Righteous Prey by John Sandford

itcoin billionaire, amateur art historian, onetime farm boy George Sonnewell sat on a concrete abutment in a sour-milk-smelling alley near Union Square in San Francisco, the cement rough against his jean-clad butt.

The night was chilly, a good excuse for the long-sleeved work shirt and nylon Air Force jacket, heavy jeans, and boots, although a neutral observer might have been puzzled by the translucent vinyl gloves he wore on his hands.

The clothing had been worn only this once, the better to minimize the transfer of DNA to a murder victim.

And he waited, a predator in plaid.

Overhead, between the buildings, he could see exactly one star, surrounded by roiling purple nighttime clouds that reflected the kaleidoscope of city lights back to earth. Though he rarely used alcohol, Sonnewell had three-fourths of a jug of Burnett’s peach vodka by his hip.

Bait.

His hands trembled. Nerves, he thought. He was scared, but he was going for it.

And here came Duck Wiggins, right on schedule, down the alley that he considered his alley. He spotted Sonnewell and the jug. Wiggins was a battered man, his face a collection of fleshly crevasses, eroded by his years on the street. His beard might almost have been mistaken for religious expression, so twisted and solid with filth it was.

Wiggins said, “Hey! This is my street, bitch!” and a moment later, “Whatchagot there?”

Sonnewell, matching the aggression: “What the fuck is it to you?”

“Gimme a taste.”

“Why should I?”

Wiggins: “Give me a taste and I’ll blow you. Later.” He was lying. He was the top of the food chain, not this dweeb sitting on the wall like Humpty Dumpty.

Sonnewell pretended to think about it: “Bite me and I’ll kill you.”

“I don’t bite.”

Sonnewell pretended to think about it some more: “Okay.”

They sat together, a yard apart on the abutment, silent except for the steady gurgling of the vodka—Wiggins got on it and never let up. It occurred to him at one point that the other man was neither drinking nor complaining, but if he wasn’t complaining, then Wiggins wasn’t complaining.

Sonnewell turned as if to say something, but instead cocked his arm and struck Wiggins at the base of the skull with a scything forearm blow, knocking the other man off the wall, facedown in the alley. The bottle fell backward, still on the wall, but didn’t break.

As Wiggins hit the ground, Sonnewell dropped all his two hundred and twenty pounds on his back. Too drunk to fight, Wiggins tried to push up and then to roll, but the other man forced him down to the broken concrete.

Wiggins, face to the side, mumbling into the dirt: “Wha . . . t’ . . . fuck?”

Sonnewell pulled a short hard-finished nylon rope from his hip pocket. The ends of the rope were knotted around four-inch lengths of dowel, like an old-fashioned lawnmower starter rope, the better to grip it. He dragged the rope past Wiggins’ forehead, nose, lips, and chin to his neck, and pulled on the dowels for a long three minutes as Wiggins thrashed and kicked and pounded the concrete with his fists.

Sonnewell cursed and looked up and down the alley as he rode the other man, fearing a witness, but he’d chosen the kill site carefully and there were no other eyes. The alcohol was too much for Wiggins to overcome; Sonnewell won in the end.

When he was sure Wiggins was dead, Sonnewell untangled the rope from his victim’s neck, put it back in his hip pocket, looked up and down the alley. Then he crossed Wiggins’ feet and turned them, rolling the dead man onto his back.

Wiggins’ forehead was wet with sweat and maybe vodka, and air burped from his lungs, creating a stench compounded of alcohol and old meat. Sonnewell took a black Sharpie from his shirt pocket and wrote a careful “1” on Wiggins’ forehead. He retraced the “1” three times, to make sure it was perfectly clear. When he was satisfied, he stood, looked both ways, and left Wiggins as he lay.

Sonnewell was a half mile from his car and it was dark, and the San Francisco streets were mean. He touched his hip, where he’d tucked a compact nine-millimeter handgun. He was not to be fucked with, not on this night. Before he left the alley, he pulled on a dark blue Covid mask; he shouldn’t get close enough to anyone to get Covid, but it was a useful disguise.

