The Rule of Three, page 24
My breathing is starting to feel labored, so I slow my pace slightly and take a minute to catch my breath on floor five.
Once you take action, freedom will be yours, I say to myself.
Things in my life didn’t get better as promised in all of Gil’s slick marketing, but I was determined to prove wrong everyone in my former life who said I was throwing my life away.
No matter how many of the events I showed up for, or how much more money I spent to “level up,” I still couldn’t get into Gil’s inner circle of anointed ones. There was always another level to reach and another tier to pay for. I would expect that the amount of money I was doling out would equate to VIP treatment and the elusive top-tier understanding that was teased by Gil, but it never did. Even after I became a “platinum investor” in his organization and put almost my entire bank balance from my trust into it, he never positively singled me out in the way he did so many other devotees. I deserved to be acknowledged and to have all the promises he kept dangling start to materialize.
By the end of my funds, I was desperate to talk to Gil about my investments in his organization, which had failed to yield any returns. I had no income because I was working sixty hours a week for the Gil Mathers team so that I could continue his seminars, and living in a communal housing situation with others like me. His gatekeepers never let us get close enough to him to have an actual conversation. The only thing I hadn’t done was pay to have a face-to-face with him, and it was the only way I could see getting a chance to get my money back. His promise was that after one hour of one-on-one time with him, we would enter the next dimension of self-realization. Desperate, I shelled out my last ten grand to secure an exclusive VIP spot in the “Spartan Warrior” retreat after-party.
I text Laura and press my ear to the access door and hear the sound of the front-desk phone ringing until it stops and a muffled voice speaks. I count to ten and hold my breath as I pull the fire door open, waiting for the alarm to sound and feeling great relief when, as promised, it doesn’t. I open and slide through the door and down the hall, catching the reflection of the nurse on duty in the glass-encased elevator bank, directly across from her station. Her back is turned.
Inside Gil’s room, the sounds of the machines around us and on the other side of the curtain whir and beep in stereo.
He looks small and old and so meek compared to when I first met him.
“I told Laura everything,” I whisper into his ear.
Gil’s eyes move steadily back and forth beneath his eyelids before I turn my back to him and move toward the closet. Once inside, I retrieve a spare pillow.
I return to his side, my hands gripping the rough industrial fabric so tightly, all of the color has drained from them.
Ten minutes into the party, I knew Gil Mathers had no interest in me or in the financial help I’d given him. He barely registered my name when I introduced myself, even though I’d literally been in the first row at more than fifty of his events and he’d cashed just as many of my checks. Every time I tried to talk about my losses, he would change the subject, ply me with drinks, or look over my head to see who else was at the party he could flirt with. Quickly his detachment flipped into predatory focus on a young woman who I found out had been invited to the reception along with her friends for free after one of Gil’s managers approached them after the show. They couldn’t have been more than seventeen. As Gil started whispering into her ear, I saw him ask his security detail something, and shortly after, everyone but the girl and the friends she’d brought with her were cleared out of the room.
In my blind rage, I’d barely made it back to my hotel room when I realized that I’d left my phone in the suite. When I knocked, no one came, but a bellman walked by just as I was on the verge of tears and, seeing my eyes, asked me if he could help. I explained that I’d locked myself out and he opened the door and wished me a good night. Rave music was blaring, and neither the girls dancing in the low strobing lights nor Gil and the girl, who were intermittently making out and snorting white powder off a copy of Gil’s book in a corner, noticed me standing in the doorway. I was shocked that this was really who this person I’d devoted so much of my hope, time, and money to was. He was not a guru or a savior; he was a predator and a fraud.
I started filming.
* * *
His chest continues its steady rhythm under the hospital sheet. I hover over him, shaking violently. His neighbor’s machine has started to beep alarmingly.
“You have to be stopped before you ruin anyone else’s life.” I squeeze the pillow so hard my knuckles crack.
Angry tears fall from my cheeks as the beeping on the other side of the curtain escalates. I can feel the warmth wafting off him as I eclipse his face with the pillow.
His roommate’s machines are beeping so loudly now, it sounds like the car alarm from earlier has gone off in this room.
I am startled backward when the door bursts open and a number of nurses descend. I think they’ve come to rescue Gil until they rip back the privacy curtain and begin to examine the man currently flatlining in the next bed.
One of the attending nurses shouts in my direction and a crash cart is rolled in. “Miss, please, you need to wait outside.”
Stunned, I exit the room. As I lean against the wall, tearfully trembling, I make out two figures moving toward me and I think they are Terry and Spencer coming for me.
I blink, slowly registering my surroundings.
“Mrs. Nichols,” says Detective Wolcott. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Detective Silvestri doesn’t say anything as he scans me from top to bottom, resting his gaze on the pillow I’m hugging tightly to my body.
Stunned, I hear the words fall out of my mouth before I know what I’m saying.
