He lifts me up effortlessly, my legs unfolding and finding the floor, Jason’s bear-arms wrapped around me. “Think of the baby,” he whispers. “Think only of the baby. And you’ll see I’m right. Let me handle this. I can handle this.”

“No, it’s . . . it’s too much, Jase.”

“This is too risky for you, Shauna. It doesn’t matter what you and I know. This doesn’t look like self-defense. I do this for a living, okay? This is what I do. This isn’t first-degree murder by a long shot, but it ain’t self-defense, either. This is prison time or, at the very best, probably a trial and the county lockup for you in the meantime. County lockup, Shauna, while our baby grows inside you. You give birth in a detention facility.” He cups a hand under my chin and makes me look at him. “That can’t happen. It won’t happen. This isn’t about me. This isn’t even about you. It’s about the baby. You know I’m right.”

I put my head against his shoulder, squeeze my eyes shut, try to mentally will away the last hour of my life. Rewind the clock, let Alexa leave, then call the police, get a restraining order, something, anything other than squeezing that trigger, anything, God, ANYTHING—

“Let me do this, Shauna. I can do this and make it turn out okay. I can.”

“How?” My voice trembling so hard, the word has three syllables.

“Never mind how. It’s better you not know. But I promise you, I can do this.”

No, I think to myself, but I don’t say it. I don’t say it because a part of me is saying yes, yes, it’s about the baby, he’s right, but no, it’s too much for anyone to do for anyone else—

“Hey.” Jason gives me one good shake. “It’s decided. I’ve got this covered. So here’s what’s going to happen. Are you listening?”

I take a deep breath, blinking away tears.

“I need you to clear everything of yours out of here. Your purse, work bag, anything of yours needs to be gone. Can you help me do that?” he asks, pulling my arm.

“I can . . . do that.”

“Good. And then we’re going to get you out of here. You were never here tonight, Shauna, do you understand? As of this moment, you were never here.”

110.

Jason

10:40 P.M.

Shauna gets into my SUV, inside my dark garage. Next to her, on the seat, is her purse and computer bag, stuffed with work papers and her laptop.

“Sit tight,” I say to her. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

She nods. Her face is washed out, her eyes vacant. I close the car door behind her. The dome light slowly fades, leaving her in darkness.

I run back upstairs to the second floor, tread carefully around Alexa’s body, and stop and think.

I look away from Alexa’s face, lying in profile. I can’t let sympathy or remorse factor in here. I have to come up with a plan. I need an airtight plan, and I need it right now.

But before my mind even starts the race, it stops. It’s right in front of me.

I don’t need a plan. Alexa already gave me one.

I’ve been planning for this.

I squeeze my eyes shut and recite her fabricated suicide note:

Now u finaly know who I am

Now u will never forgit

Number six was difrent

But she was my favorit

She was going to kill Shauna and pin it on Marshall. I’m not sure what was going to be “different” about the murder of Shauna, victim number six, compared to the other five women he filleted. Using a different knife? Maybe so. Maybe that was it.

But what about shooting victim number six in the back?

Now that’s different. And Alexa would be just as much Marshall’s “favorite” as Shauna would have been, each of them a woman close to me, a bloody parting gift to me before Marshall, his mission accomplished, took his own life.

The needle, I think to myself. The needle that Marshall planted in my office.

I race upstairs to my bedroom, to my nightstand, to retrieve that needle. Marshall must have injected it into his victims. There’s no other possible reason for a needle. But he injected them where? In the neck? The arm? The neck, I speculate. Women in the summer always have their necks exposed, and it would be harder to ward off than a needle prick to the arm, an appendage that the victim could move, flap, rotate in several directions. If I had one chance to stab someone with a needle, I’d go for the neck.

It’s a guess, but a good guess. And if I’m wrong, then it’s another reason the sixth victim was “different.”

But—where the hell is the needle? I put it right here, in the small space under the pullout drawer. There’s no way it could have fallen. Where the hell could it possibly—

“Oh,” I say aloud.

I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one who had that idea.

I go back downstairs and walk over to Alexa. She is wearing dark sweatpants, but sweatpants with pockets. I pat her right pocket lightly. Wearing my rubber gloves from Marshall’s apartment, I fish into the pocket slowly. I feel plastic. Yes . . .

Yes.

I pull out the small bag I kept the needle in. There’s the needle itself, undisturbed, still a small trace of fluid in the vial. Alexa really had been planning this. She knew where I kept the needle. She took it, probably the last time she was here. She was going to kill Shauna and inject her with this needle. She couldn’t have known when, or even if, we were going to find the notorious North Side Slasher, but she didn’t need to. She would have killed Shauna sooner or later, anyway. Either way, whether we had found him or not, she could blame it on the North Side Slasher. Once she listened to the voice mail Joel left on my cell phone this afternoon, she realized she had a small window of opportunity to actually pull this off—to kill Marshall, type a suicide note that referenced a sixth victim, and then kill Shauna and blame it on Marshall. She just needed me out of the way.

I steady my hand, touch Alexa’s hair softly. “I’m sorry,” I say to her, as if a needle injection into her jugular vein is the worst thing that happened to her in the last hour. I’m sorry about a lot of things, and I’ll have plenty of time to mourn them, but right now, I have only one goal, and that’s to make sure Shauna and our baby are as far away from this as possible.

Once I’ve injected Alexa with the needle, the vial now empty, I drop the needle back into the plastic bag. This is going to match up very nicely with those other syringes in Marshall’s cabinet.

I feel into Alexa’s right pocket again. I felt something else in there, I thought, something I need. And yes, here they are.

Her keys. It’s not easy getting my house key off her key ring with these rubber gloves, but I’m not risking a print. It’s worth the extra effort. It won’t make sense to the police when they come here tonight. If I wasn’t home when Alexa was killed—as I will claim—and nobody else was, either, then how did Alexa get into my house without a key?

It will clearly put suspicion on me, if it isn’t there already. My dead ex-girlfriend, shot in my house with my gun? They probably won’t need any extra help. But if they do, the house key, or more specifically the lack thereof, will make me look even worse.

The knife on the breakfast bar? It probably has Alexa’s prints on it. That won’t help. No. The knife has to go. I will find some sewer and dump it.

I place my Glock on the breakfast bar in place of the knife. It quite possibly has Shauna’s prints on it. That’s no good. I take a sanitary wipe out of the tube and give the gun a good scrub. I’ll blame it on Marshall. He wiped off his prints after he shot Alexa.