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“Oh, I understand,” I said. My own voice was level, almost unnaturally so, with the effort of keeping it low. “I understand everything. Why did you do it, Cole?”
“You don’t understand, I didn’t want this—I didn’t want any of this. I was trying to protect you!”
For a second, I couldn’t find the words to reply. Then I did, spitting them into the receiver with a force that took even me by surprise.
“Fuck. You.”
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“A fucking lying, traitorous, murdering—” I stopped, searching for a word bad enough for what I wanted to call him. “Cunt,” I finished, and now my voice wasn’t steady, it was trembling almost as much as Cole’s. “That’s who I’m dealing with. How could you? How could you do it to him? He was your best friend.”
“He was a fucking fool,” Cole said, and there was real agony in his voice. “I tried to warn him off, but he wouldn’t let it go. And you think all this is me? It isn’t me. I never wanted this. I was doing the only thing I could, which was to try and protect you. There was nothing I could do to save Gabe. All I could do was make sure you walked out of this.”
“You didn’t protect me, you fucking framed me, you imbecile,” I almost shouted down the phone, and then forced myself to lower my voice to a venomous whisper. “Are you seriously going to stand there and say that taking out that insurance was an act of protection? As if any amount of money could make up for Gabe’s death! You didn’t protect me, you gave the police a cast-iron case against me. Are you trying to tell me you didn’t think of that?”
“Of course I thought of that,” Cole snarled, “but if you’re in prison, they can’t murder you too, you stupid bitch.”
“Who?” I demanded. “Who? Who are you talking about? Who would want to kill Gabe, who would want to kill me?”
“I can’t tell you,” Cole said, and now the anger and anguish were gone from his voice, and he sounded scared—genuinely scared.
“Cole, I swear to God, I’m recording this conversation, and unless you want me to release it on Twitter, right now, you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“No!” he yelped, as terrified as if I had brandished a live wire at his face. “Christ, Jack, do you want to get us both killed?”
“Then tell me!”
“They. Will. Kill. Us,” Cole said, enunciating each word very slowly and distinctly, as if speaking to a small child. But I had the impression that he was doing so not to patronize me—though that might have been part of it—but to try to keep his own voice from shaking. “Do you understand that, Jack? They will kill me for telling you, and you for finding out.”
“I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck,” I spat back, matching my tone to his, with angry mockery. “Do you understand that, Cole? I’m facing life in prison. I’ve lost the only man I ever loved. I cannot tell you how little of a shit I give about the idea of someone cutting my throat too. In fact, you know what? At this point it would be something of a relief. The only thing, the only thing I care about is finding out who killed Gabe. If that gets me killed too, I honestly don’t give a damn.”
There was a long silence. A very long silence. I could hear Cole’s trembling breaths at the other end of the line. It was clear that, perhaps for the first time, he really understood how far I was prepared to go with this.
“I can’t tell you who,” he said at last. His voice was very low. “I don’t know who—but I can tell you why.”
“Okay.” It had started to rain now, the drops sliding sideways across the half-open window and spattering my face. I closed my eyes, feeling the coldness drip down my nose. It felt like crying, but it didn’t soothe the ache in my heart. “Okay. Why?”
“Fuck,” Cole whispered. “Fuck. Fuck. Look, can we do this face-to-face?”
“You must be kidding me.” I laughed at that, a harsh rasp that jolted my ribs and made me wince. I pressed a hand to the dressing. “So you can hand me over to the police again? That was you who told them I was at Sunsmile, wasn’t it? You must have been laughing up your sleeve when I spilled the beans to Hel. And when the police turned up at your cottage—they didn’t follow you, did they? It was you, you called it in.”
“I was trying to protect you,” Cole said desperately, and the strange thing was that I could almost, almost believe him. “Please, Jack. Please.”
But I was done with this.
Cole had betrayed Gabe, and then he had betrayed me too—over and over and over.
“Cole,” I said with finality, “I swear, if you don’t tell me what you know right this second, I’m going to livestream this conversation to Gabe’s Twitter account. I’m going to send it to every Discord group he ever joined, I will post it on Reddit and stream it on Twitch. And I will name you, on every single platform. I have no idea how many people that is—but Gabe’s Twitter account alone has almost 100,000 followers. I’m pretty sure a bunch of them are your followers too. You want them to hear your voice, admitting your complicity in the murder of your best friend?”
“Fuck!” Cole shouted, so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. There was a noise at the other end that I couldn’t quite decipher. It sounded like he might be sobbing. Then his voice came back, trembling and angry. “Listen to me, Jack. If you pursue this, if you tell anyone what I’m about to tell you—”
“You are done threatening me,” I said coldly. “And I have no interest in hearing anything from you other than why my husband had to die. So spit it out, or get ready to go very, very viral.”
“Do you know what a zero-day exploit is?” Cole demanded.
I frowned. “Is this some kind of test?”
“No, I’m answering your question. Do you know?”
