Unseen Eyes (Part 5)
He asked, "You were badly hurt. Where are the blood traces on the path from the bathroom to the living room?"
The floor dropped out from under me. A high-pitched whine filled my skull.
He tossed his folder onto the table. "Or were you about to tell me you're clairvoyant? That you retrieved the towel from the bathroom before Warren even cut you?"
I sat frozen, my mind racing, desperate for a way out.
I wanted to tell him I'd grabbed the towel in advance—but I couldn't explain why. I wanted to say the towel had been in the living room—but I'd already contradicted that. I wanted to—
His voice cut through the fog. "Caught in your own web? Let me untangle it for you."
He leaned forward. "Do you know what livor mortis is? Melissa had discoloration on her fingers and toes. If Warren had killed her during an attempted sexual assault, the blood wouldn't have pooled in those locations.
"At ten o'clock that evening, you and Melissa had a screaming fight. You lost control. You strangled her on that sofa."
His words bounced off the walls, pressing in on me from all sides, squeezing the air from my lungs.
Spots of light danced in my vision, merging into faces—Melissa's face. Her smile, her blush, the way her brow furrowed when she was annoyed, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She stared at me from the light, her face swollen and red from asphyxiation, her throat producing rattling sounds that couldn't form words.
I gripped the edge of the table. My legs spasmed beneath me. "I didn't—"
"You did." The detective drove each word like a nail. "When you came back to your senses, she was already dead. And conveniently, Warren showed up. You decided that these two cheaters owed you—owed you their reputations and their lives.
"You cut the power. You left something on the coffee table to pique his interest, opened the front door, and hid behind the island.
"The hallway light was infrared-activated. Warren came in, guided by its faint glow, and found Melissa on the sofa. He moved toward her, then noticed the items on the table. He touched the coffee table, the sofa—left his fingerprints everywhere.
"You came up behind him and struck him with the trophy. Warren collapsed. Blood from the back of his head seeped into the rug, but in the dark, you didn't notice.
"After that, you tied him up with something, went to the bathroom for a towel, and stuffed it in his mouth to keep him quiet in case he came to.
"Once that was done, you left the apartment and walked to the convenience store to establish your alibi."
I shook my head violently, eyes burning, glaring at him. "That's insane. You said I knocked him out—but he'd only just arrived downstairs when I left!"
"How do you know when he arrived?"
My throat seized. Ice flooded my veins.
He gazed at me with cold detachment, drumming the table. "Blue Hills is an old complex. No security cameras. The guard booth is a joke. You made a point of greeting the guard on your way out, steering him to confirm your departure time.
"It takes three or four minutes to walk from Melissa's apartment to the convenience store. You entered the store's camera range at 22:24. If Warren arrived at the complex at 22:20, then yes, you had no window to commit the crime. But he didn't arrive at 22:20.
"He was early. By five, maybe ten minutes. When you left, you took both phones—Melissa's and Warren's. After buying beer and leaving the store, you found a quiet corner, changed the time on both devices, and sent those text messages.
"Melissa's phone already had your fingerprints on it, so you didn't wipe it. But Warren's phone? You wiped his screen, then pressed his dead fingers onto it. Did it never occur to you that if his thumb had actually typed out those two messages on a QWERTY keyboard, there'd be more than one or two partial prints? You don't send that many words with a single tap!"
The buzzing swallowed his words. I clutched my head, mumbling "I didn't" and "That's not what happened," but Melissa's face kept swimming before my eyes.
She said: "You killed me, Felix. You killed me."
The detective was still talking. "After that, you drank your beer, went back to the convenience store, and waited there until 22:50. When you got home, you stuffed the clothes and the towel in the washing machine. You probably figured two items alone would look suspicious, so you added a few of Melissa's garments and ran the quick cycle—thirty minutes to erase the evidence.
"It's true that the clothes came out free of Warren's DNA. But wedged between his upper front teeth? Towel fibers.
"Then you grabbed another towel—I'm guessing Melissa's yellow washcloth. She used yellow, you used blue. A couple's matching set.
"You washed the trophy in the sink, dried it with the washcloth, and put it back in the niche. Then you cut yourself, leaving a neat trail of blood drops. You never considered that a person fleeing an attack wouldn't bleed in such an orderly pattern.
"After that, you removed Warren's shoes and staged a slip-and-fall, pretended to give Melissa CPR, and used the towel to wrap your wound—covering any of Warren's blood that might have transferred. Once the laundry finished, you called 911 and played the victim."
Melissa's ghostly image smirked. "Felix, you absolute fool."
I swatted the air to disperse her face and locked eyes with the detective. He regarded me the way one regards a rabid dog.
"I—" A croak escaped my throat, twisted and raw. "I never meant to kill her."
She was the woman I loved most. I'd never wanted to hurt her.
