James Patterson - The 8th Confession

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.

MOLLY 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.

Rogers was a celeb in her own right, a rich person’s all-purpose attorney. She was trim and pretty, a gray-eyed blonde looking deceptively young for a senior partner in a big-time law firm that had her name on the door. Just guessing, but Ms. Rogers probably charged a thou an hour.

I had to ask myself why Molly Caldwell-Davis needed a cannon when even a slingshot was overkill.

We hadn’t been looking at Molly as the doer.

Were we wrong?

Questions darted through my mind like a school of minnows. Did Molly know the Baileys? Sara Needleman? Where was Molly when they were killed? Did she have any connection with the victims of the snake killings of the early ’80s?

Was this half- stoned rich girl stealthy enough, smart enough, motivated enough, to be a serial killer?

If so, what had possessed her to kill people in her own bed?

Christine Rogers’s face was weary, but her hair shone, her blouse was starched, and her pin-striped Armani suit cost what I made in a month. She may have had the crazy schedule of a senior partner, but the attorney was all business.

“Ms. Caldwell-Davis wants to cooperate completely,” she said. “When she went to bed around one thirty a.m., Brian Caine and Jordan Priestly were alive. When she woke up sometime after ten, they were dead.”

I looked Rogers in the eye and said, “Maybe if she collects her thoughts, one or two of them will give us a clue.”

“Whatever happened, my client slept through it and was miraculously spared,” Rogers said. “I want the police, the brass, the press, everyone, including God, to know that Molly had nothing to do with the deaths of her good friends. She’s sick that they’re dead. And she has nothing to hide.”