Page 74 of Girl, Fractured

Josiah Nicholls had been sitting in here for the past four hours, supposedly their prime suspect.Except his alibi for Thomas Webb’s murder was airtight, because he’d been here, in custody, when someone was driving nails through Webb’s hands.

‘Nicholls!’Ripley shouted as she kicked the door open.The suspect glanced up, startled.‘I’m done playing.Are you ready to get serious?’

The AC was still blasting, and Nicholls’ earlier composure had now vanished.Four hours in a freezing room could break anyone, including this wannabe-killer.

‘I told you everything.’Nicholls had that deer-in-the-headlights look that Ripley loved.It was time to circle this prey, strike, and answer at least one question to this mystery before the night was out.

‘No, you told mesomethings, and only half of them were true.’

‘It was all true.’

‘Did you kill Frank Sullivan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you kill anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘Well, we’ve got two more bodies, and we’re pretty certain that the same person killed all three victims.So you either killed all of them or none of them.Which one is it?’

Nicholls’ lip quivered.His jaw clenched and unclenched like a faulty piston, while sweat beaded along his hairline despite it being zero degrees in here.Ripley was, oddly, no stranger to this expression.It was the anxious calculation of a man who’d stepped off a cliff and now realized the ground wasn’t where he expected it to be.One murder was a life sentence, three murders was a death sentence.

‘Just Frank.’

Ripley slammed her hand on the desk.It hurt, but she didn’t show it.‘Nicholls, you’re full of shit, and I want to know why you’re wasting our time.Now, I think there’s achanceyou killed Frank, but nothing else tracks, so I’m going to need you to stop living in this stupid fantasy world because, believe me, the truth always comes out in the end.’

Something in Nicholls shattered.The veneer of defiance, thin as it had always been, fractured and fell away.His shoulders folded inward as if his spine had suddenly liquefied, and when he looked up, his eyes had the vacant sheen of a man who’d finally hit the wall at the end of his rope.

‘I didn’t kill Frank.I didn’t kill anyone.’

The wave of relief that washed over Ripley almost knocked her over.Finally.It wasn’t a new jigsaw piece slotting into the picture, but it was the removal of one that never fit in the first place.

‘Keep talking.’

‘I did nothing… but I was there.’

Ripley’s eyebrows hit her scalp.‘Run that by me again?’

‘I was there, but…’ Nicholls waved his hands defiantly, now suddenly yearning to be a picture of innocence.

‘But?’

‘Okay, so Iwantedto confront Frank, that same night.We’d been texting, and got into an argument.’

‘An argument?About what?’

‘Marlowe.Cold cases in general.It just descended into mud-slinging.He told me to come speak to him in person, so I did.But when I got there…’

‘What?You saw his dead body?’

‘No, nothing like that.’Nicholls took a breath.‘I pulled up across the street, then I saw someone climbing over Frank’s fence.’

‘As in, entering his property?’

‘No, exiting.Like they’d burgled him.’

Ripley stood up straight.She processed Nicholls’ statement.Not only had this son of a bitch falsely confessed to murder, but he’d also seen the actual killer in the flesh.The urge to slap his stupid face was overwhelming.She pinched the bridge of her nose to calm herself.