As he walked back to his car, he passed a row of tents inhabited by homeless people. He left the remains of the vodka there, next to a tattered plastic POW flag planted in a bucket of dirt.

When he got to his Mercedes SUV, unharmed, he locked himself inside, took out a burner phone, and called a memorized number. The phone call was answered by a woman. Her name was Vivian Zhao. She lived somewhere in Southern California, but he wasn’t sure where. One thing he did know for sure: she was crazier than a shithouse mouse, and smart.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“Done. Alley near Union Square. As we discussed.”

“You’re my hero,” she said. “Don’t forget to throw the phone away. And your rope.”

She hung up.

On the way out of town—Sonnewell lived south down the peninsula, in Palo Alto—he asked himself how he felt about killing a man. He was interested, but not surprised, to find that he was now genuinely frightened.

He would be frightened for a while, he thought. Accompanying the fear was an unfamiliar and growing exhilaration.

Sonnewell had grown up on a Central Valley corn farm, one of the four abused children of a hard-faced descendant of Okies who’d actually made it in California. His father believed, as his parents and grandparents had, in the fist and the razor strop. Sonnewell, his two brothers and his sister, lying on the banks of a local creek, had talked of killing the old man. They’d never done it, or even tried, though the talk had been serious.

Through strange and unrepeatable circumstances, Sonnewell had once invested fifty thousand dollars in a thing called Bitcoin. When he’d sold out, with Bitcoin at $46,000 per coin, he was a billionaire. He’d ripped off ten million dollars for each for his siblings and they unanimously told their father that he and his farm could go fuck themselves.

Yet, in his heart, Sonnewell was still an American farm boy, and believed in an America he saw dissolving around him. Half the people in the Central Valley couldn’t speak English; the crazies who ran the California government had jacked taxes so high that ordinary hardworking people could hardly make it without abasing themselves before the assholes in the statehouse. The assholes who stood by as the great coastal cities of California were swarmed under by the unclean, the unhealthy, the addicted, the grasping.

Like Duck Wiggins.

The product of beatings since he was a toddler, Sonnewell was not quite right in the head.

He knew that. He was willing to use his difference.

---

AS SONNEWELL WAS pushing down the peninsula, U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport was pulling into his driveway in St. Paul, Minnesota, half a continent away. Snow was falling: more than a flurry, less than a blizzard. There were two new inches of snow on the driveway, and he knew, as he drove across it, that he’d leave frozen tracks behind himself that wouldn’t come off with a snowblower. He’d either have to laboriously scrape off the tracks in the morning, or they’d be there until February or March.

Though it was late, there were lights in the windows. He pulled into the garage, got out of the car, walked back outside and turned his face up to the snowflakes. They were like feathers, caressing his face; cold, tender, refreshing.

From well down the street, he could hear the faint tingling of recorded Christmas music coming from a house that must have had six hundred red, blue, and green lights hanging from it, and a sleigh with eight plastic reindeer in the front yard, along with a crèche. It was far enough away that he didn’t mind, but he suspected the nonstop jingles were driving the adjacent neighbors nuts. Christmas was two weeks gone. In his opinion, it was time to can the Christmas tunes.

As the snowflakes evolved from refreshing to cold and wet, he went back into the garage, dropped the overhead door, and walked through the access door into the house, where his wife, Weather, was burning toast.

“You’re burning the toast,” he called.

Weather ran back into the kitchen and popped up the toast. “Mmm,” she said, “Peanut butter–covered charcoal.”

“Do anything good today?” Lucas asked.

“Skin grafts on a guy who got fried trying to fix a high-tension wire,” she said. She was a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. Her tone was routine because the work had been routine; it was what she did. “Blew most of the fat off his body. He’s got the face of a thirty-year-old angel, but everything below his neck is a mess of scar tissue.”

