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Just as well. She was on to the Nautilus machines now, and she’d be finished soon anyway. I needed to get into place.
The rocks of the asphalt dug into my jeans as I sat behind my car, cold air biting into my cheeks. I focused on my physical discomfort, contrasting it with the warm post-workout glow she’d be feeling, surrounded by the smell of sweat and cleaning products rather than the tang of car oil and garbage from the nearby dumpster.
She appeared, gamboling toward the car, face rosy.
I crouched—I had to time my emergence perfectly—and held my breath as she rounded the row of cars.
Her trunk popped and I sprang up, keeping my steps silent, hurrying up behind her.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She jumped, the placid expression on her face replaced by fear before she even saw my face. “I don’t have any money.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said, and pulled back my hoodie so she could get a clear view of my face.
Her right hand snaked slowly toward the workout bag still hung over her shoulder.
I planted my feet and swung the crowbar behind my back in a wide arc toward her head. She crumpled like a puppet whose strings had been snapped, and landed at the foot of her car. I hit her again, twice more. Then I checked her pulse to be sure she was dead.
I shook my head as I walked away. Unforgivably stupid—to be caught out alone past midnight, with all the things she saw in her job every day?
But then, nobody ever really thought it would happen tothem.
CHAPTERTHIRTY
Jo tossed and turned, alternating between being too hot and too cold, hovering in a state halfway between full wakefulness and full sleep, constantly waiting for her phone to shriek her awake.
Half an hour before her scheduled alarm, she woke fully and snatched up her phone.
No texts. No calls. No murder—everything was okay.
She snuggled into Matt, allowing his body heat to thaw her face. His chest rose and fell in time with his breathing, and her own breath began to follow his, pulling her back into the peaceful solitude of sleep.
But the corner of her brain that had been obsessing all night whispered to her.Something isn’t right, it told her.Something doesn’t fit.
She pushed it aside and breathed in Matt’s woodsy, musky smell.Thiswas the beauty of living together, she told herself. How the comforting feel and smell of a person became as much a part ofhomeas the walls and roof around you—if you let it.
The cross contamination.It doesn’t make any sense.
Her shoulders tensed but she burrowed deeper into Matt’s chest, using him as an anodyne for the confusion and ugliness she wasn’t ready to face.
Then her phone alarm sounded. A tinkling, child-like song that would get louder and more insistent if she didn’t respond to its first gentle tones—she moaned, rolled over, and turned it off.
“Come back,” Matt croaked, voice thick with sleep.
She turned to do just that, but her phone pealed again—this time with the shrill blare of a call.
She scrambled to hit the call button.
“Detective Fournier?” Lacey Bernard’s voice crackled over the line.
Jo bolted up. “What’s wrong? Did you get another text?”
“Yes, about another murder. Deena Scott—she was Ossokov’s defense attorney.”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-ONE
Jo screeched into the peach-stucco-and-brick Granton strip mall and flew to the crime-scene tape. Once out of the car, she and Arnett strode as quickly as possible over to Bernard, who was pacing near the marked-off area. As soon as she saw Jo, she marched toward them, phone held out in their direction.
