Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate (39 page)

For a second I thought I was going to pass out.

“One of your neighbors let me into the building,” it said, because the thing in front of me was more of an it than a he. “She thought I was a singing telegram. There’s a bouquet of balloons in the living room. Not that you’ll have a chance to enjoy them.”

I swallowed, not knowing what to say. Had I not locked the door to my apartment, or had he broken in?

“You talked to the police?” it asked.

I managed an incredibly small nod, and then realizing that this could help me, started nodding enthusiastically. “I told them all about you, Fitzgerald,” I croaked. “If you kill me they’ll know exactly where to look.”
Unlike Anatoly, who was supposed to have been following you.
How could he have lost him so completely? Or maybe Anatoly was close behind, waiting for the right moment to save me. It was possible, right? There was still hope.

The dog-man raised the gun higher. It was pointing at my forehead now. He was tall so he had to cock his dog head to the side awkwardly in order to see me through those fly-like eyeholes.

Wait a minute…Fitzgerald wasn’t a tall man.

“Did I say I told them all about Fitzgerald?” I said slowly. “That’s not what I meant. I told the police all about Fitzgerald
and
you.”

“How do you know I’m not Fitzgerald?”

“Because I know who you are, and so do the cops.” But I didn’t know. The voice was sort of familiar but also somehow disconcerting and wrong. It was like listening to someone who had always spoken like a hick speak in the tone of a professional newscaster. And then it came to me and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. “Johnny?”

The non-pistol-wielding hand grabbed hold of the exaggerated muzzle and ripped the mask off. Standing before me was my least-favorite spaz-case. But he wasn’t spazzing. He was so calm and collected that it was difficult to recognize him even now that his face was exposed. His eyes weren’t twinkling, his mouth wasn’t twitching in a nervous grin. This man was serious, frightening and perversely fascinating. Kind of like death itself.

“Johnny.” I said his name as cajolingly as possible, praying that this was one of those things I could flirt my way out of. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You’re right, I don’t.” No extra words, no twittering. “But I’m getting sick of this game, and killing you and pinning it on Fitzgerald is the quickest way to finish it. I talked to Rick. I know you’ve put the pieces together the way that I wanted you to and now you’ve just confirmed my assumption that you’ve talked to the cops.”

“You and Rick are in this together?” Oh God, what about Mary Ann? Was she being threatened right now, too?

“No, Rick just talks too much, or at least he talks too much to the people he trusts. He has a soft spot for naive, bubbly idiots. It’s a role I’ve got
down,
and it’s earned me the honor of being chosen as his confidant. The guy’s been desperate for a confidant these days. He’s going through an identity crisis and he needs the support of his surrogate little brother.” His eyes traveled to my bedside clock. “Is that right? I didn’t time this well.”

“We could reschedule,” I offered. “Would you like to kill me tomorrow instead?”

His smile was amused and genuine, and the gun was still pointed at me. “I could probably kill you right now and it wouldn’t make a difference. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to wait a little longer. Anne’s providing me with an alibi, and if we can hold off fifteen more minutes it’ll make it a tad more secure.”

“You and Anne are in this
together?
” God, Anatoly had been right. But I hadn’t listened to him. I had been so dismissive of the very idea that Johnny was behind the crimes that I think I managed to even convince Anatoly that he was wrong. Now I might have to pay for that mistake with my life.

“Don’t sound so surprised, Anne is a very sexy woman,” Johnny retorted. “Plus she’s Sam’s wife and Sam owes me for Jocelyn.”

“I don’t understand.” I had fourteen minutes now. How could I get myself out of this in fourteen minutes?

“No, you wouldn’t. You’re not exactly a brilliant detective.” Johnny sighed as if my ineptitude was a huge burden to him. “That bitch, Jocelyn, left me for Sam. She had no right to do that.”

I felt my heart pick up speed as little fragments from my last conversation with Sam danced around in my head. The things he had said about Jocelyn….

She was younger than I and had just received a master’s in political science.

Like Johnny.

Before me, she had a habit of dating abusive, controlling men…

“You killed Jocelyn,” I whispered.

“She was mine and she betrayed me. She had to pay,” Johnny said simply.

