Page 70 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name

“He’s a big guy. Tall. Clearly works out.”

She shrugged moodily. “Yeah. So?”

“Ever felt physically threatened by him?”

“No.”

“Has he ever hit you?”

She looked horrified at the mere suggestion. “No!”

“Is the sex always consensual?” she asked.

She glanced up, eyes furious. “Yes.”

Belinda let the silence settle, then changed tack. “What about his personality?”

“What about it?” she snapped.

“Does he ever have mood swings? Fly off the handle over small things?”

“No,” she said stubbornly. “He’s a perfectly chill guy.”

Belinda pictured Sasha Sokolov’s head. “Hmm.”

Julia seemed to have had enough with this line of questioning. Her face had gone very red, tears still rolling down her cheeks. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. ‘You asked me how I could know that he wouldn’t hurt me?’ she finally blurted.

Belinda hadn’t asked her that, but she waited, sensing she was on the brink of a breakthrough here.

“On the night we met, some guy tried to…to…” She swallowed hard. “He put pills in my drink, and he tried to assault me.” She closed her eyes and gave a quick shake of her head. “Daniel saved me that night. He dressed me. He took care of me. That’s the kind of guy he is, not the psycho you’re trying to make him out to be.”

Belinda kept her face impassive, masking her feeling of triumph. She reopened the binder.

Time to bring out the trump card.

“Ah, yes,” she said, tapping her pen on her notepad. “Your little meet-cute. At a house party in Chicago Lawn, right?”

Julia blinked at her. Belinda could practically hear the cogs whirring in her brain, trying to work out how she could know that.

“And the other guy you mentioned?” She flipped pages, found another photo. “Floyd Monaghan, correct? Twenty-seven. A DJ from Utah.”

She watched as Julia flinched away from the photo of the smiling young man that she’d printed off one of his social media accounts. All of which had turned into shrines for him now that his body had finally been identified and his death confirmed.

“It took them a while to, uh, piece it all together,” she said. She produced her last photographs, placing each in front of her like a tarot reader, laying out her future in the cards. “Literally.”

If she’d recoiled from the photo of Floyd Monaghan in one piece, the sight of him in five bloody lumps made her jerk back from the table, her chair hitting the wall behind her. “Oh my God.”

Belinda sat forward on her forearms. “In the end, they had to use DNA because his hands and teeth were missing. The detectives investigating Monaghan’s disappearance traced his last known whereabouts to a trap house on the West Side. The same trap house behind which Daniel Castaño’s trailer is parked. It took CPD weeks of canvassing the neighborhood, but they finally got someone who’d attended the party to admit they saw Monaghan there. And not alone, either. With a pretty blond girl. Heavily intoxicated. Both were last seen heading for Castaño’s trailer. People heard multiple gunshots shortly after. It’s not drawing a long bow to conclude that Castaño didn’t take kindly to trespassers in his trailer.” She adjusted her glasses again. “But you were there, of course. You already know all of this.”

As she was speaking, Julia had stood up and wheeled around to face the wall. She bent double and vomited onto the carpet.

Belinda waited patiently until she was done. Until she’d turned back around, scraping her hair back from her tear-soaked face. She indicated the chunks of bone, blood, and sinewy that had once been Floyd Monaghan. “There’s no way he did that. He couldn’t have.”

“Oh, he did,” Belinda said, putting as much conviction into the words as she could. “Like I said. He’s volatile. Possessive. And very, very dangerous.”

Julia gave a couple more sobs that sounded more like dry heaves, then said in a small, miserable voice, “I don’t know what you want from me.”

Belinda softened her expression. “All I want is to help you, Julia. Out of this great big mess that you’ve found yourself in.”