Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Hugo
Rue’s moving out tomorrow, and I’m going to kill somebody about it.
Not her new landlord, although that was tempting. I’d say I need to work through my feelings in a more constructive manner than that, but Rue and I haven’t exchanged more than a few words since Thanksgiving, and I don’t seem capable of feeling much at all these days.
At least I’m getting to a man who’s been on my list for far too long.
December’s earlier sunsets mean I’m able to cross the well-manicured lawn and slip into the house well before Augustine Horne—retired educator, upstanding member of the community, soon-to-be dead man—returns home from his Thursday night symphony rehearsal.
No need to look for proof that he’s guilty of what I’m here to kill him for.
Three of the families I worked with at the women’s shelter reported that he’d used his private music lessons with their children to ply them with alcohol and maneuver them into watching him masturbate.
The only thing that’s kept him alive for this long is his retirement.
He’s not around kids anymore and limits his musical activities to the adults-only community orchestra.
If not for that and my preoccupation with Rue-related murders, he’d have become one of my intakes far sooner.
Once I’m inside, I walk straight to the bar cart in the music room where he used to hold his two-hour lessons with the most gifted students in his junior high orchestra.
Like an experienced predator, he picked kids from unstable homes who’d be less likely to report abuse and less likely to be believed if they did.
He lowered their inhibitions by offering them a screwdriver, joking that the vitamin C in the orange juice was good for them.
Horne still relaxes with a screwdriver when he gets home.
It’s an odd choice for a man with a reputation as a supporter of the arts, but the heart wants what the heart wants.
Unfortunately for Augustine, my heart is broken and wants him dead, and I’ve got a mad scientist best friend to help me do that.
The vodka bottle’s nearly full; I unscrew the cap and grab the first of the two vials Quinn gave me, then follow her max dosage instructions.
After dispensing seven drops into the clear liquid, I recap it and give it a good shake.
It’ll remain inert and undetectable in the alcohol, but when it mixes with the reagent in the second vial, Augustine’s stomach acid will get to work and he’ll expire of a nice, tidy heart attack.
Tidier than he deserves, frankly, but it’ll get the job done.
Now, for that second compound.
I move into the kitchen, open the fridge to grab the orange juice, and bite out a curse as I stare at the eight-ounce six-pack.
“Problem?” Quinn says in place of a greeting when she answers her burner.
“It’s half pints, not a gallon,” I say tersely. “How many drops?”
I hear clinking on her end, either test tubes and pipettes for a paralytic or a candy thermometer and double boiler for yet another attempt at her grandma’s torte.
“See, this is why we do research before we do crimes,” she says.
I press my gloved fingers to my masked forehead, but it doesn’t hold back my frustrated growl. To be fair to Quinn, everything frustrates me right now.
“I did. A few months ago. How was I supposed to know he’d switch to individual containers?”
“And did we forget how to do math?”
“Eight pints to the gallon, for fuck’s sake,” I snap.
“But I was supposed to put three drops into a full gallon, two if it was half empty, and one if it was almost out. How the hell much do I do for half a pint? And how the hell am I doing that without breaking the safety seals? And how the hell do I know which one he’ll take? ”
There’s more clinking before she answers. “Two options. One, add a quarter of a drop into each one and hope both he and the investigators don’t notice that all the seals are broken. Or two, call this off and try again when you’ve done your actual research.”
“Quarter of a drop?”
“Ah, I see you’re choosing option three,” she says. “Charge forward and get caught.”
I ignore her and try to think. “If I can figure out what glass he’ll use, can I put a quarter of a drop in there?”
She exhales hard. I hear it loud and clear over the phone. “Okay, option four. If you think he’ll pour the whole bottle of OJ in, yes. But if it’ll be less than that, you’ll need to do an eighth of a drop, which I don’t trust you to eyeball. And if you get it wrong, you can’t count on—”
Her voice cuts off abruptly, but I know what she was about to say.
I can’t count on Rue to cover for me if she suspects I’m involved. She could raise all kinds of red flags over Augustine’s death that have police and forensics teams crawling all over it.
“Option five,” she says. “Knock him out however you want to, load him into your trunk, and take him to your basement to turn him into mulch. You haven’t asked for more fertilizer chemicals this year, so you must be running low.”