“I got lost.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
LAURA
It’s after midnight and my sister looks haunted. The memorial service feels so far away now, but in reality, it has only been a few hours since we were able to wrest ourselves away from Terry’s mourners.
“You don’t have to hold everything together anymore; it’s just me now,” I say softly, tugging at her shoulder. She barely looks up. She has my copy of The Rule of Three on her lap, but it remains closed. She’s been sitting in silence looking at the darkened TV screen for the last twenty minutes and hasn’t moved an inch. Her phone has finally stopped its nonstop vibrating.
“It tends to be more entertaining if you turn it on.” I halfheartedly hand her the stack of remotes.
She breaks from her trance and half smiles.
“Please don’t.”
“Phew. Gil has these fucking things wired in such a way, I don’t even know how to turn the damn thing on anymore.”
“I can’t take any more news coverage,” she says through a loud yawn.
“Me neither.” I stare off into space beyond the screen too. “We just have to wait it out. They will get tired of us and move on to the next thing like they always do.”
I take a seat on the opposite edge of the couch so that I can stretch out my legs and nudge her thigh with my toe.
She sighs wearily. “I just want this to be over.”
“I know. Me too.” I check my phone for any sign of Monica.
“Thank you for convincing me to stay.”
“There’s no way you stay in the house alone right now.”
“Not even after the crime scene cleaners have been through.” She shudders. “I have the painters coming tomorrow to fix the walls in his office, but I don’t know how much it will help the feeling in there.”
“I want you here for as long as you want to stay. You don’t ever have to go back. We can hire people to pack it all up for you and sell it and you can start over completely.”
“I can’t even begin to wrap my head around that right now.”
“Baby steps.”
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I’ll help. You’ve been doing so much. The memorial service was impeccable. I don’t know how you pulled it all off so quickly.”
“I was in some fugue state. I don’t remember any of it.”
“You are a force of nature, Vicky.”
“So many people have touched me in the last twenty-four hours.” She rubs her arm distastefully.
“Not me. People seem to be scared.” I try to nibble on a piece of pita bread before giving up and putting it back on the tray.
“You know what the really scary thing is?” she says, pulling her hair away from her exhausted face.
“What?” I lean in, happy to have a less guarded side of my sister emerging. It makes me feel better about my own vulnerability.
“All of those stories people were telling about Terry at the service? It all sounded like they were talking about someone else.”
“He was someone different to each person,” I reply.
“It was hard to tell his friends from his enemies in that crowd,” she says darkly.
“I think there is a very thin line dividing those two camps.” I tread lightly.
“True. When I was doing the eulogy and looking around the room, I had the thought that any one of the people in that hall had motive to take Terry out. He either knew secrets about nearly every one or was owed favors. Or both.”
“I think people showed up to make sure he was really dead,” I say.
Vicky purses her lips but doesn’t say anything.
“You did a good job with your eulogy,” I praise her. “Mom would have approved.”
“She did love Terry,” she says. “I suppose I wasn’t really describing the real him either.”
“It was exactly what you had to do. You don’t have to do that any longer, though.”
“Could I really have known so little about him?” she muses.
“Don’t doubt yourself now. We’ve been through this,” I say patiently.
“Right.”
“You could say the same for me. And for Mom. Look at how much she didn’t know about Dad. Think about how many things we found out about him after she died too. No wonder her heart gave out. It was too much to process. I’m sure so much more will be revealed about all of them the longer they are dead.”
Vicky looks pained at the mention of our parents, but I don’t relent. “There’s a definite pattern in this family.”
“Secrets.” Vicky shifts uncomfortably and I can tell that this is getting too deep for her comfort level. But I do what I always do and push.
“And lies,” I say. “Terry was the king of both.”
“You never liked him, did you?” she says without a trace of resentment.
“No. But I never hid it, did I?”
“No, and it was what made him desperate for you to like him. He could never win you over. He loved a challenge almost as much as adulation.”
“Did you like him?” I ask her gently.
“I can’t remember.”
I touch her leg with my foot again. “What’s done is done. Don’t make yourself crazy by rehashing what was.”
“You sound like this book,” Vicky says drily, and I grimace.
“God. I guess that’s better than sounding like Gil.”
“What about Gil?” The consternation in her voice pushes my anxiety up a few notches.
I haven’t told Vicky about Monica visiting Gil, but it has been too long to have not heard anything from her and I’m beginning to panic.
I am amazed when my phone interrupts my response hesitation with a text notification. My heart halts as I read Monica’s message.
22:3:32
Vicky’s eyebrows are frozen in raised anticipation.
“Hey, Vick, let me see the book for a minute?” I say, forcing calm neutrality.
She furrows her brow but promptly hands it to me.
I find the page I want and read it twice. My blood pressure soars.
“What is it?” Vicky asks, immediately concerned.
“Nothing.” I clear my throat a few times, unable to free whatever is blocking it.
