Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Rue
“Got everything you need for ladies’ night?”
I rub my palms against the sides of my legs. “Yep.”
“Even though you’re not gonna need it, right?” Felicity glances away from the road to give me a sharp look.
“Right.” My answers are terse. I’m focused on tonight’s job.
“And you have your buddy?” she asks.
I pat the pocket sewn into the upper thigh of tonight’s ensemble where my frame-lock pocket knife is waiting. Single-button release, custom grip, wickedly sharp blade, and a handle decorated with an iridescent oil-slick pattern. She’s my very favorite possession.
“You have your buddy?” I ask in return.
My twin pulls out her own knife. Same specs, but unlike my sleek beauty, hers is pink with a rainbow sprinkle pattern. Her killer donut, she calls it.
“Not that I need it,” Fi says mournfully. “All I’m doing is dropping off, picking up, and drinking coffee. I’m basically a suburban mom.”
Yes. Exactly. Over my dead body will she use her killer donut to actually kill someone.
“You’re giving me an alibi and keeping an eye on the guy whose house I’m breaking into,” I remind her. “That’s important.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah. So important.”
I shouldn’t need any cover for tonight, but if I do, it’s nice to know the only other person in the world with my face is going to drive my car to a diner, use my credit card to order some food, and work at her laptop for a few hours while I’m committing crimes, even if she is dressed to avoid attention in a nondescript sweatshirt and jeans, her blond hair scraped back under a White Sox hat and round glasses perched on her nose.
I sometimes wonder what kind of people Felicity and I would be if we’d had different childhoods.
If we hadn’t been born to the second coming of Aileen Wuornos and an unknown, but undoubtedly awful, sperm donor.
If we hadn’t been orphaned at eleven. If Felicity hadn’t been adopted by the Mercers while I was still delirious in the burn unit and then screaming through my night terrors at one foster home after another.
Me, I’d probably be the same. Even without my trauma with a side of trauma, somebody had to inherit all that dark shit from mommy dearest. But Fi’s different.
She’s a sweet-natured genius who was loved by her adoptive parents and comes alive around hard facts and cold logic.
She should be the youngest tenured professor at MIT.
Instead, she’s hiding away in a farmhouse outside the city, taking mundane market analysis contracts that pay well but ask nothing of her.
Then again, I’m selfishly grateful for all her squandered potential because she devotes all her intellectual firepower to planning my murders.
Once we realized we could combine my access to death scenes and police files with her next-level statistical modeling skills, everything changed.
Suddenly, we had an algorithm that could comb through the avalanche of details about arrests, accidents, and victims to spit out actionable intel.
When we’re lucky, Felicity’s work identifies connected crimes or questionable cover-ups.
When we’re even luckier, it gives us probable suspect locations and sometimes even names.
Once we have a lead on the guy—and make no mistake, it’s always a guy—we study his routines and habits until we’ve got confirmation that he’s the one we’re looking for.
Then I act. In the six years since we moved to Chicago and started eliminating monsters, Fi’s analysis has been wrong twice.
That’s why a night like tonight is crucial. A little light snooping should turn up the physical proof I need to confirm that her data crunching accurately identified the person who killed Mary Glenn. If not, he’ll be free to live out the rest of his life, just like those two other men.
“It’s time,” Felicity says.
We’re idling a block from one of the city’s many small parks.
Last week, she and Pell placed small outdoor cameras between here and our target house to monitor traffic patterns, so I know I’m about to step onto the darkest patch of sidewalk on the least-traveled block, just like I know my exit route to Fi’s stashed car a few blocks away will be essentially deserted at this time of night.
“Try not to die,” my sweet sister says, holding up her pinkie. Her tone is bright, but I know she’s nervous for me.
“Um, hello.” I wrap my pinkie around hers. “I’m Mom but with better emotional regulation. That makes me basically immortal.”
“Oh, right, right,” she says. “In that case, go nail his ass.”
“Always.”
One more squeeze of Fi’s pinkie, and I step out of the car and fall into a brisk jog, projecting I’m just a normal woman out for a normal run at eleven o’clock at night as I cut through the empty park and turn down the street that’ll take me to the house.
There are still no suspects in Mary Glenn’s death, which I confirmed from the gossipy cop who was working the fatal car crash Bart and I handled yesterday.
Plus, the fire marshal’s initial report shows that the blaze burned far hotter and faster than the average fire, and accelerant traces found at the scene didn’t match anything from past arson cases.
