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Her address, an apartment building on the east side, was on her driver’s license. Because poor Emmy’s back wasn’t up to walking down the hill to where Nosy Girl’s car was parked, Roddy did it. By then it was dark. He drove it up to their house, where Em took over. Roddy followed her in their Subaru to Nosy Girl’s building. A button on the visor lifted the gate to the underground parking garage. Em parked (in this hot midsummer there were plenty of vacancies) and limped back up the ramp to the Subaru. She insisted on driving home, although she could only use one hand effectively. Probably because she was afraid Roddy wouldn’t remember the way, which was ridiculous. He’d had a few Elf Bites after they got Nosy Girl downstairs and into the cell—so had Em—and he was clear, very clear. Not quite so clear this morning, but clear enough. Like Holly, he understood this would be a very bad time to lose his wits.
Emily joins him. She’s wearing an Ace bandage wound tight around her wrist. It’s swollen and throbs like hell. The Gibney woman tried her best to break it but didn’t quite succeed. “She’s awake. We need to talk to her.”
“Both of us?”
“That would be best.”
“All right, dear.”
They go into the house. On the kitchen counter in a white dish are the two green pills: cyanide, the poison with which Joseph and Magda Goebbels killed their six children in the Führerbunker. Roddy scoops them up and puts them in his pocket. He has no intention of leaving their final means of escape in the kitchen while they are in the basement.
Emily takes a bottle of Artesia water from the refrigerator. There is no raw calves’ liver in there. There is no need for any. They want nothing to do with Nosy Girl’s smoke-polluted carcass, didn’t even have to discuss it.
Emily gives Roddy her thin smile. “Let’s see what she has to say for herself, shall we?”
“Be careful on the stairs, dear,” Roddy says. “Mind your back.”
Em replies that she’ll be fine, but hands the bottle of water to Roddy so she can grip the railing with her good hand, and she goes down very slowly, a step at a time. Like an old woman, Roddy mourns. If we get out of this somehow, I suppose we’ll have to take another one, and soon.
Risk or no risk, he can’t bear to see her suffer.
5
Holly watches them descend. They move with glassy care, and she’s once again amazed that they have taken her prisoner. That old ad comes to mind. She should have gone to the running car after all instead of hiding behind the chainsaws.
“I wouldn’t believe you’d have much to smile about in your current situation, Ms. Gibney, but apparently you do.” Emily has both hands at the small of her back. “Would you like to share?”
Never answer a suspect’s questions, Bill used to say. They answer yours.
“Hello again, Professor Harris,” she says, looking past Emily… who, by her expression, does not enjoy being looked past. “You came up behind me, didn’t you? With your own Taser.”
“I did,” Roddy says, and rather proudly.
“Were you here last night? I seem to remember your pajamas.”
“I was.”
Emily’s eyes widen and Holly thinks, You didn’t know that, did you?
Em turns to her husband and takes the water. “I think that’s enough, dear. Let me ask the questions.”
Holly has an idea there will only be one question before they slam the big door and turn out all the lights, and she would like to postpone it. She has remembered something else from last night, and it fits with the undergraduate nickname for this man. Fits perfectly. Were she free and talking with friends about the case in bright daylight she would have considered the idea absurd, but in this basement—thirsty, in severe pain, a prisoner—it makes perfect sense.
“Is he eating them? Is that why you take them?”
They exchange a puzzled look that can be nothing but authentic. Then Emily bursts into surprisingly girlish laughter. After a moment, Roddy joins her. As they laugh they share the particular telepathic look that is the sole property of a couple that’s been together for many decades. Roddy gives a slight nod—tell her, why not—and Emily turns to Holly.
“There is no he, dear, only we. We eat them.”
6
While Holly is discovering that she’s been locked in a cage by a pair of elderly cannibals, Penny Dahl is in the shower with her hair full of shampoo. Her phone rings. She steps out onto the bathmat and plucks it off the clothes hamper while soapy water runs down her neck and back. She checks the number. Holly? No.
“Hello?”
It isn’t a man who replies but a woman, and she doesn’t bother with hello. “Why did you call in the middle of the night? What’s the big emergency?”
“Who is this? I asked for a callback from Peter Hun—”
