Chapter Thirty #2
While James showers, I put on old episodes of NCIS but barely pay attention.
He joins me twenty minutes later, red hair still damp and water dripping from his beard onto his bare chest—I learned early on that shirtless is his typical state.
He takes his normal spot in the large armchair to the right side of the couch.
“Have a good night last night?” I ask.
“Yup.”
“What did you do after the Cage?”
His brows lower. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re my friend and I’m interested,” I answer honestly.
“Did Theo put you up to this?”
“I’m offended at the implication that my interest in your life hinges solely on Theo.”
That almost earns me a smile. When all this started, I thought Theo would be the grumpiest of the two and that James would warm quickly to me.
The exact opposite has proven true. I know James likes me, but he only recently started letting his guard down, and now I’m worried finding me in Theo’s closet brought it right back up.
“Going to start stalking me next?”
“Ha ha. Seriously, though. Do you have a secret girlfriend stashed away on the other side of town? Or maybe a secret boyfriend?”
“If I told you, they wouldn’t be secret, would they?”
I cross my arms, leaning back on the couch.
James must play poker, because there isn’t a single clue to what he’s thinking on his face.
Sensing that he won’t be giving me any juicy details about his evening, I return my attention to the show.
We watch in silence for nearly two episodes, then a roaring engine approaches.
My stomach clenches, and my palms suddenly feel damp.
“Just ask him,” James says with a surprisingly gentle voice. I look at him with wide eyes, and he offers me a soft smile that somehow bolsters my confidence. “Trust me. But… if he’s not ready to tell you, don’t push him.”
I nod, unable to verbally respond. Logically, I’ve done nothing worse than what I’ve done in the past. But logic does nothing to ease the anxiety drying out my mouth.
Theo walks inside, sets down his helmet, and kicks off his shoes, catching sight of us in the living room. He pauses in the middle of shrugging off his jacket and raises his eyebrows in a silent question.
James pushes out of the chair, says, “Hey, T,” then heads for his bedroom. He pauses at the mouth of the hallway, looks back at me, and silently mouths, “Trust me.”
After watching James disappear into his room without a word, Theo cautiously heads toward me. “What was that about?”
Deep breath. “I uh… I need to talk to you about something. Well. Two things, actually.”
He frowns, lowering to the couch. “Okay?”
“I overheard you on the phone on Friday. You said, ‘She trusts me now. I’ll get something we can use against her.’” I resolutely keep my eyes trained on Theo, watching him breathe in through his nose while his lips stay pressed shut.
“Were you talking about me?” I’m expecting to analyze his expression for a hint of a lie, so his response takes a second to process.
“Yes.”
My heart starts falling. “What?”
“But I was lying. I…” He pauses, huffs in frustration, and runs a hand down his face. “James, Kip, Luna, and I sometimes do smaller jobs with individual clients outside of the Saints. Basically, we help make problems and people go away.”
“How does this—”
“Please, just let me explain,” he interrupts.
I nod for him to continue. “Okay. Sometimes, the problem is getting rid of a car involved in a crime. Sometimes it’s hacking into a computer or breaking into a house to delete or steal incriminating photos or videos.
Then there are people. We get rid of them in creative ways.
One of our first clients was a young woman being stalked by her ex.
The police couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything about it.
Luna drove him out of the state by getting him fired, alienating him from his friends, and calling his mom. ”
“How did she do that?”
“She seduced him, got him drunk, and stole his phone to send herself his mom’s contact info and sent a company-wide email of a video of him doing body shots.
Then she took some pictures of him making out with a guy he thought was Luna and sent the photos to all the most recent guys in his messages with the text, ‘I wish this was you.’ She topped it all off by calling his mom on her phone, pretending to be pregnant. ”
I can’t help but laugh. God, I love her.
“Other times, we’ve gotten people put in psychiatric hospitals or drained their bank accounts. Most people we end up framing for a crime, and the majority were guilty of something .
