A Chip and a Chair (Seven of Spades, #5)(68)

Scanning the kitchen, she assessed the situation. Nobody would suspect the truth of what had happened here; she could sell Merritt’s death as self-defense, no problem.

Well . . . one problem.

She considered her pale, unmarked hands and arms, then shrugged and raised the knife. Good thing she’d seen so many defensive wounds in her career.

The knife stung as it bit a random pattern of slashes and cuts into her skin, but the adrenaline high rendered the pain negligible. She was more concerned by the possibility that Crystal or Merritt may have had a blood-borne illness, though that couldn’t be helped at this point.

When she finished, she looked like she’d struggled with Merritt for the knife before being forced to use it to defend herself. She dropped the knife on the floor, smeared the blood over her clothes, and ran her sticky hands over her face and into her hair for good measure. Then she returned to the bedroom where she’d left the children.

They were still trapped in the closet, crying at the tops of their lungs. She moved the chair to its original position, sat on the floor, and leaned against the closet door just as she heard a shout of “Police!” from the other side of the house.

She’d need a reason she hadn’t called 911 herself-ah, of course.

Having often been in the presence of traumatic dissociation, she could fake a reasonable approximation of catatonia. She let her limbs go slack, blanked her expression, and unfocused her eyes, staring into space.

The sound of running footsteps was followed by a man’s loud and creative cursing. Natasha didn’t bother trying to attract the cop’s attention; the girls’ hysterical crying would draw him right to them.

He appeared in the doorway a few seconds later-a wiry, uniformed cop with curly black hair and cheekbones like the edge of a cliff. When he saw Natasha, he cleared the rest of the room before holstering his gun and crouching in front of her.

“Ma’am? Can you hear me?”

He touched her face gently, then laid his fingers against her pulse. She didn’t respond.

“How badly are you hurt?” As he examined her bloodied arms, studying what seemed to be a tell-tale pattern of defensive wounds, fury flashed across his face-not too unusual. Most cops would be angered by finding an injured woman at a crime scene.

Then his brow furrowed, and he glanced over his shoulder as if recalling what he’d seen in the kitchen. Natasha imagined it from his perspective: a bruised woman stabbed to death, a large man lying dead beside her, and a second woman hiding in a back room, traumatized and covered in cuts.

As she’d intended, there was only one realistic conclusion that could be drawn. And that’s when she saw it.

He smiled.

It was brief but unmistakable-a swift, vicious twist of his lips, there and then gone. For one moment, however fleeting, he’d been glad she killed Merritt.

Interesting.

His attention returned to the din the girls were making in the closet. “Are there kids in there?” he asked Natasha, though he didn’t wait for a response. “I need to move you so I can get them out, okay? I’m not going to hurt you.”

He lifted her with astonishing strength for such a thin man, moved her over a few feet, and set her carefully back down. When he opened the closet door, he stayed low to the ground, speaking to the girls inside in quiet, soothing tones.

Things happened quickly after that. The cop took the girls out of the house, and shortly afterward, paramedics arrived to attend to Natasha. She decided to continue the ruse of dissociation for now, as it prevented anyone from asking her questions and made it easier for her to keep tabs on the situation.

Eventually, the paramedics brought her outside, sitting her on the back edge of an ambulance while the cops took photographs of her arms and hands. The house was surrounded by police cars and yellow tape, and the entire neighborhood was out in force, clustered as close to the scene as they could get while they whispered to each other excitedly.

The responding officer was among the cops maintaining the perimeter. He was more successful than most, because one icy glare from him was enough to dampen the enthusiasm of the nosiest busybody. Intrigued, Natasha watched him prowling the edges of the crime scene like an angry panther.

She’d become a social worker to better understand human behavior, and that had been after decades of surviving on her own self-taught observations. This man was hypervigilant in a way she’d rarely seen, not to mention so tense that he looked like his spine would snap if he moved too abruptly. She’d bet her degree that he’d experienced something terrible-something he’d pretended to recover from, but which had left deep scars on his psyche.

Yet he’d been so gentle with Natasha and the little girls. When Crystal’s sister ran up to the tape, screaming and sobbing, he was the one who held her as she collapsed in hysterics. And as the paramedics were loading Natasha into the ambulance for transport, he came over to ask them how she was doing.

He was a bundle of contradictions. Natasha had always enjoyed puzzles.

The cop was turning away. “Wait,” Natasha said, her voice small and meek. When he turned back, looking surprised, she added, “I don’t want to be alone. Will you come with me? Please?”

“Sure,” he said without hesitation. He jumped into the back of the ambulance with her and one of the paramedics. “What’s your name?”

“Natasha.”