Dead Certain

knowing that she wasn’t what she seemed, but he didn’t find out that it was Claudia who’d done the actual operation until after he’d slipped the Pavulon into her IV. His sympathetic treatment of Claudia at the M&M conference hadn’t anything at all to do with compassion, but rather the desire to not deflect blame from McDermott.
    “Do you think she would have liked the idea of a rabbi officiating?” he asked.
    I wanted to tell him that she would have preferred to be alive and see him dead, but what I managed to say was, “I don’t think it would have mattered to her one way or the other. I think she would have just liked the idea of all the people she’d worked with coming and paying their respects.”
    “Maybe just the hospital chaplain then,” Laffer mused. “He’s new, but a nice young man. I’m sure he would be happy to oblige.”
    “Would you mind excusing me for a moment,” I said, trying to make my voice sound natural. Instead I was afraid that I sounded like a terrified ingenue uttering wooden lines in her first play. “I’d just like to run to the ladies’ room for a moment. But go ahead, make yourself at home. Look around. I’ll come and catch up with you.”
    Instead of heading to the powder room, I quickly made my way into my little office adjacent to the kitchen. I closed the door behind me and, with trembling hands, picked up the receiver and dialed Elliott’s cell phone number. The call went through, but instead of Elliott answering I got a voice-mail recording. My terror made it difficult to breathe, but I managed to rattle off a message explaining that I figured out not only who the mole was, but the identity of Claudia’s murderer. From the other room I heard the shrill cry of Laffer’s beeper, and I hastened to finish off my message to Elliott with an explanation of where I was.
    Just as I was about to hang up the phone, I heard the soft, yet unmistakable click of an extension being eased into its cradle in some other part of the apartment. Suddenly I was afraid. Not nervous, or anxious, or filled with foreboding, but flat-out, in-your-face, the-metallic-taste-of-adrenaline-running-down-the-back-of-your-throat afraid.
    I told myself to breathe, as I rapidly calculated the odds. My purse, and the gun, were by the front door in the apartment. I stood a better chance of slipping quietly out through the kitchen and making a run for it down the back service stairs. I told myself that with any luck I’d be safely in the basement before Laffer even realized that I was gone.
    As quietly as I could, I turned the handle of the study door and cautiously stuck my head out. The apartment seemed quiet, the hallway empty. Breathing something very close to a sigh of relief, I stepped through the doorway, turning toward the kitchen.
    Carl Laffer’s hands, meaty like hams, grabbed me from behind and pulled me off my feet. I felt the wind go out of me as I hit the floor, heard the hiss of profanity as Laffer grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shook me like a doll. I tried to scream, but I could not find my voice. Instead I kicked and clawed with all the strength that I had, miraculously managing to kick free of him. I hit the floor in a disorganized pile and rolled over onto my hands and feet into a kind of impromptu runner’s crouch, meaning to take off toward the service exit in the kitchen, but Laffer’s legs were in front of my face, effectively blocking my escape.
    I rolled over until I was facing the other direction and took off at a dead run, not knowing where I was going but blindly trying to put any kind of distance I could between myself and Claudia’s killer. After a couple of seconds I realized that I was in the main hall of the apartment, heading toward the front door—the front door and the gun.
    For a minute I thought I’d made it, I felt I was almost clear, I was clear, but even as I thought that, I felt my legs go out from under me as Laffer hooked me from behind. My head hit the hard marble of the entrance hall, and I saw stars, but I still frantically clawed along the ground, hoping to make it to my purse.
    For a fraction of a second I felt Laffer’s grip loosen, and my fingertips touched the soft leather of my purse. I rolled over on my back, groping blindly in the dark recesses of my bag. As my fingers grappled with lipstick tubes and packages of tissues, my mind registered the syringe in Carl Laffer’s hand.
    I felt the sting of the injection at the