I jumped as a car door slammed in the garage. Delia raced to the kitchen to meet Vero, who’d be walking in any moment with the pizzas. Steven hurried out the front door, ushering Theresa in front of him, anxious to be gone. “Make sure the kids are packed and ready by five. I’ll be back for them after the party,” he called over his shoulder. The front door closed just as Vero came in through the kitchen, a mountain of pizza boxes stacked in her arms.
* * *
That night, after Steven had picked up the kids, I sat on my front stoop, the cold from the concrete seeping through my socks as I stared after the shrinking taillights of his truck. The kids would only be gone one night. They’d be home again tomorrow, and they were only a few blocks away, but I hated how easily he swooped in, took what he wanted, and left. I hated how unfair it was, and how nobody else seemed to notice or care.
That had always been Steven’s MO. He’d always been smooth, quick to cover his tracks. Like today, when he’d slipped into Delia’s birthday party an hour late, accomplished exactly what he wanted, and slipped right out again before Vero ever laid eyes on him, without Delia even noticing he’d left. His sense of timing was impeccable, his shell game unerring. He’d been screwing Theresa for weeks behind my back. If Mrs. Haggerty hadn’t seen him and spilled the beans, I might never have known what they had been—
I lifted my chin from my hands. Across the street, Mrs. Haggerty’s curtain flashed closed. I got up and crossed the road, heading straight for her door. If anyone had seen two strangers sneaking around in my garage the night Harris Mickler died—if anyone could stand up for me as a witness and prove I was telling the truth—it would be the neighborhood busybody. I banged on the NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sticker on the glass.
“Mrs. Haggerty?” I called through it. “I need to speak with you!” I pressed my ear to the door, certain she was listening on the other side. I banged again, harder this time. “Mrs. Haggerty! Will you please open the door? It’s important.” Her TV was on. A muted laugh track of some evening sitcom played in the background. “Fine,” I muttered, finally giving up.
This was all Steven’s fault. After she’d blown the whistle on his affair with Theresa, he’d called her an old hag and told her to mind her own damn business. I hadn’t been much kinder once I’d heard how far and wide the rumors of his affair had spread. She’d refused to speak to either of us since.
I shuffled back across the street in my socks, my feet numb by the time I reached my front door. I closed myself inside, leaning back against it, waiting for the feeling to return to my toes as I thought about Mrs. Haggerty.
Between the time I had arrived home with Harris and the time Vero had let herself in through the front door, someone had snuck into my garage without Vero or me noticing. Mrs. Haggerty was the president of the neighborhood watch. If she had seen anything suspicious, she would have called the police to report it before we’d even stuffed Harris in the trunk. But the police never came, so I could safely assume she hadn’t seen much.
So how did the killers get past Mrs. Haggerty without her noticing?
Vero and I had surprised each other that night because she’d come in through a different door. And Steven had missed Vero entirely at the party for the same reason. What if the killers had parked down the street and snuck through the neighbors’ backyards, approaching my garage from the back?
The more I thought about it, the less it all made sense. Andrei and Feliks didn’t seem like the types who’d sneak around. Andrei Borovkov had slashed up three men and left them bleeding out on a warehouse floor. He hadn’t gone to the effort to clean up and didn’t seem concerned about concealing his crime. Why bother? Georgia said nothing would stick to them anyway. Clearly, they’d had no problem bribing their way to a mistrial. So why frame a suburban mother of two for a bloodless, quiet crime? If they’d wanted Harris dead, why not slash his throat and leave him on the floor of my garage?
No, this MO felt cowardly. The killers never had to touch the body. Never had to shed blood. They didn’t even have to be present at the moment when Harris’s life left him. This didn’t feel like the work of two shameless violent criminals. I was willing to bet the killers had never done anything like this before. The timing of the whole thing felt opportunistic. Or impulsive.
But clearly, something had been planned. They’d staked him out at the bar, then stalked us to my house. They’d waited until he was unconscious and vulnerable to strike, just like …
Just like Harris had with each of his victims.
My back stiffened against the door. Maybe the MO wasn’t impulsive.
What if it was deeply personal?
I ran upstairs to my office, past Vero’s closed door, where she was cramming for her midterm finals. I opened my desk drawer and unfolded Harris’s bank statement.
There had been twelve deposits on the first of the month.
And there had been thirteen numbered files on Harris’s cell phone—twelve containing photos of his previous victims, plus the one I’d doused with tomato juice in the bathroom.
Do exactly as I said, and be discreet, or I’ll show these photos to your husband and tell him what you’ve done.
Twelve deposits, two thousand dollars each, on the first of every month.
What if the deposits hadn’t been embezzled from Feliks Zhirov? What if they’d been hush payments? What if he’d been extorting them for money?
I skimmed the payments again, certain I was right. Two thousand dollars was a small sum for a high earner in these close-in suburbs of DC, an amount that might easily go unnoticed if a man’s wife quietly wired it from her personal spending account. Harris had been making a small fortune off of his victims—an amount that was probably growing every month, with every new woman he exploited—threatening them with photos, convincing them he would tell their spouses they’d been unfaithful if they didn’t comply with his demands. And why wouldn’t they? The photos painted a very different picture than the reality of what had been done to them. And they probably had no memory of their night with Harris to support their own account of what happened after the drugs had knocked them out.
