David Handler - The sweet golden parachute

“She’s my mother,” Eric said simply. “I could never kill her.”

So he’d been wrong about that part. So had Des. Not that it mattered anymore. Staying alive mattered. Seeing Des again mattered. “But you could savagely kill Pete and Tolly,” he pressed on, fighting the fear in his voice. “And be damned calculating about it, too. You made it seem as if someone not too bright had done both killings. First by planting Pete’s haul at the Kershaw place. Then by making Tolly’s death look like a clumsily staged suicide. Although that didn’t exactly stick. People like Des have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”

“Maybe they do,” Eric admitted. “But they’re under enormous pressure to crack a case like this. If you hadn’t shown up here I guarantee you they would have dragged the Kershaw brothers away today and interrogated them day and night until one of them signed a confession.”

“Des doesn’t do things that way.”

“She’s just the resident trooper. It would be out of her hands.”

Eric wasn’t totally off base, but Mitch wouldn’t admit it to him. “I’ll concede that you successfully drew the law’s attention away from yourselves. You even have a back-up fall guy waiting in the wings.” He turned his attention back to Danielle. “Last night at the Mucky Duck you told me Mark withdrew his last five grand so he could run off with you. Was that for real?”

“I let Mark believe it was,” she answered in a tiny voice. “He thinks that… that we’re involved.”

“He’s not alone. When I saw how you looked I figured you and he had just had a tumble upstairs on his office sofa.”

She shot a nervous glance at Eric. “That’s never happened.”

“Of course not,” Mitch said. “The reason you looked that way was because you’d just dragged Tolly’s body into the woods and poured lye down his throat.”

“It’s true,” she admitted. “We took care of him as soon as we left Claudia’s house. Poochie didn’t make it easy for us, returning to Claudia’s for dinner the way she did. That was why we had to carry him down to the woods.”

“Meanwhile, Mark makes for a great suspect. He’s a family insider, broke, emotionally troubled. I can see why you’d point the law right at him.”

“Not exactly,” Eric said darkly.

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“That wasn’t our intention. We had long-term plans for Mark.”

“I don’t understand, what did you?…” Mitch’s voice caught in his throat. “My God, you weren’t done, were you? You were going to kill her. That’s it, isn’t it? Claudia was next.”

Beyond the freezers there was a doorway.

As she passed through it, Des left behind those last rays of daylight streaming down through the cellar doors and encountered utter darkness. She had no idea where any light switches were. And she wasn’t about to grope around for one. Those wide-planked floorboards over her head had shrunk and swelled across so many generations of seasons that she could see cracks of daylight between them. If she turned on a light Eric and Danielle might see it between the floorboards. She couldn’t take that chance.

She waved her flashlight beam ahead of her, pointing it downward at the concrete floor. She was in the furnace room. It was a mammoth furnace compared to the one in her own cellar, as was the oil tank next to it. Across the furnace room was another, narrower doorway. And one, two, three concrete steps up to the low, vast expanse of the cellar. She scoped it out with her flashlight. Could not see to the other side of it, where the cloakroom stairs were. Only clutter. A narrow path wove through all of the junk that was crowded in down there beneath a honeycomb of electrical conduits and copper water pipes.

Des gathered herself, the damp cellar floor ice cold against her stocking feet, her ears ringing in the heavy silence. It was so quiet she could hear mice skitter along next to the foundation. And it reeked of mold. This was not good. Des happened to be super-allergic to mold. The merest whiff could set her off. But she couldn’t, mustn’t sneeze. Sneezing was out of the question. Don’t even think about it.

She proceeded, moving slowly and carefully. She had to stay in a crouch. If she straightened to her full height her head would smack into one of those pipes. Which would make a serious thud. She could not afford that.

As she crept her way along, Des suddenly heard the floorboards creak directly over her head. She froze, her stomach muscles fluttering involuntarily. Eric and Danielle were right there, inches away from her. Mitch was right there. She could even hear their muffled voices. Couldn’t make out what they were saying.

She moved forward, her head down, silent as a cat now. Even the slightest noise might alert them to the fact that she was down there. And there was no telling what Eric might do. She couldn’t, mustn’t make a sound. And yet already she was starting to sniffle. And now, God, she could feel it coming on. She was going to sneeze. And couldn’t stop it. But she absolutely had to. She squeezed her nose between her thumb and forefinger, squeezed it so hard her eyes watered. A strangled, volcanic sob erupted deep down in her throat. Briefly, she felt as if she might choke. But then the sneeze passed. Wiping her eyes, she kept on going, using her flashlight sparingly.

She encountered stacks of aluminum folding tables. These were used for special events like the big white elephant sale that the church held every July, when its front lawn became a veritable bazaar of used toasters and television sets. Now the path snaked among piles of cardboard boxes that were marked XMAS. These held those electric candles that were positioned so charmingly in every one of the church’s windows during the holiday season-those exceedingly delicate electric candles with their fragile little glass bulbs. Des edged her way even more carefully now. Because she did not want to nudge one of these boxes. If she broke a bulb it would sound like a grenade going off. She inched her way slowly between them, flashing her light from pile to pile, careful, careful…

So careful she let out a gasp when she ran smack dab into Mary and Joseph. And the infant Jesus. All of them life-sized. All of them right there before her.

She was so startled her elbow jostled one of those very boxes of electric candles. A box that was perched on top of a pile. And was now teetering from that pile and about to fall four feet to the concrete floor. She lunged for it and caught it just before it fell, its contents rattling faintly. But it did not crash.

Sighing hugely, she returned the box securely to the top of the pile and had herself another look at what she was looking at: It was the wooden figures from the beautiful creche that the church erected on its front lawn every Christmas. Sure, there were the three kings ahead of her in the flashlight’s beam. And the shepherds. And the three-sided manger. She took it all in as she crouched there, listening to the hammering of her heart.

Now she heard something else. Rustling behind her. And footsteps approaching softly. She whirled, her SIG drawn. Two sets of eyes gleamed at her in the flashlight’s beam. Soave and Yolie were coming up behind her, crouched low.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered, holstering her weapon.

“We couldn’t let you go in alone,” Soave whispered in response.

“If we go for the shot,” Yolie explained, her mouth to Des’s ear, “we can bring it from three different angles.”

“Plus Yolie’s way better than you,” Soave added, mouth to her other ear.

This much was true. Des was no slouch, but Yolie was one of the top three gunners in the whole state. If it did come to throwing shots from up in the balcony, she’d be mighty valuable. Firing downward was just about the most difficult shot you could attempt. No matter how much you compensated, you still had a natural tendency to come in high.