He Will Be My Ruin

  “Celine would never hurt someone she loved. Or thought she loved.”

  “Bullshit. She threatened me that night.”

  “She didn’t mean it.”

  “Stop protecting her,” he snaps. “You didn’t see her. You didn’t have her crying her eyes out all over your shirt. The woman was insane. Next thing I know, she’d be tag-teaming with that British asshole and blackmailing me again. She was a whore, nothing more. And I wasn’t going to let her destroy my life. Or my family’s life. She should have been honest from the start.”

  “So, when you went there that night, did you plan on killing her?”

  “No!” He shakes his head. “I was going there to get the Ming bowl that she phoned me about and keep the peace. You think I’m some kind of cold-blooded murderer. I’m not.” He takes his time capping the empty pill bottle and dumping it into a bag. “I just did what she was going to do anyway, and then made sure I didn’t leave my fingerprints. Her medicine cabinet was full of drugs. She had probably already taken enough to kill herself that night.”

  “Just like I was going to do this?” I lift my arm to point at the empty glass, but my movements are sluggish.

  “You should have just minded your own business. Just like that sick fuck Grady. He deserves to be punished, even if it’s not for the right crime.”

  “They’re going to catch Grady eventually. Aren’t you worried what he’s going to tell them when they accuse him of murder?”

  Jace looms over me, pausing to watch. I’m sure he’s gauging how far off I am. How long before he can leave me and be sure, just like he did with Celine.

  I open and shut my eyes slowly a few times for impact.

  He turns his attention back to the nightstand, now opening up the other ziplock bag. “Grady won’t be talking to anyone, anymore.”

  The meaning behind his words hits me like a punch to the chest. I gasp. “Oh my God.” Grady isn’t in the wind. He isn’t using his technical prowess to escape any nets.

  He’s dead.

  “You killed him, too?” My chest feels like it’s collapsing in on itself.

  “What do you care? If he hadn’t videotaped and blackmailed me, your best friend would probably still be alive.”

  I don’t know why I care, but I do. The last time I saw him, it was through a window, when I told him to go to hell. I wouldn’t give him a chance to explain. Maybe he would have admitted to everything, and I would have turned my attention back to Jace. Maybe this wouldn’t be happening right now.

  “You set him up. Everything in his apartment.”

  “Just her phone and the vase. The creepy ‘Celine’ box of pictures and panties was all him.”

  “And the phone call?”

  “People will agree to do just about anything when they think it may save their life. You wouldn’t believe how many of those manufactured fake dragon vases are out there. I started looking for one as soon as I realized you had Celine’s paper records, just in case I needed a decoy. And now, when this story hits the news, everyone is going to be checking their mother’s closet for a fifty-million-dollar vase.”

  Fifty million dollars. “Is that what you think it’s worth?”

  “That’s what the private collector who has the other one is willing to pay me, in cash, if we avoid auction houses. That Asian appraiser friend of Celine’s helped me locate him. Of course now I’ll have to wait awhile, and use an anonymous front man for media purposes, and give that person a cut, too. I can’t have my name tied to this after you’ve had your PI all over me. It’ll raise too many questions.”

  “Where’s the vase now?”

  “In a hidden safe in my office.”

  I missed that entirely. “So you knew it was Grady who blackmailed you all along?” Where the hell is Grady right now? Did Jace pump him full of drugs, too? My eyes graze over his knuckles, bruised and raw. He said that was from boxing. I’m guessing that was a lie.

  We’ve fallen into a strange, calm conversation now, like two friends in the dark and quiet night, as the drugs course through me. He seems almost relieved. It probably has something to do with confessing all of his crimes to a soon-to-be dead woman. “Not until I read Celine’s diary. I was waiting for him to come back to me, to threaten me again. I wasn’t going to do anything otherwise. With Celine dying, if something happened to him, it might raise suspicions. So I kept my distance and hoped it would all dissipate. Then you came along and ruined everything.