Every single one of those women had a deeply personal motive for wanting Harris dead. And the MO felt like a perfect fit. But which one had actually done it?
Harris’s phone was probably already in the hands of a police detective by now. Without it, there’d be no easy way for me to trace the deposits back to individual accounts, but there might be a way to figure out who these women were and narrow down the list.
I grabbed a piece of paper from the printer, jotting down as many of those twelve first names as I could remember. Then I opened my browser and searched for Harris’s social networking group. Clicking on the membership page, I pulled up a roster. More than seven hundred thumbnail images filled the screen.
It was going to be a very long night.
CHAPTER 21
My mother had assured me when Steven and I first married that some dishes were impossible to screw up. Theoretically, no one should need a recipe to throw together a decent chicken soup or a simple meat loaf, but certain things about motherhood had always eluded me and cooking had been one of them. Apparently, marriage had been the other.
The pan in the oven was bubbling, browning at the edges. I cracked the oven door and gave it a cautious sniff. I’d found the casserole recipe online—which was more than I could say about my search for Harris’s victims—and the fact that I already had all the ingredients in my kitchen had felt like a small victory.
My search last night hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped. With only first names and physical descriptions to go on, I’d spent hours combing individual profiles, narrowing possibilities. Some, I’d felt certain I’d managed to identify. And after a bit of hunting and pecking through other social media pages, I was able to weed them out as possible culprits. Some had moved. One was in the hospital. Some had posted photos of other family activities or events they’d attended that night. But a handful
of names still eluded me. More than a few had deleted their networking profiles from the Facebook group altogether, which had made them impossible to find.
I set the table, put a load of clothes in the wash, made the beds, and scooped a mountain of toys off the living room floor. I’d given Vero the day off for her midterm exams and had spent the day scrubbing cake frosting stains out of the carpet, researching the names of Harris’s possible victims, and catching up on chores.
A car door slammed in the garage. I looked up from the dishwasher as Vero blew into the kitchen, dropped her purse on the counter, and kicked off a pair of black stilettos. I stacked a few clean dishes on my arm and set them on the table, taking in her sharp tailored suit and crisp white collar, her sleek French twist, and her bloodred lipstick. These were not Monday-afternoon-community-college clothes. These were not even Monday-hot-lunch-date clothes. These were high-dollar-accounting-firm-job-interview clothes. And a small part of me worried about where Vero had been all afternoon.
We hadn’t really talked since the day before Delia’s party. I hadn’t even had a chance to ask her about her date. I’d recapped my conversation with Theresa as we’d cleaned up after the party. Then we’d eaten cold pizza for dinner, Vero had studied for her exam, and I had shut myself in my office to write.
“How was your midterm?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t about to give me her notice and tell me she’d found a better job. One that came with health insurance and paid sick days and didn’t involve diapers. Or corpses.
She shrugged, peeling off her sunglasses as she wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?” She cracked open the oven and peered inside.
“Tuna casserole.”
She fanned at the billow of smoke that poured out. “Is it supposed to be black?”
Vero leapt aside as I flung open the oven door and ran to open the windows before the smoke alarms blared to life. I was standing on a kitchen chair, waving a dish towel at the detector on the ceiling, when Vero reached in her purse and slapped a brick of cash on the counter. “I’m not eating that. We’re ordering takeout.”
I dropped the towel, nearly falling off the chair as I gaped at the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. I scrambled down to shut the windows and snap the curtains closed. “What is that?” I asked, jabbing a finger at the money.
“That,” Vero said, “is thirty-seven thousand and five hundred dollars minus forty percent. You can buy me dinner to thank me.”
“For what?”
“For meeting with Irina Borovkov and collecting half of our money up front.” Every ounce of breath left my lungs. My knees buckled, and I slid down onto the chair I’d been standing on. “Finn? Finlay, what’s wrong?” Vero kicked the leg of my seat, and I swung my gaze up to meet hers.
“Do you have any idea who that woman’s husband is?” My voice was eerily quiet, disproportionately small compared to the depth of my panic.
Vero turned her back on me with a dismissive wave. She opened the refrigerator. “Sure. Irina told me all about him. The guy sounds like bad news. I’m pretty sure we can do this with a clean conscience.” Irina, Vero had called her, as if they were already old friends.
“Vero,” I said in a tightly controlled voice. “Andrei Borovkov is an enforcer for the Russian mob. He murders people for a living. He cuts people’s throats. Like those three men they found in that warehouse in Herndon over the summer.”
“Like I said. Bad news. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who…” Vero closed the refrigerator. She turned to face me, knuckles white around her Coke. “Wait. Run that by me again. I might have misheard that last part.”
I buried my head in my hands. “We were supposed to be severing ties, getting rid of every scrap of evidence! Do you have any idea what this means?”