“Nice image,” Lucas said, shucking his coat. He hung it on a hook in the hallway between the kitchen and garage.

“How about you? You catch him?” she asked.

“No, but I’ve got a better idea where he might be hiding. Not that I care much. He’s not exactly Al Capone.”

“What are you going to do now?” Weather asked. She was a short slender woman, with blue eyes and an oversized, slightly bent nose, which Lucas had found instantly attractive when they first met: gave her a craggy aspect. Her hair, originally a dishwater blond, was showing the first hints of gray, and now was being managed by an enormously expensive hairdresser named Olaf, though only Lucas considered him enormously expensive.

“Get a beer, and either watch some basketball from the West Coast or roll around in the bed with my old lady,” Lucas said.

“I’ll meet you upstairs in fifteen minutes,” Weather said. “My breath will smell like peanut butter and burnt toast.”

“Mmm. Peanut butter.” He patted her on the ass on his way to the refrigerator.

---

LUCAS WOKE AT ten o’clock the next morning, pleasantly relaxed after the moderately athletic sex. He got up, yawned, scratched his stomach and wandered downstairs in his undershorts and tee-shirt, made himself a cup of cocoa with tiny marshmallows, turned on his laptop and brought up the Google news feed.

The headlines weren’t all bullshit, but most of them were; his eyes hooked on a short story about a man strangled in San Francisco, the strangulation having been announced in a press release by the killer. The press release was attached to the story as a sidebar.

A vertical wrinkle formed between Lucas’ eyes. A killer was sending out press releases?

We are all, he thought, going to hell.

THE FIVE

If you have money, a lot of money, as all of us do, how do you get your thrills? Skydiving? Fight clubs? Orgies? Gambling? Fly your own jet, sail your own super-yacht? Well, of course you do. All of that. But it gets old, doesn’t it? It has for the Five.

So now, to liven our lives, we’re going to murder people who need to be murdered. We’re doing a service to the American culture at large, and at the same time, enjoying the extreme thrill of being hunted by the police, by the FBI, by whomever takes the time to chase us. Yes: we are going to help rid America of its assholes. We invite others to join in. Really. Please do. We can’t get this done alone. So many assholes, so little time.

As for us, we’ve already killed the first of our designated victims, Duck Wiggins. Wiggins lived on the streets of San Francisco. He was a disgusting piece of human trash. He stole, he raped, he precipitated fights, he attacked innocent elderly Asians, and the San Francisco police believe he stabbed at least three of his fellow denizens of the gutters. And, of course, he defecated on the sidewalks whenever he felt the urge.

One of the Five strangled him this morning. We put a numeral “1” on his forehead and San Franciscans will no longer have to put up with Wiggins’ vicious insanity.

To complicate the moral matters for all of you, each of the Five have put an anonymous, untraceable Bitcoin (worth $44,123.23 apiece at the instant of this writing) into a Bitcoin wallet whose address we’ve already sent to Street of Hope, a San Francisco organization dedicated to helping the homeless. Will Street of Hope accept the $220,616.15 (as of this instant) to do good? Or refuse to do $220,616.15 of good on grounds that it’s blood money? We shall see, shan’t we?

The Five

(Next up? A politician! Stay tuned to this station.)

---

A WEEK AFTER the Wiggins murder, an almost cartoonishly handsome dude—and a dude he was, with big shoulders, square teeth, a chin he could have used to chop wood, a thousand-dollar sport coat, loafers worn without socks—snuck out the back door of the Asiatic Hotel in Houston, Texas. He planned to walk around the corner to where he’d parked his car.

His simple plan was sidetracked by a bottle blonde, a beauty, maybe thirty, maybe a little older, medium tits, small waist, tight ass, the whole alluring package. She was leaning against the wall of the theater building across a narrow brick walkway from the good-looking guy, next to a door used by the stage talent. She was wearing a black silk blouse and dark skinny jeans. She was smoking a cigarette, like one of those ’40s stunners in the black-and-white noir films.

