Bunny finds herself staring down a gun held by the last person she ever expected, and six years of morning coffee runs and color-coded spreadsheets suddenly look very different in the light of a very bad evening. Carol Kelly has always been two people at once: the impossibly capable assistant who kept the Fox Theater running on caffeine and sheer willpower, and a twenty-two-year-old drowning in student debt, bartending weekends, transcribing medical records at midnight, and surviving on event leftovers. Glen Valentino noticed her. That, as it turns out, was the beginning of everything.
🀙🀚🀛🀜
Bunny was about to ask one more question when the window behind Carol imploded. The frame gave first. Something fast and low coming through, hitting the floor, rolling. Carol spun. The gun went off. The sound was enormous in the small office. Bunny felt the air change near her ear before Dash’s weight hit her from the side and drove her down. Her shoulder struck the floor. Her cheek grazed the carpet. Dash’s forearm came across the back of her neck.
“Stay down.”
She stayed down.
There was no sequence she could reconstruct afterward. Only fragments: Carol’s cry, short and cut off. The crack of something hitting the furniture. The sound of feet on the floor—two sets. Something fell hard, a chair maybe, skidding into darkness. A grunt that was high and strangled. Then the sound of an arm being torqued past resistance.
Then nothing.
Dash lifted his arm. Bunny raised her head. The office had settled into absolute stillness.
Papers had relocated themselves. One monitor sat at an angle it hadn’t sat at before. The desk lamp was on the floor, still lit, throwing a long triangle of light across the carpet. In that light: Carol, face down, both arms wrenched behind her. And kneeling on the small of her back, one knee planted with the calm precision of someone who had done this before: Detective Ramirez.
Chief Marjorie Lancaster came out of the dark hallway at Ramirez’s back. She didn’t announce herself. She put her foot on the gun that had fallen to the ground. One of Carol’s flats came off in the doorway and lay there on its side. Then the room filled.
Uniforms from the hallway, two more over the sill from the fire escape, glass cracking under their boots. Flashlight beams crossed Bunny’s face and moved on and came back. Someone was shouting about hands—“Let me see hands!”—and it took Bunny a moment to understand the officer meant hers. Dash rolled off of her and they both scrambled up. Bunny’s hands shot up, staying up as the officers did a sweep of the office.
“Ma’am, you can lower your hands.”
She didn’t.
“Ma’am.”
She finally lowered them. The page from the auction folder was still in her left hand. Lot number one. There was glass in the crease. A radio on someone’s shoulder said the east stairwell was clear. An officer crouched in the doorway, lifted the gun by the trigger guard with the end of a pen, and dropped it into a bag. The cuffs went on in two clicks. Lancaster read Carol her rights in the same voice she had used on the steps of Glen’s mansion to say they had two hours before the lawyer arrived. Carol’s cheek was pressed to the floor. Her hair had fallen across her mouth. Her eyes were open and on Bunny’s shoes. And they stayed there. Dash had lowered his hands before anyone told him to. He stood by the filing cabinets picking glass off his sleeve one piece at a time. He did not look at the window or the door. He looked at his watch.
“You said nine.”
“I said around nine.”
Lancaster didn’t look at him as she spoke, but the smirk was evident in her tone.
“It’s nine twenty.”
“And you’re still standing, O’Neill. Not dead. File a complaint.”
Bunny looked at Dash. Then at Lancaster. Then Ramirez. Then at Dash again, who met it this time and didn’t look away.
“You called them?”
“Before I sent you the text about Agios.”
“Lancaster told me not to talk to you. I—I thought you two weren’t—”
“I did,” Lancaster said. She motioned for Ramirez to step aside, got a hand under Carol’s arm and hauled her up, “I also told you to stay out of this building after hours. Nobody in this town listens to me.”
Ramirez took Carol’s other elbow. She stood uneven, one foot in a flat and one bare foot on the ground, her cardigan pulled off one shoulder where Lancaster had held it. A tear had dried on her jaw and left a line through her makeup. She lifted her chin.
Bunny looked at the shoe in the doorway.
