Then he comes upon a final photograph. This has more people in it, and by the time Hunter has absorbed the content, his hands are trembling. He closes the laptop, but it makes little difference. The image burns in his head like a flare. The photograph was taken, presumably, by the woman lying dead in the bedroom. She’s not in it, at any rate, though her husband is. It shows a table in the sidewalk area of the Columbia Restaurant on St. Armands Circle. The cloth is strewn with plates of half-eaten food and jugs of half-drunk sangria. Candles and lamps are lit—it’s midevening, middinner. Phil Wilkins is in the center, next to a young-looking Warner, with another two women and two men, most of whom Hunter half recognizes. They look happy and full to the brim with confidence and joie de wealth and circumstance, their shared grins, teeth, and tans impregnable as a fortress: except the couple in the middle, whose smiles look a little forced, as if there’s something on their minds.
Behind and to one side of the table, at the edge of the range of the camera’s flash, is another man. He’s looking down as he locks the battered car he’s just arrived in. He’s totally unaware of the Kodak moment twenty feet away. The man is John Hunter.
At the moment the picture was taken, they didn’t even know he was there. He remembers the night, however. About thirty seconds after this picture was snapped, he noticed Phil Wilkins at the table, and Phil stood up and—in retrospect—took care to come over to Hunter rather than let it happen the other way around.
They had a brief conversation. Though Hunter knew a couple of the others by sight—and had met Warner a couple of times—none appeared to pay him any attention. His mind had been on other things in any event. He was keen to go meet his woman. He waved vaguely at the table and hurried away. He arrived at a much cheaper restaurant on the other side of the Circle to find that his date hadn’t arrived yet, and was relieved.
He was less relieved when, an hour later, she still hadn’t shown up. He eventually left alone.
Yes, he remembers this night. It was his last as a free man. It was the night before the cops found the mangled body of the only woman he’d ever really loved, and blamed her murder on him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I woke with a cricked neck and a head that felt very terrible. I was sprawled on the floor, face pressed into the rug, forcing my head at a right angle to the direction it usually faced. My neck had clearly been unhappy about this for a while, and got straight onto announcing the fact now that I was awake. Opening my eyes made everything much worse immediately. The room was full of morning light streaming from the glass door onto the balcony. It smelled of ash and wine.
I blinked and focused and saw my phone lying on the floor near my head. The screen said 7:35. The panic this induced had me sitting upright, very suddenly.
Cassandra’s bedroom door was shut.
I had time to feel a beat of relief that I hadn’t made a total fool of myself by trying to follow her in there in the dead of night.
Then I noticed that the bathroom door was closed, too, and that there was now a word on it. The word was scrawled in letters that had dripped and run like spilled red wine.
The word was modified.
Someone was banging on the front door.
I scrambled to my feet, pushing myself upward via the sofa, meanwhile stepping on the saucer Cassandra had been using for an ashtray, flipping it over, and spreading ash and lipsticked butts everywhere.
I grabbed my phone. I lurched over to the bathroom door. The letters there had not been written in wine, of course. Wine would have simply run, leaving nothing but a faint residue. These letters had dripped more slowly, viscously. The red was browner, matte where it had dried. It was blood. It had to be blood.
I pushed the door open. “Cass?”
Just the bathroom. The shower cubicle. Water dripped from the fixture slowly. No one there.
More banging on the front door. I turned toward the bedroom. My head was pounding and I could feel sweat popping out all over my body and scalp.
I pushed the bedroom door. It opened six inches, showing me a strip of the far wall.
“Cass? You in here?”
There was no response, so I said it again, fighting against the climbing volume of the hammering coming from the front door and against the knowledge that I was going to have to go into the bedroom.
“Cassandra?”
I pushed the door farther, and took a step.
The smell of whatever perfume it was Cassandra wore. A bed, empty. The comforter thrown back. Everything covered in blood. Just so much blood.
There was no sign of a body, but I knew Cass could not have lost so much blood and still be alive.
All the perspiration on my body turned to ice. I stumbled back into the main room. It seemed clear I was going to have a heart attack and I didn’t care. The front door was beginning to splinter around the lock. I stumbled in the opposite direction, toward the frosted glass door.
Out on the balcony it was very hot and very bright. The balcony was three feet deep, four feet wide. A rusting railing, broken brown tiles underfoot. A couple of stories below lay a patch of waste ground, once landscaped but now overrun with scrub and tilted palm trees and discarded household items dropped off the balconies on this side of the building. Those either side of Cassandra’s were too far for me to hope to get to. I leaned over the railing, feeling it shift and squeak beneath me, and couldn’t see how I could hope to get down without breaking my neck. This was a dead end. There was only one way out of the apartment. I stepped back into the room just as the front door finally flew open.
A woman burst in. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, brown hair tied in a tight ponytail. She clocked the word daubed on the bathroom door.
“Where is she?”
I must have glanced toward the bedroom. She ran over, ducked her head through the door—and swore violently, in a voice that sounded close to cracking.
When she came back out I realized I’d seen her before, dressed differently. She was the waitress from Jonny Bo’s. The one who’d served us on Monday.
“What . . . what are you—”
“Come with me,” she said, grabbing my arm and driving me toward the front door with enough force to almost throw me over. “Come now. Or you’re going to die.”
She herded me in front of her along the walkway toward the spiral stairs. I stumbled down them, round and round, my head splitting, and I didn’t start to resist until we got down to the courtyard at the bottom, and she started to trot toward the gate.
“Who are you? Why are you—”
She stopped and turned in one fluid movement, and before I knew it had her hand at my throat, thumb and fingers gripped around my windpipe. She looked me directly in the eyes and tapped my cheek lightly—tap tap tap—with the tips of two fingers of her other hand.
“No questions. Do what I say, and do it now, or I’ll leave you here and that will be the end of it.”
She let go of me and ran off toward the gate. I followed. I didn’t know what else to do. There was a battered pickup parked in the street outside. I went around while she opened the driver’s-side door. I’d barely got my ass on the seat before she stamped on the gas and yanked the vehicle in a hard fast 180-degree turn and accelerated off up the road.