There's something you're not seeing. Something I had edited out.
The woman turning the corner just before the flash. I had seen only a glimpse of her back. Blond, ponytail. Something in her arms. But that wasn't what was bothering me.
It was that she never came back.
I hadn't thought about it until now. After the blast...The kid with the Razor was there. Lots of others. But the blond woman wasn't among them. No one interviewed her. She never came back...Why?
Because the son of a bitch was running away.
That moment flashed over and over in my mind. Some-
thing in her arms. She was running away. It was the au pair. And the bundle in her arms? That was the Lightowers' baby!
Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree
Chapter 15
HER HAIR FELL in thick, blond clumps onto the bathroom floor. She took the scissors and cut again. Everything had to start over now. Wendy was gone forever. A new face began to emerge in the mirror. She said good-bye to the au pair she had been for the past five months.
Cut away the past. Wendy was a name for Peter Pan, not the real world.
The baby was screaming in the bedroom. “Hush, Caitlin. Please, honey.”
She had to figure it out - what to do with her. All she knew was that she couldn't let the baby die. She had listened to the news reports all afternoon. The whole world was look-ing for her. They were calling her a cold-blooded killer. A monster. But she couldn't be such a monster, could she? Not if she had saved the baby.
“You don't think I'm such a monster, do you, Caitlin?” she called to the bawling child.
Michelle lowered her head into the sink and dumped a bottle of L'Or‚al Red Sunset dye all over her, massaging it into her cropped hair.
Wendy, the au pair, disappeared.