Page 1 of Winning Bid

1

JUNE

Pretend everything is normal.

That had been Anderson's advice to me. The good news was I’d had a lifetime of pretending things were normal. When I was a kid, my father used to beat the crap out of me and cheated on my mom like it was going out of style. All the while, he defrauded everyone we knew. Pretending things were normal was second nature to me for a very long time.

But the bad news was, it had been a long time since I had to pretend like that, and I was out of practice.

So, in an effort to pretend things are normal, I close the heavy blue and gold curtains in my office. I need darkness, and I need quiet. This is the only way to get it. Without darkness and quiet, I cannot think. And right now, thinking is the only way that we are going to dig ourselves out of this fucking mess. I sit at my desk and stare at my laptop. None of the words make any sense. It's not that I don't know the words. I do. I wrote them. But at the moment, my brain is too scattered for any of it to click in.

Anderson and I had spent our entire Sunday trying to come up with a game plan. Neither of us had any good ideas. Somehow, both of us being lawyers did not help. I wondered how normal people would handle it. But Monday morning came, and I had to go to work. That way, I could pretend everything was normal. Guilty people don't go to work.

Or at least that’s our theory.

But sitting in my office, I can’t hold still. My focus is absolute shit, and I need that to do my job. Andre Moeller hired me to find loopholes for him to be able to buy a bunch of companies, and now I can't even spell loopholes. I still don’t know why he wants me on this job instead of an actual fixer, but I guess that doesn’t really matter right now. All I can think about is Neil.

I've spent the last twenty-four hours shaking in my core. First, Anderson proposed Saturday night, and then Sunday morning, Neil’s body washed ashore near where Anderson and Moss had dumped it.

I hadn't expected to go through all of the stages of grief about this. But somehow, I have. Not because I'm sad that he's dead. Neal deserved to die. He tried to rape me. He tried to kill me. And if Anderson hadn't interceded, I’d be dead right now. I only wish he had been better at hiding the body. As I rolled through the stages, I tried to figure out what in the hell to do.

I wanted to forget it ever happened. All of it. I wanted to pretend that Neil never existed in the first place. I've been pretty good at that since the night that he was killed. But denial isn't helping me. Denial is not a plan.

I am so angry about this, and I had enough anger to go around. First, Neil attacked me. That any man would put his hands on a woman that way … Secondly, I had thought that Moss was some kind of body-burying genius. He looks like a murderer out of central casting. He's huge, with a bald head and an angry expression on his face at all times. The man reeks of murder. How is he not better at hiding a body?

And then there's the bargaining. I've never been a religious woman. But this has made me damn close to converting. If I thought that I could make a deal with God to save us from this mess, I would do it. Trouble is, I don't believe. I don't think God's making any deals with people that don't believe in him. And bargaining with people is how we got into this mess in the first place, so that’s out.

A cold, sick feeling has come over me. Some might call it depression. I don't know if depression can hit quite this fast. The problem is I don't see a way out of this. Anderson beat the living shit out of Neil. He killed him. There has to be evidence on his body. If not on his body, probably some video footage of the vehicle when they dropped him off.

Anderson told me everything about that night. That he and Moss drove way out to one of the farther docks on the edge of town. Moss already had a boat there. They drove the boat out far, and then they dumped him over the side after weighing his body down. Should have been no fuss, no muss.

Unfortunately, there is a fuss.

I'd like to say that I've moved on to acceptance. But I haven't. I can't. I don't accept it. I just got engaged, and now I might be brought up on murder charges, or my future husband might be. This is not how life is supposed to go. We did nothing wrong. He saved me. Anderson is a hero. But no one will believe that now.

Until yesterday, we've been very lucky about everything. Neil had attacked me in the lobby of my apartment building. Anderson fought him off there. But it was the middle of the night, so no one was around. There is no security in that apartment building. No cameras. Moss changed the lobby by adding plants to cover up any of the damage done during the fight. He had me spray some formula on all the blood spatters and anywhere else that I thought we may have touched. I still don't know what was in that bottle. But I assume it was used to obscure any blood or fingerprints that might have been found.

He made me think that we had committed the perfect crime. I want to choke him for being wrong.

I keep clicking from the documents that I'm working on to news sites covering the story about Neil. I can't help it. It's like a compulsion. I need to know the latest, the newest information. There isn't much, at least nothing that's publicly announced. I imagine they're trying to keep the details hush-hush. The less public knowledge there is, the better chance that they have of actually getting a confession from someone. I know how this is played.

I'm not a true crime junkie, but I might become one real fast.

I know that animals in the wild tend to leave a body in the water alone. But there are always creatures that go after a decaying corpse. It's my hope that they did enough damage that they won't be able to find anything on Anderson or me. I keep thinking back to the night that Neil attacked me. People saw us together as we left the bar I worked at. Being one of the last people to see Neil alive, I know the cops are gonna come and talk to me. It's honestly surprising that they haven't yet. But just the thought of talking to the police again is enough to start me shaking.

I became a tax attorney for a reason. I love the law. I do not enjoy talking to cops. It's nothing against them specifically. But after dealing with my dad's fraud and the fallout that came from it, plus the incident at camp, I've never had a good experience with the police. I have always felt like I was going to be the one going to prison, even when I wasn't the one in trouble.

Now is different. Now, I could be in trouble.

The mishandling of a corpse gets you three years. And that's just the start of my crimes. I want to stop tallying up the years I could be in prison for all of the crimes that I was involved in, but I can't stop doing the math. Math only ends when there's an interview online with Neil’s brother.

Do I click it? Is this something I really want to see?

But I can’t stop myself even if I want to. I start the video.

A blonde man with red eyes chokes on his words. “Whoever did this, for whatever reason, you should know you killed a great man. My brother was going places. We were all proud of him for getting out of here and going to the city. If the murderer is watching right now, I hope you burn in hell.”

I turned it off as fast as I turned it on. I feel sick. Watching that was a very, very bad idea. Obviously, his brother had no idea who he was. But I doubt most rapists go around bragging about what they do.

---