CHAPTER TEN

The house was too damn quiet. Mia Ripley sat at the kitchen table, a half-empty bottle of Jack and a pile of police reports her only company. She hated this. Hated the silence. Usually, Martin would be here, filling the space with his easy laughter and effortless charm.

But Martin was gone. Vanished into thin air like morning mist. And if Ella was right, if the crazy theory she”d spouted like gospel truth held any water, then Ripley had a lot of thinking to do.

No. Mia shook her head, jaw clenching hard enough to crack teeth. She couldn”t think like that. Couldn”t let herself go down that rabbit hole. Not without proof. Not without something concrete to back up Ella”s wild accusations.

Even if a small, traitorous part of her whispered that it all made a sick sort of sense. That maybe, just maybe, her partner was onto something.

Mia snarled, slamming her fist on the table hard enough to rattle the bottle.

Goddammit. This was a mess. A dumpster fire of epic proportions, and she was standing in the middle of it with a can of gasoline in one hand and a Zippo in the other. Screw Ella and her holier-than-thou crap. She didn”t know Martin like Mia did. Didn”t know the man beneath the badge, the heart beneath the armor.

But then again, did Mia? How much did she really know about the man she”d shared her bed and her life with? The man who”d wormed his way past her defenses, made her feel things she”d thought long dead and buried?

A chime from her laptop snapped her out of her spiraling thoughts. She lunged for the device, nearly upending the bottle in her haste. The email she”d been waiting for blinked on the screen, taunting her with its promise of answers.

The police report for Trevor’s death.

He’d turned up dead four days ago. Found on the roadside with a bullet hole in his skull. And only two days before Trevor woke up dead, he’d tried to extort Ripley out of fifty thousand dollars. Ripley didn’t know what he needed the cash for, but Trevor had never met a casino he couldn’t spend all night in.

Mia scrolled through the report, consuming every cold, clinical detail. Male victim, age fifty-four. Single gunshot wound to the head. Time of death estimated between ten PM and midnight. No signs of struggle, no defensive wounds. Just a neat little hole right between the eyes.

Mia”s stomach turned. She”d seen a thousand reports just like this one, each detailing the grim specifics of someone”s final moments. But this one hit differently. This one was personal.

No fingerprints left behind, no strands of hair, no clothes fibers. Everything was neat. Not the kind of sloppy, rage-fueled kill you’d expect from some criminal loan shark. This had all the makings of a professional execution, someone who had the stomach and the skills to put a bullet in a man’s brain without blinking.

Her eyes scanned the dense blocks of text, picking out details like shrapnel from a blast. Ballistics matched a 9mm PMC Bronze one-fifteen grain – the same bullet used to put down both Carter and Logan Nash. The same caliber favored by most law enforcement, FBI included.

But that didn”t mean anything. 9mms were a dime a dozen, the Toyota Camry of handguns. Anyone over the age of twenty-one could get their hands on one within an hour in this country.

Mia felt bile rise in the back of her throat, hot and acrid. She swallowed it down, along with the scream that wanted to claw its way out of her chest.

She forced herself to keep reading, to sift through the medical jargon and autopsy reports for anything that might point to her boyfriend”s involvement.

And there, buried in a sea of technical mumbo jumbo, she snagged on something.

A single line, almost lost amidst the endless litany of bodily fluids and exit wounds.

Traces of kerosene were discovered on the rear of the victim”s skull. Mild, grade D-3699-19.

Kerosene? Gasoline?

Why would there be kerosene on Trevor”s body? Had the killer tried to torch him after the fact, only to be interrupted? Was it a forensic countermeasure that hadn’t gone as planned?

She turned to the crime scene photos. No signs of fire damage, no telltale scorch marks or soot stains. Just one dead scumbag with a hole in his head, dumped on the side of the road like yesterday”s trash. The gunshot was clean, precise. Not the kind of kill you”d need to cover up with fire and gasoline.

So why the kerosene? What was she missing?

Unless, of course, the kerosene was never meant to be there.

Mia stared at the laptop screen until the words blurred into a smear of black and white, her brain doing its best impersonation of a rat in a maze, scurrying down one twisting path after another, always hitting a dead end.

Kerosene. The word stuck in her craw like a chicken bone. It was there, the answer, hovering just out of reach like a phantom itch she couldn”t scratch.

She squeezed her eyes shut, digging her fingers into her temples like she could physically yank the memory out of the sludge of her mind. There was something, a fragment of a conversation, a throwaway line that had seemed like so much white noise at the time.

And then, like a sucker punch to the solar plexus, it hit her.

A lazy Sunday morning, limbs tangled in sweat-soaked sheets. Martin had said, ‘Need to grab some kerosene from storage.’

She”d grunted something in response, too blissed out on post-coital brain chemicals to give half a damn. Martin was always elbow-deep in some project or other - tinkering with his ride, cleaning his fishing rods, gluing together those model planes he loved more than life itself.

So he needed some go-juice for his little grease monkey hobby. Big whoop. But now, with Trevor”s autopsy report seared into her retinas like a cattle brand, that casual remark took on a whole new flavor of sinister.

But where was this storage? It certainly wasn’t in Ripley’s house. She’d made it clear when Martin was talking about gas for his lawnmower – no gasoline in the house, the shed or the garden. It was an explosion hazard, and with how many enemies Ripley had, it was an easy accelerant for her demise.

The possibilities rampaged through Mia”s skull like a horde of crank-addled spider monkeys. Each one more batshit than the last, each one leading to a conclusion that made her want to gargle Drano and chase it with a chaser of buckshot.

But the facts were the facts. The traces of kerosene on Trevor”s corpse. Martin”s stockpile of the stuff, so casually mentioned you”d almost think he wanted her to know.

Mia choked out a laugh, the sound as jagged and bitter as broken glass. This couldn”t be happening. Couldn”t be real. Her Martin, a cold-blooded killer?

The idea was so absurd, it bordered on the obscene. Like a bad joke told by a worse comedian.

Time to dig deeper.

She didn’t want to believe it, but something told her she was only just scratching the surface.