As Good As Dead (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #3)

by Holly Jackson

But I’ve seen people in a self-destructive spiral before. Hell, I’ve represented many of them. In the end, you’ll only end up hurting everyone around you, and yourself. You won’t be able to help it.

I would be willing to lose everything, destroy myself, if it also meant destroying your client. That seems a fair trade.

You need to come up with your own strategies to cope with the trauma and stress. This medication will only make it harder to recover from the PTSD in the long-term. You don’t need it, Pippa, you can do this.

How could both positions be both wrong and right at the very same time? An impossible contradiction that she would never settle.

There was only one way, and it was maddeningly simple: she needed a new case. And not just any case—a case built only from black and white. No gray, no twisting. Straight, uncrossable lines between the good and the bad and the right and the wrong. Two sides and a clear path running through them for her to tread.

Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Ps. remember to always kill two birds with one stone.

She couldn’t help but feel the quiet rage embedded in that sinister question. She did think about disappearing sometimes, running away and leaving Pip behind. Or disappearing inside her own head, in those rare moments when her mind was quiet, an absence she could just float in, free. But what did “disappear” mean, really, when it came down to it? Define “disappear.”

There was a tightening in her chest as her heart outgrew its cage, unrolling under her skin, filling her with angry red until it was all behind her eyes. She watched him draw close and her view shifted to red, the scene speeding up before her.

One more case, the right one, and opportunity had handed it right to her. The universe might have aligned, for once, in her favor. This stalker could be the one. A case without that suffocating gray area, one with a clear moral right and a clear moral wrong. Someone out there hated her, wanted to hurt her, and that made them bad. On the other side was her, and maybe she wasn’t all good, but she couldn’t be all bad. Two opposing sides, as clean as she could hope for. And this time, she was the subject. If she got things wrong again, there would be no collateral, no blood on her hands. Only hers. But if she got it right, maybe this could be the thing to fix her.

Maybe justice can only ever be found outside of the law, outside of police stations like this, outside of people like you who say you understand but you never do.”

One last case, and it had landed right on her doorstep. It was her against them this time. No Andie Bell, no Sal Singh, no Elliot Ward or Becca Bell, no Jamie Reynolds or Charlie Green or Stanley Forbes, and no Jane Doe. The game had changed. Her against them. Save herself to save herself.

There was a kind of thrill in it, watching someone when they didn’t know you were there. Invisible to them. Disappeared.

He was right, she had just said that. Her test. Her trial. Her final judgment. Save herself to save herself. That was all still true. Even more so if there was that chance, that possibility, that there was a right man and a wrong man.

Andie Bell knew who DT was and she was terrified, so she sold drugs for Howie Bowers to save up money to escape, to get far away from Fairview. She sold Rohypnol to Max Hastings, who then used those drugs to rape her little sister, Becca. Andie pursued Elliot Ward in her desperate plan to escape to Yale with Sal. Elliot thought he accidentally killed Andie, so he murdered Sal to cover it up, Ravi’s brother dead in the woods. But Elliot didn’t kill Andie, not really; it was Becca Bell, too angry and shocked at her sister’s role in her own tragedy that she froze and let Andie die from her head injury, choking on her own vomit. Five years went by and then Pip came along, uncovered all those truths. Elliot in prison, Becca in prison though she shouldn’t be, Max not in prison though he should be. And, most importantly, Howie Bowers in prison. Howie told his cellmate that he knew the real Child Brunswick. The cellmate told his cousin, who told a friend, who told a friend, who put the rumor online. Charlie Green read that rumor and came to Fairview. Layla Mead, wearing the face of Stella Chapman. Jamie Reynolds missing. Stanley Forbes with six holes blown in him, bleeding out on Pip’s hands. Three different stories, but one interconnected knot. And in the center of that writhing knot, grinning at her from the dark, was DT.

Above the law because the law was wrong. A legion of dead girls and dead-eyed girls left behind them.

There hadn’t been a plan. Nothing beyond breaking the circle, beyond surviving, and killing him was how she survived. So, now that it was done, how did she keep on surviving?

Three people she’d been with through the fire and back. And she realized, then, that those same people, the ones who would look for you when you disappeared, they were the same people you could turn to if you needed to get away with murder.

People talk in a small town. And there’s been a lot of talk over the last week—the town is practically cracking open with whispered secrets and furtive glances. Most isn’t worth listening to, but there is some that cannot be ