“Apparently, he stalked his ex-girlfriend, and she has a restraining order against him. He tried to kidnap her. He isnota good guy, Ella—”
Russo tugged the phone out of my hand and ended the call.
“Wait…” I managed as I lifted my arm to grab my phone back, but my arms were made of lead, and they wouldn’t do what I asked of them.
“That’s enough of that,” he said.
“You—”
“Come on. My car’s right here.”
We turned the corner, and there, sitting right there, plain as day in front of us, was the vintage white Jeep Wagoneer.
Panic slinked down my spine as warning bells pealed in my brain. But my limbs were too slow, too sluggish to do anything about it. I tried to rally, tried to move away, but Russo had me in a vise grip and was half dragging, half carrying me to the SUV.
“Y-you…” I managed, realizing right at that moment, as my sight grew ever dimmer, a circle growing ever smaller, that Russo was the one all along.
Those driving moves? Not a stuntman’s at all.
But a detective’s.
“That wine hitting you hard?” He said it in almost a mocking tone, and that’s when I realized too late he’d drugged my damn drink.
“It was… you? In the Wagoneer?” My voice came out a low groan. My tongue felt like a salted slug.
“Well, I had to bring her out of storage when CPD took back my unmarked police car,” he said matter-of-factly.
I tried to fight him, but my limbs wouldn’t obey. He lifted me into the back seat, where I flopped down on the camel leather.
“Night night, kid,” he said as everything went black.
Eighteen
The Canceled Killer’s fifth victim was a suburban divorced mom who left her young children alone for an entire week without supervision while she vacationed with a married lover on an all-expenses-paid cruise to the Caribbean. The mother was found dead after drinking a poisoned piña colada in her home.
—Crime Hivepodcast
My head pounded with the hangover of a lifetime. My eyes flicked open, and I found myself staring at an Operation game box at the bottom of a stack of board games.
What the…?
I tried to sit up and realized my ankles and wrists were zip-tied in front of me, and I was lying on the pristine carpet. Why did this basement look so familiar?
Wait… Russo.
My brain felt like sludge as I blinked back confusion.
Dinner. Drugged wine.
That asshole.
How did I miss it? Cop as the Canceled Killer. The perfect cover.
Ugh.
I was disappointed in myself and furious all at once. And my head killed. That was the last time I let a man buy a drink for me. He must’ve dissolved a roofie in my glass before I even got there.And when I saw Russo again, I was going to punch him in his chiseled face. All that time pretending to be on my team, pretending to want to catch the killer, when he was probably just laughing behind my back, chuckling to himself about how gullible I might be.
As I struggled against the zip ties on my wrists, my face pressed into the recently vacuumed carpet, I realized why this basement looked so familiar. The foosball table. The board games. The jack-o’-lantern candle.
