My Boss is a Serial Killer (33 page)

“
All of a sudden, what you think seems
to be the only thing that matters.” She didn’t look at me, but at
the floor when she asked next, “What are you going to
do?”

“
What do you want to do?”

She shrugged her shoulders absently and
stepped away from me to walk part of the way down a narrow row of
shelves heavy with boxes, gazing at them as if she were perusing
titles in a bookstore. I realized this was the second time that day
that I’d hidden in a file room with Charlene. It seemed like almost
everything I did gave me a bad feeling of déjà vu. I had expended
almost all my energy coping with Bill, so I was not thrilled to
have another case on my hands.

“
I’ll stop,” Charlene said, suddenly
spinning to face me. “I promise I won’t do it again. If you could
just let it go, we don’t need to ever hear any more about
it.”

I refrained from pressing her as to why she’d
decided killing widows was a cool idea in the first place. There
were not enough hours left in the day for me to hear or understand
that story. And though once again this was just what I’d heard on
detective shows, I didn’t think serial murderers could “just stop”
whenever they want to. That was not really important at the moment.
What mattered was getting her back upstairs to the office where I
could deal with her in a crowd of people, hopefully some of them
armed.

“
So, how would that work?” I asked. “I
really don’t want Bill to have to take the blame for
this.”

“
He won’t have to.”

“
He already is.”

“
Right,” she said rather spitefully.
“They didn’t even arrest him. What I mean is, there’s a file
upstairs. It’s still there today; the police haven’t found it yet,
I guess. It’s on Bill’s miscellaneous file shelf in Lloyd’s file
room. The police must have missed those yesterday, but I was sure
they’d be back.”

“
Okay, but what’s in the
file?”

Charlene didn’t say, but she slid a slow,
lurking smile in my direction that made me feel like I’d just run
my nails down a piece of dry stiff velvet. She said, “If they don’t
find that file, I doubt they’ll ever be able to make a firm case
against anyone. So, how about I just take the file away, make it
disappear, and that’s the end of it. That clears Bill and everyone
else, and I’ll go to Aven and ask him to make sure you don’t get
fired. I’m sure Bill will go to bat for you, too. No harm
done.”

I thought that “no harm done” was a relative
phrase, since she’d racked up a body count of at least nine, but
arguing about ethics was better left to others. I said, “Whatever
we do, let’s do it upstairs. I need to go get fired, and like you
said, Aven left a pile of work on your desk.”

“
Okay. Hey, can I have my car
keys?”

The original purpose for our storage room
meeting seemed like an event from another decade. For a second I
couldn’t even think why she was asking me for such a thing. Then I
snapped back to reality, slipped my hand into my skirt pocket, and
pulled out the ring of keys. I had to take a couple steps toward
her, still flanked by the rickety old shelves. The claustrophobia
was hard to take. I did not want to be close to her. She sensed
this, too, and refused to budge, just holding out her hand as I
dropped the keys into it. There was a little smirk on her face.
What was I going to do? I was trying to convince her that all was
well enough that she and I could just go back to work—or go back
and be fired from work, respectively.

But then she turned her head sharply toward
the dark recesses in the back of the room. Her face screwed up with
exasperation. She raised her voice and spoke into the darkness.
“Hello. Who’s back there?”

I turned to see what she was talking about. I
hadn’t heard anyone, but another employee in the room would be a
great relief. My mind flashed to a quick thought. Lloyd?

“
You might as well come out,” Charlene
told the hidden voyeur, as she dropped back out of my line of
sight

“
I don’t think there’s anyone there,” I
said, turning back to her.

The word magicians use is “misdirection,”
which is what Charlene had just done to me while she picked up a
weapon from the wide selection of debris in the room. I had a
moment to register surprise that her arms were raised over her
head. Then something dark swooped down, and the world split apart
and cracked brightly as Charlene brought a loose file drawer
bracket down on my left temple. File brackets are about three feet
long, made of steel, sharp edged and capable of doing serious
injury to an unwary secretary’s fingers. It was the equivalent of
being bludgeoned with a dull axe. The impact knocked me sideways
into the shelves of boxes, stunning me so that I didn’t even feel
pain. A second blow landed on the back of my head. That one was
more powerfully incapacitating, dazing me enough that I dropped to
my hands and knees. Three bright red drops plopped onto the floor
before my eyes and made big crimson circles that doubled, tripled
and then swam in an amazing, nauseating loop as more blood fell.
Moaning, I squeezed my eyes closed.

