He slips out the door, then waits on the stoop while I flip the dead bolts behind him. He gestures to the alarm pad, and I roll my eyes playfully, punching in the code and giving him a thumbs-up through the glass once the system is armed. Once he’s certain I’m safe, he jogs to his car and folds himself in, and a few moments later, he’s gone.
I flip off the porch light, then reconsider, flip it back on. If there was ever a night to sleep with all the lights on, every damn one of them, it’s tonight. I press my face into the glass panel and look out into the night, at the row of hulking Victorians across the street, their silhouettes looming in the darkness. An occasional upstairs window spills out golden light, but otherwise, all is still.
“I thought he’d never leave,” a familiar voice says from right behind me, and my heart stops.
28
I stand very still, a panicky fear roaring in my ears. “What... How did you get in here? How did you get past the alarm?”
Corban steps out of the shadows of my front room, dressed like the lead bad guy in a James Bond movie. Indigo jeans, an ebony sweater, black sneakers, all sleek and designer and dark as the shadows outside. He looks like he could scale the walls of my house and drop through a window without making a sound. Who knows? Maybe that’s how he got inside.
“I learned a lot from your techie husband, including how to get around an alarm.” He makes a tsking sound, and that same creepy smile pushes up his face. It scares me more now than the last time I saw it this afternoon, when I was pulling away from his house. “I told you I knew how. Looks like you should have listened.”
It takes a couple of seconds before his words register over the pounding of my heart, and then another few for me to catch his meaning. Looks like I should have listened to what? And then I understand. Corban is referring to the text from the 678 number: FYI, I know how to get around an alarm system. “Hold on. You sent that message? You’re the one who’s been texting me?”
He lifts both arms to indicate the space around us—my foyer, my house—and I take it as a yes, which means he also sent the other one. The first threat from that same number comes flooding back in razor-sharp focus: Tell me where Will hid the money or you’ll be joining him.
I look into Corban’s eyes, obsidian and more than a little unhinged, and I think he’d do it. He’d kill me and not think twice.
But why? Why send me threatening texts from one number while pretending to be Will with the other? It doesn’t make any sense. The roaring in my ears turns hollow, like I’m at the bottom of the ocean.
“Look, I don’t know where the money is. I didn’t even know about it until a few days ago.”
“Of course, you have no idea.” His words agree but not his tone. His tone says that I know where the money is, and he’ll make good on his threat if he has to.
Sweat blooms between my breasts as I shuffle backward, inching closer to the alarm pad, trying to come up with a way to distract him for three seconds. Three seconds to activate a panic button! What idiot came up with that rule? Three seconds is an eternity when you’re panicked.
I back up another half foot. “Honestly, Corban. I turned the house upside down, and it’s not here. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
His eyes narrow, zeroing in on the panel over my shoulder. “You don’t seriously think I’m that stupid, do you?”
A rhetorical question if I’ve ever heard one. I don’t answer.
He grabs me by the wrist and pulls me down the hallway, deeper into the house, farther away from the buttons on my alarm pad.
I stumble behind, searching for the imprint of a gun poking out from under his waistband, the shape of a knife strapped under his skintight clothes. As far as I can tell, he’s not armed, but he also doesn’t need to be. His gym-chiseled body is its own weapon.
He shoves me into the kitchen and swings me around, pressing me up against the lip of the sink. “What’s the plan here, Iris? To mourn Will for a month or two, then collect the life insurance and leave town under some Eat, Pray, Love I need to ‘find myself’ new age bullshit?” He serves up his quote marks with a sneer, rage exploding behind his eyes. “Surely the two of you can do better than that.”
I don’t know what to say, but he seems to be waiting for a response, and the only one I can come up with is “I...I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He makes a disgusted sound. “Where’s he waiting for you, South America? Eastern Europe? Mexico?” He snorts, and the sweat on his head glistens under the glow of the kitchen’s canned lights. “Scratch that, Mexico is too hot. We both know Will prefers cooler climates.”
I shake my head, my heart kicking up another gear. I’m trying to do the math, to piece together the logic behind Corban’s string of eighty-seven texts pretending to be my dead husband, and the words coming out of his mouth now. He’s talking like Will is still alive.
Yet Corban has tried to trick me before.
For a second or two, I consider the practicalities of going along with his delusions. If he thinks I’m in on this heist with Will, then playing along might be a halfway decent stalling strategy.
But then Corban takes two steps closer, the thick tangle of veins in his neck pulsing with what I read as rage and hatred, and I chicken out.
“I know the messages were from you. The texts and those two notes. They weren’t from Will, were they?”
He laughs, a mean, angry bark. “I always thought it was too much of a coincidence. AppSec closing in on him at the exact time he boards a plane to the one city he detested more than any other place on the planet.” He shakes his head. “Nope, never going to happen. Though I do have to give you props. Those tears yesterday were a nice touch. You’d make one hell of an actress.”
He steps back, and I skitter around him, moving deeper into the kitchen, but every time I put more than a foot or two of distance between us, Corban closes it with a long stride. It’s like a game of cat and mouse, a demented dance around my kitchen island. But now I’m almost to the hall, and I pause, calculating the distance to the back door. If I can get there, all I have to do is open it, and I’ll set off the alarm. Can I get there?
He laughs at whatever he sees on my face. “Have you ever seen a black man run? Don’t even bother.”
I steer the conversation back to safer ground. “I’m not acting. I’m a grieving widow who found out the man she married was a thief, one who stole four and a half million dollars from his employer.”
“Five.”
“What?”
“Five million, and I stole it. Me. I’m the one who came up with the plan. Will only executed it.” He puffs up his chest, punching a thumb into the very center. “Do you know how complicated this deal was? How many layers I had to work through to get my hands on the CSS stock? Only someone highly skilled and dangerously intelligent could have come up with a plan that genius. Thanks to me, we walked away with five million dollars.”