An Offer You Can't Refuse by Sal Bianchi (ebook reader wifi txt) 📗

She had a really soft-spoken demeanor, so I could see how it might have been easy for Carl to take advantage of her. At the same time, it was difficult to believe that such a gentle person could have taken out a hit on someone.

“I’m going to get straight to it,” I addressed her immediately. “We want to talk to you about Carl Johannson.”

Angela went rigid at my words.

“What about him?” She asked as she hunched her shoulders nervously.

“You filed several police reports against him, didn’t you?” I asked blankly.

“Yes.” Angela nodded slowly.

“Can you tell us why you did that?” I asked when she didn’t offer any more information.

“He was harassing me,” she hissed, suddenly sounding much less meek than before. “Following me home from work, sending things to my apartment. It was kind of sweet at first. Like an ego boost, you know? But I told him I wasn’t interested, and he just wouldn’t stop!”

“Did he stop after you called the police?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. This was the most she’d spoken since we’d gotten here. If I kept prodding, she’d probably get even more worked up.

“No,” she replied bitterly. “They always said they’d go out and talk to him and tell him to stop, but of course, that didn’t do anything. They arrested him a few times when they caught him sneaking around my apartment, but he was always out after a day or two.”

Her hands were clenched into fists on her lap, and she was nearly shouting now.

“You must have been pretty relieved when he died,” I stated calmly.

Her eyes went wide at my accusation, and she floundered for a moment before collecting herself enough to respond.

“I was.” She nodded. “He deserved it. He spent almost a whole year harassing me, and no one else would do anything about it. I’m not afraid to leave my apartment anymore.”

“That’s good to hear,” I replied. “How did you find out he was dead?”

“W-what?” she stuttered. She seemed taken aback by my sudden question.

“I asked you how you found out he was dead,” I repeated as I stared hard into her eyes. “It must have come as a shock when he suddenly stopped showing up, but how did you find out he had died?”

Her mouth gaped open and closed for a second as she struggled to come up with an answer. I’d noticed right away that she hadn’t been the least bit shocked when I mentioned that Carl was dead. It struck me as a little unusual. Obviously, she would have noticed that Carl was no longer harassing her, but that didn’t explain how she knew he was actually dead.

“The police told me,” she mumbled after a few moments of hesitation.

“Really?” I asked skeptically. “The same police who completely ignored you when you went to them for help? They were kind of enough to come and give you the news of his demise?”

“Well, I…” Angela murmured as she wrung her hands nervously.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Theo shooting me a confused glare. When he’d suggested that I be the one to speak to Angela earlier, he’d probably expected that I’d be sympathetic and gentle. However, as much as I disliked men like Carl, I wasn’t about to go easy on someone who had paid to have another person killed.

“Who told you that Carl was dead, Angela?” I snapped when she continued to stutter dumbly.

“I think you should go,” she whimpered as she stood on shaky legs.

“Was it the people who hired to kill him?” I went straight for the kill, and Angela fell back onto the couch as her legs gave out from beneath her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered.

“Yes, you do,” I sneered as I leaned down to glare at her. “I know that you didn’t kill him. The real murderer already confessed. Ian Brooks was his name, wasn’t it? There’s no point in denying it since he was the one who told us you hired him.”

That last part was a bluff, but Angela was already on the brink of tears and looked like she might break at any moment.

“I didn’t mean to,” she sniffled pathetically.

“Didn’t mean to what?” I scoffed. “You didn’t mean to put a hit out on someone? Or you didn’t mean to get caught? Cut the crap, Angela. This is going to go a lot worse for you if you don’t stop lying.”

“I’m sorry,” Angela yelled as the floodgates broke, and fat tears started to roll down her face. “I was just so tired of feeling scared all the time! The police wouldn’t do anything! Every day he got more aggressive, and I knew I was going to end up dead if I didn’t do something soon.”

I felt a pang of sympathy as I looked down at her. She looked so pitiful curled into herself like that, but I quickly pushed the thought away.

“So what did you do then?” I asked. “How did you find the hitman?”

“One of my friends told me about this website,” she explained through tears. “It was like a message board where people could go to buy weed and stuff. We wrote that we needed someone to kill Carl. It was kind of a joke a first, like just a way for me to vent about all the stuff he’d done. A lot of the replies seemed like they were joking too. But then one guy replied, and he sounded like he was serious.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“He sent me a direct message,” Angela explained. “Instead of replying on the public post, he told me to DM him my email if I really wanted to talk about him doing the hit. I kind of panicked and didn’t reply at first.”

“So what happened?” I replied. “Obviously, you did contact him in the end.”

“Yeah.” Angela nodded. “I thought it over that night. I thought about how long I’d spent looking over my shoulder, and making sure all my