Vero uttered a few choice words about where I could stick said stool as she hauled the garage door open with both hands. She shivered as a cold autumn wind sliced under the opening and rustled her hair. Cursing me under her breath, she slung the garage door high above her head on its track until it was fully opened, resting parallel with the ceiling. I climbed up the rungs and reconnected the belt to the pulley, the way Steven had shown me. Then I pulled the cord.
Vero shrieked as the door slid freely down the tracks, picking up speed as it dropped. She lunged, catching it before it hit the ground. “Are you nuts?” she hissed. “The last thing we need is Mrs. Haggerty hearing all this and poking her nosy ass all up in our business!” Veroeased the door to the ground with a quiet thud, a sound so small I might not have heard it inside the house.
“There were two of them,” I said, climbing down from the stool. Vero wrinkled her nose at me. “It’s the only way someone could have shut this garage without making any noise. One person pulled the cord. Someone else caught the door and controlled the drop.”
“So let me get this straight,” Vero said. “You mean to tell me someone else… no,twosomeone elses… killed Harris while you were on the phone with your sister?”
“Making it look like an accident.”
“Or setting you up to take the fall.” Vero picked up the envelope and slid it into the waistband of her yoga pants—myyoga pants—as if she were afraid I might suddenly decide to give it back. She yelped as I yanked it free, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I had already claimed the money. Regardless of who’d shut Harris inside the garage, I was the one who’d accepted payment for the hit job. And if anyone ever found Harris’s body, we were the ones who’d go down for it.
When the kids went down for their afternoon naps, I retreated to my office and closed the door. Patricia’s envelope rested on top of my desk. It was noticeably lighter since Vero had counted out her forty percent of the cash, but that didn’t make it any easier to look at, and I tucked it inside my desk drawer.
The money from Patricia was no different from my book advance, just one more unearned payment for a job I hadn’t done. Just one more thing to feel guilty about. As many problems as Patricia’s money could solve, it had come tied to even bigger ones. Scarier ones. The kinds of problems that meant losing my kids. The kinds of problems that meant spending the rest of my life behind bars. Andthe only way I’d ever have a leg to stand on if Harris’s disappearance came back to bite me was to know for certain what had really happened in my garage. To be able to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I hadn’t been the one to murder him.
I flipped on the old PC, waiting as it coughed and sputtered to life. I opened a blank Word document and titled it, typing the first words that came to mind, the one thing Sylvia and my editor were expecting of me—THE HIT by Finlay Donovan. The screen was blindingly white. The cursor stared back at me with an indifferent, slow blink as my calloused fingers hovered over the keys. It had been months since I’d been able to climb out of my own mire of self-defeating thoughts. Since Steven left, I hadn’t been able to cobble more than a few words together on a page. Every plotline seemed hopeless, every romance fell flat, and every story I dreamed up felt like a complete waste of time.
When I’d missed my first deadline after Steven moved out, Sylvia had called to lecture me. I’d told her I had writer’s block, but she’d insisted I push through it. Sometimes, she’d said, you can’t see the whole story until it’s laid out on the page, and the only way to figure out what happens next is to write your way through it, one scene after the next, until it’s done. Sylvia was all about tough love and finding your own answers. Mostly, Sylvia was all about earning a paycheck. Maybe I should’ve been, too.
I touched the keyboard, trying to figure out exactly where to start my contracted novel, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Harris’s story. Probably because, through my own stupidity, I’d managed to put myself in the middle of it. If the police managed to trace Harris from The Lush to my garage, I’d become their prime suspect. And Vero and I would go to prison unless we could prove the murder had been committed by someone else.
I knew the opening scene. Harris Mickler had been murdered right under my nose. All I had to do was uncover the backstory to figure out the rest of the plot. I just had to put myself in the heads of the characters—to figure out who they were, what they wanted, and what they stood to lose. It all boiled down to means, motive, and opportunity. How hard could it be to solve my own crime?
I started typing, beginning with the note Patricia had slipped on my tray during lunch, recalling as many details as I could: the call I placed from my van, my trip to The Lush, sneaking Harris to the parking lot, then finding him dead in my garage. As I wrote, I lost myself in the story, letting my memory fill in the gaps. The names—Harris’s, Patricia’s, Julian’s, mine, even the name of the bar—I changed, letting the rest of the events of the night spill unfiltered onto the screen.
The keys clicked with increasing speed. Paragraphs became pages, and I typed until the sun pulled its tired pink fingers from the slats between the blinds. Until the clatter of dishes quieted in the kitchen, and the kids fussed in their beds before finally drifting off to sleep. I wrote through the long hours of silence that followed, until the light from my screen was the only light in the house.
