Page 49

Thirty-Nine

“Is this some kind of sick joke?” Dante says, blinking in disbelief at the body in front of them.

“If it is, I didn’t do it,” Seamus says.

“I wasn’t accusing you.”

Seamus gives a disdainful sniff. “Sounded like you were to me.”

Anna tunes out the bickering and steps into the bathroom, standing over Judd Dodge.

He’s slumped across the toilet seat, one arm trapped beneath his head, the hand dangling limply.

The other arm is flopped in front of him, fingertips scraping the floor.

His legs are curled beneath him, bent like a contortionist. An undignified pose for a man who abandoned all sense of dignity a dozen years ago.

“Maybe he’s been dead the entire time,” Dante suggests. “And someone moved the body?”

“Or maybe he’s still alive,” Anna says, lowering herself until her gaze is level with Judd’s wide-open eyes. Staring into them, she looks for a flicker of life. There’s nothing. His pupils are empty pools.

Just to make sure, she presses two fingers against his neck, almost recoiling at the sensation. Although his skin still retains some warmth, there’s no pulse behind it.

“Nothing,” she announces.

“So he’s really dead?” Seamus says.

“Yes, but for how long? Just because he’s dead now doesn’t mean he was earlier.”

Anna continues to study the body, convinced she’s missing something. Once again, she replays Judd’s presumed last moments in her head. Yawning, checking the time, not drinking. Revisiting those seconds makes something click in her brain.

She shoves a hand into Judd’s coat pocket, finding his watch.

Opening the lid, she takes a long, close look.

There, gathered in the rim of the watch face, are several small crystals of powder.

She leans in, sniffs, detects the same sharp, chemical smell she’d noticed both in Judd’s martini glass and the box of rat poison in the galley.

“It’s poison,” she says.

“I’ll be damned,” Seamus says. “You think he killed himself?”

“Not quite.”

Anna tilts her head until she’s face-to-face with Judd’s body. Then she pulls down his bottom jaw and peers into his gaping mouth.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dante says, aghast.

Ignoring him, Anna shoves the same fingers she’d earlier held against Judd’s neck into his mouth.

This time, she does recoil. Her stomach enacts a nauseated somersault as she wills herself to probe the inside of Judd’s mouth.

His teeth are covered in a warm, sticky slime that gathers on her fingertips, and each touch of his gums sends a foul stench wafting from between his lips.

It is, Anna realizes, the smell of death.

Closing her watery eyes and taking short, quick breaths through her nose, she continues to run her fingers along Judd’s teeth until at last she finds a sliver of something wedged between his upper molars.

Getting it out requires Anna to shove most of her hand into Judd’s mouth. She does—slowly—feeling a shudder of revulsion as his wormlike lips slide over her knuckles. Working blind, she pinches the sliver between her fingernails and tugs it loose.

Anna holds the sliver up to the light, making sure Seamus and Dante can also see. It’s a shard of thin plastic, still dripping saliva. Anna holds it to the light, noticing how it’s transparent and tinted pink.

“What is that?” Seamus says.

“I think it’s Saran wrap,” Anna says, remembering how she saw some in the galley, along with other ingredients that, when combined, could create the blood-flecked foam that has bubbled over Judd’s lips. Red food coloring. Vinegar and baking soda.

Quickly, she explains how Judd could have kept small amounts of all three in individual bits of plastic wrap, creating makeshift capsules that he popped into his mouth.

One strong bite would break the Saran wrap and mix the ingredients, creating the bloody-looking foam that gave the appearance he’d been poisoned.

To complete the illusion, he spiked his drink with the rat poison hidden inside his watch.

“Then how did he really die?” Dante says.

“And when?” Anna adds, thinking about Reggie currently recovering two cars away after being stabbed by Judd. Based on the time of the attack and the residual warmth on Judd’s skin, she concludes that he died within the past half hour.

All three of them crowd the bathroom doorway, searching for something that points to the manner of death.

Yes, there’s still a smear of bloody foam on the corner of his mouth, but Anna knows that’s not real.

Just one of the illusions Judd had been so fond of.

She lets her gaze slide away from his mouth and down to the side of his neck.

“There,” she says, pointing to a crimson patch of skin inches below his ear. “He was strangled.”

Anna backs away from the bathroom door, her mind racing as the situation she’d thought she understood shifts into something heretofore inconceivable. To make sense of it all, she goes through what she knows. The certainties of the night, of which there are few.

She’s certain, for instance, that Judd faked his own death. The spit-slicked bit of plastic wrap in her hand proves it.

The part that remains unclear is why. For the past hour, she’d become convinced it was so he could murder his co-conspirators one by one, getting rid of those who might implicate him while in the process framing her for their deaths.

But what if that wasn’t his true goal?

And what if that wasn’t what really happened?

Anna has no idea how long Judd was missing from his room, back when they all assumed he was dead. No one thought to look in on him until she realized he hadn’t sipped his martini, giving him plenty of time to sneak through the train and start murdering people.

While it’s easy to picture him killing Edith, Herb’s murder is less plausible. Judd’s clothes look clean and completely dry. If he had indeed slit Herb’s throat and escaped out the window into a blizzard, there’d likely be both blood spatter and wetness from the snow.

Then there’s the fact that it’s unclear how long Judd’s been dead.

Anna’s no doctor, so she could be wrong about that.

Yes, it’s likely that in the past hour or so, someone discovered his hiding spot and murdered him.

But it’s equally possible that he’s been dead since long before that—including while Herb Pulaski was still alive.

If that’s the case, then someone else knew all along that Judd was alive.

Because they’d been in on it with him.

Anna bolts from the room, stumbling into the corridor and backing against the window on the other side.

All this time, she’d assumed only one killer was at work aboard the train.

A single, silent entity trying to foil her attempt to bring them to justice by picking people off one by one. Now she understands the truth.

There’s a second killer on the train.

And Anna thinks she knows who it is.