Page 90 of Dead Man's List

Connor had become annoyingly smug about that, seeing as his hunch had been right. Veronica had been fooling around with the PI and had lied about knowing him to protect him from being captured by the police.

Kit quietly made her way around the man’s house, looking for cameras. If they existed, they were well hidden.

When she got to his back door, she sighed. Drawing her weapon with one hand, she dialed Connor on her cell with the other. “The window in the back door has been broken. The door itself is ajar.”

“Dammit,” Connor hissed. “Don’t do anything yet. Backup’s only a minute away.”

A minute and a half later, Connor had joined her at the rear of the house, his weapon drawn. Two uniformed officers followed him.

“There are two more at the front,” Connor told her.

“Then let’s do this.” Kit nudged at the door with her toe, sending the door opening on a squeak of hinges.

“Police!” Kit called as she and Connor entered the home.

“Fuck,” Connor muttered, because the place had been tossed.

The kitchen was a disaster area with piles of flour and sugar on the countertops. Broken crockery and glassware littered the floor. Every drawer and cabinet had been emptied.

Someone had even pulled the porcelain sink out and tossed it on the floor, where its pieces mixed with the shattered glass.

Carefully, Kit moved toward the living room, taking care not to disturb the scene. Connor followed close behind.

The living room was in a similar state, the sofa and chair cushions slashed, their filling covering the floor like snow. The flatscreen had been yanked from the wall and lay on the floor, also shattered.

Holes had been punched in the walls, the drywall pulled away, leaving the studs in plain view. Even the insulation had been removed.

With every step they took they found more debris.

The spare bedroom/home office was also a mess. Half of it anyway. One side of the room was a disaster area. Books had been pulled from the shelves, the ripped-out pages littering the floor.

But the other side of the office was pristine, except for a single wall where a painting had been removed and thrown on the floor. On top of the painting was a square panel of drywall about three feet square. The panel had been removed from the wall, revealing a wall safe. The safe was completely empty, its door left open.

“He found what he was looking for,” Connor murmured.

Kit nodded once, then kept going—until she got to the bedroom, where a single lamp on the nightstand dimly burned. “Dammit,” she hissed.

They were too late.

Walter Grossman lay on the floor next to his bed, his throat slit, killed in the same way that Munro, Shelley, and her mother had been.

They knew he’d been killed sometime after nine on Monday morning, when Veronica had called him in a panic, telling him that they had to get away.

The suitcase he’d clearly been packing had been dumped, its contents all over the floor and the inside lining slashed with a knife. The mattress had also been hacked apart, its stuffing strewn about.

“Shit,” Connor said as he crouched next to the victim. “Six of his fingers are missing, two on the right hand and four on the left. And…there they are in a neat little pile.” He pointed to the dresser where the killer had left Grossman’s fingers stacked in a pyramid.

“More torture,” Kit said grimly.

“The PI would have had the blackmail list. His killer wanted it, just like he wanted Munro’s. If he has both, nobody else will know who’s on it.”

“I wonder if that means Veronica also knows who’s on the list,” Kit said thoughtfully. “If she was sleeping with the PI.”

“Maybe.” But he sounded doubtful. “If she does know, maybe showing her a crime scene photo of Grossman will loosen her tongue. I wonder if she would have been the next victim. Our arresting her could have saved her life.”

“This means the killer knew who the PI was,” Kit said. “I wonder how he knew.”

Connor grimaced. “I bet Munro told him after losing a few fingers and toes.”