  “I used you as an excuse to meet with him. I told him that I had information for him.” He smiles as he reaches into the ziplock bag and pulls out a few hairs. Holding them up to the light, I see the dark brown color.

  Grady’s hair color.

  Jace releases them and they float onto the floor next to the bed.

  He’s planting evidence.

  “That’s not going to be enough,” I argue, though I have no clue.

  “Maybe not. But then there’s also his car, which has a soiled trunk full of your DNA—thank you for that. They’ll find that abandoned, twenty or so miles away from here.”

  “They’ll find his body.” My heart is starting to beat harder in my chest, working against the toxins.

  “Not soon, anyway.” He sounds so confident. Do I even want to know what he did with Grady?

  I want more information, but I can’t let this drag on much longer. I’m beginning to feel the heavy pull of what he put into my body, and I don’t know how much longer I have. Playing dead may be my only option.

  And so I do, staying as still as possible, closing my eyes for longer periods of time, until I’m afraid that I’m not pretending anymore.

  And then the chance that I’d assumed I wouldn’t have happens.

  “Shit,” I hear him mutter.

  A small plastic container from the bag of Grady’s DNA slips out of Jace’s hand to land on the floor. It must have rolled under the bed because he curses somewhere below, as if he has turned and stooped to get it.

  Summoning all the energy I can, I seize the rock clock from the table. It’s heavier than I’d imagined, and I have to struggle to maintain my grip. Swinging my bound hands as high as possible, I slam it down, hard, on the top of his head.

  And then what’s left of my conscious brain screams at me to run.

  I slither off the end of the bed and bolt out the door and down the hall, expecting hands to seize me at any moment and pull me back. I don’t stop, though, using the stair rail to keep me from falling as I stumble down into the basement. I don’t stop even when the snow bites into my bare feet.

  I run and run, tripping up the driveway, my balance off either because of my bound hands or my panic or the drugs.

  I dare to check over my shoulder only once. I don’t see Jace, but he’s there, I know it. I can hear his feet, pounding into the ground. Or maybe that’s just my heart that I hear, pounding in my ears as I run.

  I reach the road and don’t know whether to go left or right. It all looks the same—dark and empty—but I have to choose one and hope that I’m not guaranteeing my own death. “Which way . . . which way . . . which way . . .” I close my eyes and try to remember which direction he turned in from, when I was trapped in that trunk, but I can’t.

  I choose right, and hope that it truly is right, even as I struggle to stay on my feet, struggle to focus.

  The frigid cold keeps my body going, but I’m so tired. I don’t know that I can go any farther. But I think I see something. Far in the distance. Beams of light. A beacon for me, maybe.

  I just need to . . .

  My knees buckle and sink into the snow, but I barely feel the cold anymore.

  I guess that means I’m not going to make it.

  A door slams somewhere, my ears catch muffled voices. “Jesus . . . Call 9-1-1!”

  CHAPTER 48

  Maggie

  January 4, 2016

  Detective Childs exhales loudly as he sops the runny egg yolks up with a piece of rye toast.

  “Is no
w the right time to say I told you so?” I murmur, my voice still raspy, not fully recovered. They can’t be sure which caused more damage—the screaming that injured my vocal cords or the tubes thrust down my throat to try and pump the lethal dose of Oxy out of my stomach.

  But I’m alive, so I don’t care.

  “Where do you see this going, Chester?” Doug asks from his seat next to me. He was there when I woke up in the Ellenville Regional Hospital, two hours north of New York City, near the Catskill Mountains, where Jace had taken me.

  “A lot of different departments involved now. Us, local sheriff, state.” His chocolate eyes drift over the sidewalk on the other side of the glass, and the pedestrians rushing past on their way back to work after the holiday season. “He’s got some fancy lawyers, but the bastard sure looks guilty.”

