The Gemini Deception (5 page)

Tim disconnected and gave the receiver back to Marty with shaking hands.

“You did good.” Marty stuck the phone in his jacket and sank into the armchair opposite the couch. “Looks like we’ve got an hour to kill.” He leaned back and made himself comfortable. “So, how’s life?”

Before Tim could answer, the doorbell rang. Marty scrambled back to his feet. “Who you expecting?” he asked in a low voice.

“My ex-wife.”

“Fuck.” Marty pulled Tim up roughly and pushed him toward the door. “Go answer and no bullshit. Same drill. Tell the bitch to go away.”

As Tim stumbled forward, Marty stayed on his heels, his gun pointed at the back of Tim’s head. He hid himself behind the door and motioned for Tim to open it.

“Hi, Rhonda. I know we’ve got things to discuss, but today’s not good.” Tim’s words poured out in a rush. “Looks like I came down with some stomach thing, and—”

Before he could finish, a forty-something redhead trailing cheap perfume pushed past him and into the room. “I don’t care what bug you’ve got crawling where,” she replied, half shouting the words. “You’re late again with this month’s—”

When Marty slammed the door shut, Rhonda wheeled around and found herself looking down the barrel of his gun. She went ashen and froze.

“Plant your ass on the couch.” He waved the gun in that direction. “One more word out of you and it’ll be your last. Got it?”

When she hesitated, her eyes glancing about for escape, Tim grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her across the room. They sat side by side, Rhonda clutching Tim’s hand so hard he winced.

“Loud-mouth bitch, aren’t you?” Marty said as he settled back into the armchair, enjoying the sudden change in her demeanor. Her eyes were about to pop out of her head, giving her a vaguely owlish look. “Used to have one of ’em myself,” he added, looking empathetically toward Tim. “Always bitchin’ about something.” Glancing at his watch, he saw they had forty minutes more to wait. Plenty of time. “Now, where were we?” he asked Tim. “Oh, yeah. You were going to tell me about your life.”

*

“I have to make a delivery.” Ryden shouted so Magda would come take her place at the counter. “I’m going straight home after that.” She’d chosen a mix of wildflowers to cheer up Tim. They were colorful and would keep well but weren’t too pungent for a queasy stomach.

“Who are they for?” Magda asked as she emerged from the back room.

“Tim.”

“Ah.” Magda nodded knowingly with a mischievous smile. “Your Tim.”

“He’s not mine, and I’d really appreciate it if you stopped insinuating otherwise.”

“All I’m saying, dear, is that he’s a nice man with a decent job, and he’s smitten with you. You’re the only reason he comes in every week, you know.”

“I do know, and I don’t care,” she replied.

“You didn’t seem to mind his rather prolonged visit last time. I even saw you smile.”

“Oh, my, could it be I’m desperately in love with him and am subconsciously playing hard to get?” Ryden sighed. She didn’t know why she bothered to even reply. Magda wouldn’t get her sarcasm any better than she’d get any of the dozen other ways she’d tried to dissuade her from matchmaking. “Anyway…whatever, I better get going.”

“See you in the morning.” Magda smiled. “Have a fun time with Tim.”

Although she liked her boss, at times like this Ryden wanted to throw her in the stem cutter. The only way to end the debate, at least for now, was to shock Magda’s conservative sensibilities. “You know, I might just stay there all night. Hell, maybe even all week. Hide in his apartment and have wild passionate sex till I need resuscitation and then go back for more.”

Magda blushed. “Ryden!”

“See you.” Ryden winked at her and left.

Not long after, she arrived at the address they had on file for Tim, a ten-minute walk from the flower shop. It was a two-story, single-family home in a quiet neighborhood, nearly obscured from the street by tall greenery.

She was about to ring the bell when she noticed the door was ajar. She rang anyway, and when no one answered, she pushed the door open another few inches. “Tim? You there?”

When no one replied, she cracked the door a little farther and stepped just inside the threshold. “Tim,” she shouted, much louder this time. “Are you okay?” Still no answer. She started to worry. He hadn’t sounded well on the phone. What if he’d been so violently ill he’d passed out…or worse? Perhaps, she considered, he’d been rushed to the hospital and the paramedics hadn’t shut the door properly.

