Terminated (19 page)

The left side of his face ballooned in seconds, forcing his eye shut. His vision in his right eye was reduced to a blur, but he could still make out Tarbell standing over him, holding the bottle at his side.

Tarbell raised the weapon. Petersen crossed his arms in front of his face to protect himself, but Tarbell hurled it away and dropped on top of him. Petersen, his senses in shambles, tried to hold Tarbell off, but he lacked the coordination and the strength to fight.

Tarbell slapped Petersen’s arms aside and grabbed him by the throat. His long, spindly fingers dug deep into Petersen’s neck, and his thumbs cut deep into his Adam’s apple. The effect was immediate. Petersen wretched, choking on air going stale in his lungs.

Petersen snatched Tarbell’s wrists and wrenched at them, but his grip was too strong to dislodge.

“Lies,” Tarbell snarled. “You people keep lying to me. Everyone wants to deceive me. Everyone wants to ruin me. That’s not going to happen, Tom. It has to stop, and it has to stop with you.”

Petersen didn’t know what the hell Tarbell was ranting about and he didn’t care. The guy was on a rampage, and he was in his way.

Tarbell squeezed harder. A frightening noise escaped Petersen’s throat. People didn’t make that kind of noise and live. Panic electrified him and a burst of strength flooded his limbs. He kicked out to buck Tarbell off and gouged at
Tarbell’s wrists with his fingers.

They were valiant but futile attempts. His efforts only served to spur Tarbell on. His grip never wavered. Petersen’s view of the world turned black.

T
arbell stared at Petersen’s dead, battered face. He was calm now. He didn’t even have the strength to
stand. His anger had bled out as the enormity of what he’d done started sinking in. He’d killed someone. He hadn’t meant to kill Petersen, but he couldn’t help himself. Fury had blinded him, and he’d literally gotten swept up in the moment. It was a weak defense, but it was the truth. This wasn’t supposed to have happened.

“What were you doing here, Tom?”

He’d come so close to missing this invasion. After his meeting with Ingram, he hadn’t been able to focus on his work. The man’s limp-wristed attempt to warn him off Gwen needled him. It told him so much. Despite his attempts to exonerate himself and condemn Gwen, Ingram still believed some part of her original story. He’d wondered how much and left early. He bought himself a pass by telling Josh Hanson, his new boss, that he wanted to avoid any unpleasantness should Gwen return. Hanson folded to his lie like a cardboard box in the rain.

He wouldn’t have suspected anything if it hadn’t been for the camera flashes inside the darkened house. He was just about to hit the garage door opener when he saw them. The whir of the motor would have given whomever was inside advanced warning, so he pulled up on the street, entered the house through the kitchen, and grabbed the wine bottle off
the countertop. Petersen was too busy talking on the phone to hear him creep up.

Tarbell gazed at Petersen’s unmoving form on the floor. He guessed he should have expected something like this. Petersen spied on people. How could someone like that be trusted? Plus, Ingram made a living from people’s mistrust of one another. So of course they’d tried to sell him a dummy. It was insulting to think he was that stupid.

His disgust waned suddenly. Why had Ingram warned him off if he’d planted Petersen for a second round of surveillance? It didn’t make sense. It was a dumb move on Ingram’s part, and he wasn’t dumb.

He looked at Petersen’s still form.
Was the investigation still active
? Tarbell wondered. For the first time, he regretted killing Petersen. Having to piece things together from a corpse made things harder but not impossible.

He jumped to his feet and rushed for the window. He’d taken his eye off the ball. He hadn’t been watching for Ingram’s people since Gwen had been fired. He looked for the familiar Durango or some other vehicle new to his street and saw only his neighbors’ vehicles.

He went through Petersen’s pockets for answers and found a set of keys belonging to a Mazda. It was a devious move on Petersen’s part, dumping his Audi. He tried to remember if he’d noticed a Mazda following him of late and didn’t remember one. He’d look for it later. It wouldn’t be far away, and he needed to get rid of it before it got towed.

He separated the personal items from the impersonal. Along with the gun, he would keep Petersen’s cash and the lock pick gun. The driver’s license, credit cards, and everything that led directly to Petersen he would discard. He hoped to find a notebook or some other record, but the digital camera served as the only explanation for Petersen’s visit. He scanned through the pictures, deleting them before tossing it on the pile for destruction.