Dash stepped around the desk. Glass moved under his feet. He stopped an arm’s length from Carol, close enough that Ramirez shifted his weight, and he waited until she looked at him instead of the floor.
“You can stop covering for him now. You bought me enough time.”
Carol’s eyes went to Dash and stayed there. Nothing else in her face moved.
“Covering for Glen?” Bunny found herself speaking, unable to do anything else. It came out louder than she meant. An officer by the window glanced over. Dash didn’t turn around.
“Not Glen.”
Carol’s jaw shifted, once, like she was working something loose from a back tooth. She said nothing.
“You’ve got maybe two minutes before the Chief puts you in a car,” Dash said, “After that it’s lawyers, and nobody’s going to ask you what happened. They’re going to tell you.”
Lancaster looked at her watch.
“Ninety seconds.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carol said coolly.
“Marty.”
For a moment, the name was just a sound. Then Bunny saw a clipboard held out at arm’s length. A pen going back into a shirt pocket. Thin shoulders going out through lobby doors.
“Delivery Marty,” Dash said, “Weekdays, anyway. Nights and weekends he pours for the catering outfit that works half the galas in Magnolia Heights. This one included.”
He took a half step closer. Ramirez shifted his grip on Carol’s elbow.
“You were with him before Glen. Before Overture. He’s the one who got you behind that bar.”
Carol’s eyes went to Bunny, then to the floor, then back to Dash.
“He knew Glen drank there. Knew which end of the bar he liked and which night. He told you there’d be a man with silver hair who tipped well if you listened to him talk.”
The chain between Carol’s cuffs pulled tight and went slack.
“He didn’t tell me his name,” she replied.
Nobody in the room moved. Somewhere down the hall a radio gave a short burst of static and cut out.
“Why would a delivery driver—” Bunny started.
“Because a delivery driver goes everywhere,” Dash said, “Loading docks. Service elevators. Kitchens. Offices with the door propped open. Nobody looks twice at the guy with the box. Half the time nobody even signs for him.”
Bunny thought of her own signature on his clipboard, the flourish she’d put on it.
“He was dropping packages at Agios before it had a second location,” Dash went on, “Sooner or later he figured out what was in them. Then he figured out who was getting rich off it. And he decided it was his turn.”
“How long have you known?” Bunny asked. Dash turned his head far enough to see her.
“The day we ran the skip traces on Glen’s people. There’s a photo from the St. Regis benefit last July. Glen’s table in the front of the frame. Behind it there’s a bar, and behind the bar there’s a skinny guy in a black vest. He isn’t watching the drink he’s pouring. He’s watching Glen’s table.”
He looked back at Carol.
“I’d seen him before. The day Bunny had me meet her up in costume storage, I came in through the dock. He was coming down the service stairs with an empty hand truck. I didn’t think anything of it. Theaters get boxes.”
She tried to picture the bar at last year’s gala. She could see the ice swan sweating onto the tablecloth and the line of donors waiting three deep. She could not see who had been pouring.
“Not every single one,” Dash shifted his weight on one leg, “He mostly got put on shift for smaller luncheons, things you would have sent Carol to, or another staff member in fundraising. And he wasn’t staffed on any since you started working there, Bunny. He definitely wasn’t risking this last gala. Fenelope would have clocked him. You would have. Anybody who’d spent a week in this building would have. So that night he stayed home.”
He was close enough now that Carol had to tip her head back to hold his eyes.
She held them.
“He didn’t need to be there,” Dash said, “You were.”
Carol’s mouth opened. She closed it. Lancaster reached into the inside pocket of her jacket with a gloved hand and came out with a glass vial no longer than her finger. The liquid inside was pale gold and thick. When she tilted it, it moved slowly, like agave nectar in a cold kitchen. She worked the cork up a quarter inch with her thumbnail, turned her face a little away from it and frowned. Then she pressed the cork back down.
“Found it exactly where you said it would be,” She said to Dash, “False bottom in the alcove. Right where the mask used to sit.”
Carol looked at the vial. Then she looked past it, at the flat lying on its side in the doorway. Lancaster slid the vial back into her jacket. She didn’t check her watch again.
“Keep going,” she said.
Dash kept his eyes on Carol.
