Bliss by Bill Clem Page B

hesitated.
    Did Bob Booth have a gun? If so would he use it on her?
    The police were pounding on the Booth’s front door with weapons drawn. Lindsey stood close to the window and looked in. Her gaze scanned the kitchen. The table was still set as if they were getting ready for dinner. Then, she looked across from the table. Her legs fell out from beneath her.
    Oh my God!
    Melanie Booth was sitting against a far wall near the sink, slumped forward. Her head was mostly blown away and splattered on the wallpaper behind her. Bob Booth sat across from her, a shotgun stuck in his mouth, his head also destroyed and one dimensional, with nothing behind the face as if it were a paper cut out.
    Lindsey bent over and retched, gasping for breath between fits of dry-heaves. She saw the police enter, and their look conveyed as much shock as she herself felt. She ran back to her yard and into her back door. Her breath coming in ragged gasps.
    What in God’s name would have made Bob Booth snap like that?
    She grabbed the phone and dialed Jason’s number.
    When he picked up, she was crying into the phone. “Jason, he killed her, he killed her, he kil-“
    “Lindsey, what are you talking about?”
    “My next door neighbor, he just killed his wife and then shot himself. Jason, something is happening here. Please believe me.”
    “I do believe you. It’s just--”
    “Just what?”
    “I’m really sick right now. I had to come home from work early. I’ve been feeling bad ever since I left your place. I can hardly sit up.”
    “What’s wrong? Oh my God, are you okay?”
    “I don’t know, I went to the ER and had some blood drawn. They’re supposed to call me later.”
    “Jason, is it serious?”
    “I don’t know, Lindsey, I just don’t know. I gotta go. I can’t talk any more right now.”
    The line went dead.
    Dumfounded at Jason’s response, Lindsey just lay in bed for a while and stared at the ceiling. She couldn’t believe what he’d said. She called the one person in the entire world she thought she could depend on, and he wouldn’t talk to her. Maybe he was really too sick to talk? Jason had always been a good listener. That was one of the things Lindsey loved about him. Tonight, he just didn’t sound like himself.
    Please don’t let anything be wrong with him.
    Lindsey forced herself to look back out the window. A knot of people had gathered at the Booth residence, pressed eagerly against police barriers, gawking through the unshaded windows. Two more police cars and a van from the state medical examiner’s office had arrived. Lindsey just stared in disbelief. An attendant stepped out of the van and unfolded an opaque body bag.
    Lindsey felt another wave of nausea.
    She’d never seen the results of a shotgun blast before tonight, and she didn’t want to see it again when they carried the bodies out. Quelling her nausea with an effort of will, she turned away and bolted to the bathroom.
    Two hours later, Lindsey sat on her sofa with a cup of herbal tea and had just started to calm herself from the day’s events. She was trying to purge the image of the Booth’s from her mind. A loud knock on her front door yanked her from her thoughts. Probably the police wanting to ask questions, Lindsey decided.
    It surprised her to see Teresa Hagen, her neighbor and co-worker.
    What surprised her even more–was how Teresa looked.

29
    Katherine Blair stood in her Scottsdale villa and watched the rain clouds build up over the desert. The local weather service called for a severe thunderstorm with the chance of a flash flood warning as well.
    An apt description of her life, she thought.
    She dressed carefully as always when she planned to meet Stephen Vetter; she anticipated that they would go to bed. There had not been that many men in her life, and in fact, that was one of the reasons she had left Chicago.
    She had married while still in college and discovered too late that what her husband had wanted, was someone to sleep