The good-looking guy was not bashful. He pulled up, nearly stumbled, and said, “Whoa! Howya doing, girlie? All alone in the dark?”

“Taking a break between sets,” she said. He could hear the faint sound of music behind her, coming from the partially open door. She frowned, stepped closer to him, said, “Say . . . are you Jack Daniels?”

He gave her his best whitened-tooth grin. “Maybe. You from around here, or are you traveling?”

“From Austin,” she said. She looked out of the alley toward the street. They were alone. “Are you sure you’re really . . . let me see your face.”

She reached out a slender hand, as if to turn his head into the light. Daniels let her do it, the grin still on his face. She didn’t touch him, though. She had the blade of a straight razor tight between two fingers, snatched her hand back toward herself, nothing gentle about it, and Daniels felt a streak of cold pain, like a lightning strike, across his neck.

The woman stepped away and he realized, as blood gushed across his thousand-dollar sport coat, that she was wearing translucent vinyl gloves.

Andi Carter’s father was the executive vice president of the LaFitte National Bank in New Orleans. He’d never be president, nor would he ever be less than the exceptionally well-paid executive vice president.

When Andi Carter’s father was thirty-eight, his wife had run off with a building contractor to begin a new and better life in the Florida Keys. Her father was left in a middle-management bank job with not much in the way of prospects and with no notable assets . . . with one exception.

Her.

A smoking-hot thirteen-year-old, she’d caught the eye of several LaFitte executives and board members. They’d collectively made a deal with her father, and thereafter taught Andi the ways of the world, along with several uncomfortable sexual acts. They eventually (under some duress) pooled money to send her to Wharton, at eighteen, to study finance. Her father, in the meantime, had been promoted into the do-nothing executive vice president position. From which he’d never be promoted or demoted. That’s just the way it was, in New Orleans, if you’d whored out your teenaged daughter.

At Wharton, Carter had been told about this extraordinary investment opportunity in a thing called Bitcoin; all the smart kids were talking about it. She’d extracted the necessary money (under some duress) from the bank executives and board members, and though she’d gotten in a little late, it wasn’t too late. A few years later, she was worth more than all the executives and board members put together. She could have bought the bank, if she’d wanted it.

She didn’t.

Now, in the alley with the slightly crazy Andi Carter bending over him, Jack Daniels bled to death, but not instantly. When cut, he’d staggered in a circle, grasping at his neck, his carotid artery slashed open by the razor and furiously pumping out his lifeblood.

When he finally fell, Carter had again looked out toward the street, then dragged the body to the end of the walkway and behind the dumpster there, leaving a long bloody streak on the bricks. It was hard work, made easier by the jolt of adrenaline that was surging through her.

When they were out of sight from the street, she squatted and watched in the harsh illumination of a LED penlight as the last of Daniels’ blood trickled out on the bricks. Trickling, not pumping: his heart had stopped.

She gagged once, not because of the blood, but because of the rotten-tomato-sauce and spoiled-banana odors that lingered behind the dumpster. When she was sure he was gone, she took a Sharpie from her purse and wrote a loopy “2” on Daniels’ forehead. She packed the penlight in her purse, along with the tissue-wrapped straight razor and the Sharpie, and removed a compact 9mm pistol, just in case—she was not in a good part of Houston.

She walked three blocks to her Panamera, which had a splash of mud across the license plate, obscuring the number. Still wearing the gloves, gun in hand, she made it to the car unmolested, looked at her watch. She’d be back home in New Orleans well before dawn. She took a burner phone from under the front seat, punched in a memorized number, and said, “It’s done. Straight razor, his body’s behind a dumpster at the side of the Asiatic Hotel.”

The woman on the other end said, “A dumpster? That’s so delicious.”

“The best thing of my life, Vivian,” Carter said. “I want to do another.”

“That can happen—but we should leave some room for Three, Four, and Five before we go all Lizzie Borden.”

“I guess. But move them along, huh?”

“I will.”