“You were Cashler’s runner for two years. Envelopes, gift boxes, whatever she handed you. Some of those pickups weren’t at the clinic. They were at her house. Houses. The one in Magnolia Heights and the one in Eaton, past the Chatham County line.”
Carol, again, said nothing. Her eyes had gone back to the shoe.
“Ever been in Cashler’s office?” Dash asked, and it took Bunny a second to understand he was asking her.
“Yes.”
“Then you know she likes plants. Not just tomato plants. She’s got a greenhouse out back of her Eaton place, beds all the way down to the fence line. Pitcher plants. Sundews. Things that eat flies.”
He paused.
“For decoration, I’m sure.”
“And moonflowers,” Lancaster said, tightening her grip on Carol’s arm.
“Two kinds,” Dash continued, “The vine people put on trellises because it smells nice at night. And the other one. Same name on the seed packet at half the garden centers in the South. Big white trumpet flowers, spiny pods. Grows like a weed in this heat. She had rows of it. And it just so happens to have virtually the same alkaloid signatures as deadly nightshade. I’m sure Cashler nearly shit her pants when the tox report came out for Finch, so she scrambled for an alternate explanation. Something that the average person would buy. Something that wouldn’t put her in danger or any suspicious eyes on her… hobbies.”
He looked at Bunny.
“Like that story. The old doctor who grows a whole garden of poison and his daughter—”
“Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Bunny said, surprised that she could remember anything under these circumstances.
“That one.”
“Elaine always told me they were medicinal plants,” Lancaster looked at Bunny and Dash, the skepticism evident in her tone, “And as far as I know, she’s never tried to do anything nefarious with them.”
Dash turned back to Carol.
“Yeah, well, she probably didn’t—or hasn’t yet. Either way, she didn’t have to,” Dash turned back to Carol, “Someone else was already using that How-to-Make-a-Murderer garden.”
He moved back a few paces, and Bunny noticed his jaw clench though his eyes remained unreadable.
“Anyway, it wasn’t your little friendship with Cashler that confirmed things for me.”
He stepped forward and around Carol. Ramirez tightened his hold on her elbow. Dash leaned down and took one of her cuffed hands by the wrist, turned it over palm up, the chain pulling her other hand along with it.
“Just like I thought. Shine the light here, Ramirez.”
Ramirez unclipped his flashlight and put the beam on her hand. The officer by the window looked. Lancaster looked. Bunny looked, and could not stop looking. The skin across Carol’s palm was rough and red. Raised welts, some of them scarred over, some of them not, ran along the heel of her hand and up the insides of two fingers. Bunny had seen those hands every day for years. Typing, stapling, holding out coffee. She had never seen them from this side.
“Handling moonflower, the poisonous kind, causes skin irritation,” Dash said, “Especially if you can’t slip on any gloves in a pinch.”
Carol tried to close her fist. Dash held the wrist until she stopped trying, then let it go. Ramirez kept the light where it was a second longer before he clicked it off.
“One day, you’re waiting in the garden as Cashler gets some packages ready. You notice some flowers are not totally in bloom, but gosh, the garden is beautiful. You snap a picture, use it to ID the plants. And at first, it’s just a curiosity,” Dash paused, “Until it becomes an obsession. Now, each time you get a chance to wait in the garden, you tell yourself ‘Well, what harm could one little plucked pod do? Nobody counts flowers. You take a handful at a time. Then, one day, maybe over drinks at his house, you show them to Marty. Tell them what they are and gosh, isn’t Cashler so weird? So weird… but what if they cook down? What if you can make a little simple syrup, maybe the poison will cook off and you can have yourself a little morbid cocktail for your Halloween parties—you throw parties now because of the extra cash you’re rolling in now.”
Dash stopped again, took a breath. Savoring his captivated audience. Bunny felt the heat rise in her cheeks, an eager listener.
“Except you know the poison won’t cook off,” He finally spoke again, “And Marty knows too. So the two of you cook them down into something you can pour but that neither of you drinks.”
Carol’s shoulders came up an inch and stayed there.
“Then the gala,” Dash said.
