She had a point. And it was better than letting EasyClean finish the job. “How are we supposed to keep Steven out of sight? There’s no way he’s going to agree to this.”
Vero grabbed a roll of duct tape off the workbench and tossed it to me.
“Have you lost your mind?” I sputtered. “We can’t hide him here! Not with Nick and Georgia barging in whenever they suspect something’s wrong. We’re lucky they haven’t found Carl! And how would I explain to Delia and Zach why their father is duct-taped in the basement?”
“Who says we have to keep him here?” Vero plucked the motel key from her pocket and dangled it in front of me. “It’s already paid for. Cam isn’t using it. Silly to let it go to waste.”
CHAPTER 36
I sat on the garage floor, hunched over Steven’s phone as Vero hauled Steven onto his back and unzipped his coat. Frowning down at him, she lifted one lifeless arm above his head and bent one of his legs at an odd angle. “What are you doing?”
“Staging a crime scene.” She opened a bottle of raspberry syrup and squirted a puddle of it in the middle of Steven’s sweatshirt. Then she doused the end of a long screwdriver and dotted some syrup around him on the floor, leaving sticky fingerprints on its handle. She dropped the murder weapon beside him. “There!” She licked her thumb with a satisfied grin and got busy snapping pictures of our victim. “Grab the tape. I think he’s coming to.”
I set Steven’s phone on the workbench and tore a long strip of duct tape from the roll. Vero and I worked fast as Steven began to stir, taping his wrists together behind his back and securing a few feet of the stuff around his ankles. The last piece I slapped over his mouth, which felt better than it probably should have. Together, we hauled him into the rear of my minivan and shut the door.
I rested against it, wiping sweat from my brow. The van shuddered with Steven’s furious thumps as he fully awoke. A muffled shout penetrated the door. “He’s going to kill me when this is over.”
“I don’t think so.” Vero panted beside me. “I’m pretty sure Bree was right. He’s crazy about you.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Think about it, Finn. The guy thinks you beat him over the head, burned down his office, flooded his house with gas, and slashed his tires, and he still hasn’t gone to the cops. He let Bree spend an entire day in custody for a crime he knew she didn’t commit, all because he didn’t want the person in those handcuffs to be you.”
“But you saw him just now. He was ready to drag me kicking and screaming to the police station.”
“A, he wasn’t going to drag you anywhere, because there’s no way I’d let him take you. And B, the only reason he was trying to make you go to the station is because he didn’t want to be the bad guy who called the cops and turned you in. He wanted you to do it yourself. And he was planning to take you straight to Nick and your sister, because he knew they wouldn’t arrest you if he didn’t press charges.”
The van had gone still, and I wondered if Steven could hear us.
“Come on,” Vero said, pushing off the door, “we should email these pictures to FedUp and get Sleeping Beauty to the motel before anyone comes looking for him.” A series of thumps shook the van. “Any luck with the app on Steven’s phone?”
I trudged to the workbench to find it. “No, it’s one of those tracking apps parents use to spy on their teenagers. You need a password to disable it. EasyClean must have installed it after mugging Steven for his phone.”
“The phone can’t send a signal without power. Turn it off. We’ll figure it out later.”
Steven’s screen lit with a message as I picked it up.
“That’s weird,” I said. Vero came up behind me, watching over my shoulder as I tapped the notification. “It’s a meeting reminder. But that can’t be right. Steven’s calendar says he’s scheduled to attend a Fourth Quarter Profit and Loss Meeting two hours from now.”
“With who?”
“Ted Fuller and Carl.” Our eyes locked over the phone. I lowered my voice. “How can Steven have a meeting with his silent partners if one of them is dead?”
“They must have scheduled the meeting before Carl was murdered.”
“No. The meeting invitation just went out this morning.”
“Ted must have scheduled it. It’s the only explanation. Maybe Theresa was telling the truth and Ted doesn’t know about Carl.”