We'd been together for three years—the model couple in everyone's eyes.
A year ago, we started talking about marriage.
I'd been working myself to the bone, determined to give us a good life together. But then, without so much as a conversation, she went and bought a secondhand apartment.
Her excuse was that owning property before marriage gave a woman security.
But what I heard was: she was hedging against divorce.
The pressure mounted. She loved me—of course she loved me. So why was she planning for our relationship to fail?
She was buying insurance. But wasn't I her insurance?
Then she started keeping things from me.
Since we started dating, she'd always been obedient. I didn't allow her to chat with other men. I required morning and evening check-ins. If she couldn't reply within thirty minutes, she had to report her whereabouts. She'd been flawless.
But a month and a half ago, she started vanishing. She used department dinners and overtime as excuses to dodge my invitations. She wouldn't even let me sleep over anymore.
She was cheating on me. And I didn't even know who the other man was.
To keep her close, I installed spyware on her phone.
It didn't take long to find the evidence. She was exchanging suggestive messages with someone on a chat app.
The night it all fell apart, I lay awake, tormented by images of Melissa laughing with another man.
I loved her beyond reason. Every holiday, I bought her gifts. I'd drunk myself into the ER with clients to earn money for our future. If she wanted it, I'd pluck stars from the sky or drag the moon from the sea. I would've died for her.
And this was what she did to me?
I couldn't understand it. I scrolled through our old messages over and over, trying to pinpoint when she'd changed.
It was around that time that spam accounts kept sending me friend requests. In a fog of rage and self-loathing, I approved one. The sender immediately pushed a free video.
It was footage of Melissa, humming to herself in the shower.
The sender said she was their top streamer. More "fresh content" was available for a price.
My vision went red. I opened my spyware and found that, the previous afternoon, Melissa had sent a message to her chat contact: "Ya Court Hotel. Tomorrow 9 p.m. See you there."
She was going to a hotel with another man.
That night, I nearly demolished my rental.
At 9 p.m. the next day, I waited at the Ya Court Hotel—and caught them.
When we got home, my whole body trembled with fury. But Melissa accused me of attacking her colleague, said I'd made it impossible for her to face him at work.
And she still had the nerve to care about her reputation!
I couldn't hold back anymore. I called her a slut. She was selling her body for money and sleeping around. If I hadn't been smart enough to install monitoring software, how long would I have worn the horns?
She froze. "You installed what?"
"I installed a tracker!" I roared. "How dare you act innocent when you're whoring yourself out? What's next—selling yourself on the street? How much did Warren pay you? Is it more than I've spent on you these past three years?"
I expected her to dissolve into tears, to throw herself at my feet and promise never to do it again.
Instead, she screamed at me for the first time in her life: "What right do you have to spy on me? Who gave you the right?"
Her defiance made me laugh—cold, bitter, wild. I showed her the video and demanded she admit what she'd done. If I hadn't been watching, would she have kept selling herself and made me the fool?
Tears streaming, she lunged for my phone. "Why did you watch those videos? What's the difference between you and that animal?"
I can't remember what happened next.
I only meant to teach her a lesson. To show her that actions have consequences.
She was so much smaller than me. Her resistance was nothing.
She started screaming. I clamped my hand over her mouth. She clawed at me, and the pain made me lose control. All I could think was: how could she do this to me? How could she betray me like this?
I knew she was hurting. I heard her crying. I heard her trying to call my name. But I couldn't stop.
A month and a half of festering resentment, rage, and anguish erupted like a volcano. For the first time, I felt her entirely under my power. She wasn't a livestream whore. She wasn't the object of another man's desire. Her body and soul were in my hands.
I loved her so much. I wanted all of her.
By the time I came back to myself, she wasn't breathing.
---
I stared at the detective through a film of despair. "I never wanted to hurt her. I loved her too much, but she had no self-respect. I tried to give her mouth-to-mouth, but then Warren—that son of a bitch—actually had the nerve to show up at our door! He's the reason she's dead. If not for him, I'd never have—how dare he come looking for her!"
The moment I saw Warren through the peephole, the last thread in my mind snapped.
This filthy bastard had gotten Melissa killed. If he hadn't existed, I would never have throttled the woman I loved. He owed her his life, and he owed me my freedom.
The detective got one thing wrong: I didn't leave anything on the coffee table.
When Warren entered, the hallway light was still on. He touched Melissa, realized she was dead, and immediately reached for his phone to call 911.
That was when I cut the power.
I dialed Melissa's number. Her ringtone exploded in the dark. Warren panicked and fumbled for the source of the sound, desperate to silence it.
During the struggle, her phone had slid under the sofa. It took him a long time to fish it out, and when he finally did, the screen showed my name.
Bang!
I swung the trophy with every ounce of strength I had.
After I'd used their phones to fabricate my alibi, I deleted the missed call.