I jumped out of my skin as Vero popped the top on her Coke can. She set the can down hard on the table, snatched up the money, and waved it at me. “It means you can afford a decent divorce lawyer and hold on to your kids. That’s what this means!”
I stared at her, dumbstruck. Last night, I’d told Vero every word Theresa had said, about how they were buying Delia’s affection and I had no money left for an attorney. About how Theresa was going to take my children from me, even though she didn’t want them. All that time, I’d been fussing about Steven and his damn Dreamhouse when I should have been telling Vero what I’d learned about Andrei Borovkov.
“We are not taking this money!” I said, shoving it back at her. We’d paid all my debts. I was finally right-side up. As long as I didn’t do anything stupid, I stood a better chance at holding on to Delia and Zach. “You’re going to call that woman right now and you’re going to tell her it was all a misunderstanding. Then you’re going to give her the money back.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I spent some of it.”
“How much?”
“Forty percent.”
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I did the math in my head. “You spent fifteen thousand dollars in one afternoon?” She nodded, looking contrite as she hunched over her Coke. “On what?”
Vero sat up, her voice rising as she pointed a finger at me. “You were the one who said we should get rid of every speck of evidence! So I did.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means there was a corpse in the trunk of my Honda! I’ve watched every episode of CSI, and you know there’s no way to cover that up.” Vero cast me a guilty look through the thick coat of mascara on her lashes. “So I sold my car to my cousin Ramón for parts.”
“And…?”
“And I bought a new one.”
I got up and threw open the garage door, blinded by gleaming graphite curves and sleek silver pipes the second I turned on the light. The Charger looked wildly obscene parked beside my minivan. A dealership sales sticker was still taped to the back window, obscuring my view of the two child safety seats buckled behind it. “What is that?”
Vero wrung her hands. “A 6.2-liter V8 … with a really big trunk?”
I slammed the door.
Vero headed for the liquor cabinet. “I think we’re going to need something stronger.”
I opened my mouth to swear at her in at least five languages I hadn’t learned yet when the house phone rang. Vero and I both went still. We stared at it as it rang again. No one ever called the house phone except telemarketers or groups soliciting donations. Groups like our local order of police.
Vero took a slow step back from it. “Who do you think it is?”
Part of me hoped it was Andrei Borovkov, just so I could tell Vero I told you so. I steeled myself as I reached for the phone. “Hello?”
“Finlay, where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for three days! Why haven’t you been answering your cell phone?” My shoulders sagged at the sound of Sylvia’s voice.
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said, sliding into a chair and massaging a temple. I couldn’t deal with a lecture from my agent right now. She’d emailed me on Friday afternoon for an update on my manuscript, and I’d closed the email without bothering to reply. “My cell phone died. I have a new one. I’m sorry, Syl, it’s been a crazy couple of days. I’ll email you the number.”
“Your editor wants to know where you are with the book. I tried putting her off to give you more time, but she’s demanding to see what you have so far.”
“What? No!” I sputtered. “I can’t send anything.” All I had was Harris’s story. Even with the names changed, it teetered far too close to the truth. It’d be too risky to send it. “It’s a mess. I haven’t even proofread it. It’s nowhere near ready.”
“I’ll tell you what’s a mess! You are in breach of your contract. Do you understand what that means? They can cancel your next book and call back your advance. You have to send me something. Anything. How much do you have?”
“Not enough.”
“Finlay.” Jesus, she sounded like my mother.
“Okay, okay. I’ve got a few chapters I can send you.” She was going to hate it anyway. But at least she could tell my editor I’d tried. “It’s not the project we talked about, but it’s all I have.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty thousand words?”
“Get it to me now.”
“I’ll send it to you tonight.”
“No, Finlay. Now. I’m not hanging up this phone until I see it in my in-box.”
I tucked the cordless under my chin and carried it upstairs. All I wanted was to get Sylvia off the phone so I could figure out what to do about Andrei Borovkov, the cash in my kitchen, and the fifteen thousand dollars of mob money that was now parked in my garage.
Without bothering to fill in the subject line, I sent the file to Sylvia. “There, are you happy now?”
Sylvia’s nails clicked against her keyboard as she grumbled, “I’d be happy if you weren’t three months behind on your deadline. I’d be happy if I hadn’t spent the last two days leaving you unreturned voice mails. I’d be happy if Gordon Ramsay showed up in my apartment and insisted on making me dinner tonight. But this,” she said through a deflated sigh, “will have to do. Give me your new cell.”
I pulled the prepaid phone from my pocket and rattled off the number.
“I’ll give this a read and see if I can use it to buy you more time. Meanwhile, get your butt in that chair and start typing or you can kiss your advance good-bye.”
“Thanks, Sy—” There was an abrupt click as she disconnected.
I leaned on the desk, my hands planted on either side of the keyboard, my head hanging over it. I was going to be dropped by my agent. And then by my publisher. What I had sent to Sylvia was hardly intelligible. I wasn’t even sure it was a coherent story. Thankfully, Harris’s and Patricia’s disappearances hadn’t made national news. My agent and editor lived in New York. Still, I prayed like hell I had remembered to change all the names before sending it out.
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