15. BREADCRUMBS

15

brEADCRUMBS

RYDEN

T he lifeless body of a man in his late twenties was discovered in a storage unit in Charleston. The victim was identified as Victor Bane. Victor worked in The Mirage, an underground club notorious for illegal gambling.

Detective Rosario apprehended Ms. Wark, a party girl who was also an alleged madam for the murder of Victor Bane.

“We believe it was a sexual encounter gone awry. Millicent and Victor were known associates, and further investigation revealed they were having sexual relations,” said Detective Rosario, the lead detective on the case.

When asked about the case, the DA was confident that it was open and shut due to the amount of evidence, despite the continued absence of the murder weapon. Detective Rosario remained tight-lipped when asked about the murder weapon, replying that they were still pursuing leads and that he had no further comment.

“Bullshit.”

I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Victor was gone. I had failed in my promise to my mother and my stepfather.

Gritting my teeth, I read the words again, and it still didn’t soften the anger. It had been a few days since Victor’s death, and there were stories and speculations, and the killer was arrested two days ago.

It was, once again, a fucked-up lie.

The killer didn’t do it in a fit of anger, even though everything suggested otherwise. No. I could taste the threads of deception in every piece of neatly planted evidence.

Anyone with a semblance of a brain would know these clues were too meticulously placed to be real. Each breadcrumb seemed to lead straight to Millicent. Only stories had such tidy resolutions.

Even though I was angry, I had to admit it was a stroke of genius.

As someone who had done it before, I could identify the cunning behind these puzzles. The detective wouldn’t see beyond the obvious. I knew the mind of another killer. The one who killed Victor wasn’t new to this.

“Here,” Enzo slid a cup of coffee to me. “And stop reading that.”

“I can’t.”

Victor wasn’t necessarily a good man or an easy man to be around, but… he was still my brother.

“What are we going to do?”

“Find the killer and kill him.”

Enzo sighed. “I’m sorry. I know you haven’t talked with him in a while, but he’s still your brother.”

“He is,” I bit out. “I tried to help him…”

I didn’t even know he was back in Detroit until I saw his picture in the newspaper. I tried to help him, but Victor was… a burden I couldn’t carry with me to places I wanted to go. So, I had to let him go.

Volatile, reckless, and brainless, that was what I had called him the last time I saw him and told him never to come home unless he was willing to change his ways. He disappeared from my life after that.

“I’m going to find Patel.”

“Patel will kill you if you disturb him today.”

“He’ll get over it,” I said, grabbing my keys from the table. “I’ve to know more.”

“I need a favor, Patel.”

Detective Rishi Patel opened the door just enough to keep me from entering. “Were you still sleeping?” I asked, scanning him up and down.

“Don’t you take a day off? Fuck, it’s so early. What do you need?” he asked with a frown.

“I need to look at Rosario’s case file.”

“What? Fuck, you know I can’t do that. What are you trying to do, Sinclair? Get me fired?”

“Calm the fuck down, Rishi. You owe me one. I gave you the Six O’Clock Killer,” I said, piercing him with a look I knew would get him. I was the reason he got the promotion and became a homicide detective.

“I know,” Patel said, motioning me to get inside. “But Rosario will bite my head off if he knows I did you a favor.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said as I followed Rishi inside his small, matchbox-sized apartment. Ethan Rosario was a thorn in my fucking ass, but the detective was a good man. I couldn’t just kill him, no matter how frustrating he was.

“Screw it. What do you need?” Rishi walked into his kitchen and poured the blackest coffee I had ever seen into two mugs before handing one to me.

“First, I need at least a few packets of sugar in this coffee. Next, I need Victor Bane.”

No one around me knew about Victor or how we were related, except Enzo. Having a different last name helped. I wanted it to stay that way.

“Ah, damn, man. Why?”

“Because I know Millicent didn’t kill him.”

“But the evidence says otherwise. The case is pretty straightforward.” Rishi took his phone, searched for something, and then handed it to me. “Somebody else is already covering his story. She’s really good.”

My brows furrowed when I saw the picture on his phone screen. It was a true crime podcast titled Hunters and Preys , with a picture of a black snake and a white snake twisting around a sun.

She called her seasons a novel, and each one was titled, with a few chapters under them.

Victor’s was the twenty-fourth episode. Scoffing, I put the phone down on the table. I wasn’t interested in this. “I don’t need this. I need the real thing.”

