David Ellis - In the Company of Liars

The door is not even closed all the way. She pushes it open slowly, takes a breath, and walks in. With her shirt, she wipes the doorknob on both sides. Jessica swore that the doorknob was the only thing she touched.

She tells herself that she will not look at him-not directly-at least not until she is finished. But her instincts betray her, and she almost swoons as she sees him, lying motionless, face down, across the carpet. Her eyes move directly to the wound on the back of his head, to the statuette caked with blood and hair lying near him.

“Oh, Sam,” she whispers, but hearing her voice snaps her to attention.Do your job first. She walks past his body stoically, searching the carpet, until she finds it. The single platinum earring. She places it in her jeans pocket.

There. She is done.

But she thinks of her daughter. She remembers the phone call that she forced Sam to make on Friday-Sam’s call to Jessica, firing her from her position, shutting her out of his life, over an impersonal telephone line.

All I wanted to do was talk to him, Jessica told her, only hours ago.

Allison looks out the window. Most people don’t live up here by the lake year-round. Sam did, loved the tranquillity. Maybe, what, three or four people live up here right now on this street.

Meaning three or four potential eyewitnesses, at a minimum, who may have seen Jessica come here-including the widower next door, whose light was on in the front room when she passed it driving up here.

And whoknows who may have heard Jessica’s reaction when she was at Dillon & Becker’s offices in the city while Sam fired her from his office in the capital. Allison could hear, over the phone and sitting at a distance, Jessica’s protests; did anyone at Dillon & Becker hear her?

Jessica was here, in this house, on the night of the murder. She was upset the day before, after a phone call from Sam. Not a good combination.

And all of this is Allison’s fault.

Allison removes the single earring from her pocket and places it back near Sam’s body. She yanks a strand of hair from her head and lets it fall to the carpet near Sam. She writes crime fiction; she knows that a strand of hair must have the follicle attached to provide DNA.

What else?

Allison grabs her finger, painted with red polish, and breaks off a substantial piece of her nail. She makes the motion in the air of swinging something, trying to figure where a fingernail might break off. Oh, who knows? She lets the fingernail drop to the carpet as well.

She can’t be too obvious. It can’t look staged. Maybe this is enough, to draw their attention to her.

What else?

Allison looks at the statuette, on the carpet near Sam’s body. Plenty of blood on it, almost dried now. She touches it with her finger, thick like syrup now, and wipes a stain across her maroon sweatshirt. A trace of Sam’s blood, on her sweatshirt.

What else?

The Alibi.She remembers it, from the novel she is writing. The novel she hates.Best Served Cold.

She knows where his computer is, upstairs. She takes the stairs carefully, lest she lose her balance and fall on her wobbly legs, and goes to his office.

She is lucky, she thinks, thoughlucky hardly seems the word, that Sam does not use a password to protect the screen saver on his computer. The screen is black with asteroids and stars moving about. With one push of the computer mouse, the screen returns to his e-mail’s in-box. She hits the “compose” icon and pulls up a new mail message. She types in the words-murky, fuzzy words, that she comes up with off the top of her head-and addresses the message to her own web address,allison@allison-pagone.com:

A:

NEED TO DISCUSS FURTHER. GETTING WORRIED. MANY WOULD BE UNHAPPY WITH MY INFO. NEED ADVICE ASAP.

S

She wipes down the keyboard and mouse after she sends the e-mail. She will wipe down the banister, too, and the front doorknob. No, she is not looking to guarantee herself a conviction. She is not going to write her name in blood on his bathroom mirror. What she has done is insurance, nothing more. They won’t necessarily be able to make a case against Allison, or even suspect her. But after her work here, they certainly won’t be able to make a case against Jessica, either, and that is her principal goal. If it ever gets close to Jessica, Allison will be able to hold herself out, plausibly, as the suspect. After her work here, her daughter will never be accused of this crime.

She checks her watch. It is close to twenty after one. Having sat down for even a minute, she feels intense exhaustion sweep over her. But she resists. Now is no time to get weary. She only has to get back home now.

She will retrieve that novel she’s working on and delete it from her computer. If they come looking for her, they will undoubtedly seize the laptop. Another benefit of writing crime fiction-she knows, at least generally speaking, of the government’s powers to retrieve deleted material from a computer’s hard drive. They will find it. And they will find it very interesting that she deleted this document from her computer only minutes after returning from Sam’s house.

Now for the hard part. She will see him one last time. She thinks of what she wants to say. Yes, she knows it’s foolish, she knows he can’t hear her now any more than he would be able to hear her later, in the privacy of her home.

She comes back down the stairs and moves to Sam, gets on her knees and begins to cry.

At this moment, she is sure that she loves him. At this moment, her feelings for Sam have crystallized, have moved from an intense passion, from a reawakening of feelings dormant for so many years, to love.

“I love you,” she says to him through a full throat. She reaches for him but it seems inappropriate. Her hand is only inches from his head. She wants him to see her one more time, even if he can’t. She wants to look into his eyes, but she will not move him. His face is surprisingly peaceful, if defeated, his eyes closed but his mouth open ever so slightly.

“I’m so very-Sam, I’m so sorry,” she whispers.

But he is dead, and she has Jessica to protect. She rises to her feet and heads to the kitchen, removes a freezer bag from a drawer and grabs a paper towel off the roll. She returns to the living room and picks up the award from the manufacturers’ association, wipes it down as well as she can, grips it firmly with her own hand, then puts it in the freezer bag. She turns her head away as she does so, avoiding the blood and hair caked against the marble base, stifling her tears because so much of the night remains.

“Talk to me,” McCoy says into her collar, as she keeps a safe distance from Allison’s SUV, heading south now, away from Sam Dillon’s house. McCoy left Harrick at Dillon’s house to work with the team, now that Allison is gone.

“I don’t know,” Harrick says through her earpiece. “I’m looking. What-hang on.”

McCoy can hear muffled voices now. A team of federal agents are back in Dillon’s home, trying to figure out what the hell Allison Pagone did while she was there.

Maybe, McCoy thinks,she just came to say good-bye. To see for herself. But probably not.

“The award is gone,” Harrick says. “She took the fucking murder weapon!”

“The earring, too?” McCoy asks.

“Hang on.” More muffled noise. “No, no, but it’s closer to Dillon’s body.”

“Okay. Okay. You know what she’s doing.”

“Hang on,” Harrick says. “There’s gotta be more.”

“Get back to me when you know everything. I’ll see where she goes.”

“She’s going home, Jane.”

“I’m not so sure,” McCoy says. “Let’s see.”

Yellow like lemon. She remembers it like it was yesterday, her utter relief when she found her five-year-old daughter outside the back of the Countryside Grocery Store, pointing at the yellow pole in the ground. She no longer shops at this store on Apple and Riordan; it was the place she shopped way back when, back when she and Mat lived around the corner. Now she lives several miles away, but she always smiles when she passes this particular store.