just made things trickier. I wasn’t fooled by Aiden’s sob story. I believed it, but that didn’t suddenly erase the fact that he’d worked for my husband, doing God knows what else. I couldn’t trust him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by that. I just…I wish I hadn’t had to go through with it. I can’t even look in the mirror without cringing.”
It was really hard to be mad at him. “You don’t look just like him. You have laugh lines around your eyes. My husband didn’t laugh enough to have those.”
That earned me a small smile from Aiden.
“You knew about Sophia withdrawing the money. And my husband’s plan to leave me. Was he…was he planning on killing me?”
“Yes.”
I couldn’t actually imagine my husband killing me. Hurting me? Sure. But why get his hands bloody if he didn’t have to? Why be plagued with nightmares if you could avoid it? “You said you ran errands for him that he didn’t want to run. Was that going to be one of them? Killing me?”
His Adam’s apple rose and then fell. “I would never hurt you.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question. Did he or did he not ask you to kill me?”
He pulled his eyes from the road. “He did. But I wasn’t going to go through with it.”
“You changed your face to protect your family. I’m a stranger. I know you would have killed me in order to protect them.”
“You’re not a stranger.”
Snuggle Muffins stirred in my lap. He could feel my agitation. He was the only one in this car that really knew me. No, Snuggle Muffins didn’t know what my favorite color was. Or why I fell in love with the white picket fence neighborhood. But he knew me better than the man beside me swearing he loved me. The one saying he was helping me escape. The one saying he never would have killed me.
“Were you in contact with Sophia Tremblay?” We got A now. The plan’s a go. It’s time.
“I have her address, if that’s what you mean. I’m not sure if she’ll still be there or not.” He told me the address from memory.
Either he had a really good memory, or he was in cahoots with her. I tried to study the side of his face to see if he was lying. But I didn’t know his tells. I didn’t know him. I felt more uneasy the farther we drove. Maybe just a little of the unease came from the fact that I hadn’t needed to cut Detective Torres’ finger off after all. Aiden had known Sophia’s address the whole time. But at least I’d seen those emails. At least I knew something was up. The loss of a thumb was worth that.
“So what was the plan exactly?” I asked. “Trick me into opening the front door for you because you had my husband’s face? Then you were going to kill me?”
“I never got the final instructions.”
Because I killed him. I ran my hand down Snuggle Muffins’ back to calm him. I knew he was growing agitated from Aiden’s answers too. He had been planning on killing us. What was to say he still wasn’t? I needed to just ask him about the emails directly. I was never one to beat around the bush when it came to life or death.
“I took Detective Torres’ phone.”
He turned to look at me again. “Why would you do that? Lying to him and kicking him in the back of the head wasn’t enough for you? Now add theft to the list.” He sped up.
Also cutting off his finger and knocking him out again. But Aiden didn’t need to know about those things. “There were a few weird emails.” I discreetly used Detective Torres’ thumb to unlock his phone. “We’re running low on supplies again,” I read. “It was signed T.” I waited to see if he had a reaction. He didn’t. “I think T is for Tremblay. I think Detective Torres was working with my husband.”
“Why would you assume that? T could stand for anything.”
Or it could stand for Tremblay. “It would make sense that she was hiding out until after I was dead. Someone could have recognized me.”
“Do you know a lot of people in Canada?”
I glared at him. “Other than my husband and his mistress? No, not many.”
He licked his lips again.
Maybe I did know one of his tells. It seemed like he licked his lips when he was nervous. Which meant…he was hiding something.