I look at the text again and don’t respond to my sister.
“I need to get to the hospital.”
“Is he awake?” She jumps to her feet. “I’ll come with you.”
“No,” I say sharply. “I need to be alone with him.”
“Okay, Laura.” I see she’s hurt, but time is running out. I grab my car keys.
“What’s going on?” Her concern for me is etched in the creases around her eyes.
I pause on the doorknob and take my key fob off the crown key- chain and place the heavy charm on the entryway table, the diamond sparkling in the hallway’s chandelier light. Vicky’s eyes go to it and then back to my face.
“There’s something I need to take care of. Don’t wait up.”
* * *
It is almost two a.m. and the only signs of life are artificial, the machines clicking away as I walk carefully down the corridor. With each cautious step, I hope that whoever is monitoring the hospital’s security cameras is otherwise occupied.
Gil’s room feels oddly spacious when I tiptoe in and gingerly shut the door. It takes me a few minutes to adjust to the darkness and register the absence of his roommate. The privacy curtain has been pulled open, giving a cavernous feel to the space.
“I guess you got your private room after all,” I whisper. I feel a pang for the man he’d been rooming with—whose name I never learned—and his family.
In the closet where I saw the nurse stocking extra blankets and pillows earlier in the week, I feel around and discover that there are no pillows, so I opt for a blanket. Feeling the synthetic material and realizing its porousness in my hands, I put it over my face and breath, the flow of air through the cheap fibers confirming what I suspected. I return to the closet and find a commode wrapped in a large plastic bag. I unsheath it, place it back into the dark cubby, and walk over to his bedside with the bag in my hands.
I don’t think about anything other than what I need to do. There is no space for hesitation or doubt. This must be done for us to have any chance at a happy life.
I barely look at his face as I slide off the ventilator mask and quickly place it on my own face to keep the machine’s alarm from going off from the inevitable pressure drop. I smell his familiar breath in the mask and think that this is as close as we’ll get to a last kiss.
Once the machine appears to be stable, I lift Gil’s head with the back of my right hand. His breathing has picked up pace without the oxygen, and this rattles me slightly as I pull him closer.
I keep waiting for my emotions to overtake me as I cast a last look on Gil’s drawn face, but now all I can see is Libby, lying in her hospital bed, brain-dead, only being kept alive by a machine long enough for us to say goodbye. I channel how Gil was in that moment when I so desperately needed him there for me, and for Libby. But he was somewhere else too.
I pull the plastic bag over the top of his head and slide it down his face and cinch it at his neck. The cool flow of oxygen in the mask on my own face feels inappropriately calming as his body begins its natural fight against suffocation, even in unconsciousness.
I place my hands firmly around his neck to keep the bag taut as the long pitch of the EKG begins to flatline. I close my eyes and say, “Let go,” over and over until his body stops seizing.
The sound of my name being called and the heavy pressure on my arms and shoulders rips me away from my husband and out of my daze.
There are frantic people and harsh lights all around me. I try to speak at the sight of the bag being pulled from his head, his oxygen being pulled from my head and replaced on his, but the steady machine tone of his heartbeat restarting is the only sound I can make out while I’m pulled into the hallway and my hands are pulled firmly behind my back.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
WOLCOTT/SILVESTRI
“Mrs. Barnes,” I say, before correcting myself. “I’m sorry. Victoria.”
She greets the address with a tight, wordless smirk. She’s sitting next to her lawyer across the table from me. When they first arrived, this guy could barely be bothered with going through the motions of polite formality. The Panerai peeking out from under his shirt cuff nicely complements the pair of freshly polished wingtips that easily eclipse the monthly sum of my mortgage payments. I’m often self-conscious about my use of the word “irony” but am willing to bet that utilizing the deep legal bullpen of the man whose murder you’ve helped plot in the hopes of getting yourself acquitted of that very crime falls under the dictionary definition.
Silvestri’s in the room down the hall with Laura Mathers and her lawyer, handling that interrogation. I’d guess the mood in there is as humorless as the one I’m dealing with, though my partner does have a knack for injecting levity whenever possible.
“Victoria,” I begin. “I’m going to be straight with you. We walked in on your sister in the act. We’ve got her dead to rights. Now, she can take the full weight of this on her own, or you can help her out by filling us in on how it really went down.”
“Detective,” the lawyer protests on her behalf, “my client will be neither intimidated nor cajoled—”
“I’ve gotta give it to you,” I say, briskly ignoring him. “You ladies nearly pulled it off.” She does an admirable job of holding my gaze stoically. “You really sold the whole grieving-widow act.” I draw out the pause, to give this next bit a nice, long runway. “Even the tracking devices that Terry planted on you and the gals didn’t manage to implicate you, somehow.” She indulges in a deep breath and a slow, deliberate blink but otherwise manages to maintain a neutral expression. “I’ll admit,” I continue. “We took our focus off the three of you pretty early on.”
