The rain poured down in sheets, making everything bleary.
I stood at the window, staring at my yard, watching huge puddles forming on the sidewalks and street. The storm drains couldn’t keep up with the amount of rain pouring down. The house was dark, all lights were off, and I kept watch until well past midnight. Estimates of the time of Angie and Nick’s death were earlier in the night, after dark but before midnight. What if he didn’t come tonight? My plan would have failed.
Yawning, I leaned over and stroked Mr. Tuttles’ head. “Time to call it a night, Little Dude.”
I climbed into my cotton pajamas and cuddled into bed, Mr. Tuttles at my feet and Stormy at my head. The rain thrummed on the roof, and I could tell it was raining particularly hard because it wasn’t usually so loud. Normally the sounds of rain relaxed me, but tonight I was annoyed by it. I wouldn’t be able to hear if anybody broke into the house to murder me in my sleep.
I pulled a out a book and used my mini book light to read by. I wasn’t planning to sleep tonight.
The first indication I had that something was up was when Mr. Tuttles stood up and looked towards the bedroom door. I looked to Stormy. She was still, eyes wide open, ears pricked up. Something was up, but with the constant, intense drumming of the rain, it was hard to tell what.
I quietly snapped my fingers at Tuttles. No sense in getting him hurt in any of this. He jumped back up onto the bed, and I walked in sock-covered feet to the door and very quietly closed it behind me. Mr. Tuttles emitted the slightest whine.
A huge clap of thunder almost made me jump out of my pajamas with an intensely bright flash of lightning right behind.
Did I hear movement in the kitchen? Maybe.
I had my semi-automatic Glock 22 with me, a reliable and accurate sidearm. Once, I’d decided I needed to take some self-defense class, so I went to a Krav Maga class that was held just for women. A younger, eager, version of me had visions of turning myself into a ninja, being able to take down bad guys with a single elbow to the throat or a kick to the groin. An out of shape, out of breath me listened intently during the class, when the instructor said, “The only time you will need Krav Maga is when you’ve left home without your gun.” After hearing that, I decided to skip Krav Maga and put my life, instead, in the hands of my Glock. I’d only taken out of the gun safe once for any real reason, other than practice, which was when Angie had called me in the night. I felt like I was coming full circle. Maybe Angie was watching.
I stepped down the stairs, my ears wide open, avoiding the third step from the bottom, moving quietly in my socks. There was a master switch on the hall before the kitchen that would switch on all the lights at once, which would give me a huge advantage over whoever this intruder was.
The rain made less noise on the first floor, and I swore I heard a drawer open and close. I had put all of my kitchen knives in the mud room so as not to give anybody a chance at an easy weapon. Whoever they were, they were looking for a weapon, there was no doubt of that.
All of my senses were fired up. I could feel electricity flowing through the room, as though the intruder was moving through an electric field, bending the direction of the electrostatic forces, making the hairs on my arms twitch in response.
Stealing into the family room, I flattened my body against the wall and crept forward, hearing more quiet sounds. Now I could see the pencil light of a cell phone’s flashlight, moving around a drawer full of Tupperware. Excellent.
I’d been stuck thinking it was Beatrice for so long, I was making the same mistake Javi and Dayna were making. When I opened my eyes and really thought through the evidence, it was clear to me there was a suspect I’d never even considered. It seemed impossible. I didn’t even want to admit to myself that it might be somebody who was the least likely person in the world to have committed this murder, but my instincts were never wrong. Mostly never.
Reaching along the hallway wall, my fingers found the light switch, and with my right hand, I raised my gun. I closed my eyes so as not to be blinded by the lights when they went on, and I held my breath. I clicked the button. The lights flashed on.
Eyes open, and there before me stood Edward Diamond! I knew it! And what was he wearing? A long-sleeved black cotton sweater.
It’s probably his kill shirt.
He was stunned by the lights turning on, unable to see for just a moment, and I leveled my Glock at him. Surprisingly, he stood upright, and I questioned everything in my life that I had ever said I was positive of. He was completely dry, but I saw water trailing him on the floor and a closed but quite wet umbrella leaning on the cabinet next to him.
He looked at me, blinking, his gnarled, miserable face twisted into a grimace, evoking both anger and contempt at the same time.
“Ed!” I said, my voice betraying my surprise in spite of having that feeling it was him.
Edward’s eyes glinted like a wolf’s. “I knew it would come to this.” He took a step towards me. Upstairs, Mr. Tuttles started barking like crazy, and I was glad I had locked him in my bedroom.