“
You’re crazy about Bill Nestor, and
you turned him in to the cops the first chance you got,” said
Charlene’s voice from somewhere near the ceiling. “I know you’d
give me up in a heartbeat.”

While she spoke, I struggled to sit up. I was
unsuccessful; all I managed to do was lurch in a sloppy
half-circle, like a drunken dog trying to find a place to sleep.
Charlene’s voice moved into the next aisle and deliberately, with
one great straining groan, she pushed the entire world down on me.
Out of the corner of my swimming vision, I saw a barrage of
forty-pound boxes hurtling down from the tipping shelf, slamming
into me, knocking the wind out of me so that the only noise I could
make was one pathetic “whoomp” before I was smothered under a
landslide of paper. A few more painful thuds registered through my
pummeled body, but I still didn’t have the presence of mind to be
more than stupidly baffled by my predicament.

From somewhere beyond my landslide grave, I
heard, “I’m sorry, Carol—I really, really am.”

Then I heard the sound of her footsteps,
muffled through the haze of my slipping consciousness, and a moment
later, the door slammed closed as everything went utterly dark.

Somewhere across town, Gus Haglund was
interviewing Bill Nestor and seeing, as I had known in my heart,
that this lawyer was a decent human being who happened to have
obsessive-compulsive disorder but certainly was no killer.
Suddenly, Gus looked up as if his name had been called from a long
distance away. He had a terrible feeling that something was wrong.
My face flashed in his mind, and he rose to his feet, saying, “Get
a squad car over to MBS&K stat!”

Within fifteen minutes, I was being
extracted, bloodied and badly bruised, but otherwise unharmed, from
under the boxes in the storage room. Gus seized me and held me
against him, saying, “Thank God we got here in time.” Then I was
taken to a private hospital room where I convalesced for several
days until Terry Bronk came to my room and begged me to come back
to work because no one else could do my job. I demanded a raise and
got it, so I said, “Sure, I’ll come back right after my honeymoon
in Paris.” That’s where I was soon to be headed with Gus, my
fiancé.

That sounded like a perfectly reasonable
rescue to me, as I lay under a crush of boxes in the total darkness
of the storage room. Except that I may have gotten some details
wrong. Gus and I didn’t share any psychic link that I knew of.
Also, detectives don’t say “stat;” doctors say “stat.” The scenario
didn’t account for why anybody would think to look for me in the
storage room. And imagining that Terry Bronk would offer me my job
plus a raise was really just the ravings of a woman with a
concussion.

At first my head was shrieking with the
bright agony of being creamed with a sharp metal bar. When that
pain faded to a raging roar, I had the rest of my pummeled body to
contend with. I did not think I’d broken any bones, unless Charlene
had managed to crack my skull, but I hurt, badly, in parts that had
never had hurt before. But this pain, too, began to fade into
obscurity as breathing became increasingly, scarily difficult. The
air I could manage suck in, as if through a straw, was woefully
under the legal limits for sustaining life.

But I must, must, must stay calm, I told
myself. The more frightened I felt, the harder it was to make use
of the reedy whispers of air left to me. I counted to twenty,
gasping, and made myself concentrate. The darkness, I was relieved
to realize, was thanks to Charlene’s snapping off the lights, and
not because she had actually blinded me. Still, knowing the cause
of my blindness didn’t help cure it. If I couldn’t figure out which
way was up, freeing myself would be all the more difficult. And my
progress was being clocked by my aching lungs.

All right, then. “Up” was where the paper and
boxes were crushing my back. Okay. “Down” was my face, smashed
against the cold tile floor and sticky with blood. Where were my
hands? I located them at the ends of my arms. Could they move? One
of them could. My left hand was not pinned, though most of my left
arm was from the elbow up. The fingers were tingling but not yet
numb. Fine. One hand is better than nothing.

