Page 7 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

CHAPTER THREE

Rue

“Got everything you need for ladies’ night?”

I rub my palms against the sides of my legs. “Yep.”

“Even though you’re not gonna need it, right?” Felicity glances away from the road to give me a sharp look.

“Right.” My answers are terse. I’m focused on tonight’s job.

“And you have your buddy?” she asks.

I pat the pocket sewn into the upper thigh of tonight’s ensemble where my frame-lock pocket knife is waiting. Single-button release, custom grip, wickedly sharp blade, and a handle decorated with an iridescent oil-slick pattern. She’s my very favorite possession.

“You have your buddy?” I ask in return.

My twin pulls out her own knife. Same specs, but unlike my sleek beauty, hers is pink with a rainbow sprinkle pattern. Her killer donut, she calls it.

“Not that I need it,” Fi says mournfully. “All I’m doing is dropping off, picking up, and drinking coffee. I’m basically a suburban mom.”

Yes. Exactly. Over my dead body will she use her killer donut to actually kill someone.

“You’re giving me an alibi and keeping an eye on the guy whose house I’m breaking into,” I remind her. “That’s important.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah. So important.”

I shouldn’t need any cover for tonight, but if I do, it’s nice to know the only other person in the world with my face is going to drive my car to a diner, use my credit card to order some food, and work at her laptop for a few hours while I’m committing crimes, even if she is dressed to avoid attention in a nondescript sweatshirt and jeans, her blond hair scraped back under a White Sox hat and round glasses perched on her nose.

I sometimes wonder what kind of people Felicity and I would be if we’d had different childhoods. If we hadn’t been born to the second coming of Aileen Wuornos and an unknown, but undoubtedly awful, sperm donor. If we hadn’t been orphaned at eleven. If Felicity hadn’t been adopted by the Mercers while I was still delirious in the burn unit and then screaming through my night terrors at one foster home after another.

Me, I’d probably be the same. Even without my trauma with a side of trauma, somebody had to inherit all that dark shit from mommy dearest. But Fi’s different. She’s a sweet-natured genius who was loved by her adoptive parents and comes alive around hard facts and cold logic. She should be the youngest tenured professor at MIT. Instead, she’s hiding away in a farmhouse outside the city, taking mundane market analysis contracts that pay well but ask nothing of her.

Then again, I’m selfishly grateful for all her squandered potential because she devotes all her intellectual firepower to planning my murders. Once we realized we could combine my access to death scenes and police files with her next-level statistical modeling skills, everything changed. Suddenly, we had an algorithm that could comb through the avalanche of details about arrests, accidents, and victims to spit out actionable intel.

When we’re lucky, Felicity’s work identifies connected crimes or questionable cover-ups. When we’re even luckier, it gives us probable suspect locations and sometimes even names. Once we have a lead on the guy—and make no mistake, it’s always a guy—we study his routines and habits until we’ve got confirmation that he’s the one we’re looking for. Then I act. In the six years since we moved to Chicago and started eliminating monsters, Fi’s analysis has been wrong twice.

That’s why a night like tonight is crucial. A little light snooping should turn up the physical proof I need to confirm that her data crunching accurately identified the person who killed Mary Glenn. If not, he’ll be free to live out the rest of his life, just like those two other men.

“It’s time,” Felicity says.

We’re idling a block from one of the city’s many small parks. Last week, she and Pell placed small outdoor cameras between here and our target house to monitor traffic patterns, so I know I’m about to step onto the darkest patch of sidewalk on the least-traveled block, just like I know my exit route to Fi’s stashed car a few blocks away will be essentially deserted at this time of night.

“Try not to die,” my sweet sister says, holding up her pinkie. Her tone is bright, but I know she’s nervous for me.

“Um, hello.” I wrap my pinkie around hers. “I’m Mom but with better emotional regulation. That makes me basically immortal.”

“Oh, right, right,” she says. “In that case, go nail his ass.”

“Always.”

One more squeeze of Fi’s pinkie, and I step out of the car and fall into a brisk jog, projecting I’m just a normal woman out for a normal run at eleven o’clock at night as I cut through the empty park and turn down the street that’ll take me to the house.

There are still no suspects in Mary Glenn’s death, which I confirmed from the gossipy cop who was working the fatal car crash Bart and I handled yesterday. Plus, the fire marshal’s initial report shows that the blaze burned far hotter and faster than the average fire, and accelerant traces found at the scene didn’t match anything from past arson cases. Brick wall, dead end, the firebug escapes detection to kill again.

But neither the police nor the fire marshal has Felicity. Her miracle algorithm linked a single line in an arson report from nine years ago to evidence in Mary’s investigation, along with a probability map based on suspicious fires and persons of interest for said fires over the past decade. Yada yada, data plus pixie dust plus my sister’s big brain, and here I am, ready to break into the house belonging to Howard Marshall, a white, thirty-nine-year-old high school dropout.

According to Fi’s algo, Marshall’s ninety-one point seven percent likely to have been responsible for five house fires in the city, all involving older women who lived alone. Three of those women died: one from smoke inhalation, one from crush injuries, and now Mary. Tonight, I’m looking for the last bit of proof I need to finally kill this fucker.