Finlay Donovan Is Killing It(Finlay Donovan #1)(64)
“This is her. I’m sure of it,” I said. “The date of her last post to the networking group was a little over a year ago. That would have been around the same time Nick said a woman had called the police to register an anonymous complaint.” A scene was slowly unfolding in my head. “Two people killed Harris. What if Nick’s hunch about Theresa is right? What if Theresa and Aimee were waiting for Harris outside The Lush?”
“You think they were stalking him?”
“They would have known he was going to be there. They might have seen me walk him out to my van.” In the dark, they might have assumed I was the one who was staggering. Under Harris’s weight, we were both unsteady on our feet. “Maybe they got the wrong idea and thought I was his next victim. Theresa could have recognized my van and followed us here. Maybe she hadn’t intended to kill him. Maybe she only intended to stop him. But then I ran inside the house and left them a perfect opportunity.” I showed Vero the note from Steven. Her dark eyes narrowed as she read it. “They already knew how to close the door without using the motor. They’d done it together before.”
Vero’s face paled. “No wonder Theresa didn’t want to tell Nick where she was that night. You really think Theresa and Aimee could have murdered Harris Mickler?”
“I don’t know. But Nick said all he needed to bring her in was a motive.” Theresa had a big one. And I had given her the means and opportunity to act on it.
But if I told Nick his suspicions were right … If I told him about Aimee and gave him just enough information to find her and make the connection himself, regardless of whether or not Aimee and Theresa were guilty, that trail of bread crumbs would lead Nick straight back to my garage. Suddenly, the possibility that Nick might find out about Feliks didn’t seem quite as terrible.
I grabbed Nick’s business card from my purse.
“What are you doing?” Vero’s voice was tinged with panic. “You can’t tell Nick about this!”
“I’m not,” I said as I typed. “I’m giving Theresa an alibi.”
Vero leaned over my shoulder, reading the carefully worded text I’d just sent to Nick: I think Theresa is having an affair.
CHAPTER 28
My fingers itched as I walked past my office. I’d felt stuck after I’d written the scene in the garage. I’d had no idea what was supposed to happen next until this new revelation about Theresa’s involvement had opened a door to the next chapter of the story. This plot line made sense. All the pieces seemed to fit. And I had less than a month to finish this book without implicating myself in the process.
Even if I changed their names, Theresa and Aimee couldn’t be the murderers in my story. It would be foolish to skirt so close to the truth. No, the story had to lead somewhere else. Somewhere less believable. The killer had to be some larger-than-life character, some archetypical villain people could believe I had made up because they’d already seen him play out on a TV or a movie screen. And the only other person I could picture playing the part was the real-life villain I planned to feed to Detective Anthony.
Feliks Zhirov was virtually untouchable. According to Georgia, he’d never spent a day in jail even though he was guilty as sin. If Feliks smelled an investigation—even one he wasn’t directly involved in—I was pretty sure he’d bring the case crashing to a dead end. He was my safest option. And maybe the only person capable of keeping me and Theresa out of jail.
I sat down at my desk and opened the draft of my story, skimming the scenes I had written so far: A seasoned contract killer takes a job to kill a problem husband. She vets the target, stalks him in a bar, drugs him, and takes him to the dump site in an abandoned underground garage.
I dropped my head against the desk, kicking myself for sending this draft to my agent without thinking it through. The details were all steering far too close to home. But maybe I could get away with tweaking it a little.
I dove back into the manuscript, picking apart what I had written so far, making subtle changes to the characters and setup: The problem husband is an accountant working for a high-profile mob boss. He also happens to be super wealthy with a sizable life insurance policy that will go to his wife. Sometime between the first drink and the drugged one, my heroine realizes the wife never transferred payment into her offshore account as agreed upon. Too late to change direction, my heroine loads her mark into a utility van and drives him to the underground garage to let him sleep it off. The assassin steps outside to call the wife, to tell her the job is off for nonpayment. Meanwhile, someone else slips in behind her and uses a silencer to put a bullet between the husband’s eyes. Determined to seek a vigilante-style justice and solve the mystery of who murdered her mark, she investigates his death, pairing up with an unsuspecting hotshot detective to stay one step ahead of the police and tracking down the runaway wife in the process.
Yes, I thought, cracking my knuckles over the keyboard. Yes, this felt like it could work! There was nothing in this story about hot young bartenders who studied law, or real estate agents who stole other people’s husbands. There were no subplots involving lewd photos or extorted hush payments. No mentions of custody battles or starving authors doing questionable things to pay their bills.
Hours passed. My fingers ached and my mind felt weary. Smells started wafting from the kitchen—baking bread and steamed vegetables and the buttery, rosemary-coated skin of a roasting chicken. Night fell outside my window to the clank and clatter of silverware downstairs, the slide of the high chair from the table, and the hand-vac as Vero tidied up after dinner. No one knocked on my door. Three fresh chapters later, I jumped at the bright ring of my cell phone.