I hit him in the side of the leg with the bolt cutter, and he dropped to his knees, firing again.
I tried to scramble backward, away from him, as he tried once more to take aim at me.
Jabbing at him with the bolt cutter, I managed to hit his wrist.
The gun fired again.
I ducked to the right.
Kulak was screaming now, in a blind rage, his eyes rolling in his head.
“Kulak! Freeze!”
“Sheriff’s office!”
“Freeze!”
“Drop it!”
I heard the shouts and the shots that followed instantly.
Blood and tissue pelted me.
Alexi Kulak’s body jerked and twisted above me.
He looked surprised. Shocked.
And then the light in his eyes went out, and his rage went flat, and his body dropped, falling across Bennett Walker’s legs.
I dragged myself to the side on one arm, trembling violently, my heart pounding wildly. My ears were ringing. I lay flat on the cold concrete. Not six feet away Bennett Walker stared at me. His eyes were wide open, unblinking.
One of the shots from Kulak’s gun had struck him in the forehead.
He was dead.
Chapter 65
Landry ran across the garage, shouting Elena’s name at the top of his lungs, knowing she probably couldn’t hear him. The gunshots were still ringing in his own ears. He could hardly hear himself think.
“Elena! Elena!”
She didn’t move, staring at Bennett Walker’s blank, lifeless stare.
“Elena!”
He was there then, on his knees, bent over her, wiping blood splatter and tissue from her face, hoping to God none of it was hers. His hands were shaking.
“Are you hit?” he shouted, staring into her face. “Are you hit?”
She blinked, seeing him for the first time.
“H-he’s d-dead,” she said.
Landry nodded. Gently he pulled her into his arms and held her, his cheek pressed against the top of her head. It seemed they stayed there for a long time, even as deputies and crime-scene people moved around them.
His heart galloped for miles as the adrenaline slowly ebbed. He couldn’t remember ever having been so scared as he had been seeing Alexi Kulak pointing a gun at this woman he now held.
What an idiot he had to be, falling in love with a woman who put herself into situations like this one over and over again. But there it was, and all he could do about it was hold her and stroke her hair, and whisper words to her that he was sure she couldn’t hear.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter what the words were. It only mattered that he said them.
Chapter 66
For once an ER doc and I agreed: she did not want to admit me, and I did not want to be admitted.
“She’s been shot, for Christ’s sake,” Landry growled.
The doctor, who might have been a zygote when I was her age, rolled an eye at him. “It’s only a flesh wound.”
“Yeah?” Landry said. “How many times have you been shot, sweetheart? This isn’t a fucking paper cut.”
I got off the gurney, my arm in a sling, and started for the door.
“Elena-”
“I want to go home,” I said simply, and walked out into the hall.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
I didn’t argue. Nor did I point out to him that I couldn’t get home without him. I hadn’t gone to Alexi Kulak. Alexi Kulak had come to me. I didn’t want Landry asking me why.
“Lisbeth is there and-”
“No, she isn’t,” he said.
I stopped and faced him. “What?”
“She’s not there. There was no one in the house when I stopped by.”
Half a dozen bad scenarios streaked through my head like so many comets, the worst of them being that Kulak had gotten rid of her while he was lying in wait for me. “We have to find her,” I said.
“We’ll find her.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. We have to find her. She knows what happened.”
Landry squinted at me. “What do you mean, she knows what happened? We know what happened. Walker killed Irina because she was pregnant. She was going to ruin his life. He killed her and dumped her body.”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? You’ve been selling Bennett Walker as a killer from day one.”
“I don’t think he did it, James,” I admitted. “I watched Alexi Kulak torture him. The only thing Kulak wanted to know was why. Why did he kill her? And all Bennett could say was that he didn’t know, that he couldn’t remember doing it.”
“So? Who would cop to anything that would piss off Alexi Kulak?”
“But that pissed off Alexi Kulak,” I said. “If Bennett had had an answer, he would have given it up. I think he believed he did it. I think he woke up Sunday morning, found a dead girl in his pool, and convinced himself he must have done it.
“He couldn’t give Kulak the answer, because he didn’t have one.
“And what makes you think Lisbeth does?”
A hunch, I thought, a feeling. A feeling that had been slowly taking root in the back of my mind as small scraps of information melded together.
“When Barbaro recanted his statement,” I said, “I asked him if he had seen anyone who could corroborate his statement. He said he’d seen Lisbeth. As he got back to his car at Players, she was walking across the parking lot. But Lisbeth told me she went home long before that.”
“So Barbaro’s lying,” Landry said.
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he lie about something so stupid? Why not just say no one saw him? It’s impossible to disprove a negative.”
“And why would Lisbeth lie about being there,” Landry said, as the picture started becoming clearer to him, “unless she had something to hide.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Yesterday I showed a photograph of Irina and Lisbeth to a mentally disturbed woman who hangs around Players and the Polo Club. I asked if she had ever seen Irina. She looked at both girls and said that they were very naughty. I think she meant ‘they’ as in ‘together.”“
“You think Irina and Lisbeth were involved?” Landry asked.
“I think so. I think Lisbeth thought so, anyway.”
“But why would Lisbeth kill Irina?” Landry asked.
I thought about it for a moment, replaying all the broken little pieces of memories. The photographs of Lisbeth and Irina together, Lisbeth so happy and smiling-and the photos of Lisbeth standing a little apart and uncomfortable in the snapshots of herself with men. Too many pictures of Irina on her fridge, I had thought.
I thought about how hard Lisbeth had argued with Irina about the after-party. I thought about the abject grief and the abject guilt.
“Irina was pregnant,” I said. “She wanted a rich American husband, not a naive lesbian farm girl from East Backwater, Michigan.”
“Rejection,” Landry said.
A deep sense of sadness came over me as I thought about it. As motives for murder went, it was one of the oldest stories in the book. Unrequited love. It never ceased to amaze me that an emotion that was supposed to be so good and bring such joy so often turns so destructive.
And no matter how often life tries to teach us that lesson, we keep going back for more.
Chapter 67
The moon was bright as Lisbeth walked along the dirt road. She didn’t know what time it was. Time didn’t matter. She had been walking for quite a while, though, she thought.
She had never walked into the wild countryside alone. The idea would have frightened her. But not Irina. Irina would have laughed at her fear of snakes and alligators, and teased her into going. Irina knew how liberating it was not to feel fear. Lisbeth was only just beginning to learn what that meant.
She knew where she was going because the location had been described in great detail over the last few days among riders and barn hands, on the news. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, to go to the place where Irina had been found, where her body had been destroyed. It was no less a holy place than any other for her.