53

Victoria was well-versed in disasters, from the downfalls of major corporate empires to the slow decline of her marriage. She never tired of the thrill of coming out of them unscathed.

But she’d never handled anything like this. In the many, many nights that she’d laid awake as Warren snored beside her, blissfully unaware that her jagged thoughts were meandering dangerously close to the edge of homicide, Victoria had let her imagination roam. Death was a chameleon, a revolving door of options, but in the end, she’d preferred the idea of a quiet, contained bathtub of blood.

Not this massacre. Not the permeating stench of rot.

Squeamish wasn’t a word she used to describe herself. Her father hadn’t taken her on his hunting trips; those were only for men. Tough, manly men who shot big guns and got dirty, never mind that Jeremy Livingston’s uncalloused hands and perfectly creased slacks cast serious doubt on his definition of masculinity. But when he’d return from a weekend in the woods it was Victoria he called to his side.

His reservations about the act of hunting didn’t extend to the handling of the carcass. He’d had no qualms about Victoria watching him hang a gutted deer from the garage ceiling, narrating as he worked to break it down. Granted, it had been years since those delightful life lessons, but Victoria hadn’t forgotten.

She knew what it meant to get dirty.

As she peeled away the disgusting drop cloths and rolled them into sticky piles, however, the years since those Sunday mornings with her father grew exponentially. Warren was supposed to have died peacefully in the bathtub and a crime-scene team was supposed to dispose of the aftermath while she played the part of Stunned Wife.

A red glob flapped off a sheet and slid down her forearm. Victoria grimaced and batted it away with a few choice words that were not playground approved. And Warren had wanted her to be the mother of his many children?

She wasn’t going down that road again, not when the point was irrelevant and the more pressing issue was someone else’s blood staining her bedroom. Lost in thought and arms full, Victoria tripped and went sprawling to the floor. The blood-covered plastic sheets smeared the carpet with a sickening slurp.

“Son of a—” she groaned, head thrown back in exasperation. She was tired and sore. Blood had soaked into some of the soft-fabric surfaces. Clots had hardened in the places where the carpet had been inadvertently exposed in her efforts. A third of the bedroom was a still from a Rob Zombie movie.

And through it all, X was watching; she was acutely aware of the rolling video feed, ignoring the creeping sensation of a being a bug under a microscope.

Victoria checked her watch. An hour and thirty-seven minutes.

There was also the matter of Warren’s eyeballs decomposing in the drawer.

Victoria yanked off the dish gloves she’d grabbed from the kitchen and opened a private browser on her phone. The security footage slid to the corner as she typed in her search parameters of how best to remove the stains from the carpet. The top result was a blog from a mother in Indiana raising three kids with her three favorite men (husband, God, and Jesus). Flowers and blubbering pink hearts with chipper dimples danced along the byline. Archives devoted to preschool activities, toddler lunches in fancy boxes, and aligning secular readings with the Bible were arranged on the left menu.

“Wow,” she said, scrolling through paragraph after holy-dripping paragraph of anecdotes and allegories. Warren probably would’ve loved for her to make a mommy blog.

He probably would’ve liked for her to go to church, too, come to think of it, but potato, tomato; it was too late for Victoria to rediscover Catholic guilt. She’d made her own peace. If she’d learned anything about religion from her upbringing, it was that the worst sinners were often the ones pointing fingers the hardest.

The louder you were, the easier it was to blame someone else for your crime.

Victoria was experiencing this firsthand.

Somewhere in between teaching your dog to sit for Jesus and a how-to on constructing the perfect grievance letter to your wayward neighbors, Victoria found a section on household chores and deep-cleaning solutions.

She skimmed down to a suggestion of Dawn dish soap and a steel brush. “Because even the Devil’s afraid of Dawn,” she read aloud. “Praise be.”

She let loose a dry laugh and dropped her chin to her chest. Victoria was exhausted. Racoon rings was an understatement. The bags under her eyes had bags. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever felt the buzzing need to rest.

One hour and twenty-nine minutes.

No rest for the wicked, she thought, closing the browser. No rest for the wicked and certainly not for her, wherever she fell on the morality spectrum.

She didn’t have any Dawn. Warren insisted she buy the fancy soap that smelled like brambleberry and moisturized. God forbid he use an extra squirt of lotion.

The longer she took, the deeper the stain would set. The harder it would be to remove. She could almost feel it clawing into the fibers. X’s mechanical laughter echoed in her ears.

Don’t ask for help.

Don’t get caught.

Her keys and purse were by the front door where she’d left them after Detective Meyers’s surprise visit. A quick glance at her clothes reminded her that she couldn’t go out in public looking like Carrie at the prom. Getting to her closet the way it was, however, would be an enormous pain in the ass and a waste of time.

Victoria instead turned to the basement.

Skirting around glass from a broken picture frame, she wove through the chaos of Warren’s things in search of something clean and close to her size. It wasn’t like he’d be wearing them anytime soon. She put her dirty clothes into a pile and grabbed a pair of his old joggers and an oversized gray hooded Syracuse sweatshirt.

Victoria smoothed her hair—good enough—and headed toward the stairs when her foot caught the edge of a box, upsetting a massive container of files. Warren had insisted on keeping multiple copies of their important documents: expired IDs, passports, car titles, birth certificates, marriage license. He’d even kept duplicates of their tax statements going back five years. Just in case, his only explanation.

Just her luck to knock over a paper trail of their relationship when her future was on the line, she thought.

She bent to scoop them up, ignoring the voice in her head telling her to leave it for later. Old habits die hard. As she shuffled the stack together, the words on the top caught her attention. certificate for the disillusion of the entity.

That was strange. The rest of Warren’s client files were either digital or stored at the office. The date was listed as the week before his death. Warren hadn’t mentioned anything about shutting down one of their clients recently. That many were leaving for different agencies, she knew. But willingly terminating any of their entities would have involved her consideration.

These documents hadn’t been filed, nor was the information complete, she gathered from a brief scan of the fields. She wanted to delve further into the contract notes but decided to bring them with her instead. Getting sidetracked by Livingston business was exactly what X would want.

Whatever deal Warren had been working on could wait for the light of day. X, however, could not.