Chapter 67
Allison
I send a final message from Finley’s phone to mine: I’m truly sorry for all the pain I caused you. I love you and Grayson more than anything. I hit send and whoosh away Finley’s last words to me. If only he’d said anything like that when it counted.
Luke should be receiving that message now. That will be his cue for the very last thing I need from him tonight.
I grab Finley’s fancy Italian leather gym bag and leave the car.
Marlow’s is the third house from the corner.
I should be able to access his backyard from the alley.
If I’m fenced off completely, I’ll probably just toss the bag over the fence and hope it lands behind a bush.
But if I can access his backyard, I’ll stow the bag somewhere.
Someplace not too obvious, but not so expertly hidden that a team of police officers executing a search warrant couldn’t find it.
I’m back in the car less than ten minutes later.
The woodpile was perfect. But it’s too soon to leave.
At least twenty minutes need to pass. There has to be enough time, reconstructing tonight’s events with cell phone pings and license plate hits, for Marlow to have killed Finley and dragged him to the Wagoneer.
It’s not easy sitting still when you’re so close to putting this to bed, when all you want to do is go, go, go!
But discipline and care got me this far.
After twenty minutes in total have passed, I’m ready to leave.
I turn off Finley’s phone, which is what Marlow would do if he were thinking clearly.
Besides, if Fin’s phone stays on, the police could find him with real-time cell tracking.
I don’t want his body found for a few days.
I want at least a day or two to see how things look, to wrap up any loose ends I may have missed.
It’s just a few minutes shy of midnight when I reach Grace Park. The streets are quiet, a light mist now falling. As I drive down Cherry Oak Avenue toward the construction site, my eye catches motion along the sidewalk.
It’s Luke, on his bike, riding toward me. He stops me on the road and rolls up to my window. “How did you know to pick this house?” he asks. “You know this is one of those old mobster houses? Rico Cagnola or whatever his name was, one of Capone’s guys?”
Yes, I do, as Marlow Luckett explained to me in my garage.
Every story needs a villain. Marlow, welcome to the story.
“All I know is it’s been under construction for months, so it would have a dumpster.” The less he knows, the better.
“Well, you’re right about that,” he says. “The dumpster’s in the back.” He thinks a moment. “Kill your lights and don’t pull into the driveway. Drive onto the lawn and pull around to the back of the house. It’s private back there.”
“On the lawn? No—”
“Yes. Trust me. The lawn’s not really a lawn right now. C’mon.”
He rides away. I follow him slowly, headlights turned off, until I reach the property.
The house itself is half-gutted, windows boarded on one side.
I navigate the Wagoneer around a tall piece of equipment with a drill dangling in front, an excavator next to it, and pull up in the back right next to the dumpster.
Luke’s right; this is much more private.
We are secluded behind the house and it’s dark as pitch.
Almost too dark for our purposes—we need to see what we’re doing, and neither of us has a phone for a flashlight.
The dumpster, ten feet in height, is filled to about a third of capacity, with all sorts of construction debris—drywall, broken tile, floorboards, that kind of thing.
“Don’t open the trunk yet,” Luke says, stopping his bike. “Let’s open the dumpster door.”
“The dumpster has a door?”
“Of course. We just unlatch it.” He looks at me. “You haven’t used a dumpster before?”
“Um, no?”
“C’mon. It’s easier with two people.”
He clearly knows how to do this, narrating as he goes.
Lifting a latch upward, removing a small chain, then raising a lever that starts the door opening.
Luke and I catch it, quietly and slowly helping it to the ground.
A few tiles and part of a floorboard slide out of the dumpster.
“That’s okay,” says Luke. “We need stuff to fall out. We have to cover him with debris once we have him inside. You want him concealed, right? You don’t want his body discovered right away? ”
“Correct.” We’re in a much stronger position if the police don’t find Fin for several days.
“Okay, you…ready to do this?” he asks.
Am I ready to bury my husband inside a construction dumpster under a pile of debris? A part of me still can’t believe any of this is happening.
Sensing as much, Luke takes the lead, opening the rear of the Wagoneer and pulling Finley out slowly, feet first, until Fin’s wrapped body is almost standing straight up. Luke wraps his arms around Fin’s upper body and walks backward, Fin’s shoes dragging in the dirt, until he reaches the dumpster.
“I’ll need your help for this part,” he whispers to me.
“We have to lift him onto the top of the debris. Then we have to separate the debris until his body sinks low enough that we can throw stuff on top of him. Anything that slides out the side of the dumpster, no problem, we’ll throw that on top, too.
Nobody will notice him. Not until this dumpster is full, and they unload it at some landfill or whatever. Probably several days from now.”
I blink hard; there lies my husband, wrapped like a mummy, halfway inside a garbage dumpster. My body starts shaking.
“Allison,” he says, gripping my arm. “You’ve gotten this far. Let’s finish it.”
Luke does the lion’s share of the work, using his hands and feet to jostle and push and pry and separate debris until Finley’s body disappears beneath several layers of drywall and floorboards and the like. Or at least as best we can tell in the dark.
He closes up the side door of the dumpster. The clank of the door jars me out of my funk. He’s right. We’ve come this far. I can’t let emotion overtake me now.
“What next?” he asks.
“I dump this car and ride home on your bike,” I say.
“And I suppose you don’t want me to know where you’re leaving the Jeep.”
“Less you know, the better.”
He picks up his bike and throws it inside the back of the Wagoneer. He lives only six blocks from here, but I don’t dare give him a ride. We don’t need hits from license plate cameras anywhere close to Luke’s house. He can walk.
“I’ll…call you in the morning,” I say. “That would be normal. A follow-up call after Finley acted so odd tonight.”
He hugs me, a good long embrace, back rub and all. “What you did for Trin tonight…I don’t know what to say—”
“Let’s just finish this,” I say. “Go home.”
“Right. Gray should still be asleep on the couch. He was totally depleted. Get home to him fast.”
“I will.”
“And, Allison?” he whispers as I pull away. “It’s scary that you’re so good at this.”