Page 64 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

“No.” She reached into her purse. She found the paper bag.

Dye packs.

That was what was supposed to be inside the bag.

Back in California, they had all agreed on the red dye packs, flat and slim, less than the size and thickness of a pager. Banks hid the exploding dye inside stacks of paper money so that would-be bank robbers would be indelibly stained when they tried to count their loot.

The plan was to see Martin Queller humiliated on the world stage, stained by the proverbial blood of his victims.

Laura had lost faith in proverbs when her children were murdered by their father.

She took a deep breath. She located Jane again.

The girl was crying. She shook her head, silently mouthed the words her father would never say: I’m sorry.

Laura smiled. She hoped that Jane remembered what Laura had told her in the bar. She was magnificent. She would find her own path.

The next part went quickly, perhaps because Laura had watched it play out so many times in her head—that is, when she wasn’t trying to conjure memories of her children; the way David’s feet had smelled when he was a baby, the soft whistle that Peter’s lips made when he colored with his crayons, the wrinkle in Lila’s brow when she studied how to frame a photograph. Even Robert sometimes haunted her thoughts. The man before the accident who had danced to Jinx Queller on the piano at the Hollywood Bowl. The patient who had wanted so desperately to get well. The violent inmate at the hospital. The trouble-maker who’d been kicked out of so many group homes. The homeless man who’d been arrested time and time again for theft, assault, public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, public nuisance, loitering, suicidal tendencies, making terroristic threats, willfully threatening to commit bodily harm.

“In some ways you were lucky,” Laura’s oncologist had told her after the shooting. “If the bullet had entered your back three centimeters lower, the scan would’ve never found the cancer.”

Laura reached into the paper bag.

She had known the moment she pulled it from behind the toilet tank that she was not holding the agreed-upon dye packs, but something better.

A six-shot revolver, just like the one her husband had used.

First, she shot Martin Queller in the head.

Then she pressed the muzzle of the gun beneath her chin and killed herself.