Eight Perfect Murders(29)

Stepping into the house I swung the crowbar again, but Chaney easily blocked it with his meaty left arm, then swung at me with his right, batting me in the shoulder with a fist. It didn’t hurt but it knocked me off balance for a moment, and Chaney charged, grabbing me by my tracksuit in both fists, shoving me up against a wall. Something, probably a coat hook, jabbed me high up in my back. Warm blood was spraying from Chaney’s nose, hitting me in the face. Some memory, probably from an Ian Fleming novel, went through my panicked mind, and I raised my right foot, bringing my heavy boot down hard on Chaney’s instep. Chaney grunted and loosened his grip, and I pushed forward as he stumbled backward, both of us falling after a few steps, me landing on top of him, hard, hearing something snap. Chaney’s face contorted, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish pulled from the water. I pushed myself off his body, then put a knee on his chest and leaned on top of him again. He struggled to breathe, and I put my gloved hands around his thick neck, and squeezed, pressing as hard as I could with my thumbs. He tried to pull my hands loose, but he was already weakening. I closed my eyes and kept squeezing. After about a minute, or it might have been longer, I stopped and rolled off to the side, breathing heavily and aware that my mouth was salty and thick with blood. I ran my tongue around my teeth, but it was the tip of my tongue that was ragged and painful. I must have bit it during the fight. Blood was filling my mouth, and I swallowed it. It seemed a bad idea to spit a mouthful of my own blood onto the scene of a crime, even though I knew I’d probably left all sorts of DNA traces already.

Crouching in front of Chaney, and without directly looking at him, I felt for a pulse in both his neck and his wrist. There was none.

I stood, the world wobbling around me for a moment, then bent to pick up the crowbar. I had decided earlier that I would need to go through the house, take a few valuables, after Chaney was dead, but I didn’t know if I had it in me. I just wanted to be back in the car, heading as far away from what had just happened as possible.

I was about to turn when movement from the corner of my eye made me look across the foyer toward the open-plan living room with floor-to-ceiling windows. A ginger cat was making its way slowly toward me, its unclipped nails clicking on the hardwood floor. The cat stopped and sniffed at Chaney’s body, then looked again at me and meowed loudly, taking two steps closer, then flopping onto its side and stretching out to show its white tufted stomach. A wave of almost paralyzing cold swept through my body, a premonition that for the rest of my life this one image, this cat asking for love while its owner lay murdered on the floor, would haunt me forever. Without thinking, I bent down and scooped up the cat, bringing it with me out to my car, and driving away.

The snow had picked up and had now begun to stick to the roads. I drove slowly, reversing my route back through Tickhill’s town center then picking up the highway that would lead me through the White Mountains and south to Massachusetts. My movements in the car felt slow and deliberate, and even the car itself felt like it was moving through air that had turned into something close to solid. Time had slowed down, and everything was suffused with a sense of unreality. I looked down at the passenger seat where I’d put the docile cat. Some part of my brain was yelling that you never take anything from the scene of a crime, telling me I’d just signed my death warrant, but I kept driving. The cat was now looking up toward the window, at the snowflakes flying by the car. There was no collar. I reached a hand out and rubbed the cat along its spine; it was thinner than I thought, most of its bulk coming from its thick orange fur. I thought I could detect a tiny purr vibrating through my fingertips.

Once I was through the mountains, and my mind had started to clear a little, I made the decision that I would pull over into some random town, look for a store, or an inn, someplace with an unlocked door, and slide the cat inside. He or she would be found and taken to a shelter. There was a risk, a huge risk, that someone would see me, but I had to try. I should never have taken the cat, and I couldn’t even remember now why I had done it. But now that the cat was in the car, I couldn’t bring myself to simply push it out onto the side of the road. That would be the prudent thing to do, but the cat’s chances of survival would be so slim.

I kept driving, and somewhere in southern New Hampshire the cat put its head down and went to sleep. I hadn’t pulled over in any random town, and I suddenly knew that I wasn’t going to. When I arrived back in Beacon Hill and found a parking spot right in front of my building, the cat was still with me. I scooped it up and took it upstairs. It was ten thirty in the morning.

While the cat padded around my small apartment, sniffing and rubbing its cheek along every piece of furniture, I stripped off all my clothes and put them, along with the crowbar, into a heavy-duty garbage bag. Then I showered, soaping up and rinsing off at least three times, until the hot water began to run out.

In my original plan for the day, I was going to leave Chaney’s house, then drive slightly north to a used bookstore I knew that was in an old refurbished barn. I’d been there multiple times, and in the past had had luck finding rare editions of crime novels. If for some reason I wound up being a suspect in Chaney’s death, if my car had been spotted by someone, then at least I’d have had some reason for being in New Hampshire on that particular Monday. It was a very thin alibi, but it was better than nothing. I supposed that now I could say that I was planning on driving to a favorite bookstore but turned back because of the snow.