Brick wall, dead end, the firebug escapes detection to kill again.
But neither the police nor the fire marshal has Felicity.
Her miracle algorithm linked a single line in an arson report from nine years ago to evidence in Mary’s investigation, along with a probability map based on suspicious fires and persons of interest for said fires over the past decade.
Yada yada, data plus pixie dust plus my sister’s big brain, and here I am, ready to break into the house belonging to Howard Marshall, a white, thirty-nine-year-old high school dropout.
According to Fi’s algo, Marshall’s ninety-one point seven percent likely to have been responsible for five house fires in the city, all involving older women who lived alone.
Three of those women died: one from smoke inhalation, one from crush injuries, and now Mary.
Tonight, I’m looking for the last bit of proof I need to finally kill this fucker.
I slow my pace as I turn onto Marshall’s block and veer into the alley behind his house.
Conveniently, my break-in wardrobe looks a lot like running clothes: a black bodysuit, black hoodie, thin black gloves, and a black knit hat that I can pull over my face like a ski mask to cover everything but my eyes.
Even though this is a fact-finding mission, my murder kit’s strapped to my back.
The one time I didn’t think I’d need it, I got caught in a bad situation, so fool me once and all that.
With my mask down, I creep along the side of the fence separating Marshall’s property from his neighbor’s, grateful that his desire to come and go in secret means I don’t have to deal with motion-activated lights.
Actually, nothing in Marshall’s house is technologically advanced, so I won’t need the signal jammer tucked in the bottom of my backpack, although I brought it with me in case things go sideways and I need to block an unanticipated 911 call.
I make quick work of the cheap back-door lock and enter his kitchen, where the clocks on his appliances light my way. It’s a bizarre inverse of my process at work when I’m called to a scene to identify the deceased. There, I search for clues about the cause and manner of the person’s death.
Here, I’m trying to figure out how I can cause it.
The trash can’s empty except for a half dozen crushed beer cans.
Good. A man who drinks this much alone is a man whose at-home accidents can be easily explained.
And if I need more staging options, I’ll grab bags from the outside bin—although the last thing I want is to pick through this asshole’s coffee grounds and greasy takeout containers.
After a quick search of his mostly empty cupboards, I tiptoe into the dining room, which has a scarred wooden café table that barely covers a quarter of the space. The living room is equally underfurnished, offering nothing useful.
Before I head to the second story, I grab my burner phone and text a question mark to Felicity.
She answers with a thumbs-up from her own burner, which means she has eyes on Marshall working the register at his overnight gas station shift.
The universe doesn’t always hand us easy surveillance, so we did a dance of joy when we spotted the twenty-four-hour diner directly across the street from the Pump-n-Run that employs a serial arsonist and murderer.
And since Marshall’s a loner with no friends, family, roommates, or even pets, I’ve got the place to myself for another six hours.
Three doors greet me upstairs. The one on the right reveals a room with a table, chair, ancient desk lamp, and two freestanding work lights.
A sharp scent hangs in the air, likely from the accelerants Marshall used to snuff out Mary’s life.
But the materials themselves aren’t here, so I grind my teeth and keep looking.
The middle door is a bathroom, where my flashlight reveals a huge bottle of painkillers in the medicine cabinet and an empty tube of burn salve in the trash. It’s not proof proof that the fire that killed Mary also hurt him, but it’s a damn sight more than the investigators have right now.
So fire got us both. Cool that I’ll have something to chat with him about before I kill him.
The last room is clearly Howard’s. My flashlight sweeps across an unmade bed to land on a nightstand covered in lotion and stiff tissues that I wish like hell I’d never seen.
Muffling my dry heaves, I use the tip of my flashlight to pull open the drawer, where I find more crispy tissues, about twenty lighters, and at least a dozen packs of matches.
So that’s confirmed. Howie likes fire. And jacking off, although that’s not what’s going to land him under my knife.
I keep my light low as I scan the rest of the room, coming to a dead stop when I spot two jugs and a large plastic bin on the floor.
“Please please please,” I whisper as I approach, hoping Howard labeled everything. Sure enough, my flashlight reveals a label that reads POTASSIUM NITRATE. But before I can open the lid on the bin to investigate, the closet door flies open, and a hand wraps around my arm.
My scream is cut off when a second hand clamps down over my mouth and a low voice growls in my ear, “Don’t make a fucking sound.”