Page 148 of Reinventing Cato
“Only he thinks we’ve bonded over this.” Cato gave a frustrated sigh. “We haven’t. He’s even more annoying now. He said he was going to pray for Pedro. I’m a really bad person because even that aggravated me.”
Cato started the engine. “Sure you’re okay about me staying for while? I mean, you probably need someone with you, right? In case you have flashbacks or need bits of you rubbed to take your mind off how I nearly died while you were sleeping.”
“I want you to stay.”
Cato smiled. “Thank you.”
“I’ve been given all the details that you failed to provide about just how close you came to dying.” He reached out and touched the marks on Cato’s now-unbandaged but badly bruised wrist. “I was horrified.”
“You should have been there. I was awesome. Oh, youwerethere, but someone was taking a nap.”
Vigge knew that Cato was making light of something that had terrified him, and Vigge, once he’d heard about it. Even thinking about Cato being pushed over the edge of that roof made his heart clench.
“Sure you’re all better now?” Cato asked as they headed out of the city.
“I will be. I didn’t know Rohypnol could be injected. On top of what I’d already ingested, it was so fast acting I had no chance. It’s likely the way he subdued the other victims, apart from Marcie. That was just sheer rage.”
“I had traces of Rohypnol in my blood too, just from the swig of your beer. The police found a baggie with several tablets of it in my bathroom when they searched, but there were no fingerprints. Pedro really was setting me up for a fall in more ways than one.”
“It’s bloody infuriating that I’d even talked about being careful what we drank and we were still caught in his trap.”
“He didn’t mean for me to be drugged. The swig I had was enough to make me woozy, but I made myself throw up, so at least I wasn’t so out of it that I couldn’t make Max drive me to the car park. If I’d just passed out, and not read that text, I don’t know what Pedro would have done. I think we were lucky. Maybe I believe in fate.”
Vigge felt goose bumps flash down his arms.
“Oh, and Aaron has finally made a statement to the police. Not that it matters now. I’m angry with him because if he’d spoken out sooner, all this might not have happened.”
“You can’t know that and yes, I’d heard. Turns out Pedro was a person of interest in the Brighton investigation. He engineered a friendship with Marcie after defusing a situation with a drunk who was hassling her. He walked her home that night, played the nice guy and convinced her to exchange numbers and probably put the tracker in her phone at the same time. He began to pop in more and more often, which led to a friendship of sorts, more in his head than hers. Her friends said she was wary about him though never felt threatened by him. And then he started to get too possessive and didn’t like it when she tried to back off. But Pedro had an alibi for when she was killed. He was at the hospice with his mother. The staff know him well. Nice guy, they said.” He gave a short laugh.
“I thought he was a nice guy,” Cato said. “I liked him.”
“He was dismissed as a suspect. Apparently, his mother had taken a bit of a turn and he’d driven down to see her. He stayed the night in her room, on a guest bed, which wasn’t an unusual occurrence, and it was confirmed by the staff as well as his mother. But further investigation showed the catches on the window of her room had been interfered with so that the safety window would fully open. He used that route to exit and enter. His mother either thought he’d been with her all night, or she lied. Once Pedro was challenged, he admitted it.”
“Bloody hell.”
“He felt everything was being taken away from him. His father died in a car accident last June. His mother is dying of cancer. He lost money for part of his doctorate research, which apparently isn’t going too well. Marcie—though she never called him her boyfriend, chose you over him. And you just waltzed through life being your brilliant self. Gifted at everything, with the world falling into your lap.”
Cato winced.
“The tracker told him where she was and he saw you with her. He confronted her and she shoved how great you were in his face. Went on about how fantastic you were, why would she want to be with a loser like him, and he flipped. Hence the frenzy of the stabbing. Done with a skewer from the hospice kitchen. So, premeditated. And he admitted to flooding out the place where you were living and manipulated you into moving into that house. He told someone who was due to move in that there was an issue so he could give you the place instead.”
Cato shot him a startled glance.
“It’s over now.”
“It was definitely him who sent the texts? Threatened my family? The policeman I spoke to said it was him, and I told my family there was no longer a threat, but I still had that nagging doubt…”
“Definitely him. He’d have no reason to lie.”
“Unless he liked the idea of someone still tormenting me.” Cato chewed his nail.
“He knew too much for it to have been anyone else. It was him. He borrowed Sam’s car and caused your mother to come off the road. He’d given Sam tickets to some exhibition in London to make sure he wasn’t home.”
“Jesus. I still can’t quite believe it.”
“It’s over now, so you don’t need to worry about the NASA job.”Have you accepted it?
“Right.”
