True-Life Adventure

that and tried to blackmail you, didn’t he? Not Jacob. You. So you just lifted some digitalis from your Aunt Hallie and killed him.”
    “How do you know about Aunt Hallie?” He sounded panicked.
    “Lindsay told me. Birnbaum, incidentally, made kind of a strong case. He had Brissette’s story and also Tillman’s story to back him up. Tillman had talked with Lindsay the night before she disappeared. All three of them knew Jacob was off his nut, but there was no reason for either Brissette or Tillman to make it public. Probably you would only have had to kill Birnbaum if he hadn’t had the reports ghostwritten. When that came out in the paper, you realized Paul Mcdonald would be able to connect Birnbaum’s murder with the job Jacob hired Birnbaum to do. The people whose names Jacob had given Birnbaum would be questioned. So that meant Brissette and Tillman had to be killed. I understand there’ve been attempts on Mcdonald’s life as well.”
    Koehler’s eyes got even smaller. “Are you working with Mcdonald?”
    Sardis laughed, a horrid mean, contemptuous laugh. I had no idea she was such a good actress. “I don’t split with anybody,” she said. “After all, I’m not asking for much money, really.”
    “I don’t get this. I thought you were Lindsay’s friend.”
    “Oh, I am. You won’t kill her. As long as she thinks Jacob is the murderer, she’ll keep quiet about it, for Terry’s sake.”
    “How about after Terry dies?”
    “With any luck, she won’t until after your public stock offering. By then you’ll be long gone.”
    Koehler looked at her quizzically.
    “That’s your plan, isn’t it? You can’t stick around here now. Not with this many murders behind you. Especially considering Kogene’s going to fall apart without Jacob— I mean without Jacob’s genius. Maybe Marilyn will develop a leukemia cure and maybe she won’t. It’s too late to wait around and see and you know it. What you’re running, Mr. Koehler, is a ghost company. You’re hoping nobody catches onto that until you can make away with a few million dollars from the sale of your stock. Which you can’t do until you sell it. So all you have to do is keep Lindsay and me quiet until you do.”
    He sighed and handed Sardis the envelope. “Here’s the five grand.”
    “Thank you.” She handed over the tape.
    “When can I get the other tape?”
    “As soon as you get ninety-five thousand dollars together.”
    He grabbed her arm. “You bitch.” I felt sweat pop out on my forehead. “You said ten thousand for both tapes.”
    “Let go of me.” He did, and she reached for something under the gray sofa she was sitting on. She held the object up so he could see it, then took a step away from him. “The other ninety grand is for this.” The object was a tape recorder. She took a tape out of it. “I just made a new one.”
    Koehler sprang at her, but Sardis was expecting that. She dropped the tape down her blouse and sidestepped away from him. She got into a martial arts pose about as convincing as the one I’d struck in the med center library. “You’re going to have to kill me for it, Mr. Koehler.”
    “With pleasure, Miss Kincannon,” he said, and went for her again. But she wasn’t fast enough this time. Her arm went up and his went down under it. He had her by the neck.
    If it made me sweaty to see him grab her arm, I could have drowned watching this. I had little prickles all over me and my throat was completely closed— I swear to God, I couldn’t breathe at all. I was afraid she was going to die and I was going to have to watch, not knowing what to do. My mind was paralyzed.
    Though I have no recollection of it, I suppose it unfroze at some point during the next split second. Because all of a sudden I was in the room with Sardis and Koehler, broken glass flying all around. I landed on one of the sofas and used that as a springboard to Koehler’s back. I grabbed his arms with my arms and pried. Sardis squealed.
    “Let go, you son of a bitch. Let go!” That was my voice, I think.
    He let go and bent over. I somersaulted over him, hitting my head on the side of one of the sofas. That felt like somebody had shoved a conduit through my brain, but I had to get up. If I didn’t, Koehler might kill Sardis. If anything happened to Sardis, the world would resemble the Mojave Desert. I couldn’t let that happen. The future was up to me.
    Those things came to me more as feelings than thoughts, and they