Definitely not Roy fucking Schafer, who was standing in the hall outside.
"Go away."
"You know I can't do that, Jamelia."
"I said, 'go away.' "
"And I said I'm not going to."
"For how long? A few minutes? An hour? What happens when I let you in? What happens when we solve this thing? You gonna wait outside my apartment then, too?"
"Jamelia-"
"Don't you 'Jamelia' me. Go away. I don't need you here. I can take care of myself."
He took the comment like a slap in the face. The expression was every bit as satisfying as she'd thought it was, in the deep place in the pit of her stomach where right and wrong didn't matter nearly so much as making sure that people suffered when you wanted them to suffer.
He waited a minute, opened his mouth just about long enough to close it again, and then walked off. Even from the limited view of the peep-hole she could see that what started as a casual walk away quickly became frustrated, even angry.
She smiled the way that people smile when other people hurt inside. That was all she needed. Another way to fuck her own life up. It was a mess, and it was perfect, and that was all she'd ever asked for. Doing this to herself didn't even bother her, not any more.
No need to worry about whether or not there was a future for them any more, not when she could just end it now. She could almost feel the weight of doubt falling off her shoulders already. No more need to question what was going to happen between them. Nothing was going to happen between them, and that was good enough. As long as she could know where she stood, it didn't matter that it hurt.
After all, she'd always deserved to suffer. Maybe Roy did, or maybe he didn't. But she hurt worse, which in the end meant it was okay.
Thirty
Jamelia let herself slump back against the bed and felt the tugging in her chest that told her to go back and apologize. She couldn't just leave things the way they were. She shouldn't have said it. She should have opened the door.
That was exactly why she didn't do it, though. Because every part of her wanted to, and that part was going to hurt now or it was going to hurt when he had to leave her behind when he left. But the hurting, that part was built in.
And if she was going to hurt, then she wasn't going to let someone else hurt her. She'd been a bitch for twenty-five years, and looking back it had hurt her as much as it had hurt anyone else.
Then she crawled back into bed and got ready for the time that was going to come. Things wouldn't stay this way. Craig had told her he was going out of town, and he'd done it for a reason, though she couldn't begin to guess what that reason was.
That meant that she needed to be ready for just about anything. Someone was going to get killed, and it was going to be soon. Neither of the two men she'd met so far had been accidents.
Nor had they been caught by accident. The one who broke into her house, 'Ryan,' had been sent there. No chance in hell was he there of his own volition. He wouldn't even know where she lived.
Craig could have been the man pulling the strings, but why? Why would he want her dead? Because she knew too much? That directly contradicted what he'd told the others in that little grove. She was 'on the hook,' he'd told them. Then, not four hours later, he sends someone to kill her? It didn't make any sense. Not one lick of sense.
There was always the chance that he expected her to get the better of her attacker. Maybe Craig had told the guy that the owner of the apartment was out of town. Just an easy break-in. But then why bring the gun?
She'd seen evidence plants before. This wasn't that. The weapon was holstered and buttoned in. So it wasn't the uniforms trying to protect her.
If it wasn't Craig, who was it?
The thought ran through her head that whenever things seemed impossible, there was probably a wrong assumption somewhere. Too many detective novels as a girl, maybe, but she'd learned a long time ago that it didn't always work that way. Sometimes the only wrong assumption you had was that their reasons would make sense.
But just in case, she ran through a few of them. First was that Roy wasn't involved. More than a few television shows had given rise to the notion that there might be dozens or hundreds of killers who took over investigating their own murdering, and then have to pin it on someone else. If Roy were involved he would have certainly wanted her dead. And he'd left with about enough time to kill Becca. The pieces fit together, sort of, but only in the broadest strokes.
She didn't get the gut feeling that he could have done it. It wasn't a hell of a lot to go on, but as she thought it through, the circumstances got pretty ugly. Why sleep with her damn near right up until the moment her sister died?
Well it was to taunt her. The questions were easy to answer. But if he was trying to taunt her, he could have done a better job of it. He could have asked about her family, asked about her sister. How things are going with them, the works.
He had a phone, if it was just an ordered killing then he could have stayed at the resort until after Jamelia got the call. That would have protected him from any suspicion. That he didn't know not to have circumstances make him look suspicious was evidence by itself that he didn't know about the murder in advance.
She assume that Craig was involved. But it was impossible that he didn't know anything. He'd been slowly handing her the killers one-by-one, in order. As if he had them all in his back pocket and every day or two he decided that she should have another one. Just barely slow enough that it might be inconspicuous.
By now he'd know that the cops had picked up the blue-and-white truck. No doubt he'd known it before he told her he was leaving town, probably got a text about it during their brunch together. Very possibly they'd reached out to him as soon as the guy was picked up.
The questionable assumption lit up like a Christmas tree. She assumed that there was someone else in the shadows, someone who was manipulating these guys into killing the women they'd killed. Or, at least, someone manipulating them after the fact. Now that they were here, and the women were dead, someone was passing them orders.
That one hadn't been because of a feeling or a hunch or anything like that. She just had trouble believing that Craig would make such erratic decisions, so much relying on chance.
But maybe he wasn't as smart as she had him pegged for, or maybe he was much smarter than she had figured. Maybe-
Jamelia heard the sound of footsteps coming to a stop in front of the door. She saw the shadow of the figure outside, saw it widen just a bit, and then an envelope slipped under the door. She reached for it and grabbed, but she could already tell that whoever had dropped it was in the wind. They'd taken their sweet time coming up, but the minute that the envelope was all the way through they'd started booking it down the hall, towards the fire escape. It was closer than the elevator.
Right on cue as she opened the door, the fire alarm hit. Someone had gone through the fire door. The heavy door sent a loud slam echoing through the hall. Jamelia winced as it sounded, and looked down at the envelope in her hands.
Russo, it said. The handwriting was nice, neat, even. She tore the envelope open neatly and tossed the torn-away bit in the trash can by the door. The paper was neatly folded. She unfolded it and started to read.
The handwriting here was atrocious. She knew right away that someone else must have written the letter, than the person who folded it up and addressed it to her.
She could barely decipher it in some parts, but the parts she could told her that what she was looking at was a diary. A diary for the writer and the writer only, or they might have tried to fix the numerous misspellings and mistakes in writing. Then again, maybe they didn't know about them. Maybe this was how the person always wrote, but nobody wrote anything like this.
Nobody wrote anything like this, that is, except for a confession. Jamelia took a breath and sat down at the little table by the window, flattened the paper out, and pulled out her own pad. If she was going to make a serious attempt at reading this, then she was going to need a copy that was at least halfway legible. And that meant transcribing, which meant a lot of work, considering how poorly written the original was.
She took a breath and a pen and craned her neck forward in the chair. Either way, she had work to do.
Thirty-One
Jamelia took a long last look at her copy. This was a confession, more than anything. The problem was that she had no idea who she was supposed to pin it on. She didn't recognize the handwriting on the paper, nor did she recognize the handwriting on the envelope. But they spoke of two completely different individuals. People who were so completely separate on the scale that someone might wonder if they were, strictly speaking, the same species.
Jamelia knew better. Or at least, she certainly thought she did. There were bad people out there, and there were uneducated people out there, and there were people out there who had unsteady minds. This guy was all of those things.