Kevin O'Brien - Disturbed

He nodded. “You certainly can.”

In the kitchen, she retrieved the Tupperware container in which she’d brought over the pasta salad. Lynette smirked at her. “Well, Molly, I see you weren’t so headachy that you couldn’t stop and chat up our good-looking, green-eyed guest,” she said under her breath.

“I’m just being polite,” Molly replied. She held up the empty Tupperware container. “I’m giving him the pasta salad to take home, since neither one of you touched it. And by the way, Lynette, that recipe for Angela’s ‘fantastic’ dill dip? It’s Nalley low-fat dill dip, which you can buy at any old Safeway. Angela had a meltdown and dropped the hors d’oeuvres tray on my kitchen floor. I’ll be cleaning up spilt hummus when I get home. I rinsed off the vegetables that had been on the floor and, as for the bread — I blew on it, Lynette.”

“What?” Lynette said, scowling at her. “Are you crazy?”

“That’s disgusting,” Jill muttered, a hand on her hip.

“If you want details about Angela’s meltdown, you’ll just have to ask Angela,” Molly said. “I’m sure she’ll tell you. And she’ll probably tell you all about my family, too — if she hasn’t already, Lynette.”

“What are you talking about?” Lynette shot back. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Just my patience — with you, with all of you,” Molly grumbled. She marched into the dining room, where Chet Blazevich gaped at her.

“What’s she talking about?” she heard Lynette saying.

Molly handed him the Tupperware bowl and lid. “Here you go,” she said briskly. “Take as much as you want and keep the container. Thank you for the talk.” She touched his shoulder. “I think you’re very nice,” she whispered, and then she headed for Lynette’s front door.

She hurried down the block toward the house. Fallen leaves drifted across the road, and Molly kept her arms folded to fight off the chilly breeze. She couldn’t believe the crazy things she’d just said to Lynette and Jill. What the hell was wrong with her? Raging hormones, she told herself, just part of the pregnancy package.

That handsome cop probably figured she was crazy.

Heading up the walkway, Molly pulled her keys out of her purse. She was still a bit shaky, and wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up Angela’s mess on the kitchen floor. She was almost at the front stoop when she stopped dead.

Someone had bashed in the faces of their pumpkins.

“Oh, shit,” she murmured. “Who would do this?”

She thought about Angela, but as nasty as she could be at times, Jeff’s ex wouldn’t have done that to her own child’s jack-o-lantern. Erin would be devastated.

Molly wondered if Lynette’s brats might have been the responsible parties. After all, they got their kicks throwing dirt balls at passing cars from the vacant lot at the edge of the cul-de-sac. Smashing pumpkins seemed like a perfect outlet for the little shits. But Lynette’s brother had taken them to a Seahawks game today — along with Jill’s son.

Bending down, Molly ran her fingers over the bashed-in face of Erin’s smiling jack-o-lantern. It was beyond repair. With a sigh, she straightened up and started to unlock the door. But then she balked.

The door was already unlocked.

Molly could have sworn she’d locked the door after leaving the house two hours before. She hesitated and then stepped into the front hall. The house was quiet. She glanced around to make sure nothing was different, and no one was lurking. She headed into the kitchen. As she moved around the island of kitchen cabinets, she looked down at the floor, where Angela had dropped the tray earlier.

The floor was clean — no globs of hummus or shards of glass from the broken dipping bowl, no stray broccoli crowns or baby carrots.

Molly frowned. All she could think was that perhaps Angela had snuck in and cleaned everything up. Maybe Angela still had an old key.

But Angela wouldn’t have smashed those pumpkins.

So it must have been someone else.

She turned toward the sink and saw something that didn’t seem like Angela’s work at all.

On the clean granite counter, three baby carrots were carefully arranged in the shape of a smile — below two broccoli crowns that might have been eyes.

The raw vegetables had been scattered over her kitchen floor earlier.

Now they formed a jack-o-lantern’s grin.

She glanced over the top of her Vanity Fair magazine as the elevator door opened. Ensconced in the cushioned love seat across from the front desk, she’d been waiting forty-five minutes. The W Hotel’s lobby was all black and gray, with sleek steel and glass. She blended in well in her black power suit and tan trench coat.

She was there for Jeremy Hahn’s last-minute “business meeting” that Saturday — the day before Halloween. Jeremy’s meeting must have ended a few minutes ago. The person with whom he’d been doing business was just now stepping off the elevator.

The thin, nubile blonde in the Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform was a prostitute named Tara. She was sixteen, but trying hard to look even younger. Lynette’s husband met Tara once or twice a week in the same room at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle for an extended lunch hour.

“Why always the same room?” she’d asked Tara a while back.

“Cuz in that room, he’s got like four or five porn magazines stashed under the mattress — in the middle, where the maid can’t see ’em when she changes the sheets,” Tara had explained. “He likes to take ’em out, look at ’em, and warm up before I get there. Usually, by the time I come knocking, he’s so horny and coked out, he practically attacks me.”

It hadn’t made sense why Jeremy planted his porn in the hotel room — rather than just bring it with him. But Tara had enlightened her: “If he was caught with that shit on his person , they’d lock him up and throw away the fucking key. Jeremy likes ’em young — illegal young, if you get what I’m saying. I mean, shit, I’ll be too old for the son of a bitch in a year. Anyway, if anybody finds the porn in that room, Mr. Hahn can always say it’s not his. Ha! He’s a lot less nervous about toting around all the coke he puts away.”

Tara wasn’t adverse to a bit of cocaine herself. That was how the woman in the tan trench coat got her cooperation. She started out by giving Tara eight hundred dollars and two grams of quality cocaine for some information on Jeremy Hahn — and the promise to keep her informed about when these sessions at the W were scheduled. That had been three weeks — and four “business meetings”—ago. Tara could be pretty reliable if the payoff was another gram or two of coke — something the dealer called an eight ball, whatever that was. She just knew it cost over two hundred dollars a pop.

The woman in the lobby thought it was rather amusing that she now consorted with killers, drug dealers, and prostitutes. Just a year ago, she’d been happily married with two children, and she made a little money on the side custom-building dollhouses for people in the neighborhood and their kids.

She stood up as Tara walked through the lobby. She wondered if Jeremy liked Tara to stay dressed in the white blouse, Black Watch plaid skirt, kneesocks, and saddle shoes while they did the deed. But as she seriously thought about it, she really didn’t want to know.

She followed Tara into the ladies’ room. Another woman was in there, putting on some lipstick in front of the mirror. Tara ducked into one of the stalls.

The woman in the trench coat waited until the other woman left. Then she dug the little Baggie out of her purse and slid it under the stall door. She watched it get snatched up. “Anything new to report?” she asked.