Carter clicked off. The phone would be dropped on a dark portion of I-10, its parts run over a thousand times before first light. She’d stop on a side street to wipe the mud off her license plate, so a cop wouldn’t stop her for that violation, and maybe remember it, if her car had been photographed as it passed near the murder scene. She giggled as she pulled off the blonde wig, threw it in the back seat, and settled down to drive.

That whole thing with the executives and the board members? It had left a mark on her psyche, one not easy to rinse out. Not that she tried too hard.

THE FIVE

We’re pleased to announce the death of the second of our designated assholes, U.S. Representative Clayton “Jack” Daniels of Brownsville, Texas. He was a real turd: a man of no morals, a liar, a racist, a deeply corrupt rabble-rouser who opposed the timely imposition of Covid-19 protective measures, a man whose vote in Congress was openly for sale to the highest bidder. He needed to go, for the safety of us all.

One of us cut his throat with a straight razor early this morning—those are not easy to come by, in this day and age—and left his body in the alley behind the Asiatic Hotel in downtown Houston. Note to Houston police: look behind the dumpster. Another note to police: look for Bunny Blue’s fingerprints. They should be all over the bed.

We put a numeral “2” on Daniels’ forehead and Americans will no longer have to put up with his political and sexual debaucheries.

Again, to make the murder more interesting, each of the Five have placed an untraceable Bitcoin in a wallet with the address sent to the Texas Poverty Law Center, which leads the fight against Texas hate groups. At the time of the donation, each coin was worth $42,320 U.S. dollars for a total of $211,600. Will the TPLC accept the blood money? We shall see. Fun, isn’t it?

The Five

(Next up? We’re killing a real greedhead!!)

---

AS CARTER WAS rolling through the night toward New Orleans, Virgil Flowers, an agent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, was working late in front of a Lenovo computer. He looked up from page 388 of a 500-page printed Microsoft Word manuscript that had been edited in red ink, to the same manuscript on the computer screen. He corrected an on-screen typo and . . .

Quit for the night.

“Jesus.” No one awake to hear him. He’d been crouched over the screen for five hours and his back ached like fire. He stretched, scratched his head, yawned, and printed out the chapter he’d just edited.

The printer ran for a while, stopped, signaling that it was out of paper. Virgil put more High Bright Boise Multi-Use copy paper in the printer and it started grinding away again. When the last page came out, he moved the edited paper manuscript to the “done” box on his desk and saved the electronic manuscript to his local drive, to the cloud, and to a thumb drive.

He didn’t want to do it, but he’d need to print out and read the whole paper manuscript one last time after he’d edited all five hundred on-screen pages. Doing that, he’d probably find another five hundred small changes.

He’d learned that if he read the novel on paper, he could more easily spot problems. It was a pain in the ass but had to be done. He kicked back in his chair and looked at the stack of paper: this one was good, he thought.

His first effort, the beginner novel, had been naïve. He hadn’t known what he was doing, but he had been learning. The second novel, the practice novel, had been better, but was rejected by a New York literary agent, though she’d been encouraging.

“You write well,” Esther had said, in a thirty-two-second conversation. “You need more complications, more characters, and you need to spend more time developing them. You need to keep the velocity, but you do have to spend enough time with the characters to make them three-dimensional.”

He’d done that with this third novel.

---

THE NEXT MORNING, he woke late—he’d been up until two o’clock—and found his girlfriend, Frankie, sitting in the kitchen, feeding the twins and simultaneously reading the Daily Mail, the American edition, as she did each morning.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Got up to page three hundred eighty-eight on the rewrite. I’ll finish the inserts tonight.” He got Cheerios from the cupboard and milk from the refrigerator. “One more trip through, and it’s gone.”

One of the twins poked a Cream of Wheat–covered spoon at him and said, “Da,” looked confused for a moment, then went back to her Cream of Wheat. Frankie said, “Good. You’re gonna sell this one.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Virgil said, settling across the table.

