I sat up like a bolt. She started laughing and slipped off the bed. She began getting dressed.
“That wasn’t funny,” I said.
“I think it was,” she insisted.
I climbed off the bed and started getting dressed, too. She kept laughing in a punch-drunk sort of way. Eventually, I was laughing too. I pulled my pants and shirt on first and then started hunting around the bed for my shoes and socks. I found them all except for one sock. I finally got down on my knees and looked for it under the end of the bed.
And that was when the laughter stopped.
Angela Cook’s dead eyes stared at me from under the bed. I involuntarily propelled myself back on the carpet, smashing my back into the bureau and making the lamp on it wobble and then fall to the floor with a crash.
“Jack?” Rachel yelled.
I pointed.
“Angela’s under the bed!”
Rachel came quickly around to me. She was only wearing her black panties and white blouse. She got down to look.
“Oh, my God!”
“I thought you checked under the bed!” I said excitedly. “When I came in the room I thought you’d already looked.”
“I thought you did while I was checking out the closet.”
She got on her hands and knees and looked up and down the under-side of the bed for a long moment before turning to look back at me.
“She looks like she’s been dead about a day. Suffocation with a plastic bag. She’s naked and completely wrapped in a clear plastic sheet. Like she’s ready to be transported. Or maybe it was to contain the smell of decay. The scene is quite diff—”
“Rachel, please, I knew her. Can you please not analyze everything right now?”
I leaned my head back against the bureau and looked up at the ceiling.
“I’m sorry, Jack. For her and you.”
“Can you tell, did he torture her or just… ?”
“I can’t tell. But we need to call the LAPD.”
“I know.”
“This is what we’ll say. We’ll say I brought you home, we searched the place and we found her. The rest we leave out. Okay?”
“Fine. Okay. Whatever you say.”
“I have to get dressed.”
She stood up and I realized the woman I had just made love to had completely disappeared. She was all bureau now. She finished getting dressed, then bent over to study the top of the bed at a side angle. I watched her start to pick hairs off the pillows so they couldn’t be collected by the crime scene team that would soon descend on my house. The whole time I didn’t move. I could still see Angela’s face from where I sat and I had to adjust myself to the reality of the situation.
I barely knew Angela and probably didn’t even like her too much but she was far too young and had far too much life ahead to suddenly be dead. I had seen a lot of dead bodies in my time and I had written about a lot of murders, including the killing of my own brother. But I don’t think anything I had ever seen or written about before affected me like seeing Angela Cook’s face behind that plastic bag. Her head was tilted back, so that if she’d been standing she would’ve been looking upward at me. Her eyes were open and frightened, almost glowing at me from the darkness under the bed. It seemed as though she were disappearing into that darkness, being pulled down into it and looking up at the last light. And it was then that she had made one last desperate push for life. Her mouth was open in a final, terrible scream.
I felt like I was somehow intruding on something sacred by even looking at her.
“This isn’t going to work,” Rachel said. “We have to get rid of the sheets and pillows.”
I looked up at her. She started pulling the sheets off the bed and gathering them into a ball.
“Can’t we just tell them what happened? That we didn’t find her until after we—”
“Think, Jack. I admit something like that and I am the butt of every joke in the squad room for the next ten years. Not only that, I lose my job. I’m sorry but I don’t want that. We do it this way and they’ll just think the killer took the sheets.”
She balled everything up together.
“Well, maybe there’s evidence from the guy on the sheets.”
“That’s unlikely. He’s too careful and he’s never left anything before. If there was any evidence on these sheets he would have taken them himself. I doubt she was even killed on this bed. She was just wrapped up and hidden underneath it—for you to find.”
She said it so matter-of-factly. There was probably nothing in this world that surprised her or horrified her any longer.
“Come on, Jack. We have to move.”
She left the room, carrying the bedsheets and the pillows. I slowly got up then, found my missing sock behind a chair and carried my socks and shoes out to the living room. I was putting them on when I heard the back door close. Rachel came in empty-handed and I assumed she had stashed the pillows and sheets in the trunk of her car.
She picked her phone up off the floor. But instead of making a call she started pacing, head down and deep in thought.
“What are you doing?” I finally said. “Are you going to call?”
“Yes, I’m going to call. But before it turns crazy, I’m trying to figure out what he was doing. What was this guy’s plan here?”
“It’s obvious. He was going to pin Angela’s murder on me, but it was a stupid plan because it wasn’t going to work. I went to Vegas and I can prove it. The time of death will show I couldn’t have done this to Angela and that I was set up.”
Rachel shook her head.
“With suffocation it is very difficult to pinpoint exact time of death. Narrowing it to even a two-hour window could still put you in the picture.”
“So you’re saying my being on a plane or in Vegas is no alibi?”
“Not if they can’t pinpoint time of death to exactly when you were on that plane or already in Vegas. I think our guy is smart enough to realize that. It was part of his plan.”
I slowly nodded and felt a terrible fear start to rise in me. I realized I could end up like Alonzo Winslow and Brian Oglevy.
“But don’t worry, Jack. I won’t let them put you in jail.”
She finally raised her phone and made a call. I listened to her speak briefly to someone who was probably a supervisor. She didn’t say anything about me or the case or Nevada. She just said she had been involved in the discovery of a homicide and would shortly be interacting with the LAPD.
Next she called the LAPD, identified herself, gave my address and asked for a homicide team. She then gave her cell phone number and ended the call. She looked at me.
“What about you? If you need to call someone you better do it now. Once the detectives arrive they’re probably not going to let you use your phone.”
“Right.”
I pulled out my throwaway and called the city desk at the Times. I checked my watch and saw it was well past one. The paper had long been put to bed but I needed to inform someone of what was happening.
The night editor was an old veteran named Esteban Samuel. He was a survivor, having worked for the Times for nearly forty years and having avoided all the shake-ups and purges and changes of regime. He did it largely by keeping his head down and staying out of the way. He didn’t come to work until six P.M. each day and that was usually after the corporate cutters and editorial axmen like Kramer had gone home. Out of sight, out of mind. It worked.