Karin Slaughter - Martin Misunderstood

'You ain't all that,' she noted, tugging up her underwear. Her stomach rolled over the top like a muffin over its paper wrapper.

'I was-'

'Shut up, Fool.' She reached into her purse, checking something. 'All right, then,' she mumbled.

Martin had managed to stand but he was so dizzy that he didn't trust himself to reach down and pull up his pants. He put his hand on the desk to steady himself. He should do the gentlemanly thing now, like offer to take her to dinner or maybe suggest a drink. 'Unique, perhaps I could-'

'Pull up your pants, Fool. That weenie of yours ain't nothin' to look at.'

'Oh, sorry.' Martin scrambled to do as he was told.

'Carry that box out to my car,' she ordered. 'And stop looking at me like that. Just 'cause you got a taste of the honey don't mean you can keep buzzing the hive.'

An blew her nose with a tissue even as tears streamed down her face. She should have known better than to start watching The House of Mirth while she was on her period. Or maybe An was just sensitive in general. For the life of her, she could not get Martin Reed out of her mind. The way he had compared her to Tempe Brennan… the way he had vomited when he'd seen the crime-scene photos (An had always had a soft spot for men with weak stomachs. Her father had suffered from ulcers his entire life). And then there was that look he gave her when she released him from the holding cells – part confused child, part sadistic monster. Would she ever know the real Martin?

An tried to turn her attention back to the movie, mindful that thinking about Martin Reed would never lead her to a good place. The truth was that after Charlie had died, one of the main reasons An had never been able to make a connection with another man was because there was always a little part of her that was scared of being beaten. She hated to admit it (it was the kind of revelation she would only have shared with Jill) but she had decided a long time ago that the perfect man for her would probably be one who could never touch her or get close enough to harm her in any way.

In short, her ideal mate was Jill, but with a penis.

'Ugh,' she groaned. She was too old to change back, and she was pretty certain that she wouldn't be able to scrape the gay flag bumper sticker off her car without removing a chunk of paint in the process.

An tried to concentrate on the movie, holding the box of tissues in her lap. Gillian Anderson's Lily Bart was lying in bed, taking that last fatal dose of laudanum, when An's phone rang.

'Hello?' she sniffed.

'Aw, shit,' Bruce said. 'I knew I shouldn't have let you go home alone. Not with this being Jill's anniversary and all.'

An looked at the paused image of Gillian Anderson lying in bed. Even close to death, she was still beautiful. An couldn't help but think that that's exactly how Jill would have looked if she had really lived and then really died. Wasn't laudanum a derivative of opium? Surely they would have given Jill something for the pain.

'An?'

'I'm okay,' she told him, sniffing again. 'What's up?'

'The security guard from Southern Toilet Supply just called. He found a dead body in the bathroom.'

'What?' An gasped, shock making her heart feel as if it had stopped in her chest. Bruce explained to her what had happened, but An's brain could not process his words into anything that made sense. Even as she got dressed, got into her car, drove to Southern, flashed her badge at the police blockade and went into the bathroom, she still could not quite grasp what Bruce had told her.

And then she had seen the prone body of Unique Jones and finally understood.

The woman was lying face down on the floor, her dress hiked up, legs spread. There was a mop handle sticking out from between her legs. Blood pooled around her head. Incongruously, the whole bathroom smelled like flowers.

An asked, 'What happened?'

The coroner supplied his theory. 'I'd say she was hit with this,' he said, holding up a clear plastic evidence bag. An saw a wall-mounted bathroom air sanitizer with blood and hair stuck to the crushed tip.

'Came from over there,' Bruce said, pointing to the empty mounting bracket bolted to the wall. 'Lavender scent.'

That explained the smell.

'The blow was fatal,' the coroner explained.

'Was she raped?'

He got down on his knees and craned his neck to look up between the legs. 'Unless he's got a penis the size of a mop handle, I'd say he couldn't perform,' the man noted. 'Typical with sexual offenders. They can't penetrate, so they punish the victim, and then they get their sexual release. There's enough jizz here to paint the Capitol dome.'

An shook her head, trying to clear the image that had brought. 'Who found the body?'

'Security guard,' Bruce told her. 'He fell asleep in the booth.' Bruce pinched his thumb and forefinger together, brought them to his mouth and made a sucking sound. 'Guy likes his weed.' He shrugged; half the cops on the force did, too. 'Anyway, he woke up, saw that Jones' car was still here, went inside and found her like this.'

'Were any other cars in the lot?'

'He pulled the security tape for us,' Bruce said. 'The only other car that came in and out was a powder blue Cadillac.' He paused for effect. 'We ran the plates. The car's registered to Evelyn Reed.'

'Fuck,' An whispered. Martin had promised he would stay out of trouble.

'He seemed agitated that day when he came to work,' Daryl Matheson testified in front of the judge. 'I asked him about the blood on the bumper, and he got really defensive.'

'He was pounding on the briefcase,' Darla Gantry stated, after swearing on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 'I asked him what he was doing and he told me to mind my own damn' business.'

'Well,' Norton Shaw began, clearly reluctant to be telling this to the jury. 'Martin was always complaining about Unique. I didn't pay much attention to it. He usually complained about a lot of people.'

'He scared me,' Gloria 'Madam Glitter' Koslowski admitted. 'I told him to leave. I didn't want to be alone with him.'

'Unique was always scared of Pasty. He stared at her all the time, looking at her breasts and things.' Renique, Unique's sister, was steely yet composed (she had trouble of her own – it seems the church where she worked had found some accounting irregularities).

Evelyn Reed sobbed, 'I didn't know what to do with him! He was just out of control!'

It must be said that the final nail in Martin Reed's coffin came from his own words. An had found a tape recorder in Unique's purse alongside various purloined office supplies. Cellphone records had shown she'd made several phone calls to the local television stations, offering to sell her story. And what a story it would have been.

On the tape, Unique's voice sounds hurried, almost excited. 'You been paying for sex? Seeing prostitutes? Martin, that's what Ted Bundy did!'

'Yes,' Martin replies, sounding cool, confident. 'I'm just like Ted Bundy.'

Even Max Jergens had looked convinced when An had played the tape in open court. 'No way,' he'd said when the judge had asked if he wanted to cross-examine the witness. 'Dude, did you hear what he said?'

Through it all, Martin sat passively by his lawyer. Or, at least, he seemed to be passive – how could you tell what was going on in Martin Reed's twisted, sick mind?

To her credit, An had tried to find even the slightest bit of evidence in Martin's favor. Each inquiry she made only seemed to dig him deeper into the hole: His fellow employees seemed to think he was a cross between Baby Huey and Charles Manson. Add to that the forensic evidence – Martin's sperm inside Unique, his saliva and sperm on the floor in the office and in his shoe – and there was not much An could do but sit back and wait for the judge's gavel to fall. And fall it did.