The Daily Mail was voracious in its search for the very worst things that happened in the United States each day, and now, Frankie said, “A Texas congressman got his throat cut last night. Somebody wrote a ‘2’ on his forehead.”

Eyebrows up: “Like the ‘1’ in San Francisco?”

“Exactly. Press release came out before the cops found the body.”

“Fuckin’ cops,” Virgil said.

“This is gonna be something,” Frankie said. “Actually, it already is something. I’ll bet you ten American dollars that CNN is all over it this afternoon. Breaking News!”

“Fuckin’ CNN.”

The late nights on the novel left him feeling grumpy.

---

 

A WEEK AFTER that, it was Jamie McGruder’s turn, the Minnesota ninja warrior in training.

McGruder slipped over the brick wall and duckwalked across ankle-deep snow and past a line of dormant bridal wreath bushes that edged the swimming pool. He was leaving tracks, but the front two inches of his size thirteen boots were stuffed with paper to make them easier to control on his size ten-and-a-half feet.

McGruder was a tall young man with dark hair, gray eyes, and long, feminine eyelashes. He was wrapped in a dark green Givenchy down parka ($2,990 from Nordstrom) along with black gloves and a black ski mask. He was wearing a black Tumi backpack. He was a hard body who worked out an hour every day under the eyes of a personal fitness coach. Until six months earlier, he’d never considered murder, not that he personally had anything against it.

He’d scouted the mansion, inside and out, and knew where the security cameras were located. The closest one was at the corner of the empty swimming pool, but on the far side of the bridal wreath.

The half owner of the house, Anson Sikes, was in New York. His wife, Hillary Sikes, the other half owner, should be on the move, coming home; she rarely left her office later than six o’clock. The housekeeper was in her apartment at the back of the house. He’d seen her shadow on the window shades.

McGruder had never served in the military but had taken a dozen courses from the wannabe tactical schools. He’d trained in knife fighting, sniping, pistol shooting, scuba diving, and evasive driving. He’d learned to spot enemies who were following him, in cars, on motorcycles, or on foot, and he’d learned how to lose them.

He’d spent a year in a boxing gym, where an instructor lied and told him that if he continued to work out for another three years, he’d be ranked in the top ten light-heavies. He’d jumped out of an airplane with a tac pack dangling below him; he had a brown belt in karate and would be a black belt within a year.

In stalking Hillary Sikes, most of that training had proven to be useless, although, he thought, maybe he could use it someday. And he had a pistol in his pack. He was an excellent shot, even if he said so himself.

All that training, but never yet knowing the thrill of an actual kill.

Yet.

McGruder moved slowly through the expensive snow-covered landscaping, mostly duckwalking, but sometimes on his stomach, as much for the thrill of it, the ninja vibe, as for concealment. He took a full minute to cross the last open space to the corner of the garage and settle there in the soft snow.

In January 2011, in McGruder’s first year at Harvard, he’d turned eighteen and had received the initial payment from the trust set up by his grandfather: one million dollars. He would receive another million at age twenty-one, another at age twenty-five, and the last million at thirty.

At eighteen, the twelve years to age thirty seemed like an eternity, and a million, well, it wasn’t really all that much, was it? Not in this day and age. You couldn’t exactly go crazy with it, or you’d find yourself broke. His stingy wastrel parents made him pay his college costs from his trust, but okay, he had that covered. What should he do with the rest? Could he use it to make more?

The boy had a gambling gene and he’d heard about this thing called Bitcoin. Some ultrasmart computer nerds told him it was going to be big. In February 2011, Bitcoin reached parity with the U.S. dollar and McGruder thought, what the fuck, what else are you going to do with your money? Buy more shoes? Another guitar? He put a hundred and ten thousand dollars into Bitcoin at $1.10. A hundred thousand bitcoins.

In November 2020, Bitcoin reached $18,000 per coin and he dumped the whole lot, only to curse himself later when Bitcoin got to $60,000. Still, his original investment was worth better than a billion dollars even after he paid his taxes, which he carefully did, and being a self-made billionaire at twenty-eight wasn’t all that bad.

