Fool Me Once(96)

Joe had reiterated when she’d come home how he hated guns, that he had no interest in going with her to the range, that he really wished that she didn’t keep them in the house.

In short, he doth protest too much.

It was odd, looking back on it, why a man who had no interest in guns would still want to have his fingerprint in the safe database. “Just in case,” Joe had said. “You never know.”

There are moments in life when everything changes. It was again like one of those optical illusions. You see only one thing, and then you shift something just a little, and everything changes. That was how she felt, holding this gun that someone who clearly didn’t know what they were doing had tried to clean.

It was a gut punch. It was a betrayal of the worst kind. Sleeping with the enemy—she felt a fool and worse. And yet it also made terrible, horrible sense somehow.

She knew.

Even as she went into denial, she knew that this gun, her own gun, had killed her sister. She knew it even before she went to the range and shot it and brought the bullet to Shane. She knew even before she talked Shane into secretly testing it against the .38 found in Claire’s skull.

Joe had killed Claire.

Still there was a chance she was wrong. There was a chance a clever hit man had broken into the safe, used her gun, put it back. There was a chance it wasn’t Joe at all. That was why she switched the two Smith and Wesson 686s, putting the one Joe had taken from the safe’s hidden compartment for out-of-state purchases and switching it with the one registered in New Jersey that she kept in plain view. She made sure none of her other guns were loaded or had ammunition . . .

Only the Smith and Wesson in the hidden compartment.

She started digging through Joe’s stuff and intentionally left clues that she had done so. Maya wanted him to know that she was onto him. To see if he would react. To get enough information to make him tell her why he had killed Claire.

Yes, Kierce was right. It was Maya who called Joe that night, not the other way around.

“I know what you did,” she had said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I have proof.”

She told Joe to meet her in that spot in Central Park. She arrived early and cased the area. She spotted two street punks—she would later learn their names were Emilio Rodrigo and Fred Katen—walking past Bethesda Fountain. She could see from the way Rodrigo moved that he was carrying a weapon.

Perfect. Fall guys who could never be convicted.

When they met up, she gave Joe every chance.

“Why did you kill Claire?”

“I thought you said you have proof, Maya. You have nothing.”

“I will find proof. I won’t rest. I will make your life hell.”

It was then that Joe pulled out the loaded Smith and Wesson 686 he’d found in the safe’s hidden compartment. He was smiling at her. That was what she thought anyway. It was probably too dark to see that and her eyes were drawn to the gun. But right now, as she relived what had happened, she could swear Joe was smiling.

He aimed the gun at the center of her chest.

Whatever she had thought before—all that talk about what she knew—it fled out the window at the sight of the man she’d pledged to love forever pointing a loaded gun at her. She had known, and yet she hadn’t believed it, accepted it, not really, it was all a mistake, and somehow, forcing his hand like this would show her what she had missed, how she got it wrong.

Joe, the father of her child, wasn’t a murderer. She hadn’t shared her bed and her heart with a killer who tortured and murdered her sister. There was still a chance that somehow it could all be explained away.

Until he pulled the trigger.

Now, sitting in that foyer in the dark, Maya closed her eyes.

She could still remember the look on Joe’s face when the gun didn’t go off. He pulled the trigger again. Then again.

“I removed the firing pin.”

“What?”

“I took the pin off the hammer so it couldn’t fire.”

“It doesn’t matter, Maya. You’ll never prove I killed her.”

“You’re right.”

That was when Maya took out her other Smith and Wesson, the same one Joe had used to kill Claire, and shot him three times. She intentionally missed killing him with the first two. She was an expert markswoman. Most street-punk robbers were not. So death from a single shot would be too obvious.

Kierce: “The first bullet hit your husband’s left shoulder. The second hit landed in the right tangent of his clavicle.”

She’d worn a trench coat and gloves she’d bought for cash at a Salvation Army store. That was where any powder residue would end up. She ripped them off and threw them in a bin over the wall and onto Fifth Avenue. They wouldn’t be found, but if they were and someone decided to test them for powder residue, big deal—they couldn’t be traced to her. She bent down now and hugged Joe as he died, making sure to get plenty of his blood on her shirt. She put both guns in her handbag. Then she stumbled back toward Bethesda Fountain.

“Help . . . please . . . someone . . . my husband’s . . .”

No one searched her. Why would they? She was a victim. At first, everyone was concerned with her possible injuries and finding the killers. The confusion paid off. She had been prepared to dump the handbag somewhere—there was nothing in it but the weapons—but in the end, there had been no need. She just held on to them and eventually took them home. She dumped the murder weapon in a river. She put the firing pin back on the hammer of the registered Smith and Wesson and put it back in the safe. That was the one Kierce took and tested.