“Stop and put your hands up where I can see them.” Ed slowly put his left hand up, palm facing me, but his right hand stayed down, and I couldn’t see what was in it. “Both hands!” I ordered while I mentally went through all of the reasons it was him. “The shrubs, right? You didn’t want them removed. But why kill Angie over that?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t kill anybody.”
“It was the change on the floor of Angie’s house that brought you here, wasn’t it? You’re the only person I know who still carries change in his pockets. When you heard I had something from the house, you thought it was the change. You even mentioned a small hole in your pants pockets.”
“I didn’t remember hearing any fall, but I had to be sure.”
I tried to remember that conversation outside his home. “You talked about going to Italy with your wife, which is why you didn’t want the tea olives pulled out even though they were dying. But Angie was going to take them out, anyway.”
But why would anybody kill over dying shrubs?
“She called me.”
That’s right, Ed didn’t have email or text, which was why we had no digital record of Angie meeting with him. “She said she was planning a trip to Italy, but the hotel I talked about didn’t exist. Said she must have heard wrong. I brought up the bushes. I told her she HAD to leave them be, and then I could see her mind working. She realized I lied about Isabella and the olive trees, spinning a story so that she’d leave them alone. She wouldn’t listen to me! I TOLD her she had to leave the bushes! I offered to pull them out myself, and she said no, they already hired a contractor who would do it, and she didn’t want me getting hurt. She said there’d be liability issues.”
Then it dawned on me. “Your wife! She’s been missing for over five years. She’s buried under those bushes, isn’t she?”
“She was a nag! Ed, do this, Ed, do that. She never shut up. It was like a knife through my brain with her constant picking at me. I cooked, I cleaned, I did yard work, but I was never good enough. I showed her, though, didn’t I? Steaks were overcooked? How about a frying pan to the head. That shut her up.”
Mr. Tuttles’ barking intensified. It was surprisingly loud down here.
“So you killed her.”
“I did. The contractor had dug the hole for the new bushes that day, but he’d also found a leak in the irrigation system and had to dig even more to locate it. I chatted him up, and he said none of the drawings matched the actual pipes for the irrigation, so by the end of the day, he’d left a huge gaping hole by the side of my yard. It was already late afternoon, so he taped the hole off and told me he’d be back in the morning to plant the new shrubs. I dragged Isabelle’s sorry ass out there and dropped her in it, covered her in dirt, and leveled it all out. Those half-witted landscapers never even noticed the hole wasn’t as deep as they had dug. I even went out and supervised to make sure it all went as smoothly as possible.”
Monologuing. That was the cliche you see in every movie, where the good guy loses his advantage while the bad guy tries to buy time, but in this case, I wanted him to monologue. What Ed didn’t know was that I had my security team back out this afternoon who installed cameras all over the inside of the house. Right now, everything Edward said was being recorded by my cameras and stored instantaneously to the cloud. Even if he killed me, which I highly doubted could happen, that recording would be there for Javi and Dayna to see.
“Did you ever have any back problems, or was that just a way to make everybody pity you?”
“No, I jacked up my back cleaning up the blood inside the house, but it was better in just a few days. With Isabelle missing, even with my story of her leaving me, I didn’t want anybody to get suspicious. I figured it would be better if everybody believed I was an old, decrepit man.”
He was right. His ruse worked on me. Even when I thought he might have done it, I couldn’t get past his physical limitations.
“Why did you burn the house down? Nobody was even looking at you as a suspect!”
“It’s that damn DNA! Nick, with all his talk about how they can find killers these days with barely a spittle’s worth of DNA. He said a cough or sneeze, or even yelling, could leave enough DNA for them to find and then trace back to me. I had to get rid of that entire place!”
“That wasn’t good enough, though, was it? You had to kill Nick, too.”
“He became suspicious. When he brought up the DNA, I asked a ton of questions. Then, he mentioned he had seen me walking normally one time, around my back yard. What Nick was doing watching me in my back yard, I don’t know, but I could tell he was thinking out loud. He had to go before he went to the police with his suspicions. He, too, underestimated me, just like you are right now.”
“You killed him that night, while he was asleep.”
“Nick never believed anybody in this neighborhood was dangerous. He barely had any security.”
Mr. Tuttles’ barking reached a fevered pitch. “For Chrissake, can’t you shut that dog up?” I didn’t answer as another lightning strike was immediately followed by another clap of thunder.
Faster than I thought possible, Ed grabbed the umbrella and lunged at me. I turned and fired the gun at him, but he had already moved to his left, and I missed. The umbrella came down on my right hand. I dropped the gun.
Dammit! When did this old guy get so fast?
