My Boss is a Serial Killer (35 page)

“
Carol, don’t you remember? They were
cut off you.”

“
Cut off?” I had been wrapped up in a
hospital robe almost as soon as I’d arrived, but I didn’t remember
anyone cutting anything off me. If I didn’t have any shattered
bones, they were going to send me out of here—my insurance wasn’t
that great—and I didn’t even have shoes to walk home in. “Why’d
they cut them off?”

“
We didn’t know the extent of your
injuries so we needed to undress you.”

“
My favorite skirt?”

“
Oh, it was all but ruined anyway. I am
sorry. You can have a friend bring you some clothes from home,”
said Serita.

“
Ruined?” I asked again, looking away.
That had been my favorite skirt. That was my go-to skirt. And the
blouse had an embroidered collar that had pushed its price into the
stratosphere. Ruined? “That bitch,” I said under my breath. It was
the first moment that I was able to get angry at Charlene for
something she’d done to me rather than to Bill.

Serita left me alone with my mounting
rage.

And here’s another thing—where was everyone?
All that had happened to me since that nice nap on the garage floor
had been me responding to medically trained bullies who demanded my
explanation of why I worked with crazy people. Shouldn’t police
officers be swarming around me? Shouldn’t the press be crowding in
the emergency room, wanting to take my picture? Was that something
that only happened on television? Maybe so. But I rather resented
that nobody from MBS&K had come to check on me. I guess I was
in that much trouble.

I formulated a plan of action that would
swing into effect after I heard my test results. Step One: demand a
prescription for painkillers that would make me unable to feel
anything for the next two weeks. Step Two: find my cell phone and
call my parents to come and rescue me and to bring clothes. Step
Three: come up with more steps later. I went to sleep on the narrow
little hospital bed before I fully got through Step Three.

But they don’t like people to sleep in
hospitals, and there is a vast plan of action to prevent you from
dozing more than half an hour at a time. The intern woke me to say
that I was covered with contusions—uh, yeah, I had guessed that,
but then, I don’t have a medical degree—but that, bone-wise, I
seemed to be unbroken. I could expect, said the intern, to feel
some soreness and discomfort over the next several days. “Soreness
and discomfort” are medical code words that mean “pain so
excruciating you won’t be able to blink,” which I gleaned when he
gave me a stack of prescriptions for anti-inflammatories, muscle
relaxers, and painkillers that was almost as thick as a Reader’s
Digest.

“
Can I go home?” I asked him. I wanted
to be near my television.

“
I’ll authorize your release provided
you have someone who’ll stay with you for the next few days,” he
said, “but I think you’re supposed to talk to Detective Haglund
first.”

Glad as I was to hear that Gus was at the
hospital, I wished I’d had a chance to comb my hair. But judging
from his expression when he entered the room, combing my hair would
have done little to help. He stared at me with undisguised
horror.

“
That good, huh?” I asked. I tried to
pull myself into a sitting position.

“
No, lie still,” Gus said, rushing to
my side. “Oh, good God, honey, why do you keep doing this to
yourself?”

“
I didn’t do this to
myself.”

Glaring at me, he said, “You’re lucky that it
looks like a truck ran you down, or I’d strangle you.”

This was perplexing. I wasn’t sure what I’d
done wrong. I asked the reason for the potential strangling.

Gus was happy to explode at me, and he
ranted, “Because you keep putting yourself in rooms with suspects
and inviting them to try to murder you. I don’t understand why you
refuse to tell me about these informational revelations until after
the suspect has escaped or tried to bludgeon you to death. I could
charge you with obstruction of justice. In fact, I’d like to. In
fact, I may just do that right now.”

“
Would that involve a full body search?
Because I’m a little sore tonight, but maybe tomorrow?”

He refused to laugh at that. But he stopped
yelling at me.

“
What’s happening? Did you get
Charlene? Did anyone tell you what happened?”

