Finlay Donovan Is Killing It(Finlay Donovan #1)(11)

My shirt was wet under Zach’s round cheeks. His nose was running, and I resisted the temptation to slide a finger under it and wipe a booger under one of the glass-covered portraits, right under Theresa’s nose. But that would be petty. A booger wouldn’t go unnoticed in Theresa’s perfect world for long, and, with any luck, neither would Bree.

Calling Delia’s name again, I pulled a tissue from a box in the kitchen. Theresa’s laptop sat open on the breakfast bar beside it, the Windows logo bouncing from one end of the screen to the other while it slept. Curiosity got the better of me, and I tapped the space bar. The laptop came to life without prompting me for a password, revealing the home screen—a search engine. A cursor blinked in the empty search field.

I peeped around the corner into the hall. Delia’s conversation with her Barbies trailed down the stairs from her room. Zach wriggled as I shifted him to my other shoulder, his eyes drifting closed again as he sucked softly on his pacifier.

With my free hand, I henpecked Harris Mickler’s name.

Social media accounts and photos flooded the screen. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. I clicked open his Facebook profile. An attractive forty-something man smiled back at me. Harris Mickler, age forty-two, married to Patricia Mickler, and vice president of customer relations for some up-and-coming financial services firm.

Patricia … It felt strange to put such an innocuous name to the face of the woman who’d offered me fifty thousand dollars to kill her husband. Sifting through his online albums, I managed to find only one picture of them together—a single token anniversary photo taken five years ago. The wide-eyed surprise captured by the flash of the camera was the same expression she’d worn when I’d caught her staring at me in Panera.

Delia’s make-believe princess voice tinkled quietly upstairs. Zach’s paci fell limp between his lips as he slept. I clicked on Patricia’s profile. I don’t know what I’d hoped to find—a duck-face selfie attention-seeker? One of those annoying social media friends who vaguebooks between posting online quizzes and political memes?—but Patricia was none of those things. Her posts were spare and thoughtful, and she rarely included photos of herself. According to her profile, she was an investment banker, which you’d think would make her an entitled, rich asshole. Instead, as far as I could tell, she was equally unpretentious with her money. She volunteered frequently at her local animal shelter, made donations to crowdsourced fundraisers for friends who were down on their luck, and seemed most comfortable in faded denim and sweatshirts. The only ostentatious thing about her was her wedding ring, crusted in diamonds and boasting a grossly large center stone. It seemed disproportionately extravagant, given the little I knew of Patricia. And yet, it featured prominently in every photo of her.

Curious, I zoomed in on one. Patricia cuddled a shelter cat in her arms, the ring on full display. Everything else about her was casual and plain: unadorned jeans, well-worn sneakers, a shelter T-shirt covered by a simple blue hoodie … I tipped my head, angling to look more closely. A black band peeked out from the sleeve of her sweatshirt, looping around her hand and circling her lower thumb—a wrist brace. I clicked backward through her photos, pausing on one taken three months earlier—a bandage on her forehead. Then another before that—a splint on her finger.

I can’t tell him I know. That would be … very, very bad.

I clicked back through her photos again, searching for bruises in the dark rings under her eyes, for a telltale knot in the aquiline shape of her nose, or the bulge of a cast under a baggy sweatshirt, liking Harris Mickler less and less with every blemish on Patricia’s body that may or may not have been a scar. I clicked back to his Facebook profile, even though I knew I shouldn’t. He was a member of dozens of social networking groups, as far east as Annapolis and as far south as Richmond.

And just like Patricia had said, he was confirmed to attend an event tonight at a trendy bar in Reston. The Lush was only a few miles from here …

I tried to brush off the errant thought, but it stuck. I could go. Just to see. I could have a cocktail and watch him from a discreet corner of the bar. Just out of concern for Patricia.

I closed the browser and cleared the search history. This was ridiculous. I didn’t even have anything to wear.

From upstairs came the soft chime of Delia’s voice as she played. I laid Zach on the sofa with his blanket and his paci and crept back up the steps, pausing in front of Steven’s bedroom. Theresa had been inside my house just that morning. She’d told Steven my door was unlocked, a fact she would only have known by testing it. At least I had been given a key.

Steven’s bedroom door was cracked, and I nudged it open with a finger, surprised by the chaos on the other side. I’d expected to find the bed linens pressed and throw pillows artfully arranged. Had braced myself for silk flowers on the vanities and candles around the bathtub. But Theresa and Steven’s bedroom was a disaster. Their bed was a temple of unmade sheets. Bras and socks had been strewn everywhere, and the only thing adorning the tub was a pile of mildewing towels. A single framed photo of the two of them hung crooked on the wall. All this time, since I’d first caught them cheating, I’d feared the private spaces they shared would look far tidier than my own. But as I kicked a pair of Steven’s boxer shorts aside and stood in front of their open closet, their life behind closed doors didn’t feel much different from the way mine and Steven’s had, and suddenly it made sense to me why Theresa didn’t want me inside her home.