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“Yes.”
“Do you have a last name, Brock?” she asked.
“Barlowe.”
“Okay, so, Brock Barlowe, you’re a private investigator who has killed more than a few men. In the military, I am guessing based on your posture.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. I might have been able to shake a lot from my service days, but my posture was not one of them.
“And you are here to figure out how the hell this happened to me,” she said, lifting her arm, and placing it on the table.
And there it was.
A nasty-ass red scar up the length of her arm.
Yes, up.
“What?” she asked, looking down at it, immediately grimacing. Even people who didn’t have a lot of vanity would likely wince at a scar like that. And what it represented.
“It’s up your arm.”
“Yeah…”
“Most suicide attempts go across the wrist, not up the arm. Up the arm is something someone does when they genuinely want to end things. It’s really easy to bleed out if you cut the vein.”
“I don’t think it did. But someone was clearly trying to either end me, or make it seem like I wanted to end myself.”
“You can say that again,” I agreed. “So, Cam told us that you don’t have any known enemies.”
“I can tell by your tone that you don’t think that is true.”
“In my experience, no one gets to a position of as much power and wealth as you have without someone out there plotting some kind of petty, or devastating, revenge.”
“Well, maybe my path up didn’t involve stepping on the backs of others.”
“Honey, that’s just not possible,” I insisted. A path to billionaire status meant someone, somewhere was suffering because of something you’d done. Workers who were making slave wages, people working in dangerous situations, ex-partners who you ghosted, a person whose ideas you’d borrowed and made your own, something.
“I’m sure there are people out there who don’t like me, Mr. Barlowe, just as I am sure you have people out there who don’t like you either. Women you ghosted. Hearts you’ve broken. Friends you’ve come to blows with. No one gets through life with every single person on the planet loving them.”
“That’s true, but not everyone ends up on a 5150 because of a fake suicide attempt, Miss Coulter,” I said, and I liked the way her lips twitched when she realized I was not going to back down just because she got a little haughty with me.
“Fair enough. I’m sure I can rack my brain and come up with a couple of names. But I genuinely don’t think any of them would be capable of this. This is… insane,” she said after searching for the right word for a second.
“It is,” I agreed. “I can’t figure out if you were just meant to die and have it look like suicide, or if it was purposely done to send you to the hospital and make you look, for lack of a better word, crazy.”
“Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” she asked as she poured another glass.
“What do you remember about that night?” I asked.
“Not as much as I feel like I should,” she admitted, brows scrunching. “I definitely remember coming home. Then I have flashes of ordering Chinese, running a bath, putting a bottle of red to breathe on the counter, and then hearing the buzzer. And that’s… it.”
“A bottle of red?” I asked, then watched as her gaze went to the kitchen, putting the pieces together. “Could someone have moved it?”
“Cam?” she suggested.
“No. He said he never touched anything here. He bought you all new shit for your little bag for the back of the car. He didn’t want to ‘taint the scene’ or anything. Do you have a cleaning lady?”
“Yes!” she said, brightening a bit. “Yes. I can ask her. She’s never dumped an entire bottle of wine, though, is the strange part. She may have put the glass away, but I really don’t see her doing that. She’d be worried it was expensive. And it was.”
