Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

they always say in the movies. I’ve been watching a lot of bad TV lately,” he said, “late-night movies. Keep my mind off my troubles.”
    “Does it work?”
    “No,” he said. “Not one tiny little bit. So where were you when I was stealing the passkey?”
    “Last night, when I went for the ice, I went down the wrong corridor. Too much vodka. Instead of going back to three, I stayed on four. I ended up trying to fit my key into Beryl’s door.“
    „The old broad must have demolished you for waking her.“
    „But I didn’t. She doesn’t sleep with her hearing aid in. Never heard a thing. Then, when I was walking back down the corridor to come back to three, I heard a door open. At the time,
    I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe Cecilia woke her when she heard me at the door. I went back to apologize, to tell her not to be alarmed, it was only me. But when I got back to that part of the hallway, all the doors were closed. This morning, it occurred to me it might have been Cathy, that she might have waited up for Martyn. I thought maybe if she’d seen him, or talked to him, we might learn something helpful.”
    “What did she say?”
    “That she had waited up. She hadn’t meant to, but she was crying and couldn’t sleep.”
    “Over Martyn?”
    “Yeah. Man, he laid some real big line on her about how fucked-up his wife is, that he might leave her later on, and Cathy apparently went for it in a big way. Anyway, then subsequently, someone let her know he and the Mrs. were expecting another kid, just to see her reaction.”
    “Who did that?”
    I winced. “Me. I had to check out Martyn’s story, try to find out what was really going on. That’s my job.”
    “And?”
    “And I felt I had confirmed my suspicion that they’d been together when I saw the steam coming out of Cathy’s ears, so to speak.”
    “But you don’t think she—”
    “Gut feeling? No. Sky must have heard me. She said she opened the door and thought, What am I thinking? and closed it without ever looking out. Martyn must have gone down the other way. We probably missed each other by seconds.”
    “You believe her?”
    “I do,” I said. “Something has to tie all this together. True, Martyn lied to her and hurt her. For some, that could be a reason to kill. People kill for a lot less.”
    “For leather jackets, sneakers, sunglasses, a buck fifty, an imagined insult”
    ‘True.”
    “So?”
    “Okay, suppose Cathy did kill Martyn. What about the other two? Can you figure out something that makes sense where Cathy killed them all? You know, I was thinking along those lines at first, the black widow spider bit. But I can’t get it to make sense.”
    “That’s because you’re convinced it’s a man.”
    “Maybe so.”
    “Fewer assumptions that way,” he said. “If it’s business, killing off the competition, it’s easier to believe, more straightforward.”
    “Occam’s razor.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Except that that’s science. This is human emotion, twisted all out of shape. So in this case, choosing the simplest explanation may not lead us to the killer. It’s true that sometimes—often—the cops find someone dead, they go right to the doer, the husband, the boyfriend, the business partner, the whatever. And sometimes the trigger is something that to others would seem so small, the sting of an insult, something said in front of others that causes humiliation. Or worse, the insult resonates in the heart of one human being, because it turns out it’s something they have always secretly believed to be true about themselves.
    “But there are times when the motive is convoluted, complex, dense, the result of an event that happened long ago that floats back up to the surface after years of remaining buried, God knows why. Sometimes—”
    “I get it, Rachel.”
    “Well, I don’t. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why, and it’s eating me alive. It’s hell not knowing, not being able to stop it”
    He shook his head. “No, Rachel, it’s work. Hell is something far more personal.”
    It was personal for me. But I didn’t say so. Chip was looking elsewhere, thinking other thoughts. Besides, Detective Flowers was headed our way.
    “They’re going to talk to us separately,” I said. “Leave out the part about the passkey, okay?”
    “Count on it,” he said. He slid his hand into his pocket and slipped the passkey into my hand. “I wasn’t planning on mentioning violating the crime scene either.