Page 167 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“Right.” Timms nods like he’s deep in thought. “Don’t want anyone to think this wasn’t my idea, top to bottom.”

This draws a soft snort from Fi.

“In fact, I’ll be the one to turn the camera on and off. People need to know I make my own goddamn decisions. I act alone.”

I feel Hugo relax against me, and I breathe easier, too. We both edge backward when Timms leans forward and taps RECORD.

Here we go.

“Hello, fellow Philosopher Kings,” he says, his brow furrowed in an expression of constipated seriousness. “I’m coming to you today with my Apology. That’s Apology with a capital A because, like the great Socrates on his deathbed”—he gestures at the fanboy memorabilia behind him, his movements awkward and self-conscious—“I’m not here to apologize. I’m here to defend myself. True disciples will understand the difference. If you don’t, look it up. It’ll change your life. Examined, not unexamined.”

He taps his temple, his eyes fixed uncomfortably on the camera. It’s a lot of hard eye contact.

“I’m recording this video so there can be no question about my methods and my thought process. And then I’m choosing my own ending.”

He taps the gun on his knee, a movement I’m sure the people who watch this in the aftermath will notice and remark on.

“On June eighteenth, I went to talk to Paul Franklin, man to man, about my wife. Things escalated. He disrespected me, so I put hands on him. What happened afterward, well…” He leans into the camera. “Here’s what you’ve all been asking. I killed Paul Franklin.”

I hear a hissed exhale from one of the people listening in my empty living room. At a minimum, we have this. Now to get him to wrap it up and make himself dead.

“I did it in my wife’s home,” he says. “The home I paid for with my humble civil servant’s salary. The home where he had carnal relations with her in my bed. And I killed him with the nine-iron I bought for her on our sixth anniversary.”

I fucking knew the force of the blows to Franklin’s skull didn’t match the person they arrested for the crime, but nobody cared enough to pump the brakes and look into it no matter how much I pressed the issue. I even asked why there were no defensive wounds on Franklin’s body. A blow from a strong but small woman wouldn’t drop Paul immediately; he’d have tried to fight back. A blow from a gym-strong cop drops a man like Paul in his tracks.

It’s a funny feeling, having your own forensic findings confirmed by the murderer, on camera, while you’re in the room.

And he’s enjoying it. Timms looks like he set down the two-ton weight he’s been carrying since June.

“That’s right,” he says. “I killed him while my wife was drinking alone at some artsy-fartsy street fair, waiting for him to show up. And nobody came forward to support her alibi because the world rightly doesn’t give a shit about a past-her-prime female alone in the crowd.”

His face darkens then. “So we’re clear, I displayed proportionate anger toward an appropriate target. Any man who says otherwise never had anything worth defending.”

Hugo and I don’t exchange glances. We don’t exchange glances harder than any two people have ever not exchanged glances as this cretin justifies murder using words my boyfriend put into his mouth.

I’m going to make this man rail me so hard when we get home tonight.

“Now,” Timms drapes himself against the couch, warming up to having an audience, exactly like Hugo said he would, “you may be wondering what happened to that particular item. It certainly left our city’s finest investigative minds stumped.”

Sarcasm bleeds into his tone, and his eyes start to drift to the left. Hugo immediately steps in front of me, giving Timms a subtle shake of his head. Timms smoothly shifts back to the camera. After all, he’s got more grievances to unspool.

“Maybe if our offices weren’t overrun with unqualified diversity hires, they’d have reached the logical conclusion: the man who did it took it with him.”

He sets the gun on the couch cushion and grabs the golf club, brandishing it proudly for ten seconds longer than necessary before he lowers his arm.

“Yes, you will find little Pauly Franklin’s soy boy DNA on here. It’s been in the back of my closet since the night I did it.”

Timms sets the club down and picks up the gun, rolling his head to the left until his neck gives an audible crack.

“Here’s the part that’ll make the bloodsuckers—sorry, lawyers—cream their panties. Pull the intake log from evidence the day of the murder, and you’ll find a parking receipt from a pay box two blocks west of my wife’s house. Some tech bagged it off the floor like it was trash.” He leans forward to whisper, “Here’s a clue: it wasn’t trash.”

An electric charge races down my spine. I told the tech to bag that receipt. Something about it niggled at me, but when I went to look for it the following week, though, it was nowhere.

“That’s my receipt,” he says. “My fingerprints are all over it. It puts me in that house an hour before Angie made her whiny 911 call. By the time I noticed I’d dropped it, it was already collected. But did I panic? Did I cry about it like a little bitch? No.” He taps the barrel of his gun to his temple. “I was smart. I called in a favor.”

Timms waves his hand like a magician revealing one of his illusions. “That receipt’s been sitting in the warehouse the whole time, filed as evidence under an embezzlement cold case from a decade ago. And no, I’m not saying who moved it. That man did me a solid without asking questions. A man who gives up a brother isn’t worth the paper.”

Hugo’s weight shifts from foot to foot, and I can practically feel his impatience for Timms to wrap this up so we can go after whatever crony helped him cover up a murder and frame an innocent.