Page 87 of I Will Ruin You

When we didn’t respond, Marta pressed. “That name mean anything to either of you?”

Bonnie and I remained stone-faced. I slowly shook my head, but then said, “I think there was a Lodge student by that name a few years ago.”

“Yes,” Marta said. “He did go to Lodge.”

“And he’s dead?” I said. “Somebody killed him?”

Marta nodded solemnly. “That’s right. We’re in the early stages of the investigation. But we do have some leads, as it turns out.”

I hoped Marta did not notice me swallowing. My mouth had turned into the Sahara. I reached back to the table for the glass of water and had some. I’d no sooner done it when I wondered how guilty that made me look.

And then I thought of something.

Pictures.

There were pictures on my phone of Billy Finster’s place. Shots I’d taken when I went by there in the afternoon. I should just stick out my wrists and tell Marta to put on the cuffs.

“What sort of leads?” Bonnie asked.

I slipped my hand down into the front pocket of my jeans, got my hand on my phone.

“A car was spotted parked near the Finster property,” Marta said. “Like maybe someone had been watching the place.”

“Okay,” I said as I brought the phone out of my pocket.

“One of the neighbors thought it looked kind of suspicious, so they made a note of the plate, the make and model of the car.”

I tried to look down at my phone discreetly, brought it to life by pressing my thumb to the button at the bottom.

“Am I boring you?” Marta asked.

“Sorry,” I said, glancing up half a second after I opened the photos app. “I muted my phone and thought I felt a text coming in.”

I quickly glanced down. The most recent photos were those I’d taken of Billy’s place. I tapped the garbage can icon. Once. Twice. Three times.

“Did you?” Marta asked.

“Did I what?” I asked, slipping the phone back into my pocket.

“Get a text?”

“No. Sorry. Go on.”

Marta said, “So I had them run the plate, and when I got the result back I had them run it again, because it didn’t make any sense to me.”

Should I get ahead of this? I wondered. Admit it was me? But what kind of excuse could I come up with that didn’t mention the blackmail scheme?

“And so here I am,” Marta said. “The plate’s attached to a dark blue 2020 Mitsubishi, just like the one out front in your driveway.”

Marta looked squarely at her sister and said, “That’s your car, isn’t it, Bonnie?”

Forty

Stuart Betz couldn’t stop thinking about the box of chicken wings he’d left behind. That was pretty damn stupid.

Not just because it was a terrible thing to waste good food that way. Paulie’s made good wings. Stuart had actually considered going back for them, although not so much because he was hungry. He had, to be honest, kind of lost his appetite there for a while. The reason he thought about going back was because the box of wings was a clue.

When the police found it sitting on the roof of the Camaro, they’d figure no one leaves food behind unless something happened, something that scared a person shitless. What you’d have then was a potential witness. And then their next stop would be the wing joint, and pretty soon they’d have a description of him, maybe even a description of his pickup truck. At least he’d paid in cash, so they wouldn’t have a credit card to track. That was smart. The other thing that gave Stuart hope was that the guy making the wings barely looked at him. He was running the place on his own and didn’t even want to make small talk when Stuart said, “Busy night, huh?”