Not luck—Luke. After my call, he ran down and switched out the actual security discs for blank ones. The next morning, he handed me the security discs in his living room, and I broke them into more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle.I could get you a hammer, he quipped.We could grind them into a fine powder.
I nod along as Harp speaks, trying to act like a professional. “Thatislucky,” I say.
I return to my car and breathe a sigh of relief. I am in the clear. Nobody will ever know what I did. Not Harp. Not Finley. Not even Luke, whom I did not correct when he assumed that it was Finley, not me, who got caught up in this road-rage affair. Nobody will ever know this story but me.
Me and Marlow Luckett.
I haven’t lost sight of what I did. It was not my proudest moment. I hit a man with my car and left him behind without calling for assistance. But I surely would have faced criminal charges for hitting him, and he would have known my identity. I wasn’t willing to jeopardize myself in either way for that monster.
I will let the rest of summer pass. I will be grateful for the bullet I dodged and tolerant of my cheating husband until the fall, when we say goodbye to our son, Grayson, off to college in New York.
Then I will decide what to do with Finley and our train wreck of a marriage. I will decide when to end it. I will decide how to end it. And I will decide how much it willhurt.
Ten Months Later
April 4,2026
4
Louise
Sergeant Louise Pratt pulls her coat tight against the morning wind, asking herself why she still puts up with the gray and cold midwestern weather, but knowing the answer, as she approaches the sorting facility on the south end of Grace Park. The air outside reeks of sour trash and diesel fuel.
Even on a Saturday morning, LSK Ventures, nestled behind a strip of warehouses, hums with a low mechanical rumble, the buzz of workers, the whines and clanks of machinery. She passes under an open-air hangar, her badge on a lanyard around her neck. The intense overhead lighting seems redundant with the natural light, but it’s their electricity bill, not hers. She walks along segregated piles of splintered wood, scrap metal, crushed cardboard.
Her partner, George Sarkisian, beat her here but, good egg that he is, waits by the yellow tape. He probably drove, unlike Louise, who only lives five blocks away. They make quite a pair, she and “Cutty,” as she calls him—Cutty Sark, the whiskey. Cutty clears six feet and is up to 225, while Louise has to look up to see five feet. She likes to say she makes up for her height with a head of poofy gray curls and a big attitude.
A uniformed officer lifts the yellow tape for them, a young man whowas in diapers when she kicked in doors as a rookie in Chicago. She’s seen him before. Marzullo or something.
“Detectives,” he says too formally, but appropriately so as a newbie on the force. “Jimmy Nardulli. I’m the responding.”
Right, that’s it—Nardulli.
“Morning, Jimmy. This is Sergeant Sarkisian. You can call him ‘Cutty’ or ‘Sark’ but not George. You can call me Lou.”
“Lou? Oh, I’m sorry—”
“Not because I’m a lieutenant,” she says. “My name’s Louise. Call me Lou. And take a breath, Jimmy. Is this your first homicide?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“All right, you’re on, kid. Show us the way.”
“Bay Four,” he says, leading them. “Workers found him when they were separating construction debris.”
Bay Four is cordoned off near the back of the hangar. A massive dumpster, forest green in color but in need of a paint job, is opened on one side like a drawbridge, but moved back from the conveyor line. As they get closer, the odor transitions from sour to outright putrid.
“Who called it in?” she asks.
“Facility supervisor. One of the workers noticed something off when the contents got dumped into the sorter. Stopped everything.”
“Good,” she says. “Don’t let them restart until we say so.”
A pair of CSU techs are crouched near the corpse, lying on tattered drop cloths with standard-looking paint stains, ripped pieces of duct tape on each end.
“He was wrapped in the drop cloths?” asks Cutty.
“Yes, sir.”