CHAPTER 17
The house was quiet, the kids already down for their afternoon naps when I woke the next day. Vero had fallen asleep on the couch, her blistered hands curled around the throw pillow under her head and her face slack with exhaustion. I didn’t see any sense in waking her when I left. A local news channel was playing softly on the TV in the background. She’d probably been up all night watching the headlines, listening for the police, waiting for them to show up at our front door. The only way either of us would ever sleep peacefully again was if we knew who had really killed Harris Mickler.
I’d written through the night but was no closer to understanding the chain of events that had led up to that moment when I’d found Harris dead in my garage. Who, aside from Patricia and me, had a reason to want to kill him? Everything I knew about Harris had come from his social media profiles and his cell phone. Surely every woman in those horrible photos had had a motive to want to end Harris’s life, but I’d locked it in his car at The Lush, and I couldn’t risk going back for it now. Patricia was the only person who couldhelp me solve Harris’s murder. That is, if she’d bother to answer any of my calls.
Desperate, I tracked down the number for the firm where Patricia was employed. The receptionist apologized, explaining Patricia had called in sick that morning, and she would be taking leave for the remainder of the week. I didn’t know much more about Patricia than I knew about Harris, but thanks to the note she’d left on my tray in Panera, I knew her home address.
North Livingston Street was already dressed for Halloween, cottony cobwebbing strung from the limbs of the trees and bright pumpkins dotting the front porches. I eased to the curb a block away from number forty-nine. The Micklers’ house was a modest 1960s split level, landscaped to blend in with its unassuming surrounds. Like most of the others in this zip code, the simple brick shell had probably been remodeled inside, with granite counters and ornate trim and sunken jetted bathtubs to suit the lofty price and high-end tastes of this corner of North Arlington.
The plantation shutters through the windows I could see were all drawn shut, and the driveway was empty of cars. As far as I could tell, no cops were poised to pounce outside.
I dialed Patricia’s number for the third time since I’d left my house, tossing my phone in my drink holder with a muttered swear when an automated voice told me her mailbox was full. I got out of my van, aiming for nonchalant as I strolled casually up the sidewalk toward the Micklers’ house. Most of the neighbors were probably at work, which was precisely where Patricia Mickler should have been.
She’d been foolish to call in sick the day after she’d paid someone to kill her husband. Or maybe she was just playing up the role of the worried wife. I hoped, wherever she was, she hadn’t skipped town. If she ran, the police would be sure to find her, and if theyquestioned her about her husband’s disappearance… Well, I didn’t want to think about what she might confess in exchange for reduced prison time.
Satisfied I wasn’t being watched, I crossed the street to Patricia’s house. The front stoop was neat: no stacks of mail, no knickknacks or Halloween decorations. I rang the bell. Its faint chime was just audible through the foyer window. No thump of approaching feet. No barking dogs. I waited a minute before rapping hard on the door. The house remained quiet. I peered through the window. The lights were off inside.
Where would she have gone?
I turned to go, pausing by the mailbox mounted beside the Micklers’ door. My hand hovered over the lid. I was pretty sure tampering with someone’s mail was a criminal offense, but if Harris’s mail was anything like mine, it contained plenty of things I didn’t want people to know about me.
I glanced over my shoulder, then both ways down the street, before cracking it open. The stack inside was thin. Slender enough to fit inside my coat without drawing notice. Before I could talk myself out of it, I tucked the mail into my open jacket and hurried to my van. Locking myself inside, I hurriedly thumbed through the envelopes.
A handful of bills, some coupons, a few advertisements… All the mail had been jointly addressed to Mr. & Mrs. Harris Mickler. Except a single monthly bank statement, addressed to an LLC—Milkman Associates.
Milkman,like the password to his cell phone.
I slipped my car key inside the flap and sliced it open, scanning the statement. This was clearly not an account he shared with Patricia. There were no withdrawals for groceries or utility bills or mall stores. No hair salons or doctor appointments or routine expenses related to their house. My stomach went sour as I read the charges. Payments to upscale bars and high-end restaurants, a flower shop in Vienna, and the glitzy Charleston-Alexander jeweler in town. There were several recurring charges to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, halfway between Harris’s house and The Lush. This must have been Harris’s operating account—the one he used to wine and dine his victims before he drugged and blackmailed them into silence.
I flipped the page and found a list of twelve deposits, all for the same amount—two thousand dollars—all bank-to-bank wire transfers on the first day of the month. Harris must have been doing some financial consulting on the side. And, apparently, his consulting business was doing well. By the looks of it, he had twelve regular clients on retainer, making payments every month. In the last week of September, Harris’s balance on the account had been a little more than a half million dollars. But the total in the account by the end of that month, when the statement closed, was… zero?
