Chapter 10
ten
. . .
Mia
I’m going on hour two of making phone call after phone call and getting fucking nowhere when my phone buzzes. It’s Johnson.
“Give me some good news.”
“Amy got her lockjaw fixed, so there’s some chance she might suck my dick again someday.”
“Johnson.” Damn this guy.
“They didn’t bring the charges after all.”
“Did he walk?”
“Yep.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. That’s all we need is some do-gooder public prosecutor worming his way in and gassing up Harvey’s lawyers the week before we bring the real charges.
The fluorescent lights flicker, messing with my eyes. I’ve got to get out of this basement.
“Okay. Then I’m on my way out. Gonna catch fifteen and then—”
“Nah, if you’re thinking of heading back to the crashpad, forget about it.”
Goddamn Johnson. Working fuhgettaboutit into every conversation.
“What do you mean? Why?”
“Shit, are you not on eGuardian at all? It’s compromised.”
My heart thumps hard in my chest. “The fuck do you mean, compromised?” I can’t get a good breath into my lungs.
“Randy’s on tail, followed Harvey once they let him go, and he drove right there.
” I steady myself, one hand on my flimsy card table desk.
It shifts under my weight, but the screech of metal on concrete rings far away from my ears, as does Johnson’s voice.
“Stay the hell away, that’s the latest. Hope you didn’t leave your favorite undies there. ”
I don’t respond to his snide comment. I hang up, and I run.
I burst through the caution tape where the door used to be.
It’s not my fault.
The case…
Nicole.
Harvey Blagas.
The door I slammed in his face.
The cacophony of noise in my head filters its way down to three little words:
You killed him.
I run from room to room. In the kitchen, the walls are painted in blood.
It isn’t all his, please, I want to beg God, but ever since Nicole’s body turned up on a gorgeous day in September all those years ago I can’t believe that God answers prayers.
My eyes settle on the pieces of the broken tequila bottle he’d cleaned up, and I imagine Armin holding his own, slicing up Harvey’s loser henchmen with ease.
But I pick out the image of his handprint trailing down the wall.
I know it’s his; my mind conjures up the memory of that hand on me, and my eyes prick with tears.
The needle is gone, some part of my mind trumpets, the FBI training in crime-scene minutia.
The one I used to pick the glass out of his foot.
I can only hope he palmed it, and is sticking it in Harvey’s eye right now.
I call everybody: Johnson, Stiggy, the team lead, even Rochelle back at the office in Syracuse. I pretend to be calm, collected. Routine call. Just wrapping up the latest facts for the legal package. But nobody’s got a hit on where Harvey might be now.
Or maybe they’ve decided Armin is the sacrificial lamb to wrap up this investigation, to tie it in a blood-covered bow for the prosecutors. Why not offer an ex-sheriff as the last charge on the list?
This last thought blots out all the others, and I hang up on Rochelle in the middle of her irrelevant chit-chat, screaming inside my own mind, and I call Sunbreak Security.