The Marriage Lie(83)

I back up another half foot. “Honestly, Corban. I turned the house upside down, and it’s not here. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

His eyes narrow, zeroing in on the panel over my shoulder. “You don’t seriously think I’m that stupid, do you?”

A rhetorical question if I’ve ever heard one. I don’t answer.

He grabs me by the wrist and pulls me down the hallway, deeper into the house, farther away from the buttons on my alarm pad.

I stumble behind, searching for the imprint of a gun poking out from under his waistband, the shape of a knife strapped under his skintight clothes. As far as I can tell, he’s not armed, but he also doesn’t need to be. His gym-chiseled body is its own weapon.

He shoves me into the kitchen and swings me around, pressing me up against the lip of the sink. “What’s the plan here, Iris? To mourn Will for a month or two, then collect the life insurance and leave town under some Eat, Pray, Love I need to ‘find myself’ new age bullshit?” He serves up his quote marks with a sneer, rage exploding behind his eyes. “Surely the two of you can do better than that.”

I don’t know what to say, but he seems to be waiting for a response, and the only one I can come up with is “I...I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He makes a disgusted sound. “Where’s he waiting for you, South America? Eastern Europe? Mexico?” He snorts, and the sweat on his head glistens under the glow of the kitchen’s canned lights. “Scratch that, Mexico is too hot. We both know Will prefers cooler climates.”

I shake my head, my heart kicking up another gear. I’m trying to do the math, to piece together the logic behind Corban’s string of eighty-seven texts pretending to be my dead husband, and the words coming out of his mouth now. He’s talking like Will is still alive.

Yet Corban has tried to trick me before.

For a second or two, I consider the practicalities of going along with his delusions. If he thinks I’m in on this heist with Will, then playing along might be a halfway decent stalling strategy.

But then Corban takes two steps closer, the thick tangle of veins in his neck pulsing with what I read as rage and hatred, and I chicken out.

“I know the messages were from you. The texts and those two notes. They weren’t from Will, were they?”

He laughs, a mean, angry bark. “I always thought it was too much of a coincidence. AppSec closing in on him at the exact time he boards a plane to the one city he detested more than any other place on the planet.” He shakes his head. “Nope, never going to happen. Though I do have to give you props. Those tears yesterday were a nice touch. You’d make one hell of an actress.”

He steps back, and I skitter around him, moving deeper into the kitchen, but every time I put more than a foot or two of distance between us, Corban closes it with a long stride. It’s like a game of cat and mouse, a demented dance around my kitchen island. But now I’m almost to the hall, and I pause, calculating the distance to the back door. If I can get there, all I have to do is open it, and I’ll set off the alarm. Can I get there?

He laughs at whatever he sees on my face. “Have you ever seen a black man run? Don’t even bother.”

I steer the conversation back to safer ground. “I’m not acting. I’m a grieving widow who found out the man she married was a thief, one who stole four and a half million dollars from his employer.”

“Five.”

“What?”

“Five million, and I stole it. Me. I’m the one who came up with the plan. Will only executed it.” He puffs up his chest, punching a thumb into the very center. “Do you know how complicated this deal was? How many layers I had to work through to get my hands on the CSS stock? Only someone highly skilled and dangerously intelligent could have come up with a plan that genius. Thanks to me, we walked away with five million dollars.”

And yet nobody walked away with the money, did they? Nick caught them.

It suddenly occurs to me that Corban is narcissistic. Probably borderline, as well. Excessive bragging is just one of the personality disorder traits but a classic one, which explains why I didn’t see it before. Narcissists are hard to spot, as they’re often skilled at hiding their disorder from the world.

“What’s CSS?” I say, slipping my palms into my back jeans pockets. It’s a casual move, but also a deliberate one. My phone is there, cold and hard and comforting, against my fingers. I flip the ringer switch to silent. With any luck, he won’t know it’s there.

“Crunch Security Systems. The shares AppSec acquired in a venture capital payout back in 2013. I’m the one who told Will to move the shares to a company I set up in the Bahamas, and exactly when to liquidate them. He could have never come up with it on his own. He may be a whiz with computers, but he’s hopeless when it comes to business.”

I give Corban an impressed brow lift, even though I’m only half listening. I need to keep him talking, to put as many words between us as possible.

“But Will must have messed up somehow, because AppSec found out. I talked to Will’s boss. He told me they had a forensic accountant tracing the money, and all signs point to Will.”

My cell phone vibrates against my hip with an incoming call. Can I swipe to pick up without him noticing?

Corban lifts a shoulder, a yeah, so? gesture. “We knew they’d find out eventually.”