His muscles contracted and his body jerked.
“What did you do that for?” Psycho asked.
“He should have followed my orders.”
“Put that away. I need to focus on driving.” Psycho took a hand off the wheel and gestured toward the back of her car. “Inside a gray travel bag you’ll find duct tape. There’s also a thin blanket back there. Bind him to the seat and then cover him up, will you?”
Cleo worked fast. After Eddie was taped up and covered with the blanket, she took a breath. “Thanks for the help.”
“You’re welcome.”
For the next ten minutes, they drove in silence until Psycho started talking. “Am I the only one who loses sleep at night, wondering where Bug went off to?”
Cleo rubbed some of the tension out of her neck. “I didn’t sleep well before Bug left, so I can’t say her disappearance has changed anything. I will say this, though: only a coward would run off like she did. We made a deal. She should have stuck around to finish what we all started.” Cleo stared ahead at the road. “Malice should have told us right from the beginning what she knew about Bug’s plans to take off.”
“Yeah,” Psycho agreed.
“I don’t trust Malice,” Cleo went on. “Which is why I’ve been keeping an eye on her sister.”
“Sawyer Brooks, the one who works at the Sacramento Independent?”
“Yes. Do you know her?”
“She came to see me.”
Cleo leaned forward. “She showed up at your apartment?”
“Yes. I told Malice about the visit, but I thought it was best to keep it from the rest of you since I didn’t want anyone to panic.” She shrugged. “It made sense that a journalist would want to talk to me after all the media exposure the Black Wigs has gotten, thanks to dickless wonder Brad Vicente.” There was a short pause before Psycho added, “When Malice told us that she’d known all along Bug might leave the country, I began to realize how very little we know about one another. And then last night, another sister showed up.”
Cleo gasped. “What? How many sisters are there?”
“Three. Malice, Sawyer, and Aria.”
“Is she a journalist too?”
“No. As far as I know, she’s Sawyer’s little helper. I don’t think we need to worry about them. They’re just as fucked up as the rest of us.”
Eddie moaned and wriggled beneath the blanket.
Cleo watched him closely, but her thoughts were on Malice’s sisters. She didn’t like the idea of Sawyer Brooks breathing down their necks, playing detective. And now Aria too. This information presented a new urgency to her plans and what lay ahead.
Psycho was right: they knew very little about one another. Malice, Psycho, and Bug weren’t the only ones with secrets. Shit was going to get real.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The connection between Nick Calderon and Bruce Ward hit Sawyer in a flash, jolting her awake.
The Children’s Home of Sacramento. The picture she’d seen on Nick’s Facebook page. The one with two other boys in front of the home: Bruce and Felix. Bruce had to be Bruce Ward.
She sat up and looked at the time. It was nine o’clock on Saturday. She’d slept in. Sliding her feet over the edge of the bed, she went to the living room, where she’d left her backpack, and grabbed her files, something she’d been too tired to do last night before bed.
If the name “Bruce” referred to Bruce Ward, what were the odds that two men who spent years at the same school for troubled kids would both be killed by some random person wearing a black wig and lipstick?
She tapped her finger against the picture. There were two photos of Bruce. One was of him as a kid, standing in front of the Children’s Home of Sacramento. The other was of three men, who were dressed in hunting gear. One of them was definitely the same Bruce she’d seen lying dead in his garage.
Coffee. She needed coffee.
Fifteen minutes later, Sawyer was chugging down the strong brew like it was water and thinking about Nick Calderon and Bruce Ward and how they died.
A person wearing a dark wig, the hair bluntly cut at the shoulders, was seen on a security camera at the time of Nick Calderon’s murder. Trudy Carriger saw a person fitting a very similar description leaving Bruce Ward’s house.
A dark, shoulder-length wig and red lipstick did not fit the description of the Black Wigs. According to Nick Calderon’s ex-wife, Nick was gay. Relevant or not, why would a group of pissed-off women go after a gay man?
And what about the shoe and sock? Why would both Nick Calderon and Bruce Ward remove one shoe and not the other?
Unless someone else had removed their shoe. But why?
Sawyer searched the internet, plugging in random word combinations about murdered victims who were missing a shoe. All sorts of crazy headlines popped up. She kept clicking and skimming through story after story of murderers with shoe fetishes, which didn’t fit in either of these cases since the shoe had been left behind.
Her search took her down many paths, including one article that talked about syringes being used beneath toenails and fingernails as a form of torture. Another story mentioned drug users shooting up in the crook of the elbow or between the toes to avoid track marks.
She made a note to find out whether or not Nick Calderon or Bruce Ward had drugs in their system when the autopsies were done. It seemed clear when she’d looked inside Bruce Ward’s garage that there had been a struggle. Broken glass and tools covered the cement floor, which told her Bruce Ward had tried to fight off his attacker. Maybe the killer hadn’t expected a fight and in his or her haste to leave forgot to put the sock and shoe back on the victim. The likelihood of that happening in both cases, though, was slim. It didn’t make sense. Why go to all the bother to hide an injection site and then not take the time to put the shoe back on?
Sawyer spent the next few hours looking for information about The Slayers and other vigilante groups. Endless links quickly took her down a rabbit hole of information. She ended up on YouTube, where she noticed The Slayers already had over a million upvotes.
News headlines for the Black Wigs included Sacramento Vigilante Group the Black Wigs Grows in Popularity, Everyday Citizens Taking Law into Their Own Hands, and so on. It made sense that The Slayers wouldn’t be the only people following the Black Wigs’ lead.
She got up, stretched, and went to the bathroom. After she’d refilled her coffee cup, her phone buzzed, letting her know she had an incoming call. It was a number she didn’t recognize. She picked up the call anyway. It was Nancy Lay, the eighty-nine-year-old woman who used to work at the Children’s Home of Sacramento. Apparently she’d been a cook, and she was willing to talk. She lived at Oak View Retirement Center off Bell Road in Auburn.
Sawyer hung up, then rushed to get ready.
When she opened the door to leave ten minutes later, Aria was standing there. Sawyer gasped and put a hand to her chest. “You scared me!”
Aria’s eyes widened. “You scared me!”
“What are you doing here?” Sawyer wanted to know.
“I need to talk to you.”
Sawyer groaned. “The answer is no. I haven’t had time to do a search on that guy.”
“It’s not about that. It’s about Nick Calderon. I went to his work and talked to his boss.”