Chapter 101

I’M CLOSE. The corner of the Fálcon is twenty… ten… five feet away. I squeeze my eyes shut, running blind. I can’t bear to look at this.

But I have to look, don’t I? I feel like I have no free will in this matter.

Racing around the corner, I brace for the worst shock of my life. The four body bags.

They aren’t there, thank God. Not yet, at least.

There’s no crime scene, no throng of onlookers. No Dakota either. Just the bright red awning of the Fálcon, pulling me in with its powerful undertow.

Seconds later, I burst through the front doors. Don’t let them be in the same room as before! It’s where Michael would surely look first. He knows the number. I told him.

Dashing through the lobby, I head straight for the elevators, only to see half a dozen people waiting there. Without breaking stride, I turn for the stairs, taking two at a time. I’m leaking buckets of sweat as I climb past the second and third floors.

Spilling out onto the fourth, I practically hurl myself down the long hallway.

It’s quiet.

Too quiet.

Never has a silence sounded so deadly, so haunting and eerie.

I pass one door after another until I reach the room Penley and Stephen were in. Their room. I come to a fast stop, and it’s as if I’ve given the pain of running here a chance to catch up. My legs and lungs feel like an inferno.

I see a “Do Not Disturb” sign that wasn’t there yesterday. Staring at it, I almost don’t notice the other thing that’s different.

The door’s open.

Just an inch, not even that. A small sliver of space between the door and the jamb. Slowly, I push my way in.

It’s no Motel 6. The room is more of a chic apartment. I step into a foyer with black-and-white tile like a chessboard. More games to play? For the first time, I hear something – a voice from around the corner.

It’s Stephen.

Is he laughing? Why would he be laughing?

I take a few more steps forward and realize he isn’t laughing. No, he’s crying. Sobbing is more like it.

Peeking my head out, I glimpse down the short hallway and I see why.

Michael has a gun pressed to his forehead.

Chapter 102

“PLEASE, DON’T DO THIS,” begs Stephen in a high-pitched whine. “Please, no! Please!” He’s naked, quivering and cowering by the foot of the bed. It’s all I can see in the dim room.

“Shut up!” barks Michael. “Shut the hell up!”

It’s happening so fast, and I’m frozen, almost as if I’m stuck in time or I’m watching a dream. That hideous burning smell is back too.

Michael cocks the gun, his voice seared with rage. “You fucked the wrong woman, and youdefinitely fucked with the wrong guy,” he says to Stephen. Then -

PFFTT!

I see the spurt of blood even before I hear the strange muffled blast.

The back of Stephen’s head blows out, and the wall behind him is splattered with dark red brain matter. For a second, he remains standing, his eyes open and brimming with terror. A flap of scalp juts out behind his ear like an open gate. This isn’t a dream, Kris.

Then Stephen’s body goes limp, as if a puppeteer suddenly released the strings. His arms and legs fold as he melts to the floor, a pool of blood around his head creeping wider and wider. The blood on the floor looks almost black.

God is in the details, right?

I begin to scream, just like in my dream.

Michael whirls around, his arm outstretched, the gun aimed right at me. Watching his gloved trigger finger twitch, I throw out my hands. “NO! MICHAEL! IT’S ME!”

He squints, seeing that it’s true. It is me.

“What are you doing here?” he says, lowering the gun.

I struggle for words, but there aren’t any up to the task. All I can do is slowly walk toward him. I’m not sure if I want to hold him or hit him.

“Don’t touch anything!” he says. It’s an order.

Huh?

“Fingerprints,” he explains. “Ours can’t be here. Don’t touch a thing.”

He begins twisting a small tube off the gun’s barrel – a silencer, I assume. That’s why the blast wasn’t really much of a blast.

Then he stops, thinks for a split second, changes his mind. Twist, twist, twist. The silencer stays on.

That’s the word for this, isn’t it? Twisted.

I keep moving toward him, my body feeling as if it’s crumbling with each step. Words finally come. “What have you done, Michael?”

That’s when I look farther into the bedroom and realize -I only knew half of it.

Michael slaps his hand over my mouth before I can scream again. Keeled over on a desk by the bed is a very naked, very dead Penley, blood still dripping down her chest and leg. An awful lot of blood is pooled on the floor.

Michael removes the hand from my mouth, raising a finger to his. “Shhh, we don’t have a lot of time,” he says. “We have to leave now. Kristin, we’ll be fine.”

He’s so cool as he pulls a silk kerchief from his suit pocket and wipes the gun clean. Kneeling down, he places the gun in Stephen’s hand. Then he does something I don’t understand at all. Michael wipes the back of his own hand on Stephen’s fingers, wrist, and forearm.

I watch it all in total shock.

Michael seems so eerily calm, almost robotic as he works. He could just as easily be making a ham sandwich as framing another man for a murder-suicide.

What did he say about Stephen on the answering machine? “What if he doesn’t take the news well?”

Michael stands up, scowling at me, and it’s as if I’ve never seen him before in my life.

“You weren’t supposed to be here,” he says.

Were that only true. But I know otherwise. I was definitely meant to see this; I just don’t understand why yet.

“Where did you get the gun?” I ask.

“It doesn’t matter.”

I think I know. “Vincent gave it to you?”

Michael nods. “He’s parked downstairs. Around the corner. He’ll take us home, and we’ll wait for the police to contact me. You and I have a lot of acting to do, Kristin.”

Chapter 103

I BARELY HEAR Michael as my legs turn to rubber. I’m feeling dizzy and faint. I’m his accomplice now, aren’t I? An accomplice to a double murder. But I didn’t do anything. I came here to stop Michael, not to help him.

He grabs my shoulders, giving me a hard shake. “Stay with me now, okay? You’ve got to stay with me, Kristin. We’re going to be okay.”

This doesn’t seem like the time or place for a heartfelt confession, and yet it’s perfect, somehow.

“I have something I need to tell you,” I say.

“Not right now. Not now!”

“Yes. Right now, right here. Three years ago -”

“Kris, shut up! Just shut up! ”

“Three years ago, I was pregnant and about to have a baby, Michael. I came to New York with my boyfriend, who was the baby’s father.

“I had the baby right here in this hotel, Michael. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? It all revolves around this place, whatever it is. My boyfriend, Matthew, was pre-med at Tufts. He delivered the baby, a little boy like Sean, right here. We had agreed to leave the baby at a hospital after it was born. But the baby, the little boy died. Right here at the Fálcon. Can you imagine what that was like? I let my baby die, Michael! I saw my baby die, my little boy.”

Now it’s Michael’s turn to look and wonder if he knows who I am. It’s a dilemma I’ve been facing myself, for three years.

“We have to go,” he says.

I stare back into his eyes, if only because I can’t bear to look anywhere else in the room. Not at blown-away Stephen, not at Penley -definitely not at Penley.

He really did it. He killed her.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” he says as we head for the door. “We’re done here.”

But not by my count. Not even close.

All along I’ve been seeing four gurneys. Stephen and Penley only make two. Two dead. So we’re not quite done here, are we?