The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club 8)

Claire instructed her assistants to snap up the corners of the fitted bottom sheet, wrap it around Caine’s body to preserve any trace before putting it all in the body bag.

Claire said to me, “You and Conklin can meet me at the morgue when you’re done here. I’m going to take my time with these gentlemen, give them a better external exam than their mamas gave them when they were born.”

Chapter 73

I WENT BACK down to the breakfast room, saw that Christine Rogers had joined Molly and Conklin.

Rogers was a celeb in her own right, a rich person’s all-purpose attorney. She was trim and pretty, a gray-eyed blonde looking deceptively young for a senior partner in a big-time law firm that had her name on the door. Just guessing, but Ms. Rogers probably charged a thou an hour.

I had to ask myself why Molly Caldwell-Davis needed a cannon when even a slingshot was overkill.

We hadn’t been looking at Molly as the doer.

Were we wrong?

Questions darted through my mind like a school of minnows. Did Molly know the Baileys? Sara Needleman? Where was Molly when they were killed? Did she have any connection with the victims of the snake killings of the early ’80s?

Was this half- stoned rich girl stealthy enough, smart enough, motivated enough, to be a serial killer?

If so, what had possessed her to kill people in her own bed?

Christine Rogers’s face was weary, but her hair shone, her blouse was starched, and her pin-striped Armani suit cost what I made in a month. She may have had the crazy schedule of a senior partner, but the attorney was all business.

“Ms. Caldwell-Davis wants to cooperate completely,” she said. “When she went to bed around one thirty a.m., Brian Caine and Jordan Priestly were alive. When she woke up sometime after ten, they were dead.”

I looked Rogers in the eye and said, “Maybe if she collects her thoughts, one or two of them will give us a clue.”

“Whatever happened, my client slept through it and was miraculously spared,” Rogers said. “I want the police, the brass, the press, everyone, including God, to know that Molly had nothing to do with the deaths of her good friends. She’s sick that they’re dead. And she has nothing to hide.”

“Wonderful,” Conklin said. “So, Molly, this is square one. We need a list of everyone who was here last night, including the caterer, the delivery people, and whoever walks your dog.”

Molly looked at Conklin with her big red-rimmed eyes. There was dried spittle in the corners of her mouth.

“Tyco walked my dog. I cooked for the party, and Brian tended the bar. I didn’t know half the people who showed up, and that’s the truth. People brought people who brought other people.”

“Let’s start with the ones you know,” said Conklin.

Chapter 74

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Conklin and I entered the autopsy suite and saw Tyco’s body lying on a slab. His eyes were closed, but his collection of nipple rings and studs winked from a stainless- steel bowl under the lights.

“I’d almost given up,” Claire said. “But look here.”

She raised the boy’s left arm, handed me the magnifying glass so I could see what she was calling “two defined pinpoint punctures.”

Beside me, Bunny Ellis, Claire’s number one assistant, pulled down the zipper on the second body bag, the one holding the remains of Brian Caine.

I turned — and for a terrifying moment I thought Brian Caine was alive.

The sheet Caine was wrapped in moved — but as I watched in horror, I saw that it wasn’t Caine that was moving. It was something slim and banded, barely discernible against the mottled pattern of the sheet.

I screamed, “Snake! That’s the snake!”

The animal seemed liquid as it poured out of the body bag and slid down one of the legs of the gurney onto the floor, head flattened in strike mode, winding across the gray ceramic tile toward Claire.

“Don’t move!” Conklin yelled out.

His gun was in his hand, and he fired at the swiftly moving target, once, twice, again and again, the weapon bucking, bullets pinging off the tiles, gunfire echoing in the suite.