Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Rue
“So how are we killing him?” Fi asks as she pours us more coffee much later that morning. “Gas leak?”
“We share a house.”
“Right. Bad.” She thinks. “Cut his brakes?”
“He never leaves the house that we share.”
“Right. Sad.” She thinks some more. “I pretend to be you again, knock on his door, and stab him in the face?”
“Tempting, but my objection to you killing anybody remains in place. Also, he’s genuinely dangerous.”
Hawaiian Shirt’s flattened skull floats through my mind, and I shudder.
“Not to you.” Fi scoffs and jumps out of her chair when the toast pops out of the toaster. “Hey, do we even know if Hugo Mohr is his real name?”
“Of course it is,” I say with slightly more confidence than I feel.
While her back is turned, my mind flips to Hugo’s eyes during the worst of our fight this morning.
Nobody’s ever looked at me like that, with loathing and longing all tangled together, and I don’t know how I’ll be able to walk through my door again with those memories hanging in the air.
It makes me wish I could hide here forever.
Just become a permanent fixture in the bedroom that’s been waiting for me, with the yellow quilt and the pretty curtains and the nightstand holding a charger that fits my phone.
“So when are you moving in here?”
No surprise that my twin was thinking in tandem.
“I can’t,” I say, regretting my negative answer for the first time in the history of her asking it.
She spins back to the table and slides a plate of buttered toast in front of me, giving me a sad smile. “Yeah.” Then she turns to pop two more slices of bread into the toaster.
We both know the farmhouse is too far from my job to be practical, although I’m planning to stay here for the next few days.
I even called off work, although I made Bart promise to text if any major cases come in.
I need to know if Timms’s house somehow does become a crime scene or if Hugo killed somebody after I left the duplex.
Not sure how I feel about cleaning up his next crime scene, though.
Asshole. Stalking, voyeuristic asshole.
“Okay, so when are we looking at a new place for you to live?” Fi asks as she sets a brand-new Costco-sized jar of Nutella in front of me, pointedly not making eye contact as she does.
I focus on slathering chocolate hazelnut goodness on my toast and fighting back tears.
“I’ll start looking today. And I need to get out of my lease.”
She snorts. “I dare him to try to hold you to it.”
“He won’t.” Will he? Yesterday, I’d have said he’d let me out of it as a kindness if I asked. Now, I’m not sure.
An alert chimes on Fi’s phone, and she quickly silences it. “I should be leaving for yoga,” she says.
“Yoga? You?” I ask around my mouthful of toast. “How long has that been going on?”
She focuses on doctoring her toast as intently as I just did when my living situation came up. “I don’t know. A while. I found a studio that’s worth the drive to town.”
“At noon on a Friday?”
Fi shrugs. “It fits my schedule.”
“O… kay.” Yoga’s a surprising choice for my let’s-run-the-data, let’s-get-shit-done sister, but maybe an activity that calms her brain is good for her. “I’m glad. Makes me feel less guilty that you’re stuck here helping me when you should be, I don’t know, the queen of Silicon Valley.”
She rolls her eyes. “I beg you to stop taking responsibility for my choices. I love what I do. And I’d be a terrible queen.”
“Easier said than done. And you’d be an amazing queen.”
“Actually…” She grins and pantomimes settling a crown onto her head, where her hair’s haphazardly gathered in a topknot, as per usual. “I would, wouldn’t I?”
“And how’s the Rowdy’s kidnapping case going, your majesty?”
I ask this to distract myself from the shit show waiting for me outside these walls, but Fi shocks me with an actual update.
“I found my guy.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep.” She adjusts her pretend crown. “There was another disappearance last week. A sixty-year-old man, last seen leaving a Rowdy’s in Louisville.”
“Connected to your serial abductor?”
“Serial killer,” she corrects me, dancing in her chair with excitement. “No way is he keeping these people alive. Although lord knows he could.”
“You tease! Who is it?”
She drags it out a little longer, popping the last bite of Nutella toast into her mouth, blotting her lips with her napkin, and setting it on her plate before primly folding her hands.
“Cormac Archibald King,” she announces.
I blink. Blink again. “Billionaire playboy Cormac Archibald King kidnapped someone from outside a Rowdy’s in Kentucky last week?”
“Kidnapped and killed. My model is seventy-nine point nine percent confident.”
I shake my head to clear it. “Manhattan’s golden boy. The social media darling. The guy who once spent forty grand on a bottle of wine and used it to make sangria. That’s the guy you’ve been tracking?”
“Yes.”
“Honey.” I reach for her hands. “I think what you’re describing is a psychotic break.”