Bunny felt the auction page in her hand. She had forgotten she was still holding it.
“Lot one was never really for sale, was it?” Dash said, “A jade mask, hollow, heavy enough nobody notices what’s inside. Glen buys it, Glen takes it home, and whatever Cashler packed in it goes home with him. Everybody in on it knew he’d win. He always won.”
“Eight thousand five hundred,” Bunny said. Her voice sounded like it was coming from the next office.
“So that night you had one job,” Dash continued, “Get a drink into Glen’s hand. Wait for the room to get loud. Walk out.”
“The seating chart,” Bunny said.
“Mickey asked you to put Glen next to Carissa’s table,” Dash said to Carol, “But you’d have done it anyway. Two exes, an open bar, an expensive villa. Everybody’s watching the paddles. Nobody’s watching the assistant.”
We put exes next to each other’s tables all the time, Bunny had said that. She had said it laughing, to Carol, twirling a pen. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
“And when it came out that the chart was wrong,” Dash said, “it just looked like a mistake. A lucrative mistake- one that makes the fund-a-need go through the roof. Fenelope loved it. You’d worked for her long enough to know she would.”
Carol lifted her head.
“I was good at my job,” she cut in, trying to wriggle out of Ramirez and Lancaster’s grip uselessly. They clamped down like vices, like animal traps.
It was the first full, truthful sentence she had said since the window came in. Ramirez looked at Lancaster. Lancaster didn’t look at anyone.
“You were,” Dash said, “So when the bidding started, you went out the service corridor. Marty was waiting at the loading dock. He never had to come inside.”
Bunny saw the terrace. Cold stone steps. Mindy hunched over the registration tablet in her brown cardigan, holding up the empty tray of name badges. All guests present and accounted for. Every last one. Bunny had squeezed her shoulder and stood there another minute because it was quiet outside and she didn’t want to go back in yet.
She hadn’t been in the room. Neither had Carol.
“The plan was clean,” Dash said, “Glen goes home with the mask. Glen dies in the night. Heart, stroke, whatever a coroner calls a sixty-something man who drank too much at a party. You two let yourselves in, take the mask and everything in it, and you’re gone. If anybody starts asking questions, there’s Carissa sitting right there with a grudge. There’s Fenelope with her auction. Nobody’s looking at a delivery driver and a girl who books the caterers.”
He let a second pass.
“Except Glen didn’t drink it.”
Carol’s chin moved. A small movement, down and to one side.
“Maybe he was careful. Maybe he just didn’t like what you poured,” Dash said, “He handed it off. Harold Finch was standing right there.”
“Harold wasn’t—” Carol started then stopped.
The officer by the window had turned all the way around now. Nobody told him to go back to the glass.
“Harold wasn’t supposed to be the one,” Dash said, finishing for her, “But he was. He walked out of that ballroom behind Glen, and he didn’t make it to the car.”
Carol shut her eyes. When she opened them they were wet again, and she didn’t try to wipe them. She couldn’t. Bunny looked down at her own right hand. Earlier that night, before the doors opened, Carol had come up beside her at the edge of the Egyptian Room with two flutes of champagne. She had held one out without a word. Bunny had taken it. She had drunk half of it standing right there, watching the florist fix a centerpiece, and she had not looked at the glass once. Her fingers had closed around the auction page. The glass in the crease cut a thin line across her palm. She didn’t open her hand.
Dash let the silence sit long enough that the officer by the window cleared his throat. Then he started to pace. Three steps toward the filing cabinets, three steps back, glass grinding under his shoes each time he turned.
“But what I can’t figure out,” he said, “is why. Why him? And why cover for him now?”
Carol watched him turn. She didn’t move her head to do it. Just her eyes.
“You had a good thing going,” Dash said, “Cashler was paying you ten grand a month to carry boxes into cocktail parties. Glen was paying for everything else. That’s the best job in Magnolia Heights, and it isn’t the one you had here. So why throw all of it in with a guy who drives a delivery van?”
“Glen was a piece of shit,” she said it flat and fast, like she’d been holding it in her mouth for a while.
Dash stopped pacing.
