Page 47 of Trip Through Your Wires

“Sit down,” Richardson orders like I am some kind of child.

“You can’t tell me—”

“Now!”

Too stunned by his audacity to raise his voice at me, I sink back down, eyes narrowing. “Make it quick.”

“I have been waiting for this moment,” he cuts me off, placing a hand on top of the folder.

“Payoffs feel that good?” I ask snidely.

After Richardson left the store earlier, I thought long and hard about his invitation. What could he possibly have to offer me? There was only one answer—money. He wanted to pay me off to keep me from speaking out about his son. Well screw that.

Royce Richardson would not rest in peace for what he did to those girls and my best friend. His son’s memory would never know peace. Not as long as I was alive.

That is why I came. Not for money, but my best friend and the families of those girls. Their memories would not fade like the news stories. I planned to whisper it to anyone who listened.

“Payoffs are a necessity,” he smiles. “But paybacks, necessary.” I tilt my head, his comment curious. “Tell me Ms. Miller, what payback do you think my family is owed?”

“Your family?” I scoff.

“Yes,” he leans in, cologne permeating my lungs. “My family. We are the ones after all that lost a son.”

“A son that was a murderer!” I fire back.

“So,” his eyes flash. “That’s the way it is, then? An eye for an eye?”

“What?” I shake my head.

“My son,” he growls. “That is why you killed him, isn’t it? Because he took a life, so you felt justified in taking his.”

My stomach drops and the temperature in the room skyrockets. Suddenly it feels like it is one hundred degrees. My mouth goes dry and a bead of sweat rolls down my back. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Please,” he cuts off my protest. “Spare me the denial, Ms. Miller. I do not wish to hear your lying tongue. You murdered my son and I have proof.”

“Proof?” I repeat, my heart starting to race as the room tilts. The conversation had just taken a one hundred and eighty degree turn and I was no longer in control.

“Tell me,” he eyes me curiously, “while your friends were covering up what happened that night, did you think to ask them if they checked for security cameras on the surrounding properties? Or were you so arrogant playing God, that you did not worry yourself with the details?”

As the beating of my heart picks up, slamming hard against my ribs like a toddler kicking its feet during a tantrum, the memory of that night flashes in my mind. Did the guys think about that? I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about those first hours, my mind was practically catatonic by what I’d just done.

If Jake or Cruz hadn’t thought about it, how was it the man peering down at me like a shooter on a firing squad had, and more importantly, when?

“CCPD may be run by bumbling fools, but they were smart to subpoena the security footage of the surrounding homes where that body was found,” he says as if reading my mind. “I don’t know what it was that told me to look at that footage. Perhaps it was the police report from the night Royce went missing and statement of a homeless man on the beach, who said he heard an argument that night.”

“That’s why we’re here?” I ask tightly. “You have a theory—”

“I have the truth!” He slams his fist down on the table, and leans in, eyes dark like the Devil. “You murdered my son, then your friends rolled his body into the ocean like he was nothing. You made it impossible for his mother to mourn him. For me to mourn my only child!”

“Your son was a monster.” I grip the edge of the leather seat, needing something to hold onto. “He killed five girls and if I hadn’t stopped him that night he would have done the same to my best friend.”

“It was not your right to decide his fate,” he seethes. “But providence has seen to it that I now get the chance to decide yours.”

Tears fill my eyes as the very fear that sent me running up to Highland last week becomes my reality. The other shoe has just dropped, and with it, the world crashing down around me.

With the overpowering smell of Drakkar Noir churning my stomach, I bend over and throw up. Only no one is here to hold my hair and rub my back. I am all alone in this fucking nightmare, and I have no one to blame but myself.

Richardson snaps and a moment later, a scantily dressed girl is standing next to the booth with a mop and bucket. When I finish emptying my stomach, I pull my head back up and watch in disgust as he rubs his chin and eyes her lasciviously as she cleans up my vomit while swaying her hips.

---