“No,” she says. “I’m positive Cormac King is perfectly sane and acting of his own free will.”
I keep my gaze steady until she screws up her face and slaps my hands away.
“Oh, fuck you, I’m perfectly sane too! I’m just saying, he was in every town where there was a disappearance on the day it happened: Louisville, Philadelphia, Hartford, Indianapolis, two in Boston, two in Minneapolis, and then the one here in Chicago that got me started on all of this.”
“And all those towns have a Rowdy’s.”
“Yes. And Mac famously loves Rowdy’s.”
I turn it over in my head. Hell, some part of me thinks she might be onto something. Cormac King’s visits to Rowdy’s around the country are well documented on gossipy social media accounts. And if Fi’s correct that he was in each of the cities when the disappearances happened, then—
Oh my god, no. I’m not falling down this rabbit hole with her.
I take a slug of coffee before responding. “Didn’t you have a huge crush on Mac in high school?”
“No,” she says too quickly before muttering, “It was junior high.”
“And now you think the man with the mansion and the incredible cheekbones is a thrill killer?”
She angrily adjusts her bun, her pretend crown forgotten. “I don’t know why he’s doing it. I just know it’s him.”
“So he could be keeping them captive in, like, separate wings of his mansion,” I point out. “The man probably has at least three sex dungeons.”
She huffs. “And we could be stashing bad men in my barn, but we’re not.
He’s not either.” Her fingers wrap around her capy necklace as she talks, her eyes going fuzzy in the way they do when she’s thinking about a new dataset or an expansion to her computer setup.
“I just need to figure out how all those people are connected. Once I do, I’ll know the why, and then I can—”
Her eyes snap back into focus, and she laughs at herself for once again getting caught up in the promise of a juicy dataset to dig into.
“Well, when you figure out why he’s kidnapping”—I lift my hands in apology—“sorry, killing these people, definitely let me know so we can start planning.”
Fi nods absently, her gaze still distant behind her glasses. My thoughts, meanwhile, drift toward my four p.m. appointment to meet Pell and personally observe him ripping every one of Hugo’s cameras out of the duplex.
I drop the remains of my toast back onto the plate, appetite gone.
“What’s wrong with me?” I say quietly. “Why do I keep ending up with guys who do this to me?”
Felicity sets her mug down with a definitive thunk. “It’s not you, love. It’s the men.”
I nod, letting her words soak in.
It’s the men. It’s always the men.
This time, I’ll remember.
“Well?” I say to Pell when he comes loping through my front door.
“Hello to you too, neighbor girl.”
“Don’t ‘neighbor girl’ me,” I snap. “Where’s my apology?”
He crinkles his nose as he adjusts the brim of his battered White Sox cap. “For what, exactly?”
“Guess.” I glance pointedly down at his big canvas bag of tools, then at the walls around me. “Why would you even do it in the first place?”
“Aww, darlin’.” Our friendly neighborhood fixer grins and slings an arm around my shoulder. “Because he paid me.”
Strike the “friendly” part. Friends don’t let friends surveil friends without their knowledge. But the man is Teflon and ignores my death glare as he drops his bag on my coffee table and puts his hands on his hips, spinning to take in my living room decor.
“Your boyfriend set up the basement in this half as an emergency holding cell back when he bought the place. Then you showed up, and all of a sudden, he was willing to rent it out.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Okay.” Mr. Teflon shrugs. “He wanted a camera down there, then on the front and back doors in case a not-quite-dead guy made it out of his restraints.” He shoots me a grin. “In case y’ever wondered why your basement door has three hardcore locks.”
I did, actually. But I never asked because it made me feel safe.
“The good news,” Pell says as we head down the stairs, “is he’s making himself scarce while I take care of you.”
“Yippie,” I say flatly.
In the basement, Pell quickly locates and removes a small camera from one of the ceiling joists.
“I never noticed,” I say. “I’m never down here.”
“Surprising.” He glances around the unfinished concrete space. “Thought you’d make use of a second kill room.”
Holy shit. It is. The epoxied floor has a slight downward slope leading to the drain in the center. It’s subtle, but now that I know who my landlord really is, it’s clearly a domestic version of the Chamber of Consequences.
Once we’re back on the main floor, Pell heads to the front door and frowns.
“Aww, hell.”
“What?”
Instead of answering, he strides to the kitchen and studies the doorframe, then curses again, dropping his drawl like he does when he gets serious. “This might take longer than I thought.”
He returns to his bag and starts rummaging around.
“Goddammit, Pell, what?”
He sighs. “This ain’t the tech I installed. Your boy must’ve upgraded.”