I’m back in the car less than ten minutes later. The woodpile was perfect. But it’s too soon to leave. At least twenty minutes need to pass. There has to be enough time, reconstructing tonight’s events with cell phone pings and license plate hits, for Marlow to have killed Finley and dragged him to the Wagoneer. It’s not easy sitting still when you’re so close to putting this to bed, when all you want to do is go, go, go! But discipline and care got me this far.
After twenty minutes in total have passed, I’m ready to leave. I turn off Finley’s phone, which is what Marlow would do if he were thinking clearly. Besides, if Fin’s phone stays on, the police could find him with real-time cell tracking. I don’t want his body found for a few days. I want at least a day or two to see how things look, to wrap up any loose ends I may have missed.
It’s just a few minutes shy of midnight when I reach Grace Park. The streets are quiet, a light mist now falling. As I drive down Cherry Oak Avenue toward the construction site, my eye catches motion along the sidewalk.
It’s Luke, on his bike, riding toward me. He stops me on the road and rolls up to my window. “How did you know to pick this house?” he asks. “You know this is one of those old mobster houses? Rico Cagnola or whatever his name was, one of Capone’s guys?”
Yes, I do, as Marlow Luckett explained to me in my garage.
Every story needs a villain. Marlow, welcome to the story.
“All I know is it’s been under construction for months, so it would have a dumpster.” The less he knows, the better.
“Well, you’re right about that,” he says. “The dumpster’s in the back.” He thinks a moment. “Kill your lights and don’t pull into the driveway.Drive onto the lawn and pull around to the back of the house. It’s private back there.”
“On the lawn? No—”
“Yes. Trust me. The lawn’s not really a lawn right now. C’mon.”
He rides away. I follow him slowly, headlights turned off, until I reach the property.
The house itself is half-gutted, windows boarded on one side. I navigate the Wagoneer around a tall piece of equipment with a drill dangling in front, an excavator next to it, and pull up in the back right next to the dumpster. Luke’s right; this is much more private. We are secluded behind the house and it’s dark as pitch. Almosttoodark for our purposes—we need to see what we’re doing, and neither of us has a phone for a flashlight.
The dumpster, ten feet in height, is filled to about a third of capacity, with all sorts of construction debris—drywall, broken tile, floorboards, that kind of thing.
“Don’t open the trunk yet,” Luke says, stopping his bike. “Let’s open the dumpster door.”
“The dumpster has a door?”
“Of course. We just unlatch it.” He looks at me. “You haven’t used a dumpster before?”
“Um, no?”
“C’mon. It’s easier with two people.”
He clearly knows how to do this, narrating as he goes. Lifting a latch upward, removing a small chain, then raising a lever that starts the door opening. Luke and I catch it, quietly and slowly helping it to the ground. A few tiles and part of a floorboard slide out of the dumpster. “That’s okay,” says Luke. “We need stuff to fall out. We have to cover him with debris once we have him inside. You want him concealed, right? You don’t want his body discovered right away?”
“Correct.” We’re in a much stronger position if the police don’t find Fin for several days.
“Okay, you…ready to do this?” he asks.
Am I ready to bury my husband inside a construction dumpster under a pile of debris? A part of me still can’t believe any of this is happening.
Sensing as much, Luke takes the lead, opening the rear of the Wagoneer and pulling Finley out slowly, feet first, until Fin’s wrapped body is almost standing straight up. Luke wraps his arms around Fin’s upper body and walks backward, Fin’s shoes dragging in the dirt, until he reaches the dumpster.
“I’ll need your help for this part,” he whispers to me. “We have to lift him onto the top of the debris. Then we have to separate the debris until his body sinks low enough that we can throw stuff on top of him. Anything that slides out the side of the dumpster, no problem, we’ll throw that on top, too. Nobody will notice him. Not until this dumpster is full, and they unload it at some landfill or whatever. Probably several days from now.”
I blink hard; there lies my husband, wrapped like a mummy, halfway inside a garbage dumpster. My body starts shaking.
“Allison,” he says, gripping my arm. “You’ve gotten this far. Let’s finish it.”
Luke does the lion’s share of the work, using his hands and feet to jostle and push and pry and separate debris until Finley’s body disappears beneath several layers of drywall and floorboards and the like. Or at least as best we can tell in the dark.
He closes up the side door of the dumpster. The clank of the door jars me out of my funk. He’s right. We’ve come this far. I can’t let emotion overtake me now.
“What next?” he asks.
“I dump this car and ride home on your bike,” I say.
