Page 73 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“They haven’t caught me yet. No evidence. You know that. None. Your word and some video that a hundred experts will say is crazy. No DNA, no tox report on Lily, and no way to get one. No weapon used on Henry, no blood evidence, fingerprints, or proof I ever touched him. So go ahead—tell the cops your big theory and see where that gets you. You’re the one in trouble. And you know if you don’t drop the hero act and let us go without any drama, I got your big secret ready to tell the world. And if she’s here—” he nods to Rosa “—she’s in on this with you, and you’ll both be found out. You don’t really have a choice, do you? And don’t worry, they won’t find her body. She’s suicidal, didn’t you know that? She’s been through an awful lot.”

He makes a mock pouty face and I could actually kill him right this minute with my bare hands—just rip his face from his skull and not feel bad about it.

“They’re looking for you,” I say.

“Didn’t you hear what I said? They can look for me all they want, even arrest me, but they got nothin’. And it doesn’t matter, because the money is coming through in a few days, and I’ll be long gone. I’m sure I can avoid them until then. It’s you they’ll want to question,” he says, and I know he means the life insurance money from Lily, and I resist the urge to lunge at him and start clawing his eyes out.

“So does she know what you did to Eddie? Or maybe she paid you to do it, for all I know,” Callum asks, still looking at Rosa with a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-here expression but trying hard to keep an appearance of being in control, like he was expecting this all along. He’s starting to look a bit like a trapped animal. He’s beginning to realize he’s outnumbered and maybe he can’t peg this on me or Rosa—she’s a wild card he didn’t expect and doesn’t exactly know how to keep the control now. He’s fishing—trying to see how Rosa is connected, so he knows if it helps him that she’s tied up in this or if it puts the final nail in his coffin if he lets her get away.

“What is he talking about?” Anna whispers to me, still clinging to my arm as the three of us stand close—a small army, allied against Callum Brooks.

“You expect me to still keep quiet after what you did?” he says. “Sending that video to the police? I mean, it will yield nothing—circumstantial crap, but the point is, you started this. I don’t have time for...whatever it is you’re trying to do here. You should hope they don’t find me, because I have a big story to tell them that you won’t like, so I don’t know what the fuck you actually think you’re gonna gain here.” He turns to Rosa again. “She tell you what she did, or is she stringing you along in her web of lies, too?” he asks.

“You killed my Eddie,” Rosa says, and Callum gives an exasperated laugh and looks at me like I’m a piece of work. A gust of hot wind blows a cloud of red dust into the air and settles as we all stand, ready for someone to make a move—or run or fight, but nobody does. It’s just the buzz of crickets and a soft breeze through the trees that make any sound.

“Get in the car,” Callum says to Anna.

I hear her sharp intake of breath next to me as he holds out his knife and points it close to her face.

“No,” I say, holding her arm as tight as I can.

“Are you actually insane? You know you’re the idiot who brought your phone to the desert where the body is. I’ve gone over it a thousand times, and that’s the only piece of evidence left behind. And then maybe if they use luminol in the office—your front office—it will light up like a Christmas tree, so good luck. You got nothin’ on me,” he says, and I know that he won’t tell the police any of that because he doesn’t want to connect himself and is just using this information as a weapon.

Also, if he’s planning on getting away with taking Anna and making her death look like a suicide, a crime I guess he did get away with once, he won’t want to talk to police unless he absolute has to. So I wouldn’t be overly worried about the words that are coming out of his mouth, even if I wasn’t about to drop a bomb on him.

“They dug up that entire area and didn’t find any bodies. Someone must have moved it,” I say.

And at first he keeps the smirk on his face, but then it fades, and his eyes flit around as he contemplates whether I’m telling the truth.

“I hear it will be a housing community called Willow Grove,” I add, and I watch him take out his phone and quickly search the words I’m saying. I know there are a few images that pop up for Willow Grove—a dirt clearing with big machinery excavating trenches and foundations, with the earth all ripped up.

The color drains from his face. If the body isn’t there, then where? Someplace my phone record isn’t attached to, that’s for sure.

“What did you do with my Eddie?” Rosa sobs.

And I know she’s giving him a little taste of what he’d be in for if he was arrested and it went to court—she’s giving him the whole act, because he knows she stands firmly on my side.

“What the fuck?” he says. “What did you do?”

“Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, and I feel the air shift, and his eyes go dark.

He lunges for Anna with the tip of his knife at her chest, and the blade slices her slightly as blood starts to run, soaking into her white T-shirt. Anna screams, and I grab for her, but her arm slips through my hand as he wrestles her into his grip, and Rosa and I shrink back.

He’s flustered now, which makes me think he didn’t mean to do that—to actually cut her, and it threw him off, another minor loss of control that angers him. I can’t tell if throwing him off plan will help us, or if he’ll just come completely unhinged.

“There’s another video,” I say, speaking quickly.

He’s holding Anna with her arm forced behind her back. I see tears stream down her face. She doesn’t have the strength to fight him, sapped by whatever drug he’s given her. He takes out a zip tie and binds her wrist. He forces her to the ground with a knife at the back of her neck. She gives me a pleading look out of the corner of her eye. This is what he counted on. Anna half-conscious, easily controllable with a knife and zip ties. No blunt force trauma or gun or anything. It needs to look like a suicide, after all.

How did I not see this coming? How could I have left her?

He opens the trunk of his car. He’s going to take her, and I have no physical way to stop him. Then he looks to Rosa like he might lunge at her, too, but he doesn’t. He keeps his focus on Anna. Is he spinning in his mind what he’ll do to Rosa—how he’ll keep her quiet?

I step in front of her instinctively to protect her and hurl my next little bomb at him. “The video of you dragging Eddie from the utility closet to the car. I guess the cameras were working that day, after all, and I thought the police might want to see it,” I say.

He stops and turns to me, his face red and his eyes wide. “You’re lying,” he says, but what he doesn’t know is that the night I stabbed Eddie Bacco, I also set a trap for Callum, just in case that Henry video that was nagging at me was something—and just in case he betrayed me.

So I gave him my car keys, and he took on the job of moving the body out the back door of the office. Before I went to the ball in Crystal’s van that night, I turned on the security camera inside the office. It shows Callum pulling Eddie Bacco by the ankles from the utility closet and out the back door. It stops there because there’s no camera outside. But in this time stamped video, I’m in Santa Fe at a charity ball, getting arrested.

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