Secrets in Death (In Death #45)(66)

“How would you get the payment to her?”

“I wouldn’t meet with her—which is what she wanted. For us to be seen having drinks together, like friends. No, she wouldn’t have that from me. In her message to me she’d routinely suggest meeting at a certain day, time, at a certain location. Du Vin, where she was killed, or Gino’s, uptown. Once or twice, the Russian Tea Room. I’d arrange for a bonded messenger to deliver. I used different companies.”

“You have records of the deliveries?”

“I have records of everything. Her e-mails and texts, her v-mails on my personal ’link. I’ve changed ’links three times since this started, but she always dug out the new one.”

Knight paused, drank again. “She was good at her job, had a way on screen. She didn’t have to do this, it couldn’t have been only the money. Do you understand? She liked squeezing me.”

“Yes, I understand that.”

“I have a file, and I’ll give you a copy of everything. I always knew I’d be here. Not that she’d be dead, but that I’d be talking to the police about all of it. I knew, no matter how I tried to pretend otherwise, Bic was right all along.”

“What did she have on you?”

“Okay.” Annie closed her eyes a moment. “Okay. My mother was a prostitute. Not my mother of record, not the woman who’ll always be my mother. That’s technically my aunt. But I’m going to call her my mother, and call her sister Carly. My mother took me in, made me hers, when I was barely two weeks old and Carly left me with her. She was only twenty-two years old, my mother, had worked her way through college, had just started a job teaching kindergarten in her hometown in Missouri. I found all this out years later, you understand. She’d raised me as her own, given me everything that mattered. To protect me, she’d moved to St. Louis, taken a job there. Moved away from her friends, her family. My grandparents were and are good people. Carly … was what she was.”

She shifted, took Bic’s hand again. “When I was thirteen, Carly showed up. It all came out, and this woman, this junkie, this prostitute, who’d only given birth to me because she’d been too stupid to even realize she was pregnant, and too afraid of terminating the pregnancy once she did. And calculated my grandparents would buy me from her. She was right about that—I learned that, too. They gave her ten thousand dollars when she threatened to take me away again, and just dump me in a ditch.

“I was thirteen, and I learned everything about my life was a lie. I was so angry, so shocked, so young, it’s all I could see. Instead of embracing my mother, my real mother, not Carly, I rejected her, I attacked her, and while she was trying to explain to me, to reason with me, scrambling to scrape up the money Carly wanted, I locked myself in my room. Later, I snuck out, and I went to the address Carly left with her. A part of the city my mom would never, never have let me go to. She was on the street, soliciting. She wasn’t licensed, you understand—this was before licensing—and the clientele she served wasn’t interested in licenses anyway. Junkies and whores and dealers, a brew of the worst, and I walked right into it.”

Knight shook back the hair that tumbled into her face, a quick, impatient move.

“She was high. I’m not sure I fully understood that, as I’d been so sheltered. I was going to get answers, I was going to get the truth. Not from the woman who’d lied to me every day of my life, but from her. God, thirteen.”

She paused, drank again, slower now, thoughtfully. “It can be such a pissy, know-it-all age. Both fierce and fragile. She laughed at me, put her arm around me, and said how I had plenty of sass, just like her. This man came up—he was high, too—and he said he’d pay her a hundred for a two-fer. I didn’t even know what he meant. She said, ‘Double that, handsome.’ I remember those exact words. She kept that arm around me, so tight, and I was still demanding she tell me the truth, too wrapped up in my own world to see the world around me. They pulled me into the alley. I didn’t even scream, I didn’t know what was happening until he shoved me against the wall, ground against me. I tried to fight, and I can hear her laughing. ‘Not so rough now, handsome, let me warm her up. God, let me warm her up.’”

Blindly, she reached out and Bic gripped her hand in both of his.

“It’s all right. You’re all right.”

“He hit her,” Knight continued, “backslapped her away. Her nose started bleeding, and she hit him. He had a knife, he waved the knife, and they were cursing at each other. So high, just flying high. Him waving the knife, and it cut my hand a little. I grabbed the knife from him, full of fear and rage and shock, and I stabbed him. In the throat. I know it was in the throat. The blood was gushing, and she was laughing again. I dropped the knife, and when he turned on her, I ran. That part’s a blur. Running, getting on a bus again, getting back, running home. I told Mom, told her everything. I’d barely been gone an hour.”

Knight breathed deep. “A lifetime can only take an hour. She bagged my clothes. We’d go to the police. She made sure I wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t hurt. Just some scrapes and bruises, that shallow cut on my hand. She held me all night, rocked me like a baby all night. We’d go to the police in the morning, she told me, and not to worry. But in the morning, there was a media report about a man and a woman found dead in an alley. Multiple stab wounds on both. They showed the photos—the ID photos. Carly and the man.”