“Are you telling me that Anne seduced the guy who killed her husband’s first wife? How messed up is
that?
”

“Anne doesn’t know anything about my past relationship with Jocelyn and she didn’t seduce me. I seduced her and it was
not
easy. But you know how it is—the quickest way to a woman’s heart is through the destruction of her rival.”

“I’m not sure that’s true…”

Johnny brought the gun a little closer to my temple.

“…of men,” I quickly amended. “But you’re right, it’s definitely true of women. I’m always telling guys that if they want to get with me they need to get rid of my opponents.”

“I like you this way, Sophie,” Johnny said quietly, “scared and willing to do or say anything to win another few minutes of life. It’s a bit like
Taming of the Shrew,
isn’t it?”

Yeah, except that even at his drunkest, Petruchio would never have dressed up like something Charles Schulz would have put in a “Peanuts” cartoon.
But I didn’t say that because he was right about the scared part. I wasn’t going to do anything that might expedite the pulling of that trigger.

“I found a few encrypted e-mails between Peter and Fitzgerald,” he went on. “Even after I decoded them I found that the wording of the messages was extremely cautious. Still, I had an inkling of what was going on. My next move was to get information out of Rick. As I said, Rick needs people he can trust to talk to, especially after that Iowa furry incident.”

“So Fitzgerald did engage in a ménage à trois with Peter,” I whispered.

“All three of them in full costume,” Johnny confirmed.

“Who was the third person?” I asked.

Johnny shrugged. “Some woman, I never got a name. But I went to Anne with the information and we both agreed that once the media got wind of it Fitzgerald’s career would be over. Anne was so grateful she let me do her doggy-style. It was the first of many compromising positions I’ve managed to get her in. But Anne and I miscalculated. We didn’t accurately predict the media’s reaction.”

“I’m confused,” I said slowly. “I’ve been doing a lot of research on Fitzgerald and I haven’t come up with one article even hinting at him being a furry.”

“That’s because there
aren’t
any articles hinting at that. We called in lots of anonymous tips and you know what response we got?”

I shook my head mutely.

“They laughed,” Johnny said flatly. “Everyone assumed the calls were hoaxes. Even the tabloids that regularly feature articles about alien babies turned us down! It wouldn’t have been a big problem if Fitzgerald was a Democrat. There are lots of fanatically right-wing publications that will print anything that makes a liberal look like a Satan-loving nympho. Those guys are experts at making speculation look like fact. But they’re not so quick to believe the worst about a candidate that they’ve already endorsed. That’s why Anne recruited Peter. We had hoped that he would give us something we could use, but of course he didn’t.” Johnny shook his head in frustration. His tone was getting harsher and I noticed he was peppering his speech with crude slang and curses. Who the hell was this man? Did
he
even know?

“So then we came up with plan B,” Johnny continued. “Anne kept working on Peter and I worked on Eugene. See, Rick told me about what Eugene did to Bruni, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to get him to take the furry thing seriously. I manufactured a little evidence to get him on the right track and before long Eugene had discovered that his boss was an ass-fucking pervert.”

“But Eugene didn’t come forward,” I noted. Another minute had come and gone.

“Peter got to him. Eugene actually felt sorry for the sicko, and sorry for Fitzgerald, too,” Johnny said, clearly disgusted by Eugene’s sense of compassion. “Or perhaps he simply hated Anne so much that he thought Fitzgerald’s candidacy was the lesser of two evils. Who knows? Whatever his reasons, he was keeping his mouth shut.”

“So how’d you deal with that?”
What did I have in my room that I could use as a weapon?

“Anne became impatient,” Johnny continued. “She called Peter into the office after hours when no one else was around and told him point blank that she knew he had been playing barnyard games with Fitzgerald and was taking the story to the press. She was secretly tape-recording the conversation so all Peter had to do was confirm her accusations. That’s all he had to do! But you know what that little shit head did, instead?”

I shook my head mutely.

“He sat down at his desk, wrote out a suicide note and jumped out the fucking window, right in front of Anne!”

“Oh, God,” I whispered.

