“Low blow, Olivia,” he says, and hangs up.
She wishes she could slam down the phone, slam a door, anything to bring the call to a close with crashing finality. Fuck him. Fuck him!
It hurts her to yell at him. She’s never been a fan of fighting like this. But she feels like she’s driven her car into a brick wall. Totaled. She is totaled inside, and she can’t pretend things are okay any longer.
Look what he’s done to them. He’s destroyed their life together, with one terrible lie.
Again.
She bites her lip and shakes her head, anger welling deep inside her. Her life as she knows it is over. Her husband is a liar. Her womb is empty. Perry is coming back, and she’s managed to weaponize him before he’s even reached the city limits. A killer is on the loose.
And the detective is standing five feet away, going pale as she listens to someone on her phone. She clicks off looking so stricken Olivia is compelled to ask, “What’s wrong?”
Moore meets her eyes, steel and worry in their depths. “Another woman has gone missing.”
20
THE HUSBAND
He shouldn’t have hung up on Olivia, but sometimes she can be so damn irritating he wants to strangle her.
A broken body flashes in his mind, and he hisses in a breath. No, he doesn’t mean that. Not like strangle her, strangle her. Sometimes she can just be so annoying, so teeth-gritting annoying that he wants to pound his fist against the wall. He’s going through something here, too. She’s not alone in her sorrow. To throw Perry at him like that… They’ve agreed never to talk about him. To excise him from their lives. And his erstwhile brother is going to show up now, after all this time? Wonderful.
Park gets his agent, Neil McKinnon, on the phone on the first try. Sometimes he gets lucky like this. Other days he has to wait, biting his nails, for Neil to return his call.
Though honestly, he would have preferred to wait rather than have to share the chaos that’s happened this week.
“Hey, hey, hey. How is my favorite client? Writing hard?”
“I have been, Neil, yes.”
“Good, good. Everyone will be happy to hear it.” Everyone is code for world-renowned bestseller Bartholomew Pekkan, writer of major psychological thrillers that wowed the world in the eighties and nineties and continue to sell like hot cakes even now. In his first decade as a writer, Pekkan sold millions of copies worldwide, made enough money to live comfortably in a small beach town in North Carolina—in a house and grounds that took up most of the town—and started hiring ghostwriters to continue the series. He figured he’d made enough money that it was time to share with some of the new, fresh writers out there.
Neil had found Park in the slush pile after he’d sent him a thriller that was, by all accounts, good enough to catch the eye of an agent but not nearly unique enough to sell into the crowded genre marketplace. In their first call, Neil had said, “Hey, you write an awful lot like Barty Pekkan,” and Park had preened, for “Barty” was his favorite writer, and he’d written his story in good old-fashioned Southern thriller style in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, Pekkan would read it and give him an endorsement.
Instead, he read it and gave him a job.
The first time they spoke, the great man to the plebeian writer, Park had walked away from the call vaguely disappointed to find his hero was a boisterous giggler with the hint of booze on his breath even from two states away, but $100,000 richer.
It was not, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But Barty gave him free rein as long as the books sold well, and Park was able to feather his nest and supplement his income and plan for his retirement. He taught during the year and wrote during the summers and tried his level best to get his wife pregnant and keep her happy. Keep her pregnant. Do his duty to his marriage, his family, his legacy. It’s been a good life, and now?
He fears all of this is about to come to a screeching halt.
You’re being punished. You know why.
“You still there, pal?”
“Sorry, Neil. Got lost in thought. There’s a problem. I had the thumb drives with the next three manuscript drafts—”
A pause. “Three manuscripts?”
“Yes. I’ve been crashing hard all summer. It’s actually a trilogy, but they’re just drafts, not even full-length. Just the bones, really.”
“Trilogy?”
“Yes. But I had a break-in last night, and they were stolen. The police are aware of the situation—”
This snaps Neil to attention, away from the dreamy idea of work completed ahead of deadline and fresh new stories to reinvigorate the series. “Police? You told them who you’re writing for?”
“No. I only said I was a ghost, but that’s it. The drives were in my safe along with some paperwork and personal documents. The police are looking for the intruder.”
The frost comes in clear through the phone. “Well, this is not good, Park. Not good at all. At least you didn’t tell them everything. Though anyone who sees the manuscript will know—”
“Actually, no. Here’s the upshot. It’s a new character. A spin-off from one of the early books. Like I said, it’s just drafted work, so there’s a chance that even if it does come out, it won’t be tied to him immediately. It would take a true connoisseur of his work to put it together. The odds are incredibly slim.”
“I don’t recall us discussing you going off piste, Park.”
“Don’t go all schoolmarm on me yet, Neil. There’s more.”
When he’s done explaining the situation, he can practically feel Neil vibrating through the phone. “Not to be a venal asshole, but you realize memoir is a huge category for us now. Promise me you’ll let me take this out when you’re done writing it.”
“You’re being a venal asshole. A woman is dead. My life has been upended. Someone’s broken into my house. My wife is devastated, and… Listen, Neil. Let’s focus. I need an advance on the next Barty book. I’ll get started on a straight series title now, send you an outline next week, and have the book to you by the end of November.”
“Two months? The next one’s not due until March. You don’t have to rush it.”
“It’s not a problem. I already know what the story is. I’ll grind it out. But I need some cash now. I don’t know where things are headed here, and—”
The genial gentleman’s deal with a handshake three-martini-lunch agent he knows and loves is back. “No problem, buddy. I trust you. Barty trusts you. But if it gets out that you’ve been ghosting for him all these years, the spigot will run dry, you realize that. Your NDA is ironclad.”
“The police need—”
“What part of ironclad did you miss? No way you can tell anyone, Park. Police included.”
“I understand.”
“Good. I’m glad we’re clear. You think about the memoir, and I’ll go run some damage control. Twenty-eight kids. Jesus. Hope you don’t have to put them all through college.”
Park doesn’t even deign the joke with an answer, just clicks off and drops the phone onto the counter with a clunk. He is rewarded with a small crack in the screen.