She couldn’t just leave. “Tim, if you can hear me, I’m coming in.” She stepped into the living room and placed the flowers on the coffee table. Tim wasn’t the tidiest guy, but aside from the open door she didn’t see anything unusual to prompt her niggling sense of alarm. She glanced into the kitchen and dining room, and everything seemed okay there, too. Perhaps she was just being paranoid. Maybe the memory of the guy who’d been following her the other day had stuck with her more than she cared to admit. Tim had probably just stepped out to the pharmacy for some medicine.

Just to be completely sure the poor bastard wasn’t home and in pain, she’d do a quick check of the bedrooms upstairs. If he wasn’t there, she’d leave a get-well note with the flowers and go. She’d never intended to charge him, anyway. These were on the house because he was such a good customer.

Convinced now that no one was home, she hurried up the stairs to ease her conscience and be on her way. She walked down a long hall, bypassing an office and then a kids’ bedroom—bunk beds, toys and baseball gear on the floor, posters of athletes and racecars on the walls. Tim had never mentioned having children.

At the end of the hall, she knocked on the only closed door. “Tim, it’s me. Ryden.” She waited several seconds, her ear to the door, before trying the knob.

The bedroom’s heavy curtains were closed so it was too dark to see much, but the ambient light streaming in through the sides of the windows allowed her to make out a silhouette on the bed. “Tim, are you all right? she asked louder. No response, and the figure didn’t move. “Shit,” she mumbled. Tim was either an extremely sound sleeper or something was very wrong. Skimming her hand over the wall, she found the light switch and flicked it on.

She blinked a few times, so shocked she was unable to fully register the scene before her. When she finally realized the magnitude of the horror, dizziness washed over her and she had to fight to keep upright. “Oh, my God.”

Tim was naked and facedown on the bed. Countless stab wounds all over his back explained the widening pool of blood on the sheets and floor.

She was going to be sick. With her hand over her mouth, she ran headlong for the adjoining bathroom, only to trip over something on the floor just inside the dark room. Scrambling to her feet, she inhaled a vaguely metallic scent and was aware her hands were wet as she reached for the bathroom light switch.

She was standing over another naked body, this time that of a woman she didn’t recognize. This victim had also been stabbed, but she was lying on her back. Blood still oozed from her wounds onto the tile.

“Jesus fuck.” Ryden realized for the first time that the killer might very well still be in the house, and her urge to vomit vanished, replaced by the need to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. She bolted down the stairs and out of the house, not stopping until she reached the middle of the street. Breathing hard, she reached for her cell phone, only then seeing the blood on her hands, jeans, and jacket. She was shaking so much it took three tries to successfully dial 911.

Later, Ryden would have no clear recollection of the police arriving or be able to say how long it took them to get there. But not long after they did, a tall plainclothes cop who introduced himself as Detective Johnston took her back into Tim’s house and asked her to sit in the living room. Two uniformed cops and another in a suit stood by watching her, and she could hear more moving around on the upper floor.

The detective sat down beside her and pulled out a small notepad and pen. “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me everything you remember from the time you arrived here until you called 911. Take your time. You never know what kind of detail might be important.”

As Ryden told him the story, more cops arrived—a quartet from forensics, she guessed, since they immediately began gathering trace evidence and dusting for fingerprints. One of them, a woman about her age, was summoned to take Ryden’s prints once she’d finished relaying what she could recall.

“I need to take samples of the blood on your hands as well as samples from under your nails,” the forensics tech told her as she pressed Ryden’s fingers one by one onto an ink pad and then a white card. “And we’ll need your jacket and jeans for evidence.”

“My clothes?” Ryden asked. “What for?”

“They’ll be returned to you,” the detective said. “We’ll take you home when we’re finished here, and a female officer will accompany you inside to get them. It’s just standard procedure.”

While the tech swabbed samples of the blood on her hands and under her nails, the detective went to consult with the other plainclothes cop, who’d spent much of the preceding minutes on his cell phone. When Johnston returned to the couch, he had new questions for her. “How did you know the Laudens?”

