“Whoa!” The clerk waves a hand in front of his face. “Lady, what do you have back there?”
I let out a strangled laugh. “Just as I thought. I left some groceries in here. Silly me.”
He nods at the dumpster around the side of the store. “We got a garbage dump over there if you want to toss them.”
I slam the trunk closed. There’s no way I’m rifling around my trunk for the source of the smell with this guy breathing down my neck. “It’s fine. I’ll take care of it when I get home.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Are you sure? That smell is pretty rank. I wouldn’t want to drive home with that.”
I force a smile. “It’s not that bad. And I don’t live too far from here.”
Only about half an hour. I’ll have to keep the windows down and breathe through my mouth.
Chapter 35
The smell is beyond sickening, but I don’t dare pull over on the way home. Even if I think I’m somewhere safe and quiet, I can’t risk it. If somebody sees me, I’m finished. It isn’t until I get into my garage and the door slams shut behind me that I dare get out of the car and open the trunk.
The stench has only multiplied in the last thirty minutes. It’s so sickening, I cover my mouth and gag. I’ve read that smells are strongly attached to the memory center in the brain, and this horrible stench mixed with lavender reminds me of another very familiar odor. One that I will never, ever be able to forget.
Although God knows, I’ve tried.
Unfortunately, my trunk is a mess. I’ve got at least half a dozen pairs of scrubs back there, two fleece sweaters, a bunch of printed notes on patients that rightfully should be shredded, and various car oils and windshield wiper fluid. I tend to throw anything I can’t deal with or want to save for later into my trunk.
I can already see bloodstains on the fabric of myscrubs. Vaguely, I am aware of the fact that I should put on a pair of gloves to look through my trunk, but gloves are the one thing I don’t have back here, and I can’t wait for that. So I keep sifting through my belongings, searching for the source of the stench.
A minute later, I’ve found it.
I back away from the trunk, a dizzy feeling almost overcoming me. I turn my head to the side and dry heave until my eyes water. No.No. This can’t be. Itcan’t.
It’s a severed hand.
Whether it’s Shelby Gillis’s hand or Amber Swanson’s hand is not clear, but I’m sure a police analysis would be able to tell me. All I have to do is call the cops and they will tell me exactly who this hand belonged to, right after they snap cuffs on my wrists and haul me off to jail for two life sentences.
Nobody can know about this.
Of course, the question of how it got into my trunk is the most unsettling of all. Clearly, it happened today while my car was sitting in the parking lot of the San Francisco airport. Somebody got into my car and left this for me. The same way they got into my house and left the blood in my basement.
I’m done messing around. By tomorrow, I’m going to have my house locked up like a fortress.
In the meantime, I have to figure out what to do about this piece of evidence. Leaving it in my trunk is not an option. Breathing through my mouth, I scoop up the hand using a couple of pairs of bloody, ruined scrubs. And then I go into my house.
The first thing I do is flick on the lights. The house seems quiet—-almost too quiet.
“Honey, I’m home,” I whisper.
I stand there for a moment, listening. If they got into my car, they could be in my house right now. And then I hear something. Are those footsteps? It’s definitely something.
Then I hear the plaintive meow.
Thank God, it’s just the cat.
A second later, the cat is padding into the foyer. I put together a makeshift litter box for her this morning, constructed from cereal boxes and scotch tape, so hopefully, she didn’t pee and poop all over my house. Getting her to leave seems out of the question—I’ve acquired a permanent houseguest. Fine. I don’t have time to deal with this.
She nuzzles at my leg, purring gently. Then she looks up at me and attempts to sniff at the bloody scrubs I have in my right hand. She bats at it with her paw.
“Please stop, cat,” I murmur. “Not for you.”
I go into the kitchen and pull one of the plastic bags out from under the sink. I throw the scrubs into the bag, tie it off, and put that inside another bag. And that inside another bag. Now there are three layers of bags. And a layer of scrubs. But if the police search my house, it’ll take them all of two seconds to get through it.