I am, actually, and that would probably be the smart thing to do. My mulch donors are chosen at random based on who I’m killing around the time that my supply’s running short. But Horne won’t work.
“She’s moving tomorrow,” I bite out. “Too many people around.”
The clinking stops completely, and Quinn heaves a sigh.
“I agreed to help you because killing predators always leaves you intolerably chipper, and—I will deny it if you tell anyone—I find intolerably chipper Hugo preferable to the shambling corpse you’ve been all month.
And I know you want to pull your shit together.
Just…” Her voice softens a touch, likely imperceptible to any other human than me. “Just be smart, okay?”
“I’m always smart,” I reply, but she’s already hung up.
Moving quickly because Augustine’s due home within the hour, I check the dishwasher and see that it’s full of clean dishes, including three highball glasses on the top rack.
Back at the bar cabinet, I find five identical glasses, which means I can’t truly guess which one he’ll use even if I could manage the right dosage.
Quinn’s right. I should call it off and figure out a new plan. But if I do that, I’ll sit at home tonight listening to Rue tape up the last of her boxes, and I don’t know if I’ll survive that.
Option fucking six, then. I stalk through his main floor in search of inspiration, coming to a stop in front of the dishwasher again. From there, my eyes travel up to the knife block on the counter.
I smile grimly as I choose the chef’s knife, boning knife, and carving fork and settle them in the silverware basket, handle down and point up, so they form a wicked cluster.
Then I close the door and race around the house placing my cameras in his kitchen, music, room, bedroom, and at his front door.
Everything’s as ready as it can be, so I ease into the coat closet and pull out my newest burner to watch the live feeds.
I don’t have long to wait before the slender, snowy-haired man lets himself in through the front door, hangs his overcoat and scarf on the coatrack, and heads straight for the bar cart to mix his drink.
How he’s kept his stomach lining intact drinking booze and acid every night for decades is beyond me. Then again, how he’s remained a violin instructor for decades while exposing himself to children is also beyond me.
I watch on the feed as he climbs the stairs to his bedroom, drink in hand, and changes into a striped pajama set. When his slippers take him back downstairs to the bar cart, it’s showtime.
Trading my phone for my tactical pen, I slip out of the closet and approach Augustine on silent feet.
I’d been counting on a no-fuss death and instead have to kill a fully conscious man in a well-lit living room.
But I’m not overly concerned. He’s seventy-six and fragile, and I’m thirty-four and have been taking out my misery on my doorway pull-up bar.
He doesn’t notice me until he’s set the vodka bottle back down after pouring a second shot into his mostly empty glass.
“Who’s there?” he squawks when I step behind him and press the blunt, heavy tip of the small baton against the hinge of his jaw, just below his ear. To keep him in place, I grab the collared back of his pajama shirt with my other hand.
“Caitlin Murphy,” I say.
“W-who?”
I reach around him and take the glass from his shaking hand. “Allow me. We don’t need you dropping this.”
Once the glass is safely on the bar cart, I press harder with the pen’s edge, angling it up and inward until he jolts at the pain.
“Bryan Suarez.”
“I’m calling the police,” he blusters.
I calmly wait for him to fumble his phone out of his pocket before I release his collar, pluck it from his fingers, and place it just out of reach on the bar cart. My grip returns to his collar before he can react.
“River Jones.”
“My phone, please,” he snaps, every inch the tyrannical music director his victims described to me.
“Do you know what’s nice about the human body?” I increase the pressure on his jaw’s compliance point. “It wants to get away from pain.”
He yelps when I press just a bit harder, and I start steering him toward the kitchen.
“All I have to do is apply a little pain here”—I push—“and you move there.”
Augustine cries out and stumbles forward, exactly as I told him he would, trying to escape the hard metal nub digging into his mandibular nerve.
Under different circumstances, I’d be using my thumb or my knuckle to steer him, but I want to avoid any hand- or finger-sized bruises on his papery flesh, just in case.
So I control him with my hand on his collar and my titanium at his throat.
Once we hit the kitchen linoleum, I use his pain to direct him to the sink.
“What’s happening?” he asks feebly, reaching up as if he could force my hand from his neck. But his musician’s fingers, with their slightly too-long nails, scrabble uselessly at the thick material of my gloves.
I repeat my earlier list.