  Jace wasn’t two steps behind me that night. He was unconscious on the floor of that bedroom with a deep gash in his head. Not enough to kill him, but the corner of the clock made for a sharp weapon, and I hit him hard. I must have stepped on the broken glass by the door on my way out. The police followed the trail of blood from my foot up the driveway and found him there, along with the bag of evidence he was in the process of planting.

  “I knew I didn’t like Grady for murder,” Doug mutters, shaking his head. “Too many things didn’t add up.”

  Grady. I don’t know what to feel about Grady, and what happened to him. On the one hand, he was a sick guy with a perverted fascination for Celine. He violated her privacy, manipulated her weaknesses, and lied to me about everything.

  On the other hand, he was the guy who kept me warm on the rooftop, who gave me a few moments of respite amid what was probably the hardest time of my life.

  Did he really deserve what Jace did to him?

  His body hasn’t turned up anywhere. We may never know exactly what Jace did to him. He vehemently denies any involvement with Grady’s disappearance, even though they found him with Grady’s hair.

  Childs’s laugh booms in the fifties diner. It’s the same place where I met him the day he handed me Doug’s business card. To think, had I not hired him, had I let this go, both Grady and Jace would have gotten away with their crimes. “Easy to say now, Dougie.”

  Doug scoffs. “Hey, who’s the one who bugged Maggie’s phone?”

  “Illegally,” I mutter, but I don’t care that my PI had the sixth sense to stick a tracking device into the back of my cell phone as soon as we realized Grady was missing.

  “Told you, things didn’t add up. A guy like Grady would know that he can’t just delete files on her computer and be done with it. On the day she died, no less. And the vase . . . No way your friend would mistake that for an authentic.”

  I smile. Doug didn’t even know Celine and he had faith in her talent.

  Thanks to that tracker in my phone, which Zac was monitoring, they knew that I left Celine’s auction but never made it back to the hotel. They found my purse—with my phone inside—tossed on the side of the freeway, heading north.

  But had that lovely couple not been heading to the airport at that ungodly early hour, no one would have found me on the side of that lonely old road until it was much too late.

  “Well, Jace looks guilty and he admitted everything to me.”

  “And his lawyers will argue that you were ‘not of right state of mind,’ pumped full of drugs. Best thing the prosecution can do now is build a strong enough case that Jace finally accepts that he’s not getting away with it and confesses.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “I do.” Childs pushes his plate away and leans back in his typical relaxed demeanor that used to anger me. Now I get that it’s how he has to be to face these kinds of things day in, day out. “It sounds like he killed Celine out of fear and opportunity. He’s not a psychopath. He’s still human. Soon that side of him will prevail, when he sees how much he’s hurting his parents. When he realizes that his life as he’s known it is over. Until then, we’ll keep building a case. We’ve got Ling Zhang cooperating with us now.”

  The Bone Lady. Another piece of the puzzle that didn’t add up in Doug’s eyes, so he had Zac dig deeper into her. She may not be a high-end auction house, but she sure has connections with black market art trade in China.

  From what she told the police, Jace showed up one day with a cardboard box containing the blue-and-white Ming bowl that she had already appraised for Celine and a vase with a red dragon on it— and a shockingly authentic-looking seal. He wouldn’t tell her where he got the vase from, and he wouldn’t allow her to contact anyone about it yet for additional appraisals, to authenticate what she already believed might be the real deal. He simply asked her to track down the collector who owned the other one, and to not say a word about the vase, or he’d be taking his business elsewhere and she could kiss a sizeable dealer’s cut good-bye.

  She wasn’t stupid. She knew how much it could be worth.

  When we went in there on the very same day and asked about a red dragon vase, she began to suspect something might not be right.

  “Where is Jace now?” I ask.

  “Out on a ten-million-dollar bail.”

  While the fact that he’s out doesn’t make me feel great, I’m not worried that he’s going to come after me. He was only a killer when he needed to cover his tracks. Now that those tracks are exposed, I’m confident he’ll lay low. He doesn’t need anything else to incriminate him.