Until he got bored.

The band was particularly disappointing. McGruder sang and played rhythm guitar—rhythm guitar because he’d only learned the chords A, C, D, E, G, plus E minor, A minor, and D minor, because they were easy. He simply couldn’t do bar chords, which the B and F required, because the strings fell in the cracks of his index finger.

He also wrote some songs, three or four chords each. He thought they were pretty good, until he overheard the bass player, in discussing the music they were playing, refer to him as “the dipshit.”

He’d fired her that same night but hadn’t since been able to escape the secret feeling that he might actually be a dipshit. Even with all the money, the tactical stuff, the karate, the jumping out of airplanes, the high-end pussy. When he was at Harvard, he’d never been one of the guys invited to go out and drink until they were projectile vomiting, or to drive a rental car to Miami and back on a four-day weekend.

Because, he suspected, nobody liked him. Not even his parents—his parents least of all. He couldn’t imagine what his mother was thinking when she bore him. Must have thought she was getting some kind of stuffed toy, like you’d win at a carnival.

So here he was, a simmering human soup of resentment, creeping across Hillary Sikes’ yard, dressed in dark green and in black. Halfway across, it occurred to him that dark clothing might not be the best camouflage in a snow-covered landscape. Whatever. At the corner of the garage, he pulled off his backpack, slowly, slowly, and extracted a Japanese chef’s knife with a fat nine-inch blade. The knife was sharp enough to cut through a thread floating in the air.

McGruder was wearing cross-country ski gloves made of leather and nylon fabric, the better to handle the knife. They were uninsulated and his hands were very cold. He touched his pants pocket and the Sharpie was there. He pulled it out and slipped it into his parka’s handwarmer pocket, along with his hands, and waited.

The frigid Minnesota air held no water and he could feel the hair prickling inside his nose as he breathed. Not since the day he’d cashed the Bitcoin had he felt like this, so alive; the tension, the engagement, gripping him like a fist. He could still back out, but everything had gone so well that he didn’t believe he would.

There would come a moment, though, when he’d either have to commit, or not. If he didn’t, he never would. That moment was coming.

Then it did.

Down the driveway, he saw a flash of light through the inch-wide gap in the security gate panels. A moment later, the gates were fully open and the Lexus SUV rolled up the curving stone driveway as the garage door started up and the interior lights came on. Hillary Sikes slowed as she approached her parking spot. Her summer-only Ferrari Portofino crouched in an adjacent stall like a crimson bullet; not something she’d want to ding, McGruder thought, so she shouldn’t be looking into the rearview mirror.

But you never knew, did you? That you couldn’t know was part of the thrill. If she saw him, locked the car and called the cops, he’d be in real trouble.

With that thought blundering through his brain, McGruder pulled the pin.

As the car edged into the garage, for a second it blocked the camera that covered the driveway. McGruder lurched forward, duckwalking, at first beside the car. Then, as it drove deeper into the garage, he moved behind it, holding his breath against the exhaust. The garage door rolled down behind him.

The garage was heated and Sikes swiveled and stepped down from the seat of the Lexus, scarlet Manolo Blahnik BB pumps flashing below an ankle-length silver fox coat; the coat was hanging open.

Sikes walked briskly around the back of the car, jingling her car keys, and then opened her mouth to scream as McGruder lurched up and slipped the chef’s knife into her chest below the breastbone, angled upward to slice through her heart. He simultaneously slapped a gloved hand over her mouth to smother any scream.

Through the thin leather of his knife-hand glove, he could feel her heart thrashing against the blade. He pressed her against the car and the scream never made it out of the garage. She died there, lying like a murdered silver fox in a puddle of purple blood. McGruder extracted the blade from her chest, wiped it on her blouse, swiveled, dropped it in the pack. Took the Sharpie from his coat pocket and wrote the numeral “3” above Sikes’ half-open eyes.