“Yes, it almost screwed up everything. Anne was such a wreck that she nearly washed her hands of both me
and
the idea of exposing Fitzgerald. But with a little effort I was able to convince her that it was Peter’s relationship with Fitzgerald that drove him to suicide, not her threat to expose him. It never is difficult to convince people of what they want to believe. So then I came up with plan C.”

“Plan C?”
Eight minutes and I still had no idea what I was going to do!

“Yeah, C. By this time Fitzgerald knew Eugene was on to him and the dynamic between him and Eugene had grown noticeably hostile, so I figured I’d capitalize on that. We just needed to make it look like Fitzgerald was trying to kill Eugene. All I had to do was dress up as one of those furry freaks and borrow Fitzgerald’s truck for a night. Fitzgerald was always very generous with that truck. I was going to wait until Eugene had too much to drink, something he did regularly, shoot a few rounds at him, miss, and then screech off before he could sober up enough to effectively follow me. If Eugene thought Fitzgerald was trying to kill him he would have gone to the police no matter what he thought of Anne.”

“But you missed missing,” I said. “You accidentally killed him.” God, I was an idiot. None of this had been clear to me before.

“It’s very hard to aim and shoot while wearing a large mask,” Johnny explained. “I was dressed as a hippo that night. The costume was very cumbersome.”

“But what about
Melanie?
” Her name shot out of my mouth like a bullet. But he wasn’t hurt by the sound. Didn’t even flinch. Her death meant nothing to him.

“I befriended Melanie, thinking she might prove to be useful, but that was
another
miscalculation. When she was at her most fragile she came to my home, unannounced and completely hysterical. Said she just needed a friend to help her through a panic attack. Unfortunately for her, Anne was there.”

“You killed her just because she found out you were sleeping with Anne!”

“Now you sound exactly like Anne. By the way she f lipped out over Melanie’s death you would have thought I had killed her sister, not a woman she had never even spoken to. But what you and Anne don’t seem to understand is I have a long-range plan. If everyone were to find out that I’m screwing Anne, then my plan might not be successful. I can’t take that chance.”

I was dangerously close to hyperventilating. I had six minutes and not one single useful idea.
Keep him talking,
said a little voice inside my head,
that’s what you need to do in hostage situations.
“Why did Fitzgerald follow me to Neiman’s? Or was he following Maggie and Rick?”

Johnny’s eyes narrowed into little slits. “You are the stupidest woman I have ever met in my life.”

“Excuse me?”

“Fitzgerald didn’t follow anyone to Neiman’s. I manufactured a lunch meeting for him so it would look like he was following you. I also wanted you to see him in San Francisco shortly before they found Melanie’s body at Ocean Beach. I’ve known from the get-go that you weren’t working for the
National Review.
Anyone who’s had the stomach to get past the first page of one of your books could have figured that out. I knew you had to be helping Melanie figure out who killed Eugene, so I made it my business to make it look like Fitzgerald did it. I called Fitzgerald in the middle of your interview with him and told him that you worked for
Hustler
just so he would wig out in front of you. I told you he drove a green truck…and I
know
you saw his truck shortly before I killed Eugene.”

“Wait a minute. You told me Fitzgerald drove a sports car.”

“A Sportrac! A Ford Sportrac! It’s a truck!”

“So the success of this plan of yours was dependant on my knowledge of cars?” I scoffed. “That was never going to work.”

“Not just cars,
everything!
And I know that Rick didn’t reveal all of Fitzgerald’s secrets to Mary Ann, but he revealed a lot.” His voice was rising and he was spitting out his words through gritted teeth. “Women like Mary Ann tell their friends everything, so again, why did it take you so long to become suspicious of Fitzgerald?
Why?
Why is everyone so stupid? I stole Fitzgerald’s cell phone and planted it on Melanie’s corpse! I didn’t even cancel the service like he asked me to when he discovered the phone missing, just to make sure that it was that much easier to trace back to him! But still, nobody put two and fucking two together! And what about those threatening phone calls I’ve been making? It took you
how
long to figure out that this was about furries?”

“Give me a break!” I snapped, my temper getting the better of me. “How was I even supposed to know what a furry was?”