  I take a long draw of my tea—it doesn’t taste as good from the diner’s porcelain mug as it does coming from Ruby’s dainty china cups. “So, now what?”

  Childs levels me with a rare solemn look. “Now you let us do our jobs and close this case the right way. And you go back to helping people who are still alive.”

  Doug clears his throat.

  “And let me guess . . .” I don’t hide my sarcasm from my voice, though in truth I owe the overpriced PI and his basement-dwelling hacker for my life. “I need to write some more checks?”

  EPILOGUE

  Maggie

  August 9, 2016

  “Where’s Hakeem?”

  “It’s me!” The little boy runs to me, squealing, carrying a fistful of wildflowers.

  “No . . . Hakeem is only this tall.” I measure against my thigh.

  He giggles hysterically. “I grow. I am big now!”

  I drop my duffel bag and reach down to wrap my arms around the gangly little boy’s body, his skin slick from playing in the warm sun. “And your English has improved.”

  Hakeem’s mother calls him from the doorway of their little home, one of several I helped build with my own hands almost a year ago now. She waves hello to me with a smile, and then herds him back with a string of Amharic. I was just beginning to learn enough of the language to communicate before I left.

  “Soccer, later?” he asks, a hopeful look on his adorable little face.

  “Definitely. As soon as I’m settled.”

  He scurries off to his mother, and I continue on, appreciating the changes and growth in the village since the last time I was here.

  I sling my duffel bag over my shoulder, groaning under the weight of the four-hundred-page manuscript that arrived in San Diego just before I left, care of Ruby. I should have expected she would be hammering away at the keys on her typewriter, capturing the mystery of Celine’s death as it unfolded. As soon as I found out, I bought her a computer with a twenty-inch monitor to make it easier on her eyes. I’m equal parts petrified and curious to see how the shrewd old lady translated the recounting I gave to her over tea, on several trips back to New York since December.

  She already has a publisher signed on. Given that the book is based on a true story, it can’t be published until after the court case against Jace is over. The murder trial doesn’t start until next year, so it’ll be years before this book ever sees a store. I’m sure when it does, it’ll be a big seller. I just hope Ruby’s alive to see the day.

  With each day that passes,
I’m more and more confident that Jace will be punished for his crimes. He has fancy lawyers, but I have one of the best private investigators, working alongside the NYPD, state police, as well as the FBI, who got involved because of the value of the vase and because this is such a high-profile case. His lawyers will try to dismiss my testimony about the night in the Catskill Mountains when Jace tried to kill me—I was heavily drugged, after all—but they can’t dismiss the stolen dragon vase and Celine’s missing diary, which were found in Jace’s hidden safe. Which I pointed the police toward before any search warrants were procured.

  Doug said that the diary is apparently chockful of details that will help the prosecution piece together the truth. He warned that it’s also the daily ramblings of an emotionally distraught and psychologically ill woman and it’s not an easy read for anyone. I equally dread and long for the day that the trial is over and the diary is returned to me, her benefactor.

  And then there’s Grady’s body, which washed up along the Hudson River in the spring. I’d be lying if I said that, hiding somewhere beneath my overall shock and disgust for the building super, I didn’t feel a slight pang of sorrow the day Doug phoned to tell me.

  Unfortunately, there was no evidence left to secure from it, but the bit of chain still wrapped around his legs suggested that someone had weighed him down. Childs won’t tell me what they’ve found on that side of the investigation, but Doug has hinted that there are video surveillance cameras near one of the bridges that may help tie Jace to the death.

  Ironic, if it’s Grady’s favorite criminal pastime that will help bring some closure to his death.

  The police confirmed that the two other women in videos found on Grady’s computer are alive and well and oblivious to their admirer’s intrusions, only emphasizing that, while Grady’s proclivities may have been deplorable, a death sentence was far too harsh.

  The police also had a lot of questions for me about my relationship with him, thanks to the video feed from the apartment building’s rooftop. Obviously I wasn’t too concerned about that motion-activated camera when we were up there together.