The 8th Confession

“Honestly, I didn’t know you were so conversant with the Old Testament,” I said while peering around Clapper to better gawk at the vignette on the bed behind him.

“I’m Old Testament on my mother’s side,” he said.

I would have laughed, but my glimpse of the crime scene had suddenly made everything too real. I mumbled, “Keep in touch,” and walked past Clapper into Molly’s bedroom suite, where two naked men lay dead.

The boy was lying on the floor, head to one side, looked to be in his teens. His platinum-blond hair was spiked, and his green eyes were still open. Looked as though he’d been crawling toward the door when he succumbed.

The older man was on the bed in a half fetal position, his apron of belly fat obscuring his genitals. His eyes, too, were open. He hadn’t died in his sleep.

This was what death by krait looked like. Central nervous system shut down, resulting in neuromuscular paralysis. The victims hadn’t been able to breathe.

“When did they die?”

“They’re still warm, Lindsay. Love to narrow it down for you, but I gotta say they died six to twelve hours ago. Did Molly volunteer anything useful?”

“Nope. Just the four bad words: ‘I want my lawyer.’ ”

Claire sighed. “Before she stopped talking, Molly told me that the dead kid was her houseboy, name of Jordan Priestly. She called him ‘Tyco.’ ”

“Tyco, like the toy company? Oh. I get it. Boy toy.”

“But I didn’t need her to identify this here father figure. He’s Brian Caine.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. That Brian Caine. Tony Tracchio better put on his cast-iron jockstrap,” Claire said, “because Caine Industries is going to be all over him.”

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 ca

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

Were we wrong?

Questions darted through my mind like a school of mi

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, Bu

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.

He was oh for six.

My hands were over my ears, my eyes wide open. I stared as the snake kept coming, now only a yard away from the tips of Claire’s bootees.

I read the terror on her face. Moving would attract the snake, but Claire had no choice. She bolted for the stepladder that she used to shoot overhead pictures.

I broke for the hallway.

The firebox was on the wall. I smashed the glass with my gun butt, cleared the shards, reached for the fire ax, and ran back to the room.

Conklin was aiming again. Claire was standing on the ladder’s top rung, and her assistants were screaming, as good as climbing the walls.

I lifted the ax, brought the blade down on the snake, divided it neatly in two at midpoint.

Both halves of the snake continued to writhe.

“It’s dead, right?” I called out, my voice shrill, sweat pouring down the inside of my shirt. “It can’t do anything, can it?”

My mind was suddenly swamped with images of sharks lying on boat decks – presumed dead – that “came back to life” to clamp their jaws around fishermen’s legs.

This snake was still wriggling, mouth open, lethal fangs exposed.

We all stared, transfixed by the killer that wouldn’t die. Then Conklin came out of his trance, disappeared into Claire’s office, and returned with a metal trash can, which he upended over both parts of the snake.

He sat on the trash can.

The look on his face told me that he felt like he was sitting on a bomb.

“No, this is good,” he said to me, red-faced, perspiring, eyes bugging out just a little. “Good a time as any to get over my fear of snakes.”

Animal control arrived at the morgue forty minutes later. They relieved Conklin and lifted the trash can.

Both parts of the krait were still wriggling.

The front end gnashed at the air.