18. Our Fortunes Are Made
OUR FORTUNES ARE MADE
Alejandro
The hallway floor runs red like a river of blood.
Most of it is in a pool directly under the staircase where the railing upstairs is cracked and broken. Then the blood spreads in thick, consistent streaks like a paved road leading to the kitchen.
Dahlia stands under the archway to the living room and watches me examine the area.
“He bled this much from a fall down the stairs?” I ask.
“He split his skull open.” She answers curtly.
“There’s no brain matter.”
She doesn’t answer me.
I take in the scene around me. Blood splatters upstairs, a broken railing, a pool near the front door, and a path going all the way to the kitchen. Brent wasn’t a large man but I can’t imagine it was easy to drag that much deadweight from one end of the house to the other.
“Why did you move him?”
“I couldn’t exactly leave a dead body by the front door.”
“So you thought it was a better idea to corrupt a potential crime scene?”
Dahlia bristles and turns to enter the living room. I follow and turn her around to face me.
“Dee, I can’t help you unless I know what happened.”
“It was an accident.” She insists.
“I wouldn’t care if it wasn’t. I’m glad he’s dead.”
She closes her eyes and presses her palm against her forehead. She leans forward and I wrap my arms around her as she melts into my embrace.
“This is a problem.” She murmurs.
“We’ll figure it out.”
“Alex, you don’t understand. Brent’s parents are wealthy.
Affluent. They have powerful connections here and will poke holes in whatever story we come up with.
” She pulls away to look at me. “Karina won’t be able to hide her pregnancy for much longer and they’re going to know Brent isn’t the father.
It’s going to look like she did it because she had an affair and wanted a divorce. ”
“We won’t let that happen.”
Her gaze drifts to the hallway and suddenly she’s a million miles away. “I’m afraid for her. I don’t know if she’ll be able to keep it together for much longer.”
“How did this happen? Why was he here?”
“He must still have access to the security cameras around the house because he showed up maybe fifteen minutes after we did. It was incredible…we didn’t even hear him come in…” horror seeps into the cracks of her voice. “One minute we were standing in Karina’s room and the next…”
“What did he do?”
“Karina was trying on a shirt she wanted to take with her. All she has at my house are heavy winter clothes and thick sweaters. I told her the shirt was pretty but her bump was visible. And then—”
I feel it when a shiver travels down her spine. Dahlia pulls away completely and says, “Come on. We have to do something about the body.”
* * *
“What did she tell you?” my brother asks.
I glance over his shoulder and through the archway leading into the dining room. Karina and Dahlia sit knee to knee, heads bowed, and whispering intently. All of a sudden Karina starts shaking her head and her voice raises but Dahlia shushes her and they carry on conspiring.
“She was evasive.” I confess.
“So was Kay.” He rubs his jaw. “Why do I get the feeling they’re hiding something?”
From where we’re standing in the kitchen I have a mostly unobstructed view of the blood trail leading from the staircase. Brent has been hidden behind the kitchen island and is covered from head to toe by an enormous floral bed sheet.
“I don’t know. Why don’t we ask the body?” I say.
There’s no way such a short fall caused such a bloody mess. If Brent had landed the wrong way, he could’ve broken his neck but a fall from that height is more likely to cause a few broken bones than be fatal.
I kneel beside the cadaver and reach for the corner of the bed sheet when I hear Karina’s voice.
“Don’t touch him!”
Dahlia has a hand on her cousin’s shoulder and Karina is surprisingly fierce and composed when she speaks. “Do not. Touch him.”
Diego and I exchange looks.
“He’s still my husband and I do not consent to you poking around his body like crows feasting for a meal. He’s already dead. Leave him alone.”
Dahlia tugs on her arm and Karina plops down in her seat once more. The cousins descend into a fit of whispers, this time more impassioned and intense than before.
I rise to my feet but Diego disobeys Karina’s orders. With the tip of his shoe, he lifts the corner of the bedsheet and I pull him away.
“Don’t. At least not right now.”
What could the two of them be hiding? It doesn’t make any sense.
Dahlia is no stranger to…well. This. As for Karina I can only imagine Dahlia is trying to shield her from this side of Diego and me.
Then again, that doesn’t make much sense either.
How is Dahlia explaining our presence to her?
It’s obvious there won’t be any police involvement and Karina must be wondering how we’re going to make this all go away.
And if she’s wondering, then she must have other unanswered questions…
“I think we should call Lettie.” Diego tells me.
