Gated Prey (Eve Ronin #3)(58)

“What are you talking about?” Anna said. “The baby was already dead. I tried to save him. What I did wasn’t a crime. It was an act of kindness.”

“Anna, look at me,” Eve said and Anna met her gaze. “We found Priscilla Alvarez’s body in your kitchen wall. She was wrapped in plastic with a hacksaw, your bloody clothes, and four open boxes of baking soda.”

Duncan said, “You call that an act of kindness?”

Anna looked down at her hands, and picked at some dry skin on her thumb for a moment, before answering in a calm, matter-of-fact tone.

“Yes,” she said. “The boy would have had a much better life with me. I’m sure she would have appreciated that.”

Her reply disgusted Duncan, who gave Eve a look that conveyed he couldn’t stand another minute with Anna. He got up from his seat and walked to the window, turning his back to both of them.

Anna looked over her shoulder at him. “You know it’s true.”

Eve was disgusted, too, but Anna’s reply was a confession of sorts, indicating that she’d accepted it was all over for her and that she might be willing to tell all, if properly coaxed. Eve decided to be nonjudgmental, to adopt the same tone as Anna.

“When did you decide to take Priscilla’s baby?”

“The day Jeff left for Berlin. He promised that when he came back, there wouldn’t be any more trips, that he’d stay with me until the baby was born. That terrified me. It meant I had to have a baby before he gets back next week.”

“Why not just fake another miscarriage?”

“It would convince Jeff that I can’t have children,” she said. “He’d dump me and find someone more fertile. That’s why he left his first wife. He’s probably already got another woman lined up. He wants a child and is tired of waiting.”

“Why did you pick Priscilla?”

“I saw her walking past my house every week. She kept getting bigger and bigger. It was like she was mocking me. It was so unfair. All the people who work here are poor, uneducated, and illegal. The only thing they’re good at is cleaning toilets and getting pregnant. Nobody would miss her,” Anna said. “So I told our contractor to take the week off, that my doctor said I needed quiet and rest before delivering my baby. Once he was gone, I opened up part of the kitchen wall, laid the plastic on the floor, and waited for her to walk down the hill to catch her bus.”

“What made you think you could perform a C-section?”

“I watched some videos on YouTube. It didn’t seem too hard, and it wasn’t, really. The difficult part was what to do with the body. There were no YouTube videos for that.” Anna grinned, which sickened Eve. “It took some thinking, but I figured it out.”

Eve noticed that Anna never used Priscilla’s name. That would have humanized her victim too much. But Eve kept repeating her name anyway, even at the risk of irritating or shutting down Anna’s confession.

“How did you get Priscilla into your house?”

“I went outside and stopped her as she was walking by. I asked her if she could maybe squeeze in another client after she had her baby. Of course she said she could, because those people are always desperate for money, so I invited her in to take a quick look at the house and give me a price.”

“She wasn’t worried about missing her bus?”

“She was, but I promised her I’d drive her home if that happened,” Anna said. “I led her into the kitchen, and once she was standing on the plastic, I pulled a bag over her head and strangled her.”

The casual way Anna said it, as if it were something people did every day, was frightening. But Eve kept her emotions in check, forcing herself to respond with the same flat, conversational tone as Anna’s.

“Did it occur to you that strangling her would also suffocate the baby?”

Anna gave her a bewildered look. “Is that what happened? Well, now that I think about it, I guess that makes some sense, though I tried to work very fast.”

“Was the baby already dead when you called 911?”

“I think so. It was such a disappointment. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I had a plan to follow, and I stuck to it. I got undressed, smeared the maid’s blood on my thighs, because it wouldn’t look right if I wasn’t bleeding, then I put her body in the plastic with everything, taped her up, and stuck her in the wall. Then I called 911. That’s when I could let go and feel my pain.”

Her eyes actually started to well up with tears, as if she were the one who’d endured the suffering, not Priscilla and her baby. Eve found herself at a loss for words.

Duncan turned away from the window and looked at Anna. “What were you going to do if you got away with it? Just leave her in your wall?”

Anna wiped away her tears. “Of course not. What if we remodeled again or if we sold the house someday? It was too risky. So before Jeff got home, I was going to take the body out to the desert, somewhere off the highway on the way to Victorville, and bury it. Even if the body was found someday, nobody would know who she was. She was here illegally. She wasn’t anybody.”

“Tell that to her husband and children,” Eve said.

“What about me?” Anna said. “That’s the sad part. I would have been an amazing mother.”