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

Conklin laughed, said, “You paint a wonderful word picture.”

I told him, “And you’ve got a great laugh, Rich. I love to hear you laugh.”

He held my eyes until I blinked first.

The only clock in the room was on the DVR, and I was too far from it to read the flashing digits, but I knew that it was late. Had to be somewhere around two in the morning, and I was feeling keyed up, starting to get some ideas about seeing the rest of Rich’s apartment. And maybe the rest of Rich.

My mind and body were overheating, and I don’t think Rich meant to cool me down when he went to the kitchen to retrieve the chilled bottle. While he was gone, I undid a shirt button.

And then another.

In the process, I adjusted my position on the couch, felt something hard and sharp down between the cushions. I wrapped my fingers around the object, pulled it out, and saw a hair clip, a rhinestone barrette between my fingers.

The shock of that two-inch sparkler chilled me to the core. Cindy’s barrette could have found its way to this couch only if Rich and Cindy had been grappling on it.

I placed the barrette on the coffee table, looked up as Rich returned with the bottle. He saw the barrette, saw the look in my eyes. Opened his mouth to say something — but nothing came out.

I averted my eyes, made sure he wouldn’t see my pain.

I muttered that it was late and thanks for the wine. That I’d see him in the morning.

I left with my shoes half tied and my heart half broken. I found my car on the street where I’d left it, and I talked to myself as I drove home.

“What are you, jealous?” I shouted. “Because being jealous is stupid! Attention, brain cells: Rich plus Lindsay? That is really, really stupid!”

Chapter 69

BY THE TIME Pet Girl arrived at Molly Caldwell-Davis’s Twin Peaks house with its astounding city view, the party had been going on for hours. Pet Girl pressed the doorbell, banged the knocker until “Tyco” opened the door and the postdisco camp of the Scissor Sisters boomed out into the night.

Tyco was wearing his party clothes: a feather boa around his slender shoulders, nipple rings, and a black satin thong. He handed Pet Girl a flute of champagne, kissed her on the lips, said, “Hi, sexy,” in a jokey way, so that Pet Girl laughed instead of saying thank you.

Pet Girl pushed past Tyco and entered the main room with its dizzying decor: tables and sofas in stepped-Alice-in-Wonderland heights, black-painted walls, leopard-print carpeting, bodies entwined on the floor pillows, the whole place feeling more like a bordello than the home of a girl who worked in a tea shop and had an eight-digit trust fund.

Pet Girl found the tanned and yoga-toned Molly on a low-slung sofa, crouched over a mirrored table, doing lines through a silver straw. Slouched beside her, swaying two beats behind the music, was the legendary fifty-year- old software billionaire Brian Caine.

“Look. Who’s. Here,” Caine said, giving Pet Girl a look so nakedly sleazy, she wanted to poke out his eyes.

“Molly,” Pet Girl said, holding out a sixty-eight-dollar bottle of Moët & Chandon, “this is chilled.”

“Just put it anywhere,” Molly said, turning away from Pet Girl as Tyco brought over a stack of Polaroids. She shrieked with delight as she pawed through the sex snaps her houseboy had taken of guests frolicking in her bedroom.

As suddenly as Molly’s attention had been pulled away from Pet Girl, it boomeranged back.

“Don’t you smell that?” Molly asked her. “Something’s burning. Why are you just standing there?”

Pet Girl blunted her expression.

She went to the kitchen, removed the pan of bite-size mushroom quiche from the oven, dumped a tray of Kobe beef on toast — worth three hundred dollars a pound — into the dog’s bowl. Then she stomped back into the party.

She called Molly’s name, finally catching her unfocused stare beneath her blank, Botoxed forehead.

Pet Girl said, “I fed Mischa. Are you going to remember to walk him?”

“Tyco will do it.”

“All right then. Au revoir, babycakes.”

“But you just got here.” Brian Caine pouted. The front of his black silk pajamas had fallen open, revealing his disgusting, hairy man-boobs. “Stay,” he implored Pet Girl. “I want to get to know you better.”