For one crazy moment, Pet Girl imagined turning on the lights to look for Vasuki and making up a story if someone woke up — but Molly wouldn’t buy anything she said.
It just wouldn’t play.
Disgusted with herself, horrified at what would happen to Vasuki if she was found, Pet Girl took a last futile look over the moonlight-washed bed. Nothing moved.
She packed up the pet carrier and left Molly’s bedroom, closing the door again so that Mischa, at least, would be spared.
Outside the house, beginning the long walk down Twin Peaks Boulevard, Pet Girl assured herself that everything would be okay. As awful as it was to lose Vasuki, there was no ID on that snake.
No one could ever tie Vasuki to her.
Chapter 72
MOLLY CALDWELL-DAVIS LOOKED at me as though she were trying to break through a profound case of amnesia when Conklin and I interviewed her in her breakfast room. Her eyes were red, and she croaked out microsentences between long blank moments as she strained to remember the night before.
Conklin said, “Molly, take it slow. Just start at the beginning and tell us about the party last night, okay?”
“I want. My lawyer.”
Footsteps thumped overhead.
EMS had come and gone, but Molly’s bedroom swarmed with CSIs. Also, Claire and two of her assistants waited upstairs in the hallway for CSU to leave so that they could do their jobs.
Claire’s voice floated down over the banister. “Lindsay, can you come up? You’ve got to see this.”
“Do you need a lawyer, Molly?” Conklin was asking. “Because you’re not a suspect. We just want to understand what happened here, you see? Because something did happen.”
Molly was staring over Conklin’s shoulder into the middle distance as I got up from the table and headed for the stairs. Charlie Clapper greeted me in the hallway, nattily dressed, good-natured, his irony freshly pressed this afternoon.
“It’s a rerun, Lindsay. Lotsa fingerprints, no weapons, no blood, no suicide note, no signs of a struggle. We’ve bagged six bottles of prescription meds and some street junk, but I don’t think we’re looking at drug overdose. I think this was either Sodom or Gomorrah, and God weighed in.”
“Honestly, I didn’t know you were so conversant with the Old Testament,” I said while peering around Clapper to better gawk at the vignette on the bed behind him.
“I’m Old Testament on my mother’s side,” he said.
I would have laughed, but my glimpse of the crime scene had suddenly made everything too real. I mumbled, “Keep in touch,” and walked past Clapper into Molly’s bedroom suite, where two naked men lay dead.
The boy was lying on the floor, head to one side, looked to be in his teens. His platinum-blond hair was spiked, and his green eyes were still open. Looked as though he’d been crawling toward the door when he succumbed.
The older man was on the bed in a half fetal position, his apron of belly fat obscuring his genitals. His eyes, too, were open. He hadn’t died in his sleep.
This was what death by krait looked like. Central nervous system shut down, resulting in neuromuscular paralysis. The victims hadn’t been able to breathe.
“When did they die?”
“They’re still warm, Lindsay. Love to narrow it down for you, but I gotta say they died six to twelve hours ago. Did Molly volunteer anything useful?”
“Nope. Just the four bad words: ‘I want my lawyer.’ ”
Claire sighed. “Before she stopped talking, Molly told me that the dead kid was her houseboy, name of Jordan Priestly. She called him ‘Tyco.’ ”
“Tyco, like the toy company? Oh. I get it. Boy toy.”
“But I didn’t need her to identify this here father figure. He’s Brian Caine.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. That Brian Caine. Tony Tracchio better put on his cast-iron jockstrap,” Claire said, “because Caine Industries is going to be all over him.”