“
We have Charlene Templeton in
custody,” replied Gus, rather grudgingly. “And I have been to the
basement of your firm’s building, where I was not at all happy to
see about twenty-eight quarts of your blood and five hundred pounds
of paper on the floor. Your boss Bill has been released with a
strong suggestion that he stay where we can find him. He tried to
come here, but I asked him to go home and leave you alone for
now.”

“
Aw, Bill’s sweet. And he didn’t do
anything,” I insisted. “Charlene’s the one who’s been killing the
widows.”

Gus looked toward the door, then moved closer
to me and spoke as if he wasn’t really supposed to tell me these
things. “She’s not speaking to anyone about that. We can keep her
because she attacked you, but she says she only attacked you
because you accused her of murder and threatened her. Charlene says
you’ll do anything to protect your boss.”

“
If you thought Bill was guilty, you
wouldn’t have just turned him loose.”

“
No, I wouldn’t have.”

“
So you believe me about Charlene?” I
searched his sweet and caring face, but all I saw there was
concern. I hoped it was concern, anyway, and not repulsion at my
newly-stitched, Frankenstein’s monster look. About Charlene I said,
“I think she’s been tracking Bill’s clients through his notes.” I
recounted my theory on how Charlene may have managed to gain
entrance to homes and convince widows to take suicidal doses of
pain medication.

“
Okay, honey. I’ve got it. You know
we’re going to have to get your statement, but…”

“
But she panicked when she learned that
a witness saw her leaving Adrienne Maxwell’s house. And she started
pointing me in the direction of Bill’s old files. She wanted to set
him up. I didn’t even realize I was being led by the nose. I’ll bet
she was the one who came to my house last Saturday and tried to
make it look like Bill had been there.”

“
Someone was at your house on Saturday?
You didn’t tell me this.”

“
There was a chair that I didn’t sand
very well.”

“
Carol, would you like me to call the
doctor back in here?”

“
She’s proud of what she’s been doing,”
I remarked suddenly, as much to myself as to him. “I think she
considers it a humanitarian act. Maybe if you appeal to her vanity,
she’d be willing to talk.”

I noticed that Gus was staring at me
cockeyed, as if my words had struck him as precocious or possibly
pretentious. I explained, “I watch a lot of detective shows.”

“
Yes. Yes, I do know that.”

“
There’s something at the office, some
kind of evidence, that she said was in a file of Bill’s. She’s been
keeping evidence from the crime scenes, maybe just for fun, but now
she’s planted it somewhere so it can look bad for Bill. Have you
found anything like that?”

Gus looked anxiously toward the door before
he responded, “Don’t you remember, Carol? According to your
coworkers, you chased her down to the garage while she was trying
to get away with the file. We have it.”

I puzzled over this; my memory of everything
from the time I’d been whacked over the head was hazy. After a long
moment, some images came back to me: the file clerk, old Paul with
his fax, Donna’s kindness toward me. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Some hair
fell out of it. Is it the victims’ hair? Has she been keeping hair
samples? Ask her about the hair samples. I bet if you check that
file for prints, Bill’s won’t be on it. Bill never goes in the file
room. I do all his filing. Tell Charlene that. Maybe it’ll crack
her!”

“
Maybe we should just wait until you
can come down and conduct the interview yourself.”

For a moment that booger got me excited about
the prospect: a real police interview! But then I saw he was
teasing me. I wasn’t going to be embarrassed, though. I said,
“Whatever I can do to nail that six-ways-from-Sunday nut job, I’ll
do. I thought she was my friend, but she attacked me. And she
ruined my go-to skirt. And she also tried to push all the blame on
poor nutty Bill. About the murders, not about my skirt.”

Gus shrugged. “Since they were Bill’s clients
and since he had an obvious mental illness, Bill Nestor would be an
excellent fall guy.”

Excellent fall guy. Now that sounded like
detective talk. I realized that Gus and I were having a denouement
just like they do on TV shows. It was really fun, especially since
I was drugged to the gills. I smiled at Gus adoringly.