“Our most frequent client is a detective, Lorry McCoy. He hires us to help put away criminals who’d otherwise get off on a lack of evidence or a technicality.
Recently, he…” Theo pauses, closes his eyes, and takes a heavy breath.
When his eyes open again, he looks desperate.
“Three years ago, his cousin was murdered, but there’s no body, and everyone else thinks the guy just ran off.
Lorry hired us to frame the killer for murder. ”
My body suddenly feels full of helium. It’s a shock to look down and see I’m still sitting on the couch. I almost miss Theo’s next words, but I don’t need to hear them to know what they are.
“His cousin was Solomon McCoy.”
Solomon howled as more blood fell, adding to the pool of bodily fluids beneath him.
I held the freshly severed finger in front of his eyes, grinning.
“This little piggy touched its sixteen-year-old babysitter.” I set the finger on the center of his chest, and he jerked away, causing the digit to fall to the floor.
I frowned when it landed in the center of a puddle of urine. “Gross. Guess I need a new one.”
I got four of his fingers before he passed out, which felt poetic seeing as I knew of at least four babysitters between the ages of fifteen and nineteen he fucked while his child slept in the neighboring room.
It wasn’t even one of the babysitters who was my client.
It was his wife, Charity. She told me about finding him with the most recent sitter, who was eighteen but had been working for them for two years.
Charity blamed the girl. She cared more about Solomon’s gambling than his serial raping of teenagers.
Part of me wanted to do a two-for-one special and kill her as well as Solomon, but I wasn’t going to orphan three children.
And she didn’t deserve it like Solomon did.
Charity needed therapy and a reality check, not a butcher’s knife.
Remembering that especially satisfying kill momentarily took me out of my current reality. But Theo lays his hand on top of mine, and the touch sucks my attention back into the room with dizzying speed.
“I’m not doing it, of course. I’m trying to get him off your trail.
He thinks I’m tricking you into trusting me so I can find a way to frame you.
But I promise, June,” he squeezes my hand, emphasizing the use of my real name, “I will not let him or anyone else take you away. I’ll kill him before that happens. ”
Fuck, I believe him. That doesn’t make this okay, though. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to get scared and do something reckless.”
“What? Like kill a detective? I’m not a fucking idiot, Theo! Or were you more worried that I would leave you?” I pull my hand from his, anger weighing my bones back down. “You should’ve told me! There’s a fucking detective investigating me!”
“I know, I know. I should have. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, that makes it better,” I say sarcastically.
“Look, you didn’t know about our side business, and I was nervous about what you’d think. It’s stupid, I know. I thought I could handle Lorry before you needed to know. I thought I’d be able to derail his investigation and he’d forget about you.”
“And?”
His shoulders slump slightly. “He’s pretty determined. But he doesn’t have anything substantial. He barely has circumstantial evidence.”
“He’s still a cop! If they’re looking at me—”
“ They’re not,” he quickly adds. “Only he is. He hasn’t shared his investigation with the others because no one thinks there’s a case.
He’s the only person who doesn’t think Solomon just ran away.
You did the job well.” He smiles like a little compliment is going to fix everything.
But the idea that Theo’s been actively involved with an investigation into me, whether official or not, has the fire in my chest fanning to alarming heights.
“How long have you known about this?”
“I—what?”
“How long have you fucking known that a detective is watching me? When were you hired to frame me for murder?”
He hesitates for a moment. Then, “Two weeks.”
Two weeks.
Two fucking weeks.
I’m going to kill him.
I clasp my hands together, nails digging into skin until the sharp pain helps focus my mind. With an immense effort, I say, “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I was going to wait until the month was over.”
“You were going to let me go another week without knowing about this? Why? Didn’t want to lose easy access to pussy before our deal was over?”
“No, June. I didn’t want you to have to deal with it yet. I told myself, and Kip and James, that if I couldn’t fix this by February fourteenth, I was telling you.”
“So, Kip knows the truth?”
Theo nods.
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
The oxygen that enters my nose feels searing hot, like I opened an oven and breathed in the air trapped inside. “What evidence does he have?”