“Funny,” he said, “Because the way you tell it, Glen fixed your car. Glen made your loan people stop calling. Glen covered your rent for three months when you couldn’t stand up behind a bar anymore. For a piece of shit, he sure kept the lights on.”
“For a price!”
It came out of her at full volume. The chain between her wrist snapped tight. Ramirez and Lancaster both leaned their weight into her arms at once and she went nowhere.
“Everything he gave me had a price on it, and he made sure I knew what it was. Every single—”
“Enough!”
Lancaster had not raised her voice once that night. She had not raised it on the steps of Glen’s mansion or in any room Bunny had ever stood in with her. It hit the walls of the small office and came back. The officer by the window stopped with one hand halfway to his radio. Carol’s mouth shut. Even the printer’s error light seemed to hold still. Nobody spoke. Lancaster adjusted her grip on Carol’s arm. When she talked again her voice was back where it always was, low and dry and level.
“O’Neill, I’ve got a suspect in cuffs, a window my department is going to have to pay for, and a mayor who wants a name on his desk by morning,” She tipped her head a quarter inch toward Dash, “Get on with it. I’m losing patience with the whole Columbo routine.”
Dash looked down at himself. Jacket, no coat.
“I don’t even have a raincoat.”
The police chief didn’t smile at this, but Bunny let out a snort, clamping her mouth shut once Lancaster’s death glare landed on her.
“Wrap. It. Up.” Lancaster spat out between gritted teeth.
“Fine,” Dash rolled his tongue in his mouth, “I was kidding about not knowing why. I’d be a pretty lousy detective if I left all the confessing to her.”
He jabbed a thumb in Carol’s direction.
Lancaster didn’t answer. She shifted her weight to her back foot.
“None of it was ever about Glen. You didn’t love Glen. You loved Marty. He was the first one who noticed you. Not the girl with the spreadsheets. You. He got you a leg up, got you a little money, got you somewhere nobody else was ever going to take you. And the two of you were going to ride off into the sunset with a trunk full of Cashler’s pills, an expensive mask, and all the cash you’d gotten so far. A little Bonnie and Clyde.”
Carol’s face didn’t change. But her bare foot slid back half an inch on the carpet, like she was looking for the shoe without looking.
“Except Glen was still alive,” Dash said, “And Glen still had the mask.”
He started pacing again. Slower this time.
“So Marty sends you back in. A reconciliation package. Something nice. A card that says sorry for how things ended, and thank you for everything you’ve done for the Fox. He’d just dropped eight and a half grand at your gala. Who wouldn’t believe that?”
Bunny could picture the card. She could picture Carol’s handwriting on it, round and even, the same hand that addressed every donor thank-you that left the building.
“You go to the house. He lets you in. You go straight to that bar of his and pour him a whiskey, Old Fashioned with a little deadly twist. He thinks it’s the way he normally takes it. You pour one for yourself too, neat, so he won’t think twice. The only difference between the two glasses is what was in his before the whiskey went in.”
Carol was looking at the floor again.
“And so that night, for whatever reason, he took it,” Dash said, “Maybe he was feeling forgiving. Maybe he thought the liquor would loosen you up and he was going to get lucky, in a manner of speaking.”
Ramirez’s grip on Carol’s elbow tightened. She didn’t react to it.
“Only it doesn’t work the way it did on Harold. Glen’s a bigger, taller man. He’s drinking on a fuller stomach than gala chicken—no offense,” he glanced at Bunny.
She raised her hands in placation.
“None taken.”
“He doesn’t go down,” Dash continued, “He starts to feel it, though. And he figures out what you did.”
Dash stopped by the broken window. Cold air moved the blind on its own cord.
“There was a struggle. In the gallery, by the alcove. And Marty was outside the whole time, waiting to hear from you. When you didn’t come out, he came in. Glen kept a Glock in the false bottom under the mask pedestal. Marty knew it was there because you knew it was there. He got to it first.”
Nobody in the room said anything. The radio on somebody’s shoulder hissed and went quiet.
“Then you had a dead man in the gallery and a story that didn’t work,” Dash said, “So you tried to make it a suicide. Moved him to the study. Put him in his chair. Wiped off any finger prints on the gun. Put the gun on the side table with his hand around it first.”