“Laudens?” Ryden repeated. “Was that Tim’s sister?”

The detective studied her face. “You didn’t know her?”

“No.”

“Ex-wife,” he said. His gaze drifted to the mantel over the fireplace, behind where she was sitting, and Ryden turned to see what he was looking at. Among the photographs was one of a much younger Tim and the redheaded woman she’d tripped over. Other photos told her the couple had two boys. That explained the kids’ room—apparently the couple shared custody.

Over the course of the next half hour, she was asked to recall everything she knew about Tim. She started from his first visit to the flower shop and ended with his phone call asking her to deliver the flowers that rested on the coffee table in front of them.

Then the detective started in on her, asking her about her life, work, family background, and marital status. By the time she was done, Johnston and the other complete strangers in the room had more information about her than anyone she’d ever known. Ryden had about as much need to talk about herself as she had interest in other people. The shock of her experience was rapidly turning into weariness under the endless questioning. She hadn’t eaten anything since that morning and was beginning to feel weak and dizzy. She could see Johnston’s mouth move but couldn’t register what he was saying.

“Foster homes never work out,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“What’ll happen to the children?”

He looked surprised. “Relatives usually rise to the occasion.”

“Yeah. Relatives might work.”

“We’re almost done, ma’am.” He sounded concerned.

Ryden just wanted to get the hell out of there. She needed the safety of her home and a stiff drink of anything. The cop asked her something else, but she didn’t hear that, either, too distracted by a sudden flurry of activity by the stairs. Two men with M
EDICAL
E
XAMINER’S
O
FFICE
written on their windbreakers came down carrying someone in a body bag. She wanted to look away but couldn’t. She wanted to run but didn’t.

The detective droned on.

“Excuse me, what?” she asked.

“I said, you can’t leave the state until we have more answers.”

“I didn’t intend to, but…I had nothing to do with this.”

“We’re pretty sure you didn’t, ma’am,” Johnston replied, “but we might have more questions for you.”

“Yeah, sure. I understand.” She didn’t expect to hear from them again because she didn’t have anything to add to what she’d already told the detective. She knew next to nothing about Tim except his taste for flowers. “Can I go now?”

“Yes. Officer Walker will see you home.”

She was driven the short distance to her apartment, where she handed over her bloodstained jeans and jacket. Once the officer had gone, she went directly to her shower almost on autopilot. She stared blankly at the red suds as they disappeared down the drain, wanting to believe she was stuck in a bad dream, but the blood washing off her body told another story.

*

Next afternoon, December 18

Ryden sat in the back room of the flower shop drinking her third cup of coffee as Magda waited on a customer. She’d slept little because of yesterday’s events, and this day had started out poorly, too. She’d spent nearly an hour searching for the wallet she seemed to chronically misplace, before finding it at the bottom of the laundry hamper. And her late start had thrust her into the worst of rush-hour traffic.

When she’d described what had happened the night before, Magda had told her to take the day off. She would have gladly accepted, too, if Magda wasn’t just as, if not more, shaken by the events. They worked silently for most of the day, with Ryden disappearing now and then in the back to collect her thoughts and emotions.

She couldn’t believe Tim was gone, that this mild-mannered man had fallen victim to a crazy killer. The distant ringing of the little bell that hung above the entrance to the shop startled her out of her thoughts.

“Ryden,” Magda called out, “it’s for you.”

She sighed wearily as she got to her feet. God, she was exhausted and certainly in no mood for small talk with customers. She hesitated at the doorway, shocked when she saw who was waiting for her at the counter—Detective Johnston and the other plainclothes cop who’d been at Tim’s house. “Something wrong?” she asked.

“We have a few more questions and would like to look around, if you don’t mind.”

“Look here?” Ryden asked. “What do you expect to find here?”

“We’ll tell you when and if we find what we came for,” the detective answered.

The realization that they were here to look for evidence chilled her. Surely they couldn’t possibly believe she might be implicated in the murders. “But…like I said, I had nothing to do with any of this. I could have been lying dead next to them if I’d walked in a few moments earlier.”