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Enrique is the man who stopped me from killing Pocher to keep me out of jail. He’s loyal to Kane, maybe to me as well, but since Kit can’t even stop the car without Kane’s approval, I’m not counting on that. Gabriel, on the other hand, is fresh out of the Army, and the kind of green I’d call slime green. It gets messy and all over everyone it touches. As for my brother, he’s unsettled and not himself. He also still believes Dad was behind Mom’s murder, He doesn’t know if Murphy might be the twist to that story. But if he flips and kills Dad, I can live with it being by his hand.
My phone buzzes with a text and I dig it from my purse and find one of about a dozen messages from Rollins. This one reads:Put on your big girl pants and get the hell over here.
I reply with:Yeah, yeah, don’t wet your little girl pants. I’m on my way.
I eye Kit in the rearview. “Drive, and if you ask Kane’s permission, I swear to God, I’ll lose my shit and we all know how well that goes.”
Kit’s smart enough to drive and I glance over at Kane, lowering my voice. “Rollins, who doesn’t even want me involved, now wants me involved. I’m translating that to mean messy, which is an understatement.”
“Has the killer been ‘messy’ before now?” he queries.
I think of the machete and the butcher knife. “He’s imitated Jason and Michael, so yes. Bloody and brutal.” Which has me thinking about what to expect. “Who’s more brutal than Jason and Michael?” I call out to our team collectively.
“Leather Face,” Jay says, glancing over his shoulder at me. “He uses a chainsaw, and it getsrealbloody and gross.” He grins.
“That made you smile?” I challenge. “Maybe I should rethink my opinion of you.”
“Maybe you should,” he says. “And stop trying to get rid of me.”
Kane arches a brow. I ignore him. This battle over Jay being too gentle a soul for the likes of us won’t go in my favor right about now.
Instead, I text Andrew:Another murder on the case I’m working on. I’m on my way there. Dad’s security sucks, as if you don’t know that. Even after the shooting, they let in one of our forensics guys just because he said he was with me. There’s shit we need to talk about. Don’t let anyone die.
What shit, Lilah? he replies instantly.
Later, I say and expect a call and demanding text messages to follow, but as I often say, what is a sister for, if not to ignore her brother?
Another text message hits my phone, but not from Andrew, not yet. This one is from Murphy, and it reads:So who doesn’t want your father to be governor?
Unease churns in my belly, not at his obvious knowledge of tonight’s events, as I’m sure it’s all over the news, but at the question itself, coming from a man whose motives in all he does in my world are elusive at best. I glance over at Kane to find him watching me with one of those dark, intense stares of his. I hold my phone in his direction and allow him to read the text. He studies it for a moment and then looks at me. “Who, indeed?”
I lean back in my seat and digest the implications of his question because, while yes, we’ve talked about Miguel and Pocher having motives to want my father out of the way—heck, Miguel could simply think Kane will be too powerful to beat if he’s connected to the governor—there are also other options. A less complicated option, that might even seem obvious, is my father’s opponent and his party, but that’s not what Kane is talking about right now.
He’s talking aboutMurphy.
Murphy, who could be working for the Society, but that conflicts with the idea he would want him dead. Unless he and Pocher are both feeling threatened by my father. Or he’s simply high-level FBI and the FBI doesn’t want my father, the new face of the Society, to gain as much power as he might if being Governor is a mere steppingstone to the White House.
Or maybe Murphy sees the way we’ve stepped into my father, instead of away from him, and he’s now afraid of what we might discover. For instance, he really is the one who killed my mother. In which case, I’ll kill him.
Chapter Seven
I don’t reply to Murphy, and he doesn’t immediately message me again.
If he’s as in the know as he usually is—perhaps too much, so it seems—he’ll figure out I have murder on my mind, and not his, at least not yet. But Murphy and I will have our moment, and soon, and it won’t be sunshine and roses either unless the roses have thorns. Now that I know she was seeing someone other than him the day she died, it’s clear he’s lying to me about their relationship. While a kid might sayliar, liar, pants on fire, I say,burn, baby, burn, and I’ll light the fire. If he killed my mother, if he’s working for the Society, he and I will have our own special kind of playdate. Except I’m the only one who will have fun.
For now, I study the address that is our destination and determine it’s a subway ride from the diner, the furthest crime scene from it thus far. This seems to blow the idea that the crimes are all happening in a small radius, all focused on one neighborhood. At least on the surface. In a city where a short subway ride takes you anywhere, and people have nearby neighborhoods they frequent, that’s not necessarily true.
But the timeline is off as well.
Nothing adds up.
Of course, everything about tonight has us living in a whacko world. Pocher being nice to us. Kane saving my father. Kane’s men protecting my father. Andrew’s weird behavior. Finding out good boy Jay loves horror movies and gore when he all but passed out at the last crime scene. It’s a regular smorgasbord of weirdness.
The vehicle pulls up to an area just behind the yellow police tape and of course, there are people in a clusterfuck everywhere. Typical looky-loos. I’d say this gets old but I’m the ultimate looky-loo. The entire process of managing a crime scene is as nosey as it gets. But there is no other way to solve a crime.
“You’re with me Jay,” I say. “Let’s see how much horror movie gore you can handle. Apparently, this one has plenty of it.”
He twists around and says, “I’ll wait at the front door. I wouldn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.”
