Chapter 4
Guy
“And where were you during all of this?” Winston asks. Monty is beside me on the couch, doing a great job of acting just traumatized enough to be believable. She’s holding my hand, sniffing occasionally, her head resting against my arm.
It’s some of the best acting I’ve ever seen.
“I stayed upstairs,” she says quietly. “But when I heard all the crashing, I got scared and came down … one of them had dropped their gun, so I shot him. Then the other one …” She covers her mouth with her hand, her eyes glassy, her voice breaking.
“He grabbed my foot and … instinct took over. I shot him, too.”
Winston stares at her. “Point blank between the eyes.”
She sniffs. “Lucky shot.”
Winston hums but doesn’t comment further.
He’s trusting my judgment here, not his own, and that makes me feel like shit.
His instincts will be telling him something is completely off, and I’m making him second guess that by backing up Monty’s story.
Still, there isn’t much else I can do. “What are we thinking? Home invasion?”
I nod. “More than likely. I interrupted them before they could do any real damage.”
He watches the bodies get wheeled out on gurneys. “They really picked the wrong house. Anyway, I’ll get your statements typed up. You wanna sign them when you’re back off leave?”
Monty glances at me, and I try not to tense too visibly. “I’ll come in before the new year, get it out of the way.”
“Sure thing.” He snaps his notepad closed. “A word outside?”
Monty releases my hand so I can follow Winston out onto the porch. The red and blue lights have attracted an audience, including Tim, who watches from his own porch in his pajamas. He probably irons them, too.
“Assault and murder in one day. Your girlfriend is a handful,” Winston says as we walk down the porch steps.
“She isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Don’t let the guys at the station hear you say that. More than one of them was pretty taken with her. She’s certainly charming.”
That isn’t the word I’d use, but sure.
“So, what did you want to talk about?” I ask, folding my arms across my chest, ignoring the chill of the December air.
His hesitation has the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. “We might be closing Erin’s case.”
Anger races through my blood, and I shake my head, as if that will erase his words. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“It’s been ten years, Guy. We had all three bodies, a note—”
“It’s bullshit, and you know it is. Erin didn’t kill herself, and she definitely didn’t kill her fucking kids,” I hiss. “That fucker needs to go down for this. I’ll take another look into it.”
Winston exhales. “If you insist, but how long are you gonna keep doing this? You’ve already been in hot water over harassing Richard. You go after him again, he’ll get lawyers involved.”
“Let him,” I say. “It’s a small price to pay for Richard Mason to go down.”
We both turn to the door as it opens. Monty stands on the threshold, eating a slice of her leftover pizza. “Where’s the bleach? The house is starting to smell.”
Winston frowns, glancing between the pizza and Monty, likely wondering how a seemingly innocent woman can kill two people and still be hungry.
“I’ll get it,” I say quickly. “Thanks Winston.”
He gives me a nod and leaves.
Inside, pizza dangles from Monty’s mouth as she gets on her hands and knees with a bucket and sponge and cleans up the blood.
She hums, chews, totally unbothered by the activity.
As I work on the second puddle of blood, I cast glances at her and wonder how many times she’s done this to be so unaffected.
“So, how come you’re on leave?” she asks, dunking her sponge into the bucket and wringing it out.
“None of your business.”
“Did you do something bad?”
“No.”
“You can tell me if you did.”
“I didn’t do anything bad.”
She shrugs and keeps cleaning. “Who’s Richard Mason?”
I pause my scrubbing and lift my eyes to her. “You were eavesdropping?”
“My dad used to say that the best secrets are other people’s. I always listen out to get the gossip. Who is he?”
I tuck away that tidbit about her dad—not that it’ll teach me much about her other than the fact the tense tells me he’s likely dead.
I continue cleaning. “He’s a real estate mogul. Rich prick. His wife and two daughters were found dead in his home a decade ago and no one has been arrested for it.”
The case is like a shadow. Any time I’d solve a crime, close a case, put someone away, I could never fully enjoy it because I’d remember Erin and her little girls.
Nothing was amiss. Not a damn thing. It looked like a straightforward murder suicide; a mother dealing with severe depression.
We looked at Richard first, because more often than not, it’s the husband.
He was clean. No affairs, no financial troubles, no neighbors reported hearing arguing between the two.
By all accounts, they were the perfect couple.
But it was too neat for my liking.
He reacted just a little too perfectly. The night his family died, he returned from a night of drinking with friends to ambulances on his driveway, and he broke down.
He sobbed on his knees. He held beautiful vigils for his family, raised money for mental health awareness charities, opened a school wing in his kids’ names.
Six months later, he married Erin’s best friend. Brought together through grief, apparently.
I called bullshit on it all.
I tell Monty this, and she listens with a soft frown, and by the time I’m finished, the blood is cleaned up.
“Why are you so sure he did it?” she asks.
I pour the bloodstained water down the sink and throw the used cloths into the washing machine before answering.
“You’ve been around bad guys, right?” I ask, folding my arms and leaning against the now clean kitchen island.
Monty nods. “You can tell, can’t you? It could be something they say, a look in their eye …
a subtle, almost non-perceptible thing that you might not even be able to name.
But you just know something isn’t right with them.
” She watches me, green eyes bright, head tilted.
“My dad was a cop, and he said it was the ghosts of the wronged whispering the truth to us.”
I choose to think of it more as my instincts, but both feel true. I’ve been around enough death to know that isn’t where a person’s journey ends and firmly believe people stick around sometimes.
“But ghosts can’t testify in court,” Monty says gently.
My nod is curt. “No, they can’t.” I take the final kitchen towel from Monty and place it on the side. “Now, are you going to tell me who those men were?”
She sighs and drops her head back. “Fine. I may have gotten into a spot of bother.”
“A spot of bother? Two men tried to kill you tonight.”
“Pah, that’s a Tuesday.” She waves her hand dismissively. “I killed a guy in Vegas, totally by accident I might add, and it turns out he was part of some gang. I can take on three guys, four tops, but there were quite a few, so I thought leaving meant they’d lose interest. Apparently not.”
“So you brought them to my door.”
“I really didn’t intend to,” she says, and for some reason, I believe her.
“I didn’t think they’d come to a chief of police’s house.
You were like my human shield. A very handsome, probably very well-endowed human shield.
” She grins innocently and grips my T-shirt.
“But look at us now! Committing crimes together, bonding—”
“We are not committing crimes together. I just didn’t want my grandkids’ aunt being arrested and put away for murder. But no more, Monty, I mean it,” I say, and she pouts. “I tell you to get the handcuffs, you do as I damn well say. You don’t shoot people; you call the police.”
She sighs. “Yes, Chief. Besides, I doubt they’ll bother with us now.
The brain behind their entire operation now has a bullet firmly here,” she taps her forehead, grinning.
“You solved my problem for me, Chief.” Another kiss on the cheek, but this one I don’t turn away from.
Her breath tickles my ear as she whispers, “We’re partners in crime. ”