Page 82 of The Expat Affair

“I assume so, yes. Lars didn’t define which diamonds or how many.” Fleur shifts in her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs. “All I know is that when Willow and I got here, he held us at gunpoint because he wanted more.”

“I see,” the detective says, eyeing me. “How did he know you could summon Willow?”

This is one point Fleur didn’t think to cover, and I suffer through a flash of red-hot panic before I manage to stitch together an answer. “I’m not entirely sure, but I’m guessing because he was the one tracking me.”

It’s a bit of a gamble, insinuating that the trackers were planted by Lars and not Ingrid, but I’m counting on Ingrid being smart enough to have masked her identity when she plunked down the money to buy them. She even said it at one point, that trackers are notoriously hard to trace. Either way, Ingrid won’t be calling up the detective anytime soon to dispute my story, and it certainly makes sense that the trackers could have belonged to Lars. The detective motions for me to keep going.

“Lars said he’d been watching me for a while. It’s possible he sawme with Willow on the day of Xander’s funeral. We had drinks near the station. We took the same train back to Amsterdam. If he was tailing me that day, he would have seen us together.”

“Tell me again how the victim fell through the window.”

“Lars charged me,” Fleur says, sounding annoyed to have to repeat herself. “He wanted the diamonds, and there was a scuffle. Surely you can’t expect me not to fight back.”

I don’t have time to explain the nuances of the Dutch legal system, Fleur said to me in these thirteen minutes, but in my country you can’t take a hockey stick to a criminal’s head and expect to get away with it. Self-defense is allowed, but it must be in proportion to the attack, and you must use a lesser form of violence whenever possible. Shoving a man out a fourth-store window is not a lesser form of violence.

But Lars had a gun, I argued.

Yes, but so did you.

After that I shut up. This is Fleur’s kingdom; the rest of us are simply living in it.

The detective purses his lips. “A scuffle.”

Fleur nods.

“Between you and a man twice your size.”

She nods again. “I pushed him off me. He lost his footing. The next thing I knew he...” She cringes, flapping a hand in the general direction of the window.

Stick as close as possible to the truth, Fleur said over and over in those thirteen minutes.People will swallow a lie when it’s concealed in truth.

The detective looks to Willow and me, and we back Fleur up with another nod.

“But you’re the one who called Rayna,” he says to Willow. “You had her number.”

“Yes. We exchanged numbers that day on the train. Fleur was a few minutes late for our lunch, so I called Rayna to catch up.”

Willow is the one who pointed out a potential flaw in this part of the story. If the detective looks into the call logs, he’ll see that it wasn’t a call but a voicemail. One I’ve already deleted from my phone, though I’m assuming it’s still floating around somewhere for the detective to pluck from a virtual cloud. Fleur swears she can make the voicemail disappear, but we didn’t have time to discuss the details.

“And the guns?”

Plural. One still clutched in Lars’s fist down on the docks, the other lying on the floor where I flung it after shooting out that arched window. It wasn’t all that difficult to dream up that part of the story—that when Fleur tossed the diamonds into the air, when Lars dove for them, the second gun dropped out of his pocket. Lars was so distracted by the sparkle, he didn’t even notice, but I did. Ipicked up the gun andboom.

“I didn’t know the gun was going to shoot. I thought you had to pull back on the little hook thing first.” I wriggle my thumb like it’s working a hammer, which the striker-fired handgun Willow handed me doesn’t have. I racked the slide and fired in one smooth motion, and I hit my target dead on. The detective was right about Americans and their guns. I’ve been shooting paper plates in the backyard since I was seven. “I guess it’s a good thing the bullet hit the glass, and not a person.”

Detective Boomsma’s expression stays carefully blank. “I guess it is.”

Honestly, Fleur and I couldn’t have coordinated any better if we’d spent days hammering out a plan. The second Lars went after those stones, our eyes met across the dust-filled space. She saw Willow’s gun in my hand. I saw the sun break through the clouds through the arched window, lighting up Lars’s back as he plucked diamonds out of the dirt. I aimed and Fleur charged. The bullet shattered the glass at the same time Lars’s body sailed throughit, all that fabulous hair flying, floating against a bright blue sky. A beautiful, choreographed dance, and Fleur and I didn’t have to say a word.

“A couple of plot holes, though,” the detective says, and I have to work hard to keep my face straight.Plot holes.We had thirteen minutes to stitch together this story; ofcoursethere are plot holes. I stare at the detective and tell myself to breathe.

He pokes up a thumb. “First of all, Lars didn’t murder Xander. A Polish man did, a known contract killer with a penchant for strangling his victims with zip ties. He was seen in Amsterdam the day before Xander’s murder, and the next morning on a bridge crossing the Amstel, upstream from where the body was found. By the time we made the connection to the murders, the assassin was long gone.”

Fleur frowns. “Contract for who? Who was this assassin working for?”

The detective turns his death stare on her. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Me? I’m not the detective in this scenario. You are.”

---