Chapter Twenty-One #2
“This is actual physical evidence that has Toby flying out to areas near the towns I think Scott destroyed before saving them… It’s not just someone on the phone or a blurry security picture that puts him en route.”
“And this could help incriminate someone as powerful as Scott?”
Eve shook her head to the obvious surprise of Lana.
“Not just this, but we believe this is the start of the investigation that would uncover the truth. And seeing as how everything happened after we realized there were flight plans, I’m assuming we’re right about it.”
Lana said she didn’t need any more information. Instead, she started rattling off ways they could use the information to make a deal or trap or frame Scott or something. Eve’s attention had strayed to a detail she hadn’t processed before.
“Five flight records,” she said, interrupting Lana.
“What?”
Eve touched the laptop’s screen with one hand and used the other on the trackpad to scroll through the pages.
“There are five here, but we were only ever able to find four records.” She stopped at one file. “We nixed this one because when Toby landed, he used a rental car that took him in the opposite direction for a golf tournament.”
Lana leaned in a little to look at the file in question.
“And why do we care about Toby?” she asked.
Eve opened her mouth to point out that, as Scott’s right-hand man, he was someone that needed to be cared about.
But she stopped herself short.
“You never said right-hand man,” Eve said instead. “You just said right-hand.” She felt her eyes widen as it finally dawned on her. “And you never said Toby. You just said Sanderson.”
Eve scanned the document she had once dismissed.
The same name was on all five.
Apparently, she had also overlooked someone.
TOBY SANDERSON WAS DEAD.
His wife, Maria, stepped over his body wearing heels.
Darius watched as she made her way over to him, smile rimmed with dark red lipstick.
“Honestly, I can spin this just as easy as the soap-opera storyline Scott has been trying to play out since we got to this horrible little town,” she said. “Except, I’m not going to waste my time waiting for all of you to do your parts.”
Maria didn’t have a gun in her hand, but she did have a Jon.
He was leaning against one of the four large steel beams that had been holding up the warehouse since the last time he and Darius had been there.
Now instead of a rotary tiller, he was cuffed to a metal pole sticking out of the concrete. Whatever it used to be attached to had long since been sawn away.
“It was you who engineered the attacks on those towns—on Seven Roads—through the years,” Darius said. “Not Toby.”
That had become glaringly clear the second Jon had walked him inside and around the socialite’s dead body. They had gotten the wrong Sanderson, and now the right one seemed to be tickled by the mess-up.
“To be honest, it’s kind of nice to get the credit for once.”
Maria paused next to a crate covered in dust. With her heel she hooked the handle and managed to flip it onto its side. She was elegant in the action of sitting down on it, but Darius could still see her husband’s blood on the bottom of her shoes.
She caught his gaze and gave her shoe a once-over before smiling again.
“See, I’ve always had a knack for breaking things,” she said. “Rules, boundaries, people. And wouldn’t you know it, towns too.”
Darius recalled Eve’s notes on the first town she had suspected that Scott had purposefully crippled.
“The corruption case in Culver,” he remembered.
Maria snapped her fingers, smile only widening.
“Who knew a few whispers here and there could detonate the entire infrastructure of that little no-nothing town,” she said, clearly delighted. “Truthfully, I didn’t even mean for it to happen. It was like playing dolls.”
“Your version of dolls destroyed hundreds of innocent lives, one way or the other,” Darius pointed out.
Maria waved her hand through the air, as if shooing an annoying fly that was buzzing around her.
“But then who came in and made it all better with all his money and all his charm? Scott the White Knight Keys. A hero that I had summoned for a problem that I had created.”
“And let me guess. Scott thought it was his idea.”
Maria nodded, her hair not moving an inch from its hair-spray hold.
“That’s the beauty of all of this, isn’t it?” she said. “I get the power, the money and the high without the responsibility if things go south. Because who’s going to look at the charming hero and the spoiled wife of his friend and think I’m even involved?”
Maria looked over her shoulder at her husband’s body.
She sighed.
“Even he had no clue what he was looking at, after your girlfriend talked about those records.”
For the first time since Darius had been cuffed and Maria had entered the warehouse, the woman’s mirth seemed to ebb.
The dark red of her frown made the apparent wealth she was wrapped in seem more sinister than before.
“Eve, Eve, Eve,” she said. “Unlike Scott, I don’t need to kill her, you and Mitchell all together. I can do two birds and one stone now.” Maria snapped her fingers again. Jon pushed himself off the beam to stand tall. “You said she would come for him?”
Jon nodded.
“Guaranteed.”
Maria swung her gaze back to Darius.
“Also unlike Scott, I don’t ignore new information.
” Her fingernails were painted red. Darius could see them clearly as she pointed his way.
“Like when Jon here reached out to our White Knight saying he could help? I didn’t discount it.
No, I listened to what he had to say. And, Detective, do you know what he had to say? ”
Darius kept his mouth shut.
He had already profiled the woman across from him.
She was a yapper.
And yappers didn’t really need feedback to keep yapping.
Maria proved him right.
“He told me that the fastest way to get Evelyn Myers is to get you.” A smile twisted up the corners of her lips. She continued, sounding as wicked as she looked. “And then? All I have to do is make you scream.”