Page 26 of Plain Sight

“Oooh, slugger. If I let you call me that all the time, will you tell me one single fact about your life outside this office?”

“I don’t like egg rolls,” he says, then disappears down the hall before I can tell him that I already knew about his egg roll thing. He’s eaten dinner at the office and at Mason’s too many times for me to be unaware that Dev does not care for egg rolls.

It’s good to build rapport. And, anyway, I don’t want him to notice that I’m not working hard on anything for Phoenix.

I’m going through all the business records I can get my hands on to see if Phoenix has ever worked with any company that might have ties to someone using the name Malcolm Walsh.

When that turns up nothing, I have one of the interns scan all the paperwork from the box in my closet.

I find a few invoices for decent sums of money, but they’re all paid to shell companies.

Next, I move on to the records from the consortium itself. We got our hands on more of it when Elise’s father died, but silly me—I thought there was no rush.

There’s sure as hell a rush now.

I want Malcolm Walsh dead.

The thought is in my head every second of the day and most of the night.

Upsetting? Of course it’s upsetting. I haven’t had this many thoughts about killing a person ever.

I’ve had thoughts about people dying. Dreams about people dying. But never because I took the initiative to kill them.

That started on my wedding day.

Funny, isn’t it? I’ve spent more than half my life being a human crime scene, and in all that time, I never thought about murder. I thought about freeing pigs being used as science experiments and imprisoned chickens and a tiny little bird who looked like a snowball. I never brought a gun with me. I never thought of my hands as weapons.

I’ve stopped in the kitchen to hang out with Snowball while Remy picks the Downton episode.

“What do you think? Are my hands weapons?”

Snowball cocks his head at me. Are you cracking up?

“Probably.”

Do you even still like me?

“Of course I like you. Are you mad that I’m spending so much time banging Lily?”

Snowball tweets like an alarm clock.

“Okay, fuck, fine. I’ll get up earlier so I can catch you up on the previous day’s bang sessions, if that’s what you need.”

Gross.

“She is not gross.” Snowball flutters his wings. “But all I can think about is how close that guy’s lapels were to his throat. I could have choked him to death.”

GROSS.

“I know.”

You are talking to a bird!

“I know that, too.”

These are not the hands of a killer!

Well, no. Not yet. And if they were, that guy…might not have deserved it. It’s tough to think of him as any kind of victim. It’s tough to picture his corpse as a victim.