Page 2 of Dragonfly

Chestnut clears his throat, drawing my attention back to him. “Miss Gayle, are you aware that there is currently an outfit in Springfield that’s pushing counterfeit bills through small, locally-owned businesses?”

“I… no. I had no idea.”

The last lingering hint of his earlier smile fades. Dipping into the envelope again, he pulls out a stack of deposit slips at least half an inch thick. He plops them on top of the first one.

“Each deposit slip here has your account number and signature on it,” he says needlessly before dropping the bomb on me: “And each one of these was marked as coming from a bag that contained at least one counterfeit bill.”

Holy shit. There’s gotta be at least fifty slips there. Even if they were each only representing a bad twenty, I’m looking at a good thousand dollars loss in front of me.

I feel queasy. Gripping the edge of the counter, I peer up at him. “My store was hit?”

“If it was only one or two deposits, I could believe it was just bad luck. But when our sting operation caught all of these”—Chestnut uses his thumb to fan out the stack of deposit slips—“in just one quarter, our task force came to a different conclusion.”

And?

Seconds away from panicking, I wait for him to tell me what it is. Because, I’m sorry, I’m so confused. The suit made me nervous; the idea that my bank account is screwed up has my stomach going tight.

No. There’s gotta be some mistake. Something… something’s wrong. I’ve done the training. I have the counterfeit pen right next to my register stand. When a customer gives me anything over a twenty for the drawer, I check all the markers to make sure it’s real. And who even uses cash anymore? A good eighty percent of my sales are either debit or credit. This is impossible.

Seriously. There’s no way he’s telling me that I’ve been depositing fake money for months?—

—only that’s exactly what he’s telling me, isn’t it?

The bell over my shop’s door tinkles again, and when Detective Lewis marches back into my store, he’s not alone.

There are two more cops with him. One’s a blonde woman with her hair pulled back in a low ponytail, the other a dark-haired man about my age with piercing blue eyes. In the back of my mind, I realize I’ve seen him patrolling on foot outside of my store more than a few times over the years.

There’s something about being slapped in the face with a uniform that makes this seem so much more real. The suits had me nervous, but the uniforms… the badges pinned to their chests… the guns on their hip… holy shit. I think I’m going to pass out.

“Please, no,” I say, my voice coming out strangled. “There has to be some mistake.”

They don’t seem to think so.

Detective Lewis nods at the male cop, gesturing toward me with a wag of his finger. The uniformed officer immediately eases around the side of the cashwrap, joining me behind the counter.

His nameplate says M. Burns. His undeniable smirk says that I’m in deep, deep shit.

A pair of handcuffs appear in his grip as if by magic. “Hands behind your back.”

Even as I’m trying desperately to argue, to understand, I do what I’m told.

The bite of the metal around my wrist is a shock, but it only gets worse when Detective Lewis finally decides to speak up as Officer Burns starts maneuvering my stunned body away from the cashwrap.

“Georgia Gayle, you’re under arrest for the charge of passing counterfeit currency. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law…”

ONE

GHOST

SAVANNAH

It took seven months for me to kill off Georgia Gayle.

Georgia Gayle was an earnest twenty-five-year-old brunette whose pride and joy was the vitamin store she owned in downtown Springfield. She avoided her parents the best she could, dreamed of going back to school for a business degree, was between boyfriends at the time, though she’d hoped the boy who worked at the deli might ask her out for coffee.

Four years in the Madison Correctional Facility—the minimum security prison I was trapped in until they released me nine months ago—and the woman who was marched into that hellhole was dead by the time she was allowed out again.

Erasing my identity as best I could just made it so that the rest of the world knew she was long gone…

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