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Means. He’d had sex with her on several occasions with no one ever knowing. He’d think it easy to do so again.
Motive. She threatened on film to out him. The film put him with Erin three days before her death. She’d mentioned the time he’d taken her virginity—underage—and I had that film too. It showed a yearslong trend of behavior against women. Erin was the only one who’d been murdered though.
I clicked the fob on my key chain to unlock my car. Something wasn’t right about it all. Not the obvious, Shane filming all those women. I couldn’t deny what I’d found myself. What I’d seen with my own eyes on those memory cards. All the women he’d slept with, including me. That didn’t even include what he’d done so ruthlessly to Erin. God, that was awful, what he’d done. I wasn’t used to dealing with a man like this, so I wasn’t looking at it all correctly.
I was seeing it from the eyes of a victim. I was his latest since I’d just had sex with him in that same bed in the same way as the video. God, he hadn’t even touched me, just let me use him. I’d thought it hot at the time. He’d kept his hands behind his head. It had seemed as if he had to tuck them there to control himself. Now it was clear he’d done so to keep them out of the camera’s way.
Out of the camera’s way.
I stopped just in front of my car. Stood on the sidewalk. Thought hard. Shane hadn’t been seen in the films. Not one of them, or at least in the ones I’d gone through, and that had been a lot. Only a hint of leg, groin. Like this morning, Shane had kept himself from being part of the shot because he’d wanted the camera to pick up me and only me.
Shane had wanted every one of the clips to be of the woman and the woman only because it was like a trophy to him. To see his conquest in all her naked glory. To know he could fuck her, expose her and get away with it.
But maybe that wasn’t it. Or that wasn’t only it. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to be filmed. Maybe because he didn’t want anyone to know it was him in the films.
Blackmail? Shane had money. Millions if I took a guess, from his dad. But he’d said he didn’t touch any of it. He could have blackmailed the women and added it to his account, and it wouldn’t stand out. But why would a man who had access to all that money want to extort more?
Maybe because it wasn’t Shane in the films. I turned around and raced back inside.
I dropped my laptop on my desk, pul
led out the memory cards. I grabbed one, set it in the little adapter and then put it in the slot. No, not that one. I switched it. Clicked through the files until I found the one I was looking for. The one where the woman had turned around to reverse cowgirl, to when Shane had spanked her. I slid the bar across the bottom of the file to move quickly through the video, passed the spank and went back to it.
There.
His thumb slipped into her ass, and I didn’t pay attention to what was happening, only the ring on the right ring finger. Gold. A few diamonds. Nothing I’d seen Shane wear.
I closed the file, switched memory cards to the most recent one. I found the file by date, the one of Shane and Erin right before her death. I slid the bar forward until she started talking. She threatened. “I wonder if everyone will want to know you like underage girls.”
A hand settled on her thigh for less than two seconds. Again, the ring.
“Oh my God,” I said, trying to use the laptop’s track pad with shaking hands. I went to a browser, typed in the name of the person I now knew had killed Erin.
Eddie Nickel.
Loads of pictures of the famous movie star filled the page. I scrolled through until I found one of him standing at a movie premiere, clicked on it.
There, on his right hand, was the ring.
Shane hadn’t fucked any of those women. Shane hadn’t killed Erin Mills. His father had.
12
SHANE
“Okay, I’m here.”
I dropped into the chair in one of the interrogation rooms of the police department.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I slouched.
The drive into town had been silent. What could I say? What should I say? He hadn’t mentioned the need for a lawyer, but if they had video proof I had sex with Erin Mills, then I wasn’t sure what legal counsel could do.
I may have had sex with a number of women in Cutthroat, but not Erin Mills. She was Lucas’s little sister. I’d grown up with her, remembered when she was a kid. Not only was there some kind of guy code about fucking a friend’s sister, but I’d never been interested.
Erin had been vain. She’d been into the whole rich Cutthroat circle that I avoided like the plague. She’d never been my type, although I hadn’t realized what my type was until I met Eve Miranski. She was my type. If Erin were still alive, she wouldn’t turn my head, no matter how pretty.
Nix took a seat across from me, dropped a notepad and pen onto the table, pressed a button on the machine set to the side.
