Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

She looked up at the television. As if on cue, the story had switched from the hurricane to her mother. The diner video was paused on Laura holding up her hands to show Jonah Helsinger the number of bullets.

So weird, the way she was doing it—four fingers on the left hand, one on her right. Why not hold up just one hand to show five fingers for five bullets?

Suddenly, the image switched to a photograph. Andy felt her heart do a weird flip at the sight of Laura. She was wearing her standard going-out-to-parties outfit of a simple black dress with a colorful silk scarf. Andy knelt in front of the TV so she could study the details. Laura’s chest was flat on one side. Her hair was short. There was a lighted star behind her, the topper on a Christmas tree. The hand on her waist must have belonged to Gordon, though he’d been cropped out of the image. The photo was probably from Gordon’s most recent office Christmas party, which Laura had never missed, even when they’d wanted to kill each other. She smiled at the camera, her expression slightly guarded in what Andy always thought of as her mother’s Gordon’s Wife Mode.

She unmuted the sound.

“... on the off-chance that it might happen. Ashleigh?”

Andy had missed the story. The camera cut to Ashleigh Banfield, who said, “Thanks, Chandra. We have breaking news about a shooting in Green County, Oregon.”

Andy pressed the mute button again. She sat on the edge of the bed. She watched Ashleigh Banfield’s face go into a split scene beside a run-down looking house that was surrounded by a SWAT team. The banner said: Man kills own mother, two kids, holding injured wife hostage, demanding pizza and beer.

Another shooting.

Andy flipped the channels. She wanted to see the photo of Laura again, or even to glimpse Gordon’s hand. MSNBC. Fox. The local news stations. All of them were showing the live stand-off with the man who wanted pizza after murdering most of his family.

Was that a good or bad thing—not the man killing people, but the news stations covering it live? Did that mean they’d moved on from covering Laura? Would there be another killing machine to profile?

Andy’s head was shaking even before she asked herself the obvious question: where was the story about the body of Samuel Godfrey Beckett being found in Laura Oliver’s beachside bungalow? That was big news. The victim had been felled by a frying pan, ostensibly by a woman who had hours before killed a police officer’s son.

And yet, the scroll at the bottom of the screen contained the usual headlines: another senator resigning, probably because of sexual harassment, another gunman shot by cops, interest rates going up, healthcare costs on the rise, stock market drops.

Nothing about Hoodie.

Andy felt her eyebrows furrow. None of this made sense. Had Laura somehow managed to keep the police out of the house? How would she even do that? The 911 text Andy had sent provided legal cause for them to break down the door. So why wasn’t Killing Machine Strikes Again being shouted about all over the news? Even with the SWAT stand-off happening in Oregon, the last photo of Laura should have been her mugshot or, worse, video of her entering the jail in handcuffs, not a photo from a Christmas celebration.

Andy’s brain was overloaded with all the whats and whys.

She let herself fall back onto the bed. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was no light coming from around the closed curtain. She looked at the clock: nine thirty in the evening.

She should go back to sleep, but her eyes refused to stay closed. She stared at the brown spots on the popcorn-textured ceiling. What was her mother doing right now? Was she at home? Was she talking to Gordon on a jail phone with a thick piece of glass between them? Andy turned her head to look at the television. Still the SWAT story, even this many hours later. Her nostrils flared. The bedspread smelled like a bear had slept on it. Andy sniffed under her arms.

Ugh.

She was the bear.

She checked the lock on the door. She closed the hotel latch. She wedged one of the chairs underneath the doorknob. Someone could still break the large window to get in, but if someone broke the window to get in, she was fucked anyway. Andy peeled off the jeans and polo shirt and underwear. Her bra was disgusting. The underwire had rubbed the skin raw underneath her armpit. She threw it into the sink and turned on the cold water.

The hotel soap was the size of a pebble and smelled like the last vestiges of a dying bouquet of flowers. She took it into the shower and between the soap and the shampoo, the tiny bathroom took on the scent of a whore house. At least what Andy thought a whore house might smell like.

She turned off the shower. She dried herself with the hotel towel, which had the consistency of notebook paper. The soap came apart in her hands as she tried to clean the stink out of her bra. She spread the crappy hotel lotion on her body as she walked into the bedroom. Then she wiped her hands on the towel to get the lotion off, then she washed her hands at the sink to remove the fuzz from the towel.

She unrolled the sleeping bag on the bed. She unzipped the side. The material was thick, filled with some kind of synthetic down, and with a nylon, waterproof outer layer. Flannel liner. Not the kind of thing you’d ever need in Belle Isle, so maybe Laura hadn’t pulled Idaho out of thin air after all.

Andy opened the suitcase and picked off the top row of twenties. Ten across, three wide, times $2,000 was... a lot of money to hide inside of a sleeping bag.

She laid the stacks out in a flat row along the bottom of the bag. She smoothed down the nylon and pulled up the zipper. She started to roll the sleeping bag from the bottom, but the money bunched into a lump. Andy took a deep breath. She unrolled the bag again. She reached into the bottom and pulled the stacks to the center. She rolled the bag carefully from the top, secured it with the Velcro strap, then stood back to judge her work.

It looked like a sleeping bag.

Andy hefted the weight. Heavier than a sleeping bag, but not so that you’d become alarmed and think there was a small fortune inside.

She turned back to the suitcase. A third of the money was left. Bad guys in movies always ended up in train stations, which had lockers, which made it easy for them to hide money. Andy doubted there were any train stations in Florence, Alabama.

The best solution was to split it up. She should probably hide some of it in the car. There would be space inside the spare tire well under the trunk. That way, if she got separated from the sleeping bag, she could jump in the car and still have some cash. For the same reason, she could put some of the cash in her purse. Except that her purse was back in her apartment.

Andy found the hotel notepad. She wrote purse at the top, then soap, lotion, bra.