired the snake's strong, muscular body, the intelligence in her eyes, feeling an almost telepathic communication with her favorite krait.

She shifted the heavy lid capping Vasuki's cage and captured the snake with her tongs, saying, "You can feed when we get back home, baby."

She dropped Vasuki carefully into a pillowcase, put the whole into a pet carrier, and snapped the locks closed.

Then she removed one of the baby garter snakes from a breeder tank and dropped it into Vasuki's cage so that her favorite pet's reward would be waiting for her when they returned.

Taking a last look around to make sure that all was well, Pet Girl exited her snake farm and locked the door.

She reached into her blouse and pulled out the antique locket she wore on a solid-gold chain. It had been a gift from her father, and his picture was inside.

Pet Girl raised the locket to her lips, kissed it, said, "Love you, Daddy," then turned out the lights.

T
HE SCENE IN Molly's place had melted down since Pet Girl had been there two hours ago. Dozens of candles guttered in their holders, food trays were empty, and the party guests who'd passed out on the floor were snoring and twitching but were definitely
out.

There was a sound coming from the kitchen, metal scraping the floor. Pet Girl froze, ducked behind a sofa, prepared to pretend that she'd been here all along. But when a body slammed her in the dark, she almost screamed.

"Mischa! Shhh." She stroked the springer's silky head, willing her heart rate to slow.

"Did Tyco take you for a walk?" she whispered, unclipping the dog's leash from his collar. Mischa wagged his tail, squatted, and piddled on the carpet, then ducked his head, expecting a reprimand—but he didn't get one.

Pet Girl told the dog to stay, then quickly ascended the staircase that wound dramatically up to the second floor. Molly's bedroom was at the end of the hall, no light showing under the closed door.

The brass knob turned in Pet Girl's hand.

What if someone wakes up?

What then?

She entered the room and closed the door behind her, stood silently in the shadows, her pulse throbbing in her ears, her senses sharpened by the danger—the incomparable thrill of it.

The bed was directly in front of her, placed between two windows, crowded edge-to-edge with a tangle of naked bodies. A mottled sheet, some kind of animal print, was twisted almost like a rope, loosely tying the bodies together.

Pet Girl tried to determine which body parts belonged to which person, and when she felt ready, she tugged on her gloves and lifted Vasuki out of the carrier.

The snake, alert to the new environment, tensed in Pet Girl's hands, and Pet Girl felt Vasuki's pure lethal power. Like all kraits, Vasuki was nocturnal, aggressive at night. And she hadn't eaten in three days.

Vasuki's head swayed as Pet Girl held her over the bed. She hissed—and her steel cable of a body suddenly twisted in her owner's hands. It took only that one part of a second for the snake to slip from Pet Girl's grasp, drop to the sheets, and slide between the folds of the bedding.

She was instantly camouflaged. Completely invisible.

Pet Girl gasped as if she were in actual pain.

Vasuki was gone. Her plan had spiraled out of control.

For one crazy moment, Pet Girl imagined turning on the lights to look for Vasuki and making up a story if someone woke up—but Molly wouldn't buy anything she said.

It just wouldn't play.

Disgusted with herself, horrified at what would happen to Vasuki if she was found, Pet Girl took a last futile look over the moonlight-washed bed. Nothing moved.

She packed up the pet carrier and left Molly's bedroom, closing the door again so that Mischa, at least, would be spared.

Outside the house, beginning the long walk down Twin Peaks Boulevard, Pet Girl assured herself that everything would be okay. As awful as it was to lose Vasuki, there was no ID on that snake.

No one could ever tie Vasuki to
her.

M
OLLY CALDWELL-DAVIS looked at me as though she were trying to break through a profound case of amnesia when Conklin and I interviewed her in her breakfast room. Her eyes were red, and she croaked out microsentences between long blank moments as she strained to remember the night before.

Conklin said, "Molly, take it slow. Just start at the beginning and tell us about the party last night, okay?"

"I want. My lawyer."

Footsteps thumped overhead.

EMS had come and gone, but Molly's bedroom swarmed with CSIs. Also, Claire and two of her assistants waited upstairs in the hallway for CSU to leave so that they could do their jobs.

Claire's voice floated down over the banister. "Lindsay, can you come up? You've got to see this."

"Do you
need
a lawyer, Molly?" Conklin was asking. "Because you're not a suspect. We just want to understand what happened here, you see? Because something did happen."

Molly was staring over Conklin's shoulder into the middle distance as I got up from the table and headed for the stairs. Charlie Clapper greeted me in the hallway, nattily dressed, good-natured, his irony freshly pressed this afternoon.

"It's a rerun, Lindsay. Lotsa fingerprints, no weapons, no blood, no suicide note, no signs of a struggle. We've bagged six bottles of prescription meds and some street junk, but I don't think we're looking at drug overdose. I think this was either Sodom or Gomorrah, and God weighed in."

"Honestly, I didn't know you were so conversant with the Old Testament," I said while peering around Clapper to better gawk at the vignette on the bed behind him.

"I'm Old Testament on my mother's side," he said.

I would have laughed, but my glimpse of the crime scene had suddenly made everything too real. I mumbled, "Keep in touch," and walked past Clapper into Molly's bedroom suite, where two naked men lay dead.

The boy was lying on the floor, head to one side, looked to be in his teens. His platinum-blond hair was spiked, and his green eyes were still open. Looked as though he'd been crawling toward the door when he succumbed.

The older man was on the bed in a half fetal position, his apron of belly fat obscuring his genitals. His eyes, too, were open. He hadn't died in his sleep.

This was what death by krait looked like. Central nervous system shut down, resulting in neuromuscular paralysis. The victims hadn't been able to breathe.

"When did they die?"

"They're still warm, Lindsay. Love to narrow it down for you, but I gotta say they died six to twelve hours ago. Did Molly volunteer anything useful?"

"Nope. Just the four bad words: 'I want my lawyer.' "

Claire sighed. "Before she stopped talking, Molly told me that the dead kid was her houseboy, name of Jordan Priestly. She called him 'Tyco.' "

"Tyco, like the toy company? Oh. I get it. Boy toy."

"But I didn't need her to identify this here father figure. He's Brian Caine."

"Uh-oh."

"Yeah.
That
Brian Caine. Tony Tracchio better put on his cast-iron jockstrap," Claire said, "because Caine Industries is going to be all over him."

Claire instructed her assistants to snap up the corners of the fitted bottom sheet, wrap it around Caine's body to preserve any trace before putting it all in the body bag.

Claire said to me, "You and Conklin can meet me at the morgue when you're done here. I'm going to take my time with these gentlemen, give them a better external exam than their mamas gave them when they were
born.
"

I
WENT BACK down to the breakfast room, saw that Christine Rogers had joined Molly and Conklin.