Page 76 of No Merciful Corruption

“It’s obvious the only solution here is to torch the place. The body has to burn hot enough to destroy most, if not all evidence of foul play. And there’s no way we can do that without an accelerant of some kind.”

“A fire is messy and accelerants are traceable. Too many things can go wrong.”

“What do you suggest then?” he demands. “A forensic team would have a field day in here. There’s blood everywhere. We can’t stick him in a car and drive him off the side of the road because we don’t know what an autopsy would reveal. A fire is unreliable but still enough to create reasonable doubt and that’s all we need.”

Disappearing him is out of the question. A young, attractive white man from a well-connected upper middle-class family with an affluent background mysteriously vanishes on the night he goes to visit his estranged wife? His estranged pregnant wife whom he’s repeatedly accused of infidelity and is actively trying to divorce him? It’s a true crime docuseries waiting to happen. The last thing any of us needs is for this to end up on the news.

What other options do we have then? He’s already dead. God, I regret not listening to Dahlia. Had I known things were going to go this way regardless I’d have made sure we got rid of him in a way that was seamless. Foolproof. Now I have to figure out a way to dispose of his body without making Karina seem like a prime suspect in his death. Which judging from the looks of it, she is.

Car accident won’t work and neither will staging a suicide. Not with the mess in the hallway.

Fire it is then.

“All right…” I concede. “Call Lettie. See if there’s anything in her little box of poisons that’ll help us.”

Diego’s eyes darken from ocean blue to cobalt. “She has very peculiar hobbies.”

“Well, they come in handy now, don’t they?”

While he calls our sister, I enter the dining room where Dahlia and Karina immediately cease their whispering.

“We’re giving Lettie a call. She’s going to help us stage the place.”

Karina is unsettlingly composed when she speaks. “What do you plan on doing?”

“Fire is our only option. We have to burn the place down so take anything you can’t live without and leave the rest. Otherwise it’ll look suspicious.”

Her expression turns somber. “I always liked this house…”

Dahlia reaches out and takes her cousin’s hand. “It’s just a house, Kay.”

“In the meantime, I want the two of you to go home. I’ll call Rian and see if he doesn’t mind picking you up. I don’t want either of you driving alone.”

“Rian’s in Ireland right now visiting his parents.” Dahlia grabs her phone and gets up from the table. “But I’ll ask Sasha. He won’t mind and he owes me a favor.”

She wanders to the corner of the room to place the call and I kneel before Karina who is deeply fascinated by a loose thread on her shirt sleeve.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“More than I thought I’d be.”

I do my best to say this as gently as I can. “Kay, I don’t care how it happened but I do need to know. After the body is burned, they’ll conduct an autopsy. I need to know if we’re staging the body, how, where⁠—”

“You won’t need to. The fall didn’t kill him.” Her fingers flex. Clench. She looks at me and says, “Just make sure they dig the bullet out of his chest before they burn him.”

* * *

“Spray the body with this first.” Lettie attaches a dark glass vial to the bottom of a spray painter. “It should be undetectable but don’t go overboard. A layer or two should be enough.”

Diego takes the device from our sister and turns it over in his hands with furrowed brows and a pinched expression. “How do you come up with this shit?”

“I have a lot of free time on my hands.”

She slips out of her jacket and leaves it hanging over the back of a nearby chair. Her sharp stilettos click against the tile floors as she wanders around the kitchen island to where Brent’s body has remained for the last fourteen hours. “I’m surprised he hasn’t begun to rot.”

She drops to her haunches and two perfectly manicured fingernails pull back the bed sheet to reveal the pale face underneath. “Pity…I’d have liked to finish him off myself. I still have a little bit of what I gave Garcia three years ago.”

“Apparently, it was a bullet wound.” I tell her. “Point blank.”