Genuine Fraud(30)

She put on the clean shirt and the clean sweater.

There was blood on the bag that held the statue.

Jule pulled that bag off and turned it inside out so the blood was inside. She put the statue in her backpack and stuffed the dirty bag into her wide-mouth water bottle.

She used the wipes to take spots of blood off the walkway, then stuffed all her trash into the water bottle, too.

She looked around.

The path was empty.

Jule touched her shoulder gingerly. It was okay. She washed her face, ears, and hair four more times with wipes, wishing she’d remembered to bring a compact mirror. She looked over the edge of the bridge, into the ravine.

She could not see Brooke.

She hiked back out along the trail. She felt she could walk forever and never get tired. She saw no one on the path until near the entrance, where she passed four sporty guys wearing Santa hats and holding flashlights, starting up the trail marked in yellow.

At the car, Jule paused.

It should stay here. If she drove it anywhere, it wouldn’t make sense when people found Brooke’s body in the ravine.

Carefully, she got inside. She took out the wipes and began to rub down the emergency brake, then stopped.

No, no. That was the wrong plan. Why hadn’t she thought it through before? It would look bad if there were zero prints in the car. Brooke’s prints should be there. It would seem odd, now that the brake was clean.

Think. Think. The bottle of vodka lay on the floor of the passenger seat. Jule picked it up with a wipe and unscrewed the cap. Then she poured some of the vodka onto the brake, as if it had spilled accidentally. Maybe that would make it seem legit that there were no prints there. She had no idea if crime scene investigators looked at that sort of thing. She didn’t know what they looked at, actually.

Damn.

She got out of the car. She forced herself to think logically. Her own prints weren’t on file anywhere. She had no criminal record. Police would be able to tell that someone else had driven the car, if they looked—but they wouldn’t know it was Jule.

There was no evidence that anyone named Jule West Williams had ever lived in or visited the city of San Francisco.

She popped the trunk and took Brooke’s phone out, as well as her own. Then, still shaking, she locked the car and walked away.

It was a cold night. Jule walked quickly to stay warm. A mile on foot from the park and she was feeling calmer. She dumped the water bottle into a trash can by the side of the road. Farther down, she tossed the bloody clothes in their black plastic bag deep into a dumpster.

Then she kept walking.

The Golden Gate Bridge was ablaze against the night sky. Jule was small beneath it but felt as if a spotlight shone on her from above. She hurled Brooke’s car keys and phone out over the side of the bridge and into the water.

Her life was cinematic. She looked superb in the light from the streetlamps. After the fight, her cheeks were flushed. Bruises were forming underneath her clothes, but her hair looked excellent. And oh, her clothes were so very flattering. Yes, it was true that she was criminally violent. Brutal, even. But that was her job and she was uniquely qualified for it, so it was sexy.

The moon was a crescent and the wind harsh. Jule sucked in big lungfuls of air and breathed the glamour and pain and beauty of the action-hero life.

Back in the apartment, she took the lion statue out of her backpack and poured bleach on it. Then she ran the shower on it, dried it, and placed it on the mantel.

Imogen would have liked that statue. She loved cats.





Jule bought a plane ticket to London that left from Portland, Oregon, under Imogen’s name. Then she got a taxi to the bus station.

Arriving, she realized she had just missed the nine p.m. bus. The next bus wasn’t until seven in the morning.

As Jule settled down to wait, the adrenaline high of the past few hours seeped away. She bought three packs of peanut M&Ms from a vending machine and sat on top of her bags. Suddenly she was exhausted and afraid.

There were only a couple of other people in the room, all of them using the station for a night’s shelter. Jule sucked on the M&Ms to make them last. She tried to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. After twenty-five minutes, a drunk man sleeping on a bench woke up and began to sing loudly:

“God rest ye merry, gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay

Remember, Christ, our savior, Was born on Christmas Day,

To save us all from Satan’s power When we had gone astray.”



Jule knew she had gone way fucking astray. She had killed a stupid loudmouth girl with brutal premeditation. There would never be a savior who could rescue her from whatever had made her do it. She had never had a savior.

That was it. No going back. She was alone in a bone-cold bus station on December 23, listening to a drunk guy and scraping the last of someone’s blood from underneath her nails with the corner of her bus ticket. Other people, good people, were baking gingerbread cookies, eating peppermints, and tying bows on holiday gifts. They were quarreling and decorating and cleaning up after big meals, tipsy from mulled wine, watching uplifting old movies.

Jule was here. She deserved the chill, the loneliness, the drunks and the trash, a thousand worse punishments and tortures.

The clock went around the dial. It hit midnight and became, officially, Christmas Eve. Jule bought a hot chocolate from a machine.

She drank it and felt warmer. She talked herself up from despair. After all, she was brave, smart, and strong. She had done the deed with credible efficiency. With style, even. She had committed murder with an effing kitty-cat statue in a beautiful state park over a massive and scenic ravine. There had not been a single witness. She had left no blood anywhere.