Blood in the Water(32)

She got to the elevator and pressed the button. The doors opened immediately. It had been waiting on this floor. She stepped back and waited until Arthur got inside. Then she pressed the button for the first floor and stared at the ceiling.

Arthur looked down at the thick curve of her neck. He thought again that he could take her any time he wanted to. He could leave her disabled and bloody on the floor. He could walk right over her and out and never be heard from again, except that there were all those other people around, and some of them had guns.

The elevator door bounced open. She stepped out into yet another corridor. Arthur stepped out after her. This corridor was full of desks and people, not prisoners but officers. They looked at him with interest as he came walking out, and as soon as he passed Arthur could hear the low murmuring of whispered conversations.

The little Hispanic woman went to the third door on the left and said, “He’s in there.”

Then she waited until he opened the door and went inside.

The room he walked into was largish. There was a big conference table in the middle of it, with chairs all around. His legal aid attorney was sitting in one of them, holding tightly to a stack of folders he had pulled out of a briefcase. Arthur tried to remember the kid’s name, but he couldn’t. He looked like he might be twenty-two.

“Well,” he said, when Arthur walked in. “Sit down. Sit down. This is a development.”

Arthur sat down and folded his hands in front of him “What’s a development?”

“This is,” the lawyer said. “Didn’t they tell you? They’re dropping the charges against you for killing your wife.”

“What?”

“They’re dropping the charges against you for killing your wife,” the lawyer repeated. “And that changes everything, of course. It even changes the bail situation. They’ll never be able to hold you on remand now. They might have, of course, if they weren’t dropping one set of charges, but now with this—”

“Why?” Arthur asked carefully. “Why are they dropping the charges against me for killing my wife?”

The lawyer laid his hands flat on the conference table and sighed. “I don’t actually know,” he said, “but I’ve heard rumors. I’ve heard lots of them. We’ll know for sure when we go into court, and that’s in less than half an hour, so I want you to be ready. But the rumors are that the DNA evidence came back and the other body they found wasn’t your wife’s at all.”

Arthur considered this. “They had DNA from my wife?”

“I don’t know,” the lawyer said. “I suppose they must have. Mr. Heydreich, really, it doesn’t matter right now. We can get to all that later when we’ve got a little time. What matters now is that we go into that hearing and if they insist on charging you for the murder of Michael Platte, then we get bail for you on that. I’m pretty sure that’s more than perfectly doable. The judge is old Nancy Kildare, and she’s got no patience with prosecutors as it is. So just get yourself into some kind of a good mental zone and let’s go in there and get you out of here for good. Then you can get home and get back to some kind of real life.”

Arthur thought of saying that he would not be able to get back to any kind of real life until somebody else was caught and charged and convicted of the murder of Michael Platte, at least, but he did not say that. He only wondered where the police thought his wife was now.

2

LizaAnne Marsh had gone into a state of nearly apoplectic mourning on the day she’d heard that Michael Platte had died, but it had been a month now, and it was getting harder to keep her focus. She was still really angry about what had happened to Michael, of course, and beyond furious at all those ridiculous stories about how he was having an affair with Martha Heydreich. It was ludicrous to think that somebody like Michael would have had an affair with somebody as old and ugly and extreme as that woman, when he could have had any girl he wanted in Waldorf Pines. He could have had LizaAnne herself. She knew he was interested. If he’d lived, it would have been just a matter of time before they had something going, and it would have been something a lot more attractive than anything he could have had with that stupid shrieking cunt. People just said things like that because they liked to sound as if they knew things.

LizaAnne was in her bedroom. Stretched out across her bedspread she had two hundred and twenty little thumbnail photographs, one for each of the members of the senior class of Pineville Station Senior High School. She loved having these pictures, because they made everything so much easier. Before this year, she’d had to get along with nothing but pens and pencils and notebooks. Even the computer hadn’t been much help. Now she could actually see what she was looking at. That made all the difference.