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.There was sabotage, I don’t know the details, but a lot of their inventory was ruined.”“AFFER?” he asked.“American Film Rentals.Listen, are you hearing me? This is a pretty strong connection.Don’t you want to write some of this down?”“I have a pretty powerful memory,” he said.“Keep going.”The more I spoke, the sillier I felt, and if it wasn’t for the pieces of the puzzle I’d put together that afternoon, or for the pillows I’d seen in Richard’s makeshift sleeping quarters, I would have stopped talking altogether.“Night, where did the pillows in your trunk come from?”“An estate sale.”“When?”“About a month ago.”Tex’s face was unreadable, but I could tell he was paying close attention.I didn’t know what it all meant myself, but with what he knew that he wasn’t telling me, maybe pieced together with what I had found out for myself, the key to unlocking this thing might appear and the idea of ending the nightmare might exist.“Tex, the thing is, Richard acted scared.I think he’s involved more, but I don’t know how.”Tex leaned back against the sofa cushions.“We talked to Richard.He’s cooperating with us.But what I don’t get is where Hudson comes into this? What’s their connection?” Tex asked.“What connection?”“Between Richard and Hudson.That’s what you’re giving me, isn’t it? The goods on Hudson James.”“You’re not listening to me! I’m telling you about Richard! I went upstairs to the balcony of the Mummy after he left and I found a couple of those velvet pillows you saw from my trunk.And he told me, the day after Carrie Coburn was murdered, that he had been in my trunk without me knowing.Those same pillows are your murder weapon in four different homicides.Aren’t you going to check it out?”“I checked out Richard Goode myself.Aside from the facts that he doesn’t like your favorite actress and he’s a recreational pot smoker, he’s clean.” He leaned forward and rubbed his palms over the front of his faded blue jeans.“No, you aren’t getting it.Richard has a zillion scripts, he’s acting! He even told me once he acted in college, and that’s when the letter was sent, and even if he says he didn’t send it, there was the deciding committee who had access to it and one of them might have been working with him.This has to do with cinematic connections, not Hudson!”“Night, forget it.Richard Goode came to us and gave us those names.We already checked them out.There’s no motive.The sci-fi expert lives in Hollywood.The documentarian was a—”“Documentary filmmaker,” I corrected.“What?”“It’s ‘Documentary filmmaker’, not ‘documentarian’.”“Whatever.He was a freakin’ astronaut.And the pop culture expert wrote her dissertation on Doris Day.Besides, Richard Goode was the one who found Hudson’s phone outside of the theater.I thought you were going to give me evidence that they were working together but you just proved to me that Goode’s on our side.”“How can you be so sure?” I asked.“How can you not be?” he asked.“Hudson James skipped town.He’s been around every time a dead body that matches this profile has turned up—from twenty years ago until today.Richard Goode was eight years old when the first murder happened.Hudson’s got no alibi, and we have hard evidence connecting him to every victim.Including you.Though somehow, despite my caution, you continue to put yourself directly in his path.”“You’re missing something, Tex.I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.”“Listen, Night, I didn’t want to tell you this but you’re going to see it in the newspaper tomorrow morning.We got a warrant and searched Hudson’s house.Those round velvet pillows you’re so fond of? We found a couple of them on his sofa.”“His sofa is orange tweed—” I started but Tex put his hand out to silence me.“We opened them up.They’ve been re-upholstered.”TWENTY-NINEThe article came out at the worst possible time.Arrest Warrant Issued for the Pillow Stalker read the title.Numbness shot through my arms and my legs, and my silk pajamas were suddenly not enough to keep the chill at bay.I sat in my kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee, flipping through the morning newspaper.I wanted to shut it, to crumple it up, or use it to line Rocky’s cage, but I had to face the reality of what Tex had been telling me all along.I had to force myself to read the article, to see in print what concrete evidence had led to this moment in time.The journalist had done his research, digging up much of what had been written about Sheila Murphy’s murder two decades earlier.To be fair, he printed Hudson’s story of picking up the young woman, offering his shirt and a ride to her apartment.He also printed the statements of the neighbors who identified Hudson’s truck, the dry cleaning label that identified his shirt, and all of the other details that Hudson had explained to me personally.None of that was a surprise.But when I continued to read, it became clear that the journalist had camped out in front of Hudson’s house in order to get this story.Was he the one who had attacked me? It seemed unlikely.He had watched the handyman’s comings and goings, watched him throw a packed bag into the back of his truck and set a cat carrier on the passenger seat.He knew Hudson was planning to leave town.He went through his trash, looked into his windows, and cooperated with the cops when it came time to tell what he’d seen.It sickened me, this invasion of Hudson’s privacy, yet if he was a killer who had been living with his freedom for the past twenty years, then that privacy was undeserved.I thought about the people I watched on crime TV, people who have been living in the open for decades before DNA evidence caught up to them.People who thought they got away with murder.Is that what Hudson had done? It certainly was what the article implied, and it would be a hard detail for people to ignore a second time around.Richard’s name had been kept out of the article, but I recognized his actions as that of the confidential source.He’d discovered a cell phone on the edge of the Mummy property and thought nothing of it at first.It sat in the lost and found until the battery wore low, beeping a caution, and alerting him to its presence [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]