Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Rue
“Do you need a cigarette?” Fi says in place of hello. “Because I need a cigarette.”
“Neither of us smokes.” I drop into the chair in front of the bank of monitors, stripping off my gloves with a sigh and popping my AirPods into my ears.
“I might need to start,” she says. “I love you more than anyone in the world, but I’m a little terrified of you right now.”
My eyes fall to the screen on the bottom right, the only one that doesn’t show my ex screaming and thrashing in real time. It’s paused on a different video, the one from when we were still together.
We’d had such a nice day. He’d suggested we go to the farmers market.
He’d suggested it. He fed me samples of local honey and carried the bag when I insisted we buy freshly baked bread to go along with it.
We held hands and walked along the lakefront.
When I’d complained that the wind was blowing my hair in my eyes, he laughingly tied it back with the red ribbon from the honey jar.
I know the video’s from that day because the red ribbon’s still in my hair as I’m kneeling between his legs, naked and blissed out from the afternoon.
“He deserves it,” I say sharply.
“Oh, totally. I’m just enjoying the show.” She laughs darkly. “Hell, I’m taking notes. There’s stuff I could steal.”
“Steal for what?” I flex my fingers, keeping them limber for what’s to come. “If an ex ever does this to you, it’ll be my pleasure to put him in the Chamber and make him pay for it.”
She sniffs. “I’ll collect my own debts, thank you very much. Also, your neighbor has appalling taste in music.”
This time, my laugh is genuine. “What’s he listening to tonight?”
“The Jackson 5,” she says darkly.
“Yeah, that’s a weekend go-to.”
“Whyyyyyy?” she wails.
“One of his nannies liked Motown.” I let my tone imply the duh. “Just be glad it’s not Michael Bublé.”
“Oh my god, he is a monster.”
“Speaking of.” I lean forward to peer at the monitor. “The actual monster seems to have stopped screaming.”
“Better do something about that,” she murmurs.
“Agreed.” I pull myself to my feet and bend at the waist to stretch out my spine, then straighten and twist left, right, and left again.
“Keep me on the phone?” Fi asks hopefully. “The video sound keeps cutting out.”
“Because that’s so great for operational security,” I mutter. But I don’t hang up. The odds of anyone hacking our burners are low, and I don’t have the bandwidth to sweat it tonight.
Pulling my gloves back on, I let myself into the Chamber and lock the door behind me. Greg’s eyes are hazy with pain when I turn to face him, but he still manages a weak smile.
“Good. You’re back.” He’s got his affectionate voice going to the best of his abilities. “Rue-Bear, when are you gonna knock this off and let me go?”
“Let you go?” If that’s his new tactic, he must think I’ve dropped forty IQ points since we were together. But I can work with it. “I suppose that depends on you.”
“Anything.” He can’t quite pull off the warm smolder thanks to the finger lying on the floor near his foot, but he sure tries.
“I need information about one of your cases.”
There’s a moment of hesitation before he nods. “Okay.”
“Angie Timms.”
This time, the hesitation’s joined by an eye twitch before he puts on his courtroom demeanor. “She killed her boyfriend with a golf club. It’s an open-and-shut case.”
I make a small noise of disappointment. “I don’t think that’s true, Gregory. I think you like to protect evil men and prosecute innocent women.”
“No.” He shakes his head firmly. “The evidence—”
I dart forward and press the tip of my knife against his inner thigh. “What evidence? I processed her boyfriend’s murder scene, remember? The golf club was never found, and Paul Franklin was killed with more force than even a woman could generate.”
“I-I… there’s evidence,” he insists. “It’s solid. It’ll—”
I carve a long slice across the top of his leg. “You and I both know that woman did not kill her boyfriend.”
“She fucking did,” he shouts as blood soaks through his expensive jeans. “Bitch!”
“Her or me?”
His chest heaves, but he doesn’t answer. Probably for the best.
“Okay, so you say the evidence is solid, but I know for a fact it’s weak as hell.” I bend forward and jab him in the middle of the forehead with my pointer finger. It’s almost as satisfying as slicing his chin open. “Think really carefully about your next lie. Who messed with the evidence?”
“Fuck you.”
“We’re back to that?” I roll my eyes. “Not your best negotiation strategy.”
“You’re as crazy as she is, you fucking cunt.”
“Ohhh, he didn’t,” Fi murmurs into my ears.
“He sure did,” I murmur back.
His eyes widen with terror when I set the knife against his remaining pinkie.
“The evidence is real,” he babbles. “There’s enough to—”
I take off the tip. His scream’s so loud, Hugo probably heard it through Fi’s AirPods.
