Now You See Her (Page 60)

When the water was deep enough to reach the overflow drain, she turned off the faucet and crawled into the tub without bothering to take off her pajamas. She almost howled as she sank into the hot water, the heat was so intense. Her toes throbbed. She stared at her bare feet through the clear water; they looked white with cold, almost shrunken.

She sank down until her chin touched the surface of the water. Tendrils of hair floated around her shoulders. Her trembling sent little wavelets sloshing to-and-fro. “Please please please,” she heard herself saying, over and over. Please let this work. If it didn’t, she would have to call 911. Probably she should already have done it, but a part of her just couldn’t believe a chill was serious.

She began to warm. It was a gradual process, the heat of the water transferring to her flesh. The shivering began to dwindle, so that it wasn’t ceaseless, letting her relax between the episodes. Exhausted, she laid her head against the sloping back of the tub. Always before, when she was warm, she got sleepy, and the colder she had been the sleepier she got. She would have to be careful not to fall asleep in the tub.

The water began to cool. Her fingers and toes grew pink and wrinkled. She let out some of the water, then turned on the hot water to refill the tub, but she forced herself to sit up. The danger of falling asleep was a real one, and so was staying in the water too long. Just a few more minutes, she promised herself.

Sometime during those few minutes she began crying again. Like most people, Candra had been neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Until she had seen Sweeney and Richard together, she had always been warm and friendly. Candra’s support had meant a lot to Sweeney’s career.

Sweeney regretted the way they had parted. She didn’t, couldn’t, regret her involvement with Richard, but the timing could have been better. If the divorce had been final, if Candra hadn’t been bitter about the settlement—There were so many things to which she could tack an “if,” and not one of them could be changed.

She didn’t dare stay in the water any longer. She opened the drain and hauled herself, trembling, to a standing position. Her muscles felt like boiled noodles. She removed her dripping pajamas, peeling them off and hanging them over the shower curtain rod to drip. Toweling off required immense effort. She finally had to sit down on the toilet lid to finish drying her legs and feet.

She blotted the dripping ends of her hair. She had to go back to bed, at least for a while, but she didn’t want to do it with wet hair. That seemed to be asking for another chill. Her eyelids drooped, and she sagged sideways, catching herself at the last moment.

She couldn’t wait for her hair to dry, either. She could always cut it off, she thought, and then shook her head as a measure of common sense kicked in again. She plucked a dry towel from the stack and wrapped it around her head, tucking all the wet ends up under the cloth. That was the best she could do.

She wobbled her way to bed. The electric blanket was still on. Naked, she crawled between the blissfully warm sheets and was asleep as soon as her muscles relaxed.

*   *   *

Detective Joseph Aquino was a burly guy with shrewd eyes and a homely, lived-in face that invited confidences. Detective H.E. Ritenour was lean and more pugnacious, his sandy hair cut military short, and he had a habit of fixing his pale gaze on suspects and not blinking until they began to squirm.

Richard didn’t play games. He didn’t fidget, and he would bet the discipline trained into him would outlast the detective’s technique. He wondered if Ritenour would stare until his eyes dried out.

When they had come to his house early that morning to tell him of Candra’s death, he had known immediately he was at the top of their list of most-likely suspects. He kept his behavior low-key and cooperated with everything they asked of him, functioning despite the shock that tried to numb his brain.

He hadn’t loved Candra in a long time, and for the past year had actively hated her, but he had never wanted her dead. He just wanted her out of his life. Now she was, in the most final way. The death of someone you knew well was always a shock, like a wound in your concept of reality. The world had changed, and for a while you had to struggle with the abrupt alteration.

Because their divorce wasn’t final, he was still legally responsible for the arrangements. He identified her body, and though he had seen bodies before, that had been in military action, undeclared war, where they had gone in knowing there could be casualties and accepted the risk, doing it anyway. This was different. This was the woman with whom he had shared his life, even if only superficially, for ten years. He had slept with her, made love to her, and, in the beginning at least, loved her. All he could feel now was regret, but it was genuine.

He called her parents, who had moved from Manhattan when her father lost almost every penny he had in some bad stock decisions. Now Charles and Helene Maxson lived just outside Ithaca, their circumstances so reduced Candra had always invited them to the city rather than spend a night in what she called “little more than a shack,” though Richard thought the brick ranch house was upper-middle-class and a lot better than what most people had. But Candra had grown up in wealth, while Richard had a different perspective.

Because of the circumstances, Richard quietly told Charles he would defer to him and Helene in the necessary decisions. Candra was their daughter; their grief was sharp. The location and means of interment would be their choice, as would the service.

Every step he took, Richard was aware of the pair of detectives. One or both of them was always within earshot when he was on the phone. Any resentment he felt was immediately controlled, because they had a job to do and murder statistics showed that any time a woman was murdered, either her husband or boyfriend was the one most likely to have done the deed. Because he and Candra had been embroiled in a divorce, that tipped the percentages heavily against him. So he remained calm, even when the detectives finally took the step of taking him into precinct headquarters and sat down with him in an interrogation room, a small, dingy square space occupied by three chairs and a beat-up table that wobbled.