Джеффри Дивер - Nothing Good Happens After Midnight - A Suspense Magazine Anthology

“Please.” I put up both palms, stopping her. “This isn’t the movies. This is business. Civilized business.”

“And — if it’s not indelicate...” She glanced around. We were as alone as we could be.

“How will I pay you?”

I shrugged, as if it wasn’t about the money. Which, I realized, it wasn’t. It was about the balance of power. “Invite me to some event at Rotherwood, we’ll talk. After it’s over. And let me reassure you again, this is absolutely confidential. I will never ever say we’d worked together. Never. I’ll never say I’ve talked to you, or know you. No matter what the circumstances.”

“But what if—”

I gestured to our surroundings. “There’s no what-if. There’s no one who can put us together, not it any way. Maybe the pothead kid with the hat,” I dismissed him with a flip of my hand. “Otherwise, you and I never met.”

She laced her fingers together, put them under her chin. “I’m so — relieved. We were going to—”

I smiled, approving, letting her know we were comrades. And that she should continue.

“We were going to send emails from her computer,” she went on. “With certain pretty compromising pictures we were having made, and then it would all get out, and she’d have to resign, and then we’d be back on track. The headmaster, well, he does drink a bit. But that makes our lives so much easier.”

I frowned, emphatically so she could see, even in the gloom, how serious I was. “Can of worms ,” I said. “IP addresses, email chains, metadata, back and forths, the forensics people can find absolutely anything anywhere. You cannot send emails, Clarissa, it’s like putting a spotlight on yourself. No, seriously, you leave Shayla alone. Pull way back. Let go. You were — and forgive me — saying something about walking across the stage?”

“Awards ceremony,” Clarissa said. “She getting some national honor for—”

“Let her accept it,” I said. “You join in the celebration. Encourage her, befriend her. Applaud her. The key is, you can’t know when I’m going to do what I’m going to do. You have to be genuinely surprised. In a way, you know, your idea is perfect, subtle but devastating. But it has to be done the right way. I know how to hide the tracks, and no one will ever know, and think of how much easier your life will be.”

“No violence.” She held up a finger.

“Never,” I said. “There are other ways to end people’s lives; professional lives, at least. After we’re back on board? Have a glass of wine, go to sleep, forget about this. It never happened.”

A piercing whistle cut through the night, so surprising I clutched at my bathrobe. Clarissa, startled, grabbed my arm. All the lights in the train flared into brightness, and a rumble sounded from the massive locomotive on the tracks across the blanketed grass.

A blue-uniformed conductor climbed the three metal steps to the now-open doorway where many of us had disembarked more than an hour ago. “Ladies and gentlemen?” He called out again, and once again we all surged forward to hear him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are so sorry, this was a false alarm. We have gone through our checklist, and checked again, and our fire crew has discovered there was apparently someone smoking in the café car restroom, and they failed to extinguish their smoking materials before they were placed in the trash bin. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, smoking on the train is prohibited by law.”

The crowd grumbled, a murmur of disapproval for this flouting of the social contract.

“Idiot,” Clarissa whispered.

“But we certainly appreciate your patience,” the conductor went on from above us, “and your cooperation, so we’ll be offering each passenger a voucher for future travel on the Lake Shore Limited, or any trains in our system. And now, with your continued cooperation, we’ll be underway as soon as the engineer signals.”

As we clambered back aboard, I let Clarissa go first, leaving at least ten people buffering between us, making sure no one ever connected us, or could put us in the same place. Sure, if someone really delved into it, for some reason, they might find we’d been on the same train, but who would get that far?

Her door was already closed by the time I got to my roomette. Without even closing mine, I scurried to the listening spot. She was already on the phone.

“You won’t believe what happened, sweetie,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking. Let’s let it go. We’re bigger than this, are we not? We’ll rise above it, and simply put our conversations down to a few too many glasses of wine. I’m out, sweetie. Let’s let Shayla be. And let the chips fall where they may.”

I got out my own phone, draped my earbuds around my neck, all of a sudden not feeling one bit tired. Now that we were back on the train’s wi-fi, I had three internet bars, but I wasn’t naïve enough to google Clarissa’s name. Or her headshots. Which I would ask Hadley, in due time, to attach to various kinky clothing-free bodies, thereby creating certain gasp-worthy photos that might not make our Clarissa too happy. I mean, it wasn’t my idea. But if it was good enough for Clarissa to do to Shayla, it was good enough for me to do to Clarissa.

But no one would know where the compromising photos came from. As I’d said, I knew what I was doing.

And maybe, if Clarissa Madison kept her part of the leave-Shayla-alone bargain, I wouldn’t have to do anything at all.

I put in one earbud, ready to block out the noises the rest of the night had in store for me. It was time to sleep, peacefully sleep, knowing that starting tomorrow morning, when the Lake Shore Limited arrived in Boston, Shayla Miller’s life would be different. And she’d never know why, never know she had me as her own personal public relations fixer. All of us women, starting in our careers, need all the help we can get.

I slid under the covers again, thinking about power and justice and sisterhood.

The whistle sounded, piercing the night, doors slammed, and a grumbling under my feet announced our journey was once again about to be underway.

“All aboard!” The conductor called.

The images of the dead... the carnage, flashed like dry lightning before Detective Barbara Lassiter’s eyes. She blinked and shook her head, as though to clear her mind. Hell of a thing , she thought, a homicide detective who has a problem holding it together at the sight of dead bodies .

“You okay?” her partner Susan Martinez asked.

“Yeah.”

“You want me to take the priest?” Susan said, as Barbara watched Father Michael Doherty through the open door of his office at the back of the church in Albuquerque’s Near Northeast Heights. The man’s haggard appearance had only worsened as the hours went by. Between consoling parishioners and fielding questions from detectives, Doherty seemed to have aged ten years in a few hours. Now, at 1:00 a.m., he looked as though he might collapse.

“No, I got it. We’ll play it like we discussed. You go to Lucas Brennan’s place. We still have someone at his apartment?”

“There’s a deputy outside the place. Are you afraid he might ‘rabbit’ on us?”

Barbara remembered their initial interview with Brennan here at the church. The young man had a deer-in-the-headlights look. His eyes wide with shock. She’d thought that if he hadn’t been so distressed, he would have been uncommonly good-looking. But his blue eyes and sensual mouth seemed to have been distorted with grief and trauma.

“No,” Barbara said. “I’m more worried about his mental state. He was as distraught as any person I’ve ever seen when we questioned him earlier. I was afraid he was going to lose it. I didn’t have the heart to make him hang around here while we processed the scene.”