Free Guardian of Lies by Steve Martini

reporters that his sister was not supposed to work that night but that she had been called in at the last moment. The brother had dropped her off at the murder house at nine thirty. Liquida must have just missed them. It bothered him, but not enough to stop nibbling on his biscotti.
    He hadn’t arrived outside the fence at Pike’s house until a quarter to ten. Had he been there earlier and seen the maid and her brother drive up, he would have postponed the entire event.
    According to the reports in the press, the maid’s brother returned to pick her up just before midnight, when she didn’t call home and efforts to reach her on her cell phone failed. He rang the bell at the front gate, but nobody answered. What he did after that wasn’t clear. The police had instructed him to say nothing more.
    Some of the details, including what little the news reporters picked up regarding the crime scene, were at variance with the facts as Liquida knew them. As usual, the authorities withheld all of the critical forensics, any trace evidence, the trail of blood inside the house, the wounds, and how and where they were inflicted. The only specifics about the weapons came by way of the vague information that the victims died of stab wounds and the disclosure that one of the victims was found upstairs and the other on the first floor.
    Having taken down the old man, Liquida had figured that he was home free. How hard could it be to rouse the woman and draw her into the study? After dispatching Pike he made some noise, stomped on the floor a few times, and waited.
    When that didn’t work, he pushed over a small display case in the study. This smashed the glass in the case and dumped various cups, other awards, and mementos across the hardwood.
    When the woman didn’t come running, he began to wonder if she was deaf. He started a search of the rooms on the second floor, but he couldn’t find her. Liquida came as close to panic in that moment as he could ever recall.
    His first thought was that she had seen him and fled, perhaps from the top of the landing when he first saw her. If so, the police could be arriving at any minute. Liquida began to sweat. He moved frantically from room to room, searching every place he could think of. He went down the stairs into the garage and found a car door open. He checked inside for the ignition key. It wasn’t there. He thought maybe she had tried to take the car and couldn’t.
    Then he noticed that the side door leading from the garage into the yard was open. She must have gone out that way, but he didn’t follow her. If she had reached a phone, the police would be on their way.
    He raced back upstairs. If he couldn’t get the woman, he would make a quick effort to find the documents and beat a hasty retreat. He started looking for the documents in the most likely place, the study.
    It was then that he found it, the note the woman had left for Pike. It was toward the front of the desk, under the pen and the ornate letter opener. He read it without picking it up. His pulse dropped forty beats. She hadn’t seen him. She was on the run from the old man, and she had taken some coins. Liquida dropped into the chair behind the desk to catch his breath.
    He couldn’t be certain how long she’d been gone. He estimated that at least ten minutes had passed since he’d seen her up on the landing from down below. He pieced it together in his head. The noise of the running water had to be the old man taking a bath or a shower.
    He guessed that when she heard this, the woman made her move. She hadn’t lingered for long or he would have caught up with her.
    Things were not going well. First the maid and now this. He was trying to figure out how he could track her down and wondering when the next flight to Costa Rica was. He was staring across the desk at her note on the other side when it occurred to him that the problem of the missing woman and the abrupt way in which she’d left might actually present