“For what?”
“It’s obvious the only solution here is to torch the place. The body has to burn hot enough to destroy most, if not all evidence of foul play. And there’s no way we can do that without an accelerant of some kind.”
“A fire is messy and accelerants are traceable. Too many things can go wrong.”
“What do you suggest then?” he demands. “A forensic team would have a field day in here. There’s blood everywhere.
We can’t stick him in a car and drive him off the side of the road because we don’t know what an autopsy would reveal.
A fire is unreliable but still enough to create reasonable doubt and that’s all we need. ”
Disappearing him is out of the question.
A young, attractive white man from a well-connected upper middle-class family with an affluent background mysteriously vanishes on the night he goes to visit his estranged wife?
His estranged pregnant wife whom he’s repeatedly accused of infidelity and is actively trying to divorce him?
It’s a true crime docuseries waiting to happen.
The last thing any of us needs is for this to end up on the news.
What other options do we have then? He’s already dead.
God, I regret not listening to Dahlia. Had I known things were going to go this way regardless I’d have made sure we got rid of him in a way that was seamless.
Foolproof. Now I have to figure out a way to dispose of his body without making Karina seem like a prime suspect in his death.
Which judging from the looks of it, she is.
Car accident won’t work and neither will staging a suicide. Not with the mess in the hallway.
Fire it is then.
“All right…” I concede. “Call Lettie. See if there’s anything in her little box of poisons that’ll help us.”
Diego’s eyes darken from ocean blue to cobalt. “She has very peculiar hobbies.”
“Well, they come in handy now, don’t they?”
While he calls our sister, I enter the dining room where Dahlia and Karina immediately cease their whispering.
“We’re giving Lettie a call. She’s going to help us stage the place.”
Karina is unsettlingly composed when she speaks. “What do you plan on doing?”
“Fire is our only option. We have to burn the place down so take anything you can’t live without and leave the rest. Otherwise it’ll look suspicious.”
Her expression turns somber. “I always liked this house…”
Dahlia reaches out and takes her cousin’s hand. “It’s just a house, Kay.”
“In the meantime, I want the two of you to go home. I’ll call Rian and see if he doesn’t mind picking you up. I don’t want either of you driving alone.”
“Rian’s in Ireland right now visiting his parents.” Dahlia grabs her phone and gets up from the table. “But I’ll ask Sasha. He won’t mind and he owes me a favor.”
She wanders to the corner of the room to place the call and I kneel before Karina who is deeply fascinated by a loose thread on her shirt sleeve.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“More than I thought I’d be.”
I do my best to say this as gently as I can. “Kay, I don’t care how it happened but I do need to know. After the body is burned, they’ll conduct an autopsy. I need to know if we’re staging the body, how, where—”
“You won’t need to. The fall didn’t kill him.” Her fingers flex. Clench. She looks at me and says, “Just make sure they dig the bullet out of his chest before they burn him.”
* * *
“Spray the body with this first.” Lettie attaches a dark glass vial to the bottom of a spray painter. “It should be undetectable but don’t go overboard. A layer or two should be enough.”
Diego takes the device from our sister and turns it over in his hands with furrowed brows and a pinched expression. “How do you come up with this shit?”
“I have a lot of free time on my hands.”
She slips out of her jacket and leaves it hanging over the back of a nearby chair. Her sharp stilettos click against the tile floors as she wanders around the kitchen island to where Brent’s body has remained for the last fourteen hours. “I’m surprised he hasn’t begun to rot.”
She drops to her haunches and two perfectly manicured fingernails pull back the bed sheet to reveal the pale face underneath. “Pity…I’d have liked to finish him off myself. I still have a little bit of what I gave Garcia three years ago.”
“Apparently, it was a bullet wound.” I tell her. “Point blank.”
She lifts the bedsheet further and examines his chest. “Let me guess. Handgun. Nine-millimeter.”
“Neither of them will say.” Diego shoves his hands in his pants pockets. “They won’t even tell us where the gun is.”
“That’s suspicious.” Lettie walks over to the sink and washes her hands. “Why are they being so secretive?”
“Beats the Hell out of me but I’m ready to get out of here.” Just then, Dimitrio and Beni enter the room. “Do you two know what to do?”
“Sasha is loaning us some help. Shouldn’t be too difficult.” Dimitrio says.
Beni’s nose scrunches as he angles his head to take a look at the body. “I never liked that guy.”