Hugo.
My grip on the knife goes lax, but I shake my head sharply.
I can’t think about him. This is about Greg.
“Who fucked with the evidence?” I ask again.
“No one!” he shouts.
I take his pinkie down to the middle knuckle.
“It’s not going to make a difference,” he chokes out, snot thickening his voice. “It’s already charged. The evidence is admitted.”
“The false evidence?” I ask sweetly, resting my knife against the remains of his pinkie.
“O-okay,” he chokes out. “There was… it… it was Timms. Her husband.”
“Ex-husband,” I remind him sharply.
And hell yes. This is essentially a dying declaration, which means Gomez and I don’t have to search Timms’s house for proof of his guilt, and we can jump right into making murder plans on Thursday.
Plus, it validates the bad feeling I’ve had about the Franklin case since basically the moment I walked away from processing the scene.
Something was off, something was missing, and it’s been dancing at the edge of my memory for months.
At least now I know Lester Timms has the answers I’ve been looking for.
My gaze returns to my sweating, bleeding, seething former boyfriend. He’s still conscious, which means I can still use him.
“Who else?”
“W-who else what?” Snot bubbles from his nose, and his red, swollen eyes dart to the top of his right hand, where I’m casually resting my knife.
“Who else is railroading Angie Timms?”
“The judge,” he says, his voice cracking. “Judge Brown’s going along with it.”
I beam at him. “Good boy.”
He slumps in relief, the trusting idiot, and with a flick of my wrist, I slice off the rest of his pinkie, hold up the nub and toss it to the floor to join the other bits.
“Why?” he screams. “I told you the truth!”
“Because.” My voice drops to a lethal hiss, and I lean in so we’re eye to eye. “You took videos of me and posted them online.”
His gaze sharpens through the pain, and where some men might be feeling guilt or remorse right now, all I see in those brown depths is cold calculation. “What videos?” he grits out, like feigning ignorance might save him.
“I know everything, remember?” I say, straightening. “The forum. Your online pals. All that shit you shared with them.”
His eyes flicker again, this time in fear.
Good.
“Do you remember that day at the farmers market?” I casually stroll around his chair, running my finger across the thick line of his shoulders as I walk. “I do.”
After he blew in my mouth that day, he’d tossed me on the bed and returned the favor, going down on me until I came so hard the pretty red ribbon slipped out of my hair.
Funny how he didn’t upload that last part to the Philosopher Kings forum.
“I thought it was romantic. Maybe the best afternoon we ever spent together.” I come to a stop when I’m back in front of him. “I bet you remember it a little differently, though.”
With a flash of my knife, he loses his right thumb, his screams turning shrill as blood pulses from the stump in time with his heartbeat.
I take a step back when it starts to pool on the floor.
I want to avoid the mess, yes, but there’s also my rage, which threatens to spill all over this otherwise clean job.
“Now that I’ve seen the video, I know it wasn’t romantic. It was the warm-up. The show was for your friends.”
Another slice. Another finger gone. Another scream.
“Greg.” I snap my own very intact fingers in front of his scrunched, sweaty, crying face. “Did you or did you not share recordings of me in Marcus Navarro’s cesspool of a forum?”
Naturally, he picks up on the wrong conversational thread.
“Marcus.” He sniffles, trying to clear his nasal passages. “Jesus, did you kill him?”
“Oh gosh, no!” I straighten my spine and widen my eyes, the picture of innocence. “Didn’t you hear? Marcus fell face-first into his glass cabinet. It was a terrible accident.”
My tone is so sickly, sweetly sarcastic that he recoils in terror.
“H-holy fuck.”
I beam. “Yeah, sugar. I killed your buddy. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t personal with Marcus. It was—”
It was personal. Navarro said he knew me. A dying stranger knew me, and I didn’t know Greg at all.
I clench the handle of my knife. Breathe through my nose. Grope for the calm I need.
“This,” I say, “is personal. I loved you.”
I choke on those last words and have to clear my throat to continue.
“I ended things because I thought you were a good man, and I didn’t want you getting dragged down by all of this someday.” I wave my arm over the Chamber, making it clear he’s not the first guest in my chair.
“I am a good man. I loved you.” Despite all the pain and all the blood, his face transforms into something sincere and earnest. Something I used to believe.
“Then why did you do it?” I whisper, hating how broken the words sound.
“That video—”
“Videos.” My voice is still thready.
“Those videos were stolen from my phone,” he says earnestly, “and—”
“Why were they there in the first place? Because we sure as fuck never discussed putting cameras in our bedroom.”