Opening the trunk, I change out the license plates. I plaster on a few bumper stickers, including one in support of Fox’s reelection.Would Daphne find that amusing?
Hopefully, she’s not too scared right now, and she kept her mouth shut. I’ve orchestrated this so there’s no way anything could be traced back to me unless she confesses to the burner phone. But not disclosing a kidnapping or a known assassination attempt would make her a co-conspirator. And with her exposure around lawyers on the Hill, she knows exactly what sort of trouble awaits her if she admits anything.
Yanking off the fake nose, wig, and bald cap, I strip out of the catering uniform. I keep the shoes on so I don’t leave any traceable tracks in the dirt. I pull out my metal bucket and dump everything inside, making sure it’s only surrounded by dirt and nothing that could catch fire.
Dousing my disguise in lighter fluid, I strike a match, and the evidence goes up in smoke.
I hightail it out of there before the farmer finds me.
It takes three hours,but the car’s vinyl is stripped, and it’s back to its factory-painted black. I’ll puncture two of the tires tomorrow and drop it off at a mom-and-pop tire store a few hours away. I’ll pay them to swap out all four tires so no one can match any treads or find any dirt from the scene on the new tires. Cops will be scouring the entire DMV for a balding man in a white Toyota Camry with size twelve sneakers and the most generic Michelin tires they make. If they ended up here, they’d meet a man with dark hair, a black Toyota registered in his name, and a closet of size eleven sneakers who spent the day binge-watchingHouse.
Turning on my burner phone, I see two missed texts from Daphne.
Daphne
I’m home. It’s over. Spoke to the cops and said nothing.
Call me? Please?
CHAPTER NINE
DAPHNE
He did it.The son-of-a-bitch did it.
I’m not surprised, but I wish he’d done it when I wasn’t so close to his victim. McArthur’s Jack and Coke splashed all over my shoes when he collapsed.
My phone rings as I sit curled up on the couch, Hawkeye at my feet on his back, his pink tongue lolling out while he naps. He wakes and dashes up my lap.
I nuzzle his fluffy coat before I finally get up the nerve to answer.
“So, was it a boy or a girl?” Guy asks.
A laugh slips out before I can restrain it. “I don’t know. They didn’t cut the cake.”
“Pity, I bet it would’ve been delicious.”
A tear slips, but I’m laughing.Am I going crazy? Has he driven me mad?
“I still don’t believe it,” I mutter.
“You don’t believe that I killed the man I said I was going to kill? That’s naïve, Princess.”
Hawkeye waddles from my lap and down to my feet, his fluffy tail wagging in the air without a carein the world.
“I just… I can’t,” I murmur. “It’s hard to wrap your head around when you witness it firsthand. One second, he was standing there, and the next, everyone’s crowding around him, and before we know what’s happening, he’s being carted into an ambulance.”
“He’s dead, Daph. They posted it on the news twenty minutes ago. He died from anaphylaxis.” He says it so dryly, it’s like he’s mentally detached himself from the crime he committed.
“Anaphylaxis? Wait, his peanut allergy?”
“Yep,” Guy says with an infuriating streak of pride in his voice. I was the one who told him about the allergy. It’s not like Sherlock discovered it himself.
Does that make me an accomplice to murder? Am I Watson? Oh, God!
“But his EpiPen,” I say. “I saw his wife jab him with it.”
“It was a decoy. I filled it with peanut oil and stole his real one.”
