Chapter 59
Allison
I lay a beach towel over the small kitchen table and park Grayson there with a roll of paper towels and a bowl of water.
His instructions: wipe himself clean of blood, dump the towels in a garbage bag, and do not move beyond the table.
There will be many things to clean up tonight; I don’t need my son’s bloody fingerprints among them.
Now it’s time to take a hard look at everything.
I start with Finley. I steel myself, take a couple deep breaths, and slide open the bedroom door.
My feet sink into plush white carpet, wall-to-wall at Finley’s insistence, the only demand he made when we bought this place.
The rest of the decisions in the bedroom were mine: the oak-framed bed, the duvet and throws, the matching nightstands and lamps.
A letter opener, a vintage one handed down from my mother, made from a silver-plate knife handle, typically rests next to the stack of mail on my nightstand.
Tonight it protrudes from Finley’s chest. Driven straight through his sternum and deep, nearly to the hilt. Finley’s blue button-down shirt is wrinkled slightly where the blade entered, with smears of blood on the shirt in various spots surrounding the wound.
He lies on the carpet between the bed and dresser.
Both elbows are extended outward, palms flat on the carpet, his left leg slightly raised, as if he’d been trying to push himself along the floor.
His face is pale and chalky, settling into a waxy stillness, his lips purplish-gray.
His mouth has fallen partially open, slack-jawed, as if he were debating whether to say something.
His eyes are half-open, unfocused, directed at the ceiling, pupils dilated.
The smell doesn’t overwhelm yet, just a faintly metallic, slightly sour, inhuman odor—but it won’t be long.
“Oh, Fin,” I whisper, a tremble running through me, but I blink away tears. I need to stay clinical. I need to focus, to look for evidence of struggle. This is not about mourning Finley. There will be time for that. This is about Grayson, protecting Grayson.
In the bedroom, at least, the signs of a struggle are remarkably few. The lamp on the right nightstand, nearest the bedroom window, has toppled to the floor.
But no blood has spilled. No pools on the carpet. No spray on the walls. No stains I can find beyond the front of Finley’s shirt. The wound was deep and clean, and the blade remained in place, creating a plug that prevented external loss.
It’s not as uncommon as one might think.
When I worked in Gang Crimes as a young prosecutor, we’d sometimes see this.
Not all stab wounds result in external bleeding, especially if the wound is internal and the weapon remains lodged.
It helps, too, if the victim lands on his back—basic principles of gravity.
Remove Finley’s body, return that lamp to the nightstand, and you might never know violence occurred in here.
The kitchen shows no sign of struggle, nothing out of order.
The sunken family room is another story.
The ocean-blue sectional is intact, but one of the leather club chairs is overturned.
The glass coffee tabletop has been knocked from its normal perch on the solid walnut base.
The pieces that typically adorn the glass top—an architecture book; a ceramic bowl of black tourmaline stones; a refracting glass orb—have spilled into the lush charcoal-gray carpet.
I return the chair to its proper spot. I lift the glass top and center it again on the base. The glass orb has rather miraculously survived intact. When I get down on my hands and knees to retrieve the black stones, I find a water glass in the carpet, a smear of lipstick along the rim.
I pinch the rim with my gloved fingers, avoiding the lipstick, and hold the glass up to the light. There’s a smear of a fingerprint on the side, too.
I place the water glass on the table. I’ll come back to that.
When I’ve returned everything to its rightful place and order, I sit on the sectional and look around for anything else amiss. I’m in a hurry, but searching for things requires calm, so I try to slow my breathing, easier said than done.
Twice, my eyes pass the fireplace, framed in black steel and tucked within the glass wall—a “floating” fireplace, the realtor called it. But on the third pass, I catch something.
More aesthetic than functional, the ceramic logs are typically lined up neatly amid the blue-orange flame. But there is nothing neat about the fireplace right now.
I bend over to inspect it, my face close to the tempered glass doors. It takes me a moment to realize what I’m seeing.
Inside, among the fireglass and imitation coals, lies the twisted wreckage of a laptop, its plastic housing warped and half-melted, the screen shattered like a spiderweb.
The keyboard has disintegrated into a scatter of charred keys, some fused to the glass, others curled like dead leaves in the heat.
You can still make out the faint curve of the trackpad, but it’s scorched, blackened, almost organic in the way it’s bubbled up.
I reach in and carefully shift the wreckage so I can see the battered outer shell. I make out the color: periwinkle.
I return to the coffee table, lean in and peer at the water glass, at the color of the lipstick.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
In part, a sigh of utter relief flooding through me. Grayson did not kill his father.
I could use Grayson’s phone right now and call 911. This would be over. Grayson would be in the clear, and the police would solve this crime within hours.
But the other part of that sigh is regret. Guilt. I set this in motion today with my words to Finley. She’s out for blood. You’re being played for a fool.
They must have met tonight, after I’d wound Finley up. Trinity walked into a tinderbox. Finley may have lit the match, but I provided the gasoline.
I take Grayson’s phone and dial my own number to reach Luke back at my house.
“Good news and bad,” I tell him. “Grayson didn’t do this.”
“Oh, thank God. I knew it. I knew it,” says Luke. “What’s the bad news?”