He looked at Bunny.
“You were right. You said it at the house. One person couldn’t have dragged him that far.”
Bunny remembered it, clear as day.
“But two could.”
Dash turned back to Carol.
“After that, you were messy. Moving fast. You took the mask because the mask was the whole point. But you still had the syrup on you, and you couldn’t walk out of Glen Valentino’s house with a vial of poison in your purse. So you put it in the one place you figured nobody would look. The false bottom, where the gun had been. You were going to come back for it.”
Carol’s eyes went, for a second, to Lancaster’s jacket pocket.
“But you never did,” Dash said.
The office was quiet enough that Bunny could hear the building’s HVAC wheeze on somewhere below them. She realized she had taken a step forward. She didn’t remember deciding to. Ramirez glanced at her. She stopped.
“Carol.”
The assistant looked at her. It was the first time since the window that she had looked at Bunny’s face instead of her shoes.
“Why are you still protecting him?” Bunny said, “He’s not here. He let you come here alone with a gun.”
For a moment Carol didn’t answer. Then her mouth moved, and when the words came they were quiet and completely steady.
“Because I love him.”
Bunny waited.
“We’d been saving. Everything from Cashler. Everything from the clinics. We had enough,” Carol said, “We were leaving tonight. After I got the auction file. He was going to pick me up at the dock,” she swallowed, “He told me everything. He always told me everything.”
Lancaster made a small sound. Not laugh but not not one either.
“O’Neill called me four days ago,” she said, “Gave me a name and a plate number. We put it out to every agency between here and the state line.”
She looked in her pocket for her phone using the hand that wasn’t holding onto Carol like a metal claw. She looked at the phone screen and put it away again.
“State troopers pulled over a white van at two o’clock this afternoon. Halfway to the Mississippi line. Driver was a Martin Brentzel, thirty-four. In the passenger seat there was a jade mask. Inside the mask were a few hundred pills, most of them with labels still on the bottles. In the back there was one suitcase.”
Carol stared at her.
“One,” Lancaster repeated.
Carol’s bare foot found the edge of the carpet and stopped there.
“He wasn’t coming to the dock tonight, Ms. Kelly,” Lancaster said, and for once her voice was not quite level, “He was never coming back for you.”
Carol didn’t say anything, Ramirez adjusted his hold on her arm, gently this time. Bunny looked across the office at Dash. He was already looking at her. He hadn’t moved from his spot by the broken window. The blind knocked against the frame behind him. His face was doing something she hadn’t seen it do before. His eyebrows had gone up a fraction and stayed there, and he let out a breath through his nose, slow, the way a man does when a bet he couldn’t cover paid off anyway.
He’d been standing on Bunny’s hunch the whole time.
His hand went to the inside pocket of his jacket, where he kept his license, and rested there. He didn’t take it out. The corner of his mouth moved in a half smile. He tipped his head at her, barely a quarter inch. Bunny felt the small cut on her palm then, for the first time. She opened her hand. The auction page unfolded on its own, glass sliding out of the crease onto the carpet, and she let it.
Lancaster let go of Carol’s arm and handed her off with a tip of her chin.
“Alright, boys. Book her. Let’s roll out.”
The room emptied just like it’d filled, only slower. Two uniforms took Carol between them. Ramirez went ahead into the hallway with his flashlight down at his knees, lighting the floor instead of the walls. The officer from the window climbed back over the sill and his boots metallically scraped against the fire escape. Somebody kicked the desk leg on the way past and apologized to nobody.
Carol went through the doorway in one shoe. She didn’t look back. Lancaster stayed for a moment. She looked at Bunny, then at Dash, then at the papers and the glass and the lamp still lying on its side. An inscrutable look passed across her face. Then she went out after the officers. Her footsteps stopped halfway down the hall. She came back as far as the doorframe and put one hand on it.
“I know a guy,” she finally said, “For the window.”
She left. Bunny listened to the service door bang shut two floors down. She stood a while in the ruined office. She bent, picked up Carol’s flat from the doorway, and set it on the corner of the desk where somebody would find it.