By Blood Written (50 page)

“Why did you have to pick her?”

His smile widened even further. “C’mon, it’s every writer’s fantasy, killing your editor.” He stood there for a moment, motionless. Then he took a step toward her.

“You didn’t really think I was going to let you leave here, did you? After the way you betrayed me? Left me? Surely you’re not that stupid.”

“No,” Taylor answered. “I’m not that stupid. I never imagined you’d keep your word.”

Taylor pulled her hand out of the purse, the Hammerli-Walther gripped tightly. She pointed it at Michael as his smile disappeared.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“This is over, Michael,” she said. “I’m going to get my phone out of my pocket and call the police. And you’re going to stand there while I do.”

His smile came back. “Oh,” he said, meanly, “your brother’s pistol. What was his name? Jack? Yes, Jack. The brother you killed.”

“Shut up, Michael. Just shut up.” Taylor reached inside her coat pocket for her cell phone. Michael took a step toward her. “Stay there,” she ordered.

He shook his head. “No, Taylor. I’m not going back to jail.

You’ll have to kill me.”

He started walking toward her, the knife held out in front of him. “Stop, Michael!” she barked. “Get back over there!”

He kept coming. She raised the pistol. “Stop!”

Ten feet away now …

“Stop!
“

Two more steps. She sighted down the barrel, drew in a breath, as Jack had taught her, then let it out slowly and squeezed the trigger.

A sharp metallic crack erupted as the hammer hit the dead cartridge. Misfire.

She screamed, turned to run. He grunted, lunged for her.

She threw the pistol at him, missed, then swung her purse at him, hard. The leather strap caught his outstretched hand and got tangled in it. They both jerked away hard.

In the darkness, the knife fell, clattering on the concrete.

He was on her now. She held out her arms. He swung wide, caught the side of her head. Taylor went down on the concrete, her shoulders and back taking the brunt of the fall. She gasped as the breath was knocked partially out of her.

He jumped on her, furious, his eyes wide, grinning horribly. She threw up a leg, trying to kick between his legs, and missed. But it threw him off balance. He landed only partially on her.

She tried to roll away, but he was too fast, too strong. He grabbed her shoulders and slammed her into the hard floor, the back of her head snapping against the concrete. She heard a noise, a strange, ugly combination of a yelp and a moan, then realized the sound was coming from her.

He straddled her chest, his hands around her neck now, squeezing hard, like a vise on her throat. In the dim light, she saw him smile down at her, the light glinting off his teeth. She felt a rage inside her she’d never felt before, a rage so powerful that for a brief moment, it even overcame her fear. She fought and bucked and scratched at him, but he held on, smiling meanly down at her.

“Let go, baby,” he whispered. “Just let go.”

Taylor felt her vision dimming, sparkles tingling in her peripheral vision. A thought raced through her mind.

He’s actually going to do this!

She kicked her legs in the air as he sat on her chest, strangling her. She was flailing now, helplessly, uselessly. Then she felt her right foot hit something loose on the floor and she kicked involuntarily again, dragging whatever it was closer to her.

Her arms were slapping at him. Still he stayed on top of her. She brought her right arm down beside his leg, flapping like a child making snow angels.

Then she felt it. Her right hand brushed against it, her fingertips retaining just enough feeling and control to realize what her legs had kicked toward her.

The knife.

The handle was hard, cold. She felt it with her fingertips, just out of reach.

But her vision … She couldn’t breathe, her throat closed off, the sparkles. Couldn’t think.
Can’t think anymore
.

She squeezed her chest as hard as she could to raise him up just a hair, then kicked her legs, scraping her body just a little to the right.

Her fingers wrapped around the knife handle. In her hand now …

All going black.

She brought her arm up, then swung, wide and hard, the knife blade sparkling in the light as it slashed in slow motion across and in front of her, above her, at Michael.

He jumped back, loosening his grip on her throat. She sucked in a huge gulp of air as the thin line across the front of his neck widened into a pencil’s width.

“You fucking bitch!” he screamed. He let go of her completely and brought his hands to his neck, just as a spurt of oily, syrupy thick blood erupted in a shower across the front of his chest and onto Taylor.