He lunged for the gun, but I was faster with my feet, kicking it away from both of us. We paused, sizing each other up. He lunged again, trying to spear me with the umbrella, but I danced backwards, into the family room, behind a chair. I kept one eye on him and with the other, I glanced around, looking for something to defend myself with. There, next to the couch! I fell back to the couch and grabbed my light saber, pushing the button. It whooshed to life with a yellow light. I spun it in a wide arc as though I knew what I was doing and held it in a fighting stance, like a Jedi Knight.
We faced each other, panting, my lightsaber making small electrical noises.
I took a deep, shuddering breath. He lunged again, trying to spear me with the umbrella, but by now he was becoming predictable, and I parried with the lightsaber. That was a mistake. The lightsaber burst into a million pieces of glass, spraying the entire room. I shook my head and small splinters of glass fell out of my hair. Ed threw the umbrella away and pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, its blade already extended. Small, but still deadly if used correctly. At this point, I was wishing I had paid more attention in those Krav Maga classes. He lunged. I shot my arm out and stepped back, poking the handle of the light sable towards him to no effect. Pain surged in my left forearm as his knife plunged in. Glass on the floor penetrated my sock, sending shards up into my foot. I ignored the pain. How was I losing a fight against an octogenarian?
Mr. Tuttles came flying down the staircase at the speed of sound, a frenzied white ball, and without pausing, leapt straight for Ed’s ankles. Startled, he instinctively reached down to shove Tuttles away, and I shoved Ed with my bloody arm, causing him to fall backwards. Mr. Tuttles growled, pulling at Ed’s pant leg. Ed stabbed at him, but Tuttles was faster, dodging and biting his ankles. Which a massive yowl, Stormy raced into the room, eyes huge and claws out. She landed on Ed’s arm and jumped away as he tried to swat her aside. I knew I had to get Tuttles out of there before one of Ed’s swipes with the knife found its mark. I ran for the door, flung it open, and called Tuttles. He took a couple of steps and then whimpered, realizing his feet were cut up and bloodied. I swept him into my arms and fled out the front door.
Pain is just weakness leaving the body.
As I rushed out into the rain, I thought I must be hallucinating. Somebody was walking towards me, and I could just hear sirens approaching.
“Kate! Are you okay?” She shouted from the street, her voice carrying over the rain.
“Becca?” She walked towards me, hair hanging limp with wetness, clothes soaked, and I thought she had never looked so good.
“I had to run out for Children’s Tylenol. Sadie has a fever, but I saw all the lights on. I stopped to see if you needed help!”
You stopped because you’re a massive busybody.
“I heard a gunshot. At first I thought it was thunder, but as I thought about it, there was no lightning right before, so it had to be a gunshot. With everything going on in the neighborhood, I decided to call the police.”
“Becca, I could kiss you right now!”
“Who’s that?” She gestured towards the house.
I spun around. Backlit by the patio lights, Ed looked like something out of a horror movie. Blood dripped from his fingertips, and he stood hunched to the side because of the ankle bite from Mr. Tuttles. I knew he couldn’t see us well as he stood in the light while we were cloaked in darkness, the only light from the streetlamp muted by the constant rain.
I put my little dog down, watching Ed the whole time.
Another lightning bolt, immediately followed by a roar of thunder, gave Ed a good look at us. He opened the umbrella and raised it over him, taking several limping steps into the yard, a bloodied monster stalking his prey. He raised his right hand, and in it was my Glock.
Shit! My gun! I should have gone back to get it! What was I thinking?
I was thinking of saving Mr. Tuttles.
The sirens were louder. They were close.
As though in slow motion, I threw my body in front of Becca. I would die before I let him kill another neighbor. Ed pulled the trigger, and I heard almost simultaneously the crack of the gun and yet another clap of thunder.
Becca screamed as agony shot through my left shoulder. A blinding bolt of lightning, attracted by the umbrella, hit Ed. He slumped to the wet ground, letting the umbrella fall away from him, as the thunder roared in my ears, closer than ever.
Clapping a hand over my shoulder, I warily approached Ed. Unbelievably, he was still alive, and he shakily tried to raise the gun again. I leaned over and took it from him, pointing it back at his head. He closed his eyes. “Do it!” he said.
“Nope.” I lowered the Glock and walked away. The darkness was interrupted by alternating red and blue lights as Javi and Dayna pulled up in the squad car.
I sat down next to Mr. Tuttles who had decided that his feet didn’t hurt as long as he didn’t move, so he sat very still, his little face tracking me. I pet him with my right hand. “You’re a very good boy,” I said. I pointed my face upwards, into the rain, and let it wash over me.