He picked up the cell
phone. It had ended up under the sofa after flying from Petersen’s hand. He liked cell phones. They left an easily traceable trail of information. He sifted through Petersen’s recent calls. He’d been calling one number a lot. He hit redial.

Gwen answered. “What is it, Tom?”

Betrayal yet again. His hand tightened around the phone until his knuckles shone white.

“Tom? Are you there?”

He hurled the phone across the room, and it smashed against the wall.

He didn’t have to ask what had happened. It was obvious. Birds of a feather, he thought. Two people living under the same oppression flocked together to survive.

He felt somewhat safe. Ingram and company weren’t seconds away from busting down his door. They’d written him off. They had a result for their client, and their client was happy enough to take no further action. Gwen, as usual, proved to be the problem. She might run to the cops if she suspected this kind of foul play. It wouldn’t be a bright move on her part, since she’d have to explain the breaking and entering, but he could see her doing it. He blamed himself for that. He’d robbed her of a lot, so what did she have to lose?

Petersen had to disappear. Gwen could claim a lot of things, but without a body, all claims lost their foundation. Tarbell had the perfect spot for him.

He went out to his car on the street, drove it into the garage and closed the door. He popped the trunk and left it open before grabbing a roll of duct tape on his way back into the house.

He wrapped Petersen in the rug he’d fallen on and taped it in place.

More by luck than design, it was a pretty clean kill. Strangulation was a smart move. It left no blood behind. The rug was the only thing with traces of Petersen’s presence and that was going. Petersen had even worn gloves,
leaving no prints behind. The lack of cops on Tarbell’s doorstep proved Petersen hadn’t been seen entering his home. The guy had never been here.

He dragged Petersen’s body through the living room and kitchen into the garage. The rug moved effortlessly over the hardwood and tile floors. Things got harder in the garage. Petersen was heavy for his size, an old guy who carried excess weight. The rug complicated matters. It made maneuvering and manhandling the body difficult and lifting the corpse into the trunk of the car nearly impossible.

Unease set in as the idea of being caught trying to manhandle Petersen’s corpse into his trunk. Adrenaline flowed, giving him the strength to lift Petersen into the car. He was forced to cut the duct tape and fold Petersen’s body differently inside the thick rug to fit the bundle inside the trunk, but he managed. He slammed the lid with a satisfying thud.

He bagged up Petersen’s items for destruction and slung them in the passenger foot well. He threw a shovel on the backseat and reversed out of his garage. The second his wheels touched the street, Petersen was no longer a problem.

He picked up the freeway and joined the rush hour traffic. Trickling along with the vehicles on their way home, he felt conspicuous, since the car sat low on its springs at the back, but the feeling didn’t last. He just looked like someone with the trunk loaded up. Progress was slow, but that was fine. He wasn’t in a rush.

It was well after six when he turned into the driveway of the Vallejo house. He parked behind the house so his activities wouldn’t be visible from the street.

The back of the property dropped away toward the water in the far distance. The property line didn’t stretch all the way to the water, but it went far enough. He grabbed a shovel from the backseat and walked out toward the water. When he lost sight of the road, he dug. He hammered away at the dry earth. It came up, but it took its toll on his hands. Even through his gloves, he felt his hands blister.

The grave took time to
dig. He felt the sun’s heat at his back disappear as it disappeared over the horizon. He watched the orange and purple sunset turn to night before the hole was deep enough. It wasn’t graveyard depth, but it was deep enough for Petersen. He climbed out of the grave and drove the car to the hole. Even though his hands had forced themselves into claws and his back screamed in agony every time he bent over, it was easy to pull Petersen from the trunk.

The body hit the ground with a thud. Tarbell unrolled him from his rug cocoon. He stripped off Petersen’s shoes, belt, and anything else that would take time to decompose before shoving him into the hole.

The color had bled from his face. He was no longer a freshly dead man. His change was hypnotic. Tarbell felt he could watch Petersen’s metamorphosis for hours, but he snapped himself out of his reverie.

He filled the grave. It stood out no matter how he disguised it, but that didn’t worry him too much. No one came to this property, and the freshly turned earth couldn’t be seen from the street. He put his faith in the elements. Fall would bring rain that would wash his tracks away. The sun would bake the ground dry in no time; and wild grasses would grow over it.