He tried to jump to his feet, but stumbled and fell backward, landing on his hips on the hard concrete. She jerked upright, rubbing her neck with her left hand, the knife held tightly in her right.

She saw his face in the yellow lantern light as he looked down on his chest, blood pouring out of his neck. He glared up at her. “Jesus,” he squeaked. “Look what you did.”

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, her voice broken and choked. Her neck ached, the back of her head pounded. “But you were going to—”

His hands were clasped tightly around his own neck now, trying to staunch the rhythmic spurts. “Oh God,” he said, his voice softer, staring down at his own blood.

She scrambled to her hands and knees, trying to stand up but too weak. She crawled toward him. The blood had soaked the front of the T-shirt, his pants, the concrete floor in front of him. She moved toward him, her hands sliding in the wetness.

“Do something,” he said. “Do something.”

“Jesus, I don’t know what—”

Suddenly he rolled backward onto the concrete. Taylor crawled over to him, the knife still in her hand. She threw it as hard as she could away from them. It clattered on the floor somewhere behind the lantern.

She put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said.

The flow of blood had slowed, his body relaxing, as he stared up at her.

“I don’t feel good,” he said, almost childlike. His eyes drifted left and right, his eyelids fluttering.

His hands loosened from around his neck and slid to his side. Taylor Robinson took his hand in hers, on her knees next to him, as the light in his eyes dimmed.

“I just wanted them to remember me,” he whispered.

Taylor squeezed his hands, blood all over her now as well.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They will.”

EPILOGUE
?

Saturday afternoon, six months later
The Butler School, St. Albans, Vermont

“My God, it’s as beautiful as you said it was,” Taylor Robinson said, laughing, as she gazed out the front windshield of the rented Chrysler.

Next to her, in the driver’s seat, Hank Powell turned and smiled at her. It was wonderful to hear her laugh again, he thought. “See, I told you.”

“I thought I’d never seen anything as beautiful as the trees on the drive up here, but now this …”

“Fall in upstate Vermont,” he agreed. “There’s nothing like it.”

He pulled the sedan into a visitor’s space in front of Blackhurst Hall, the largest dormitory on the campus of the Butler School. Completed in 1921, the building more closely resembled an eighteenth-century Georgian mansion than an antiseptic dormitory. Modeled after The Hall at St. Hilda’s in Oxford, Blackhurst was home to one hundred and fifty female upperclassmen, including Hank’s daughter. Taylor felt like she was back in England as she exited the car.

The air was crisp and fresh, saturated with the smells of autumn. There was a slight chill in the air. Taylor pulled her field jacket around her a bit tighter. She looked around admiringly.

“The campus is really beautiful,” Taylor said.

“Jackie loves it here,” he said.

“Where do we go?”

“Well, I called her a couple of hours ago, when we stopped for gas. I told her we wouldn’t make it for lunch, but we’d be at the game.” He glanced at his watch. “As it turns out, the team has a mandatory game-day lunch, so we wouldn’t have seen her anyway. Game starts at two. We’ve got a few minutes. Want to walk around?”

“Sure, I’d love to see more.”

Taylor hooked her arm inside Hank’s as they began stroll-ing down a long sidewalk that ran to the main part of campus. They passed other students, parents, groups of people walking around enjoying the day.

“I really am glad you called me,” Hank said as they wandered among the trees, surrounded by the brilliant oranges, browns, reds of fall.

“I’m glad you were willing to talk to me after all this,” she said. “I just had to do what I had to do.”

“So how was—what was it, five? six?—months in Europe?”

“At first it was awful,” Taylor admitted. “I was so crazy I couldn’t stay in one place for more than a few days. Looking back on it now, I think I must have had some kind of post-traumatic stress thing going on. But after a while, it slowed down and I noticed that every day seemed to get a little easier. First I could only go a few minutes without reliving it all, then it was a few hours. And then one day, in France, I think it was, on the Cote d’Azur, I woke up one day and realized I hadn’t thought about him or that awful night for days.”

