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“Call it what it was, Dad. At least give her the dignity of the truth.”
My shock is momentarily sidelined by the sudden bloom of pride inside my chest. Clara’s take-charge voice is doing all sorts of wonderful things below the belt, too.
Focus. I need to focus.
“You’re right. I fucked up. A lot. And Mikey found out and you know how he was. You were like family to him. I thought I was, too, but he turned his back on me and slipped that weird fucking poison into my coffee.”
“Dad. That’s crazy. You’re trying to tell me?—”
“You saved my life, Clar-bear. I didn’t know it, not at the time. But when that coroner’s report came through and I saw that fairytale bullshit was what did him in, I knew.”
I don’t realize I’ve thrown the coffee mug across the room until the sound of it shattering pulls me out of the sudden blinding rage clouding my awareness.
I pause the recording. I take a deep breath. I tell myself that I need to listen to the whole thing before leaping to conclusions.
I’ve done enough of that kind of leaping to last a lifetime.
“How do you know? It could have been me. I could have been the one who poisoned him.”
Greg laughs. He actually fucking laughs.“Oh my God, Clara. You’re too funny! An eight-year-old committing murder by poison? Honey, I have seen some twisted shit in my career. Andyeah, I’ve come across some child killers who still send chills through my spine. But you, honey? Please.”
“I could. I had the book.”
My stomach twists into knots. She challenged the notion with my own words, my own conviction that she was or ever has been, one way or another, responsible for Michael Little’s murder.
To hear Greg fucking Everett laugh in her face at the very idea is to hear him laughing in mine.
I fucking despise it.
“That damn book. It was his, first, did you know that? Got it at a school book fair when we did one of those anti-drug assemblies. He’d read it while on patrol. He was always into plant shit. I used to tease him about starting his own greenhouse and making real good money, if you know what I mean.”
He keeps droning on and on, waltzing down memory lane and comparing Michael to Martin. I never met the former, but my gut says he was a far better man than anyone else in this fucked-up pit of vipers that is LVPD.
“I found that wolf shit growing in his windowsill. After the autopsy, I mean. I knew you obviously didn’t have anything to do with it and your mother had been visiting her friend all day. So I had to ask myself, how did the poison get there?”
“He grew the poison for you.”
Well… shit.
My mind is so full of thoughts, dark thoughts and guilty thoughts and raging thoughts that all make it impossible to hear whateverthe fuck Greg crowed about in the aftermath of his dropped bomb. It’s easier to just tune it all out. Let it play as the white noise to my meditation over who I’m going to murder first.
Greg? Martin? Oleg? Raizo?
Greg. It has to be Greg.
“What do you have against the Zakrevskys?”
Clara’s question yanks me back out of that mental storm. I lean forward in my chair and crank the volume up even more, as if the background static might reveal extra hints or hidden answers.
“It’s all about control, sweetheart. You need to learn this. I’ve been trying to teach you your whole life. You have to keep things under control at all times. Oleg knew how to play by the rules. But Tolya? He was a wild card. He was out of control.”
Oh, Greg.
Greg, Greg,Greg.
He has no fucking idea what “out of control” looks like in a Zakrevsky.
But I promise him one thing: he is about to find the fuck out.
