Page 87

CHAPTER 87

BABY COULD SEE IT all flashing in Su Lim Marshall’s eyes.

The high-school ex-boyfriend in South Korea, arrested when his computer was found stuffed with forged exam results, all mysteriously downloaded in a single day. That same ex-boyfriend who, stricken with shame, had committed suicide by stabbing himself in the heart.

The landlord in Los Angeles who had raised the rents in the building where Marshall lived and who died after falling down the stairs of that same building.

Then there were the two former husbands. The first one went out fishing one night and never came home; the second one had been killed in a drive-by shooting at three a.m. in a neighborhood he shouldn’t have been near.

Marshall had to be wondering which of her past sins Baby was about to expose, which ones she had uncovered and locked onto.

Because surely Baby hadn’t found them all.

But Baby had.

Together, Baby and Jamie had traversed the labyrinth of false names, accounts, addresses, and identities Marshall had used to hide who she really was. Jamie, on the keys, followed links, and Baby — while also trying to clean and organize his den of disgustingness — chimed in with suggestions about what avenue to explore next.

Baby watched Su Lim Marshall go to the huge windows and look out at Los Angeles. She saw Marshall make the decision to kill her right then and there. It came over her like a stiffness. Living rigor mortis. Baby guessed you had to be like that to kill as efficiently as Marshall had over the course of her life. You had to be so completely and utterly disconnected from the act that your body lost itself in the task, like the automatic motions of a Roomba doing its slow waltz across the floors.

Marshall didn’t even say she needed a water or a notepad or to call the receptionist, didn’t make some petty excuse to reassure Baby as she crossed to the cabinet at the side of the room because the stupid big black glass desk didn’t have anything as practical as drawers in it. Baby didn’t mind that Marshall thought so little of her, that she wouldn’t even pretend she wasn’t going to kill her. Because, Baby supposed, in the end the woman wanted her to figure it out, to get up and rush toward her. It would make Marshall’s claim of a sudden attack and a struggle during which she had to defend herself all the more believable.

But Baby didn’t do that. She didn’t even look at the woman. She just sat quietly and listened. She’d been doing a lot of that the past couple of days, listening rather than talking. She’d been listening to Rhonda crying in her room at the beachside mansion at night. She’d been listening to Arthur and Mouse puttering around the big kitchen in Manhattan Beach, adjusting to life in the huge house with Baby and Rhonda after the Waterway Street house had been declared uninhabitable. Now Baby listened as Su Lim Marshall opened a thin, sleek drawer in the cabinet and placed her hand on what was likely a thin, sleek gun. She heard the door to the office fly open. She heard Marshall gasp and heard Mouse’s low, hellish growl. She heard the big dog’s nails on the hardwood as he and Rhonda stepped into the room.

Baby finally looked over. Her sister held the chain connected to Mouse’s collar with both hands, and her boots were planted on the floor, and still Rhonda had to lean all of her two hundred and sixty pounds back to stop the animal from getting to Marshall. It was as though the dog knew exactly who’d poisoned him.

Marshall froze with her hand in the drawer, and Mouse let out a series of eardrum-shattering barks that bounced and echoed around the huge room so it sounded like an army of devil hounds had arrived.

“You let go of what you’re holding and put your hands in the air right now, Marshall,” Rhonda said, gripping the chain with all her strength, “or I will.”