He stood, looked down at her, awaiting the rush: and oddly, he didn’t feel much. A deceased woman, lying on a concrete floor. Nothing to do with him . . .

One of her pumps had come off. He picked it up, looked at it in the overhead light, turning it, and then impulsively pulled the pump off her other foot and put them both in his backpack. For the trophy room he’d someday build. Ten seconds later, he was out through the garage access door; moving slowly across a short open space and then behind the bridal wreath, to the wall and over.

The neighborhood, part of the lake country west of Minneapolis, was heavily treed. His car was a quarter mile away, in a lakeside parking lot with two dozen others, kids and parents out on the ice, whacking a puck around. The road was actually a lane, barely wide enough for two cars to pass, trees right down to the edge of the tarmac, with almost no traffic.

He stayed at the very edge of the lane except when a car went by—there was only one—and then he stepped behind a bush where he would be invisible. At the parking lot, he waited until there was no one walking toward a car, then hurried across the lane to his Subaru Outback.

He drove a mile out, stopped on a dark back road to pull the stolen plates off his car. They went across a fence into a snowdrift. Another few miles, he was on I-494, following the loop around the Twin Cities to an intersection with I-94 east of St. Paul. On the way, he took a burner phone out of his pocket and called a number he’d already entered.

The woman on the other end asked, playfully, “How’s my boy?”

He said, “Done. With the knife. She was wearing a silver fox fur coat, if you need a detail for the press release. It was soaking up her blood when I left.” He didn’t mention the shoes.

“How do you feel?”

He thought about it for a moment, then came up with the word: “Ebullient.”

---

AT I-94, MCGRUDER turned east, crossed the St. Croix River into Wisconsin. Forty minutes later, at Menomonie, Wisconsin, the first flakes of snow began bouncing off his windshield. Hadn’t counted on snow. He peered up at the sky but could see nothing at all.

By the time he reached Eau Claire, he was driving thirty miles an hour on the interstate, through a tunnel of snow defined by his headlights and by the winking red taillights of a semitrailer ahead of him. He could see an occasional flash of lightning in the sky. He eased around the exit at Eau Claire and headed north.

Driving was still difficult, but he was only going a few blocks up the hill. Now moving at ten miles an hour, alone on the street, he took a left, stopped to look at the street sign to make sure he had it right—he did—and then continued through the business park. Slowing again, he found the building he used as a landmark, then turned onto a dirt trail. Another hundred yards and he saw a pile of broken blacktop, another landmark.

Head down, he got out of the car, took a flashlight from his pack, and checked his location. He needed to pull forward another ten feet, and then make a left turn. He got back in the car and did that.

With the car now wedged between two fifteen-foot piles of dirt, he parked, and again got out into the storm. He had two two-gallon plastic containers of gasoline in the back seat. He got them out, and, hunched against the wildly blowing snow, poured the gas through the passenger compartment.

When he’d finished, he threw the two containers onto the back seat, opened all the windows and doors, took a wadded piece of computer printer paper out of his parka pocket, lit it with a BIC lighter, and threw the burning paper into the car.

The gasoline flashed into roaring flame, singeing his eyebrows. He stepped away, then hurried on foot back the way he’d come. He had a good long trek ahead of him, but he was wearing the world’s warmest parka, and with his head bent against the wind, he trudged toward the University of Wisconsin campus.

Overhead, there was a flash and a peal of thunder. Thundersnow usually didn’t last long; it hadn’t been snowing twenty miles west of Eau Claire, and he believed that like most thunderstorms, this one would be moving east. He’d get to his car, wait the storm out, and then head back to the Cities.

If he pushed it, he might have time to drop by a club. He was well known at a couple of them and they all had security cameras. If he could get his face on a camera, the night of the murder, that’d be icing on the cake.

And he would greatly enjoy himself, and enjoy the mental image of the asshole lying on the cold concrete of her garage floor. He might even try walking around in her shoes that night.