In addition to the numerous heavy boxes on my
back, the two metal shelving units that were now braced against
each other had made an upright dam that kept everything in place,
with me as an unwilling lodestone at the bottom. I couldn’t hope
for an avalanche to provide freedom. I thought perhaps I could
lever myself against the floor and shove my way out from under the
enormous weight. Actually, there was no “perhaps” about it. I had
to do this because it could be hours before a clerk or Lloyd came
down here, and I could easily suffocate by then. If I lost
consciousness, I was a goner for sure.

I remembered, in those dark minutes, that I
had failed to prepare a will. If I made it out of here, I’d have to
ask Bill to draw one up for me. And I must make it out, because it
would be so humiliating to be the first secretary in history to die
literally buried under a mountain of paperwork.

When you’re squirming to get out from under a
ton of boxes, you think things like, “I should have worked out
more.” I needed powerful thigh muscles to extricate myself from
this, but I didn’t have them. Struggling takes up so much damned
air. Freaking out was once again sounding like a good option. Maybe
if I freaked out, I could bust right up through all this junk like
the Incredible Hulk, my shirt torn to ribbons from my bulging green
muscles. No such luck. I couldn’t move forward, not an inch. But
after a time, which seemed like airless, hallucinating hours, I
discovered that I could move backwards. The lower half of my body
wasn’t nearly as trapped as the upper half (the half,
unfortunately, that liked the oxygen so much), and I found I could
wriggle and writhe my legs and hips.

Over the long, sweaty course of scraping
myself hideously against box corners, metal brackets, binder combs
and notebook flaps, whimpering and yelping as the boxes rearranged
themselves and squashed me hard, I wormed my way backwards until
finally I emerged, utterly exhausted, gasping and in more sorts of
agony than I’d ever cared to know. But I could breathe again. That
was something. I didn’t even mind that I’d almost wriggled my way
right out of my clothes. My skirt was rucked up around my waist,
and my blouse was halfway to my neck. Everything I wore felt
shredded as I pushed my clothes back into place, wincing and
sucking breath through my teeth. Now would be a terrific time for
some clerk to turn the lights back on and find me this way, I
thought. I tried to touch my head where Charlene had struck me, but
it hurt too much and I was scared to find out how deep the wounds
went. But I could stand. More cause for celebration.

If I had been completely in my right mind, I
probably wouldn’t have celebrated by attempting the next phase of
my escape, which was to claw my way, in complete darkness, back
around the boxes and the fallen shelving units. Stupefied
determination seems to lend one a certain amount of leeway, though.
Spelunking to the door was far easier than getting out from under
the boxes. I was positively giddy. Truthfully, I was probably
delirious with shock and blood loss. With the only dose of pure
dumb luck I got that whole day, I found my way to the door without
killing myself, turned on the lights and stood blinking in the
glare like a cave dweller who had made a wrong turn.

Long though the time may have seemed, I had
probably only been trapped for eight or ten minutes at the most.
Freed of oxygen deprivation and impending death, I suddenly
wondered if Charlene Templeton was still in the building.

It took some effort to remember what floor I
should select in the elevator. My badly scraped fingers hovered at
the buttons for several seconds before I took a guess. Did I work
on the tenth floor? I thought I probably did. I was swooped up with
a lurch that made me feel quite ill and then jerked to a halt as
two women climbed on at the mezzanine level and, after looking at
me with shock-widened eyes, displayed the utmost in elevator
etiquette by facing squarely forward without further staring. They
got off two floors later, and one of them said to me as she
departed, “Um, your head is bleeding, did you know?”

“
Yes, thanks,” I replied, impatiently.
I had not seen my head or dared to touch it, but I could see my
blouse, which now sported an impressively large, brilliant red
spread of blood from my neck to my bustline. I had heard that head
wounds bleed abundantly and found that to be true. That was just
the one on my temple, the one that hurt the most. I had almost
forgotten about the blow across the back of my head, which might be
doing anything: leaking blood, bone, brains, all sorts of stuff. I
didn’t want to know. The doors closed, and up I lurched again,
holding onto the rail now to keep steady. I sure wished I had worn
flats that day.