“
Don’t you grin at me, Carol
My-Last-Name-is-Frank. I’m furious with you.”

But he wasn’t furious at me. He was furious
at what I’d done. That’s not the same. I couldn’t stop this
so-called grin in the face of all that adorability.

“
Stop that,” he commanded. “For God’s
sake, I’ve seen zombie movies where the walking dead looked
better.”

“
Hey, there’s no need to be nasty.” I
scolded him, even though he wasn’t being nasty. Gus compared me to
the walking dead out of concern. I tried to explain, “I didn’t know
Charlene was our killer when I met her in storage; I actually
thought Suzanne Farkanansia was our most likely suspect. This is
Charlene we’re talking about. I’m not sure I’d believe it yet,
except that she started filling in all those weird
details.”

“
And maybe that she assaulted you with
a deadly weapon and pushed a shelf of boxes on top of
you.”

“
Aw, I don’t think that was a
legitimate murder attempt. I think she just wanted to slow me down
until she could get rid of the evidence in the file. That way, the
hot lead detective could never make a definite case against anyone,
and it would just be her word against mine about anything that was
said or done in that storage room.” Vaguely I recalled her garage
claims that she’d only been acting in self-defense. “She could make
me out to be the scary nut job.”

“
That was a potentially lethal way to
slow you down.”

“
Yes, but women are temperamental that
way.”

“
Are you high?” Gus asked, looking at
me suspiciously. He seemed ready to summon the doctor.

“
I’m on a significant buzz, but I am
not high.”

“
I was wondering how you could lie
there looking like death and sounding happy as a clam.”

“
Gussie, I had one objective in this
whole mess, which was to make sure that Bill Nestor came through it
okay. That being done, I feel I have the right to be happy as a
clam.”

“
Even though your friend could have
killed you.”

“
Even though.” I paused. “Bitch made me
ruin my best skirt, though,” I muttered.

“
So I don’t think tonight is the best
time for us to take your statement,” surmised Gus.

“
No, maybe not. I’ve had better
days.”

“
No doubt you have,” said Gus. He
pressed his lips hard together, and I sensed that he had swung back
towards anger again. In retrospect, I think it was because I’d
expressed concern over a skirt rather than my head. He cleared his
throat before speaking again. “So this time you spent with Charlene
in the storage room, allegedly chatting away about her motives and
all, you didn’t think was better spent, perhaps, running away? Or
phoning for help? Or at least staying out of arm’s length so she
couldn’t split your skull open?”

Best to stop cracking wise and admit my
faults. “That was a mistake.”

“
And I believe last night we had a
discussion about what people can do when they’re afraid. That they
get unpredictable. That they get dangerous. And you are not in the
middle of a television show. You could have died today.”

“
Yes, Gus. I’m sorry. I’m not stupid,
but it’s hard to believe anything really dramatic could ever happen
in the middle of a law office.”

Gus took my hand and held it gingerly. I
squeezed his hard with my fingers, because my hand was one place on
me that actually wasn’t hurt. I said, “I know that officially
you’re not supposed to be fraternizing with me, but can you stay
for a while?”

“
You’re my key witness and a victim. I
can probably invent a good reason for being here.”

“
I could use some help finding my way
home. I was going to call my parents to come rescue me.”

“
Your friendly police liaison—that
being me—would be happy to help you with that.”

“
Though I was hoping you could meet my
parents under better circumstances.”

For a split second Gus lost his gloomy frown,
considering this turn of events. He said, “Actually, I might come
out of this looking pretty good to your mom and dad.”

“
That’s the spirit.” I wanted him to
join me in my increasing happiness. I had fixed things for Bill; I
had not died in file storage; and despite the fact that I was
forbidden to fraternize with Gus Haglund, here he was at my
bedside. The only downside was the loss of my go-to skirt, and even
that one was not Gus’s personal favorite of my skirts, which he had
so efficiently removed from me in our little role-playing
game.