Page 131 of Psychopath

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Quinn was tugged from his sleep, not by Mars’s sharp claws, but by his phone buzzing repeatedly. He was back home again, had been for a few days. He groaned, swiped a hand down his face, then reached for the phone.

“What?”

“You need to put the news on, right now.”

He hadn’t spoken to Cleo in almost two weeks, too afraid she’d mention Zane and he’d do something as embarrassing as beg to know how he was.

Quinn rubbed sleep from his eyes, then looked at his watch. “It’s three in the morning.”

“Just turn the goddamn TV on.”

“Fine, fine,” Quinn said. Then he patted the space beside himself on the bed for the remote.

“Hurry up—”

“Jesus, Cleo, I am hurrying, here we go.”

Quinn shuffled up on the bed and pressed the red button on the remote. The TV took a few seconds to come alive, and then Quinn was blinking blearily at the bright screen.

“The news. Channel one,” Cleo said.

“Okay, okay, ’m on it.”

The channel changed, and all drowsiness vanished from Quinn when he saw Zane’s face. He couldn’t even process the headline and blurted, “Is he all right?”

“Zane’s fine, Quinn. He’s fine. Read the headline at the bottom.”

Quinn tore his eyes from Zane’s mugshot and frowned at the red banner sliding across the screen. He couldn’t speak, but it didn’t matter, Cleo filled the silence.

“He didn’t kill them, Quinn. He didn’t kill Danny or Jessica Saunders.”

Quinn still couldn’t find his voice.

“It’s crazy,” Cleo said. “It was a setup, Danny and Jessica set him up.”

“What?”

“They went round to his house, right? Drugged him, made it look like he’d killed them, stole a shit load of money, then escaped out the back, leaving their car behind on Zane’s front drive.”

“I don’t…” Quinn managed. “I don’t understand.”

“Karma must’ve caught up with them, though,” Cleo continued. “That’s how they’ve been found out.”

The footage on screen changed from Zane’s mugshot to an image of Danny and Jessica. Quinn’s heart pounded so hard in his ears he couldn’t hear what the news reporter was saying, and he shook his head.

“What…what is this?”

“It’s Danny and Jessica Saunders, a year after Zane supposedly killed them.”

Danny still looked the same in the image, but Jessica, she was sitting in a wheelchair, frail and pale with a woolly hat over her head. They were both talking with a nurse.

“Jessica got cancer, some kind of aggressive type. The image is from a clinic in Switzerland, taken at Danny’s request. They used their real names, their real IDs and didn’t bother hiding their faces. They checked in, both of them…”

“They’re dead?”

“Yes. They died together and were buried close by. The graves are being exhumed to confirm their identity. Zane’s been locked up for over two years, believing he killed them, but it was a lie. He was innocent.”

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