could’ve told one of her friends, written it down somewhere, Jesus . . .”
“Sorry. I should have told you to use a false name. But you just told her ‘Corbin,’ right? Not your last name? You have got to relax.”
“She had friends there who met me.”
“Same with me. We’re in the same boat, but it’s not a bad boat, man. Not at all. They haven’t even found the body yet. It’s going to be like last time. They’ll never connect her to us.”
It turned out that Henry was right.
Like Claire Brennan in London, Linda Alcheri became a well-covered missing-persons case. Her body was discovered in early August, when a group of teenagers caused a small brush fire on Eel River Pond that needed to be put out. But in all the articles and reports that Corbin read, none mentioned Henry Wood, or Hank Bowman, for that matter. And no detective showed up at Corbin’s door in New York. They’d gotten away with it again, even though that fact did little to alleviate the fist-sized knot in Corbin’s stomach. It had been different with Linda—so different from when they killed Claire. With Claire, Corbin had been propelled by her wrongdoing and his enormous rage. She knew how much he’d been in love with her, and she let him believe she might feel the same way. And they hadn’t even planned on killing her. It had just happened, and it only happened because Claire had smiled at him. That half smile of pity directed toward Corbin.
No, with Linda it had been something else. Premeditated, for one. And more like a sick, twisted game. Corbin began to wonder if Henry had ever really been that involved with Linda in the first place. He’d said they were, but maybe he had lied.
Corbin kept thinking back to the night of the party, to the way that Linda had acted toward Henry before he’d left the roof deck. She’d seemed glad to see him, giving him a kiss when he arrived, but she hadn’t acted clingy, or even particularly affectionate toward him. She’d flitted around with her other guests. Maybe Henry was just someone she was hooking up with, a casual thing. And if that were the case, then what she did with Corbin that night wasn’t straight-out cheating. Henry had rigged it, lying to Corbin about the extent of his relationship. Or had he?
With obsessive regularity, Corbin struggled to remember all the details that had led to Linda’s death. He tried to remember what had happened after she woke him from the couch, then pulled him with her into the bedroom.
“I hate sleeping alone,” she’d said. “Does that make me a slut?”
Corbin remembered the strong smell of alcohol coming from her pores, how she’d reached down and touched him, then told him maybe they could just cuddle.
“What about Henry? Hank, I mean.”
“Oh,” she’d said, sounding a little surprised to be asked the question. “He’ll be okay.”
“She was the life of the party, that’s for sure” was what a lot of her friends said about Linda Alcheri after the body had been found. That was the most common quote. There was never any mention of a boyfriend.
The more Corbin thought about it, the more he realized that Henry had desperately wanted them to kill again, to replay the events in London, and he’d made it happen, lying to Corbin, making sure he spent the night with a girl who probably slept with everyone. It had been an entirely different situation than what had happened with Claire.
He’d planned everything, even knowing ahead what he was going to do to Linda’s face after she was dead.
Maybe Henry had planned the murder of Claire in London, as well?
He suggested they bring the knife and the shovel to the cemetery?
But the knife and shovel were there for a reason, Corbin told himself. They were there to fool Claire into thinking that Henry had killed Corbin.
Why had that knife been so sharp?
No, Corbin thought. Henry hadn’t planned on it all, because it was Corbin who had started it, who shoved Claire, then banged her head against the ground.
Still, in midsummer, after a night of drinking, Corbin called Henry on his cell phone.
“Hey, man. Great to hear from you,” Henry said.
“We’re done,” Corbin said. “It’s done. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“Okay. Relax. What are we talking about?”
“You know what we’re talking about.”
There was a pause. The air-conditioning in Corbin’s Midtown one-bedroom clicked on and began to hum. “Dude, let’s not