Page 178 of Dead Man's List

She pulled on a pair of disposable gloves. “My heart’s racing.”

But she was exhilarated. Sam could see it in her pretty blue eyes.

She drew a deep breath and pulled open the locker, Ryland standing behind her so that he could capture the whole thing on video. “Wow,” Kit said, staring into the locker. “He actually worked out here?”

Because it was filled with stinky shoes and exercise clothes.

Kit began removing them, placing each into evidence bags asshe verbally cataloged each item for the recording. “More shoes, more shorts,” she muttered. “A tennis racquet, a racquetball racquet, and…what is this?”

“That, Kit,” Sam said, “is a squash racquet.”

She gave him an indecipherable look before returning to the locker. “Some very smelly socks and…gross, a jockstrap.” Then she made a sound of satisfaction. “One gym bag.” She set it in an evidence box and unzipped it. Then reached in and pulled out a three-ring binder. “Bingo.”

Navarro came to stand on her left as she opened the binder. Sam stood on her right and held his breath.

“Oh my God,” Sam whispered as he scanned the first page. “Ronald Tasker said they were movers and shakers, but…oh my God.”

“Indeed,” Navarro murmured. “Shit. This is going to cause big waves downtown. There are politicians, CEOs…” He grimaced. “A few cops, even.”

Munro had been quite organized. There was a column for the name of his victim, the date on which the crime—or crimes—was committed, the nature of the crime, the date the blackmail began, and the amount of the payment.

Kit flipped through the pages, her eyes wide. “There are more than sixty names on this list. And only a few have lines drawn through them.”

One was Hugh Smith, the man who’d outed his fellow blackmailees. Another was Earl O’Hanlon, the man who’d committed suicide after Munro had drained him dry. Another was Trisha Finnegan, the woman who’d informed Munro that she was no longer going to pay him after her ex-husband had discovered her indiscretion.

“Drummond,” Kit said, reading the man’s name withsatisfaction. “He was paying twenty thousand a month.” Because Rita’s mother wasn’t the first woman he’d killed. Munro was blackmailing Drummond for the murder of the housekeeper he’d hired before Maria Mendoza. “He was probably hoping Joel would give him transactional immunity if the list became public.”

“There’s Shoemaker,” Sam said and Kit paused in her page turning. “He’d been paying Munro for more than four years.”

“Incest, kidnapping, sexual assault, and sexual battery,” Kit read. “Munro knew that Shoemaker was kidnapping and raping girls, that he was raping his own daughter, and he didn’t report him. He profited from it.”

I’m so glad he’s dead. That they’re both dead.Sam would remember the words on that page the next time he felt the tiniest bit guilty for his part in killing Peter Shoemaker. That man deserved to die. Sam only wished he’d suffered more.

“It also appears,” Kit went on, “that Shoemaker was paying Munro more than anyone else on this list. His payment was fifty grand a month. That’s how much Munro took out of his bank account the day he disappeared, because Shoemaker demanded it from him.”

That left Sam a little breathless. “Fifty thousand dollars a month for four years…” He quickly did the math. “That’s two million, four hundred thousand dollars.”

Kit turned to meet Sam’s gaze. “I’d feel like Munro owed me a Ferrari, too.” She closed the binder and dropped it into a large plastic evidence bag. “I think my brain has enough to process tonight and I feel like I need a million showers. I didn’t want to know that so many people in this city were this evil. Is it okay if I go home now, boss?”

Navarro’s smile was gentle. “Of course. You and I can go overthis list on Monday. I imagine Joel Haley and his boss will want to be involved.”

Kit pulled off the disposable gloves and dropped them in another evidence bag, just in case there was any trace evidence transferred from the locker’s contents to her gloves.

“Come on,” Sam said. “I’ll drive you home now.”

She and Sam were quiet until they were back in Sam’s RAV4. “Just…give it to me straight, Sam.”

He fastened his seat belt and looked over at her. “What?”

“Do you play squash?”

He laughed. “And if I do?”

She sighed, long and loud. “Then I guess I’ll have to stop giving Connor a hard time for being a snobby squash player. Do you?”

He laughed again. “Twice a month since summer. Sometimes Connor and I bowl, too.”

“Connor told me about the bowling a while back. Are you any good?”

---