Page 89 of With a Vengeance
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 intoJudd’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.
Forty
Seamus remains insideRoom B, which now suddenly contains two bodies. Hovering by the door to the bathroom, he watches Anna start off down the car. He chases after her, catching up in three long strides and tugging her to a halt.
“Where are you going?”
“To see Sal and Lapsford,” Anna says. “Because one of them is the killer.”
Seamus turns Anna around to face him. “Let’s just think about this for a second.”
“We don’t have that much time. Look who’s been targeted so far. Edith. Herb. Judd himself. He was working with someone to take the others out. I suspect he then planned to kill them last. But whoever it is got to him first.”
“Then explain what happened to Agent Davis,” Seamus says. “You said Judd just tried to kill him in the galley.”