“Not much. He knows Charity was your client. He has a record of you hiring one of their old babysitters to clean your house a few times. He has paystubs from your visit to a shooting range and a picture Solomon and Charity took at a fair. You’re in the background of the photo.
The worst thing he has is an image from a security camera of you getting in an Uber outside of the train station two days after Solomon disappeared.
Solomon’s car was found abandoned at the station a week later. It’s all circumstantial.”
“If it’s so circumstantial, then why is Lorry sure it’s me?”
“He’s looked into you and thinks more people have disappeared or showed up dead around you than should be normal.”
“Wait, he doesn’t just suspect me for Solomon, he suspects I’m a serial killer?” I nearly scream because this is so much worse. Putting away a serial killer is a career-making, life-changing thing. Cops latch onto these cases like they’re the only donut in a house of vegetables.
“I stole his files. Most of it is bullshit. A few I think were you. But I’ve been working through them.
I found three of the guys who disappeared and managed to anonymously point the cops in their direction.
One of the murdered guys was a gang kill, which the cops have officially labeled as.
One was already labeled a suicide, but Lorry wasn’t sure at first. He is now, after an anonymous donation was made in honor of the guy to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
The cops are only investigating two of the guys I suspect you killed.
One, I haven’t gotten a chance to look into much.
The other is labeled as a missing person, but there’s quite a lot of new evidence pointing to his wife’s new boyfriend, so they’re looking into him.
Lorry also decided you weren’t responsible for that one. ”
“You framed someone for a murder I committed?”
“Not enough for the guy to be put away. Just enough to keep Lorry or any other cop from looking too hard anywhere else.”
“That’s what you’ve been doing every time you disappear for ‘Saints business,’ isn’t it?
” I knew he was hiding something. I just didn’t realize he was spending hours cleaning up messes I wasn’t even aware of.
Giving money to charities so Lorry thinks someone, maybe a family member, was confident about the manner of their loved one’s death.
Tracking down missing people. Planting evidence on strangers for my crimes.
“Yeah,” Theo says. “You’re good at what you do, though.
There hasn’t been much to cover up. But the fewer names on Lorry’s list of your possible victims, the better.
Most are easy to fix. Unfortunately, Lorry knows my work, so I can’t just frame a bunch of people.
I can’t make it obvious what I’m doing.”
Though the anger doesn’t disappear, it does soften, dulled by the effort Theo has put into keeping me out of prison. “You should have told me, Theo. This is my mess. I should be helping clean it up.”
“I know,” he admits. “I’m sorry. I’ll tell you everything you want to know. I have a copy of Lorry’s files in my office I can show you.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
Theo’s answering exhale is drenched with relief. Then his next words are like a bucket of ice over my lingering anger when I remember that I, too, have something to confess.
“You said you needed to talk to me about two things. What’s the other?”
“Right.” I straighten my back. “When I didn’t know what your little call was about, I got nervous and decided to finish snooping through your shit.”
“Naturally,” he says with a hint of amusement that I expect will disappear any second.
“I found something. I didn’t look at it, but James saw me with it before I could put it back, and he… well, I could tell it would’ve been bad if I had looked.”
“What was it?”
“A binder behind your safe.”
The words stretch all the oxygen to a breaking point, making the room feel smaller. Color seems to drain from Theo’s cheeks and eyes. It’s not anger, fear, or betrayal shaking the foundation. It’s something much, much worse.
It’s sadness.
The visceral kind that has a heartbeat of its own. The kind that latches onto your lungs so every breath you take has to struggle against the added weight. The kind that demands attention, even from those who don’t own it.
I want to take my words, and all this terrible sadness, back. I want to rescue Theo from whatever thoughts are now holding him captive.
I want to go back in time and stop myself from ever seeing that binder.
But the only way to survive a moment suffocated in this sadness is by acknowledging it. So, I gingerly touch his forearm and whisper, “Theo? What’s in the binder?”
His voice is nearly unrecognizable. “My daughter.”