They walked on, Taylor holding his arm, the leaves rustling around them. “I think it was then that I started to feel alive again.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Taylor shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m still taking it a day at a time. Joan Delaney’s been great. She’s given me a leave of absence from the agency. I can stay gone as long as I need to.”

“That helps,” he said. “Having an understanding boss always makes life easier.”

“Problem is,” Taylor continued, “I’m not even sure I can go back there. With all the publicity—hell, the infamy—associated with this, I’m just not sure I can ever be effective anymore, let alone happy. It’s too much pressure. I want something quieter.”

“Can you afford to just walk away from it?”

Taylor nodded. “For now. I have an agreement with Joan that my compensation is based on a percentage of the money my clients bring in, even if I’ve left the agency. And Michael’s books are selling better than ever, or at least they did for the first few months after he … he died. I feel a little guilty taking money that way, but there’s no denying there’s been a ton of it.”

“I don’t think you should feel guilty,” Hank said. “You didn’t do anything but your job. You’re supposed to get paid for doing your job.”

“I guess so,” Taylor said. “Maybe in this case I did my job a little too well.”

They walked on, through the center of campus, past the old gothic buildings, the new library. “I’ve even been thinking about putting my co-op on the market,” Taylor said.

“With Manhattan real estate prices going through the roof, I could make enough to live on for years.”

“And now that you don’t have to pay capital gains on a lot of it,” Hank commented.

“Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.”

They walked on a bit farther in silence. Then Hank spoke up.

“I’m going to be making some changes myself,” he said.

“Yeah?” Taylor asked. “What’s going on?”

“Well, my dear, I am going to retire.”

Taylor laughed. “What? That’s ridiculous. You’re too young to retire.”

“I’ve got my twenty years in,” he said. “And I’ve had it.

All the heat I took for pursuing this investigation really soured me. This whole business of the FBI now being all about ‘counterterrorism,’ the ‘war on terrorism,’ blah blah blah. It’s a bunch of political horseshit, to tell you the truth.

What happened on 9/11 was awful, nobody’s doubting that.

But those of us in the trenches know that it was a crime committed by a bunch of thugs who should be tracked down and blown away. The politicians have used this as an excuse to pursue their own agendas. And meanwhile, the rapists and the thieves and the extortionists and the blackmailers and the serial killers get a pass because we’re too busy chasing Muhammad the Bomb Thrower.”

Taylor looked at him, surprised. “My, my, I’ve never seen you on your high horse before.”

Hank laughed. “Telling the suits in the front office to take this job and put it where the sun don’t shine is tremendously liberating.”

Taylor clasped his arm a little tighter. “So we’re both kind of at loose ends, aren’t we?”

Hank nodded. “Yeah. Life takes some funny turns sometimes.”

He stopped beneath a towering maple tree heavy with des-iccated leaves turning the most amazing rainbow of colors.

He turned and faced her. “I’m really glad you were willing to come up here this weekend with me. I’ve missed you.”

Taylor smiled. “I appreciate your understanding of the separate rooms thing,” she said. “I wanted to see you and meet your daughter, but I’m just not sure I’m ready for anything else yet.”

“I’m not trying to put any pressure on you,” he said. “We’ll just see where it goes.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Let’s just see where it all goes.”

He took her arm again and pulled her along as he walked briskly. “We’ve got to hustle,” he said. “The game starts in a few minutes.”

They crossed the central part of campus, to a broad ex-panse of area that held the sports fields and the gymnasium.

The gym was old, almost run-down, but behind it was a state-of-the-art track surrounding a well-groomed soccer field. They climbed a slight rise and there it was, the girls from Butler uniformed in green gathered at one end of the field, stretching and loosening up, and their opponents in red down by the other goal. A crowd of perhaps two hundred partially filled the bleachers.

“Jackie!” Hank called out, waving his arms.

Taylor watched as a tall, slim girl with long brown hair and an athletic frame turned, spotted Hank, and began running toward him. She ran with a finely tuned athletic ease, a loping, relaxed grace that suddenly made Taylor feel quite old.

“Daddy!” she squealed as Hank took her in his arms and lifted her off her feet. Taylor stood off to the side, smiling at the obvious joy the girl took in seeing her father.