He loaded up his car and drove it back to the house. He sat on the back porch, watching the movement of the water and the ships cutting through it. Sweat covered his body. He let it cool against his skin. The hard physical labor had worked the shock of what he’d done out of his system.

Killer
, he thought. He let the word work its way through his head. He’d joined a select group of people. It wasn’t a group he’d wished to join. He had no problem intimidating people or inflicting a little pain, like he had with Gwen and Amanda Norton. It was the only way to get things done these days. To survive in this world, you had to be tough, and to get ahead you had to be tougher than the next guy. It was a speech his father had trotted out time and time again to explain
his bruised knuckles. It hadn’t impressed Tarbell back then, but he’d learned to believe it over time. But killing was a different thing. It far exceeded shoving someone aside to achieve a goal.

He’d crossed a legal and moral line and there was no going back. He was a killer. It was a title that would forever be attached to him. As his shock subsided, he expected guilt to fill the emotional gap, but it didn’t. A void was being left. He’d killed, but killing came a lot easier than he might have expected. He could do it again if he had to. If he wanted to.

And oddly, he did.

He blamed Gwen for this fresh need. She’d turned him into a killer. She hadn’t put his hands around Petersen’s neck, but if it weren’t for her, Petersen would be alive. He wouldn’t pay for Petersen’s death. Gwen would. It was only fair. Killing her would make things right.

The thought stopped him. There it was. The need to kill. Only a few hours after taking his first life, he wanted to take another. The odd thing was the need didn’t bother him. He’d reached a place where rules and laws no longer applied. He would do what he needed to do. He could almost hear his father’s approval. At last, he’d attained the kind of manhood his father had beaten into him inside this house. It would have given him an emotional boost twenty years ago. Now it didn’t matter. He didn’t give a damn about his father’s approval anymore.

So Gwen was to suffer and die. It would happen, but not just yet. Some other scores had to be settled first.

Gwen sat on the sofa with Kirsten asleep at her side. The TV was playing footage from the surveillance cameras, but she wasn’t taking it in. Petersen was late. He said he’d come by the house at nine, but it was after ten. Gwen had called his cell twice, but the calls went straight to voice mail. She had
a bad feeling about his no show.

She grabbed her cell to call yet again, because Paul had the phone tied up. A headhunter had called while they’d been out at the zoo. Paul had been on the phone for ten minutes. She took it as a good sign, but Petersen’s absence was sapping any potential good news.

She hung up on her call to Petersen when Paul came out of the office with a smile on his face. She tried to match it but came up short.

“What they’d say?” she asked.

“I have an interview Monday.”

“That’s great.”

“You don’t sound too happy for me.”

She had to stop dwelling on the negative. Lord knew they needed something to be positive about. She stood up and embraced him.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m just a bit drained. It’s great news.”

“What’s the great news?” Kirsten asked. Gwen had awoken her from her doze.

“Daddy has a job interview”

Kirsten squealed and jumped up and down. “Daddy’s got a job.”

He picked her up. “No, not a job, just the interview.”

“But you’ll get it.”

“You know what, I think I will get it. I talked to the architect. We hit it off. I have a good feeling about it.”

Gwen smiled. She liked seeing Paul’s enthusiasm. It had been a while since she’d seen him that confident. “It’s about time something went our way.”

Paul pulled Gwen to him for a three-way hug. It felt good, but she couldn’t relax. She slipped away and picked up the phone. She called Petersen’s number and got voice mail again.

Paul put Kirsten down. “Petersen?”

Gwen nodded. “I’ve called his cell and his home
number. There’s no answer.”

“Leave it for tonight. He’s probably tied up with something or went home to be with his family.”

“But wouldn’t he have called if he was changing plans?”

Paul shrugged. “You don’t know the guy that well. Maybe he isn’t very reliable.”

Gwen didn’t, but she knew how dedicated he was. He didn’t want Tarbell getting away with his crimes any more than she did. He would have called if he couldn’t make the appointment.

“It’s the picture, isn’t it?”

Petersen had scared her when he told her Tarbell had a photo of them. She knew the photo he’d described, and there was no way Tarbell could have come into possession of it without stealing it. The second she’d gotten home from the zoo, she searched for the photo. It was missing. It was nice to have the validation that she wasn’t going out of her mind and to prove that Tarbell had broken into her home, but it came at a chilling price.