The Crime Writer

Katherine Harriman thanked the jury for their time and attention, smiled disarmingly, and sat down, immersing herself in paperwork so she wouldn't have to acknowledge Donnie as he began his closing.

"Our clever killer, our plotter of murder most foul, could come up with no scheme better than this? He snuck over to Genevieve Bertrand's house and then… what? Decided to leave the front door wide open? So both Westec and the neighbors would call the police, you see. Because he also planned precisely when he was going to have a seizure. He held back until just the right moment, you see. This man, this clever man, thought it would be beneficial for his ganglioglioma to swell that extra millimeter right there in Ms. Bertrand's bedroom, sending him into a grand mal seizure so the police could find him in his compromised state, establishing evidence for the insanity plea he knew he'd require during the trial he knew he'd have. Certainly the most logical approach for a clearheaded individual, don't you think? Well, happily, his elaborate plan paid off. Because he definitely fooled me. I've had the duty of trying over thirty murder cases in my career, and never and I mean never have I been more certain of a client's compromised sanity at the time of an incident than I am today."

As Donnie continued, vehement and passionate, I felt a surge of affection, something even like love, for this man who had, for a fee, taken on my cause and argued it as his own. When he finished forty-five rousing minutes later, he sat, practically panting adrenaline, and marshaled his papers into the stretched maw of his briefcase.

After the jury filed out, I reached over, squeezed his neck, and said to him and Terry, "Regardless of how this thing goes, I want you to know I appreciate what you did for me here."

We clasped hands for a moment, all three of us.

The second verdict came back three hours and nineteen minutes later.

Chapter 4

The kitchen floor beneath my bare feet felt as cool as the stainless-steel handle of the chef's knife. Through the dark I stared at the blank slit in the knife block where the boning knife should have been. I'd closed the sliding glass door had I locked someone in with me? My heart revving, I looked through the doorway at the trail of marks I'd figured for footprints. The last few were visible on the carpet before it gave over to the flagstone entry.

Not dirt, as I'd thought.

Blood.

I had a moment's lapse into terror, genuine kid-in-the-dark terror, before I recalled that I was an adult and had no options except to outgrow my mood and handle business. Firming my grip on the chef's knife, I eased through the doorway into the entry. No one peering down at me from the upstairs railing that lined the catwalk from stairs to study to bedroom.

The footprints hadn't ceased at the foyer flagstone, though they were harder to make out against slate. But there, two steps up on the carpeted stairs, another bloody C. I gazed up, the staircase fading into the dark.

Tamping down my fear, I followed. Every other step bore the mark.

I reached the top of the stairs. The footprints continued straight into my bedroom. I moved forward, knife held upside down along my forearm, blade out, as I'd learned from an expert knife fighter while broadening Derek Chainer's repertoire. I reached the threshold. Bracing myself, I swept inside.

No one was there. But on the carpet at the foot of my bed, the boning knife gleamed. I moved forward, crouched over it. The skin of my right foot was smudged, just above the little toe and extending down my outstep. I reached down, noticing that the pads of my fingers also bore dark stains. Smears on the boning-knife handle. And on the blade's edge at the tip. My head swam a bit.

I raised my foot, noting the distinctive, if now faint, C mark left behind on the carpet.

My own blood. My own footprints.

I turned on the lights, set down the chef's knife, and returned to the boning knife on the floor. A jagged print of blood on my left thumb matched a mark left on the stainless handle. The blood on my fingers from, I assumed, touching the cut on my foot, also left predictable marks matching my grip.

My fingerprints. On my boning knife.

I washed my foot in the tub. For all the blood, it was a humble cut. A clean incision, no more than an inch long, about a thumb's width back from the base of the little toe. A Band-Aid took care of it.

My head still felt unusually foggy ganglioglioma, back for a holiday sequel? I tried to tease apart which concerns were reasonable and which weren't but found my perspective momentarily shot. Was someone running me through a rat maze? Either I was driving myself insane or someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that I would. I sat on the tub's edge, hugging my stomach and shuddering, until compulsion drove me around the house, flicking on light switches, searching for a body, an intruder, Allen Funt and his Candid Camera crew.