“She sounds like she’s from a porn video. Her voice…” Patel sighed, and I threw the tissue box at him. He caught it mid-air with a smirk. “Come on, you’ll thank me. Just click that button. You’ll know what I mean.”

“Is that why you listen to this trash, Patel?” I said with a frown as I pushed his phone back to him.

“It’s good. She brings a distinct perspective that helps me approach a case from a different angle,” Rishi said, looking truly excited. “It’s great reporting. She’s perceptive.”

“The name sounds like an alias. I don’t trust people like her. If you want to accuse someone, you better do it with your real name.”

“Not all of us have the spine to speak our truths standing out in the open. She’s still good. I don’t care what your pretentious ass thinks.” Rishi looked offended, as if I was talking smack about him.

“I still stand by what I said, Patel.”

He gave me a mutinous look. “And I stand by what I said. She’s an investigative reporter like you. Her podcast has won a few journalism awards.”

I scoffed. Like me!? That’s doubtful.

“And nobody knows who she is. She’s not a reporter. She’s just a little girl playing with…”

“Oh, fuck it, Sinclair. Don’t be that guy. You know it’s not a good color on men like you. K.Y. Wolff is a legend.”

“Because she has a porn star voice?” I asked with a smirk, and he shook his head with a huff, looking indignant.

“I’m single and I’m allowed to have my fantasy, Sinclair, but she’s a legend because she knows what she’s doing,” he said as he emptied his coffee and poured another. “Do you want more?”

I shook my head. I wouldn’t put myself through the torture of that coffee again. “Fantasy is not jacking off to some woman talking about death.”

“Pfft, I never jack off when I’m listening to her. In my fantasy, she isn’t talking about death. She’s talking about my throbbing cock.”

“Fuck. Too much information, Patel,” I grunted with a glare in his direction, and he laughed, amused by himself. I wasn’t. “Too much.”

“That’s what you get for harassing me this early on a Sunday. I’m going back to bed, listening to K.Y.”

“Tomorrow. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“You won’t stop even if I say no, will you? Come back tomorrow,” he said with a slight frown.

“Don’t forget the autopsy report. And if it’s possible, I’d love to talk with the ME who performed it.”

“Arey Rama! The things I do for you,” he grumbled and opened the door. “Of course, I won’t forget. You know the medical examiner.”

“Who?”

“Yara West.”

“Ah, Doctor West. I’ve seen her around a few times,” I said, thinking about the redhead. “I saw her the other day when I was coming out of my meeting with Detective Rosario.”

“Meeting with Rosario?” Rishi scoffed. “Doctor West is good at what she does.” Rishi had a small smile, his eyes dreamy. The detective certainly had a crush on Doctor Redhead.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” I said as he walked me toward the door and slammed it shut behind me. I stared at the closed door for a few seconds before taking the elevator to the ground floor. As I drove through the lazy streets, I felt it once again, the red haze slowly rising.

Everything in me burned for a release, but I knew I couldn’t kill now. I had too much at stake.

So, I did what I told Patel I wouldn’t do. I found the podcast. Hunters and Preys.

The first one was Thirteen.

Victor’s story was Unholy Verdicts.

“Men hide behind masks of holy saints. When the masks break, they leave behind the trace of who they are: animals. This is the story of two predators, preying on helpless women. They say killing a man is a crime, but is it a crime to hunt a rabid animal and put it down?”

Raspy, soft, angry.

The voice evoked so many emotions in me, but the most potent one was shock and surprise.

I knew that voice. The blonde. Here she was. K.Y. Fucking Wolff. I stiffened in my seat, my hands tightening around the steering wheel until my fingers turned white.

Parking the car on the side of the road, I concentrated on her words.

There was a familiarity in the way she talked, as if she knew Victor personally, as if she wasn’t just sharing something she heard from the others—I knew the difference between the articles I wrote on other killers and the ones I wrote on the murders I’d committed.

She knew Victor. It wasn’t hearsay for her.

The anger in her voice was not obvious, but it was there. I instinctively knew that this woman wasn’t a reporter. She wasn’t reporting a crime someone else had committed—at least not this one.

She was a killer. She was me. I was her. We were so intricately and oddly the same.

And she knew my story.

I had to find her and permanently silence her—if it came to her and me, I’d choose me in a breath. After all, she wasn’t as innocent as I had previously believed.

To protect myself and those who were closer to me, I had to kill this woman. I knew that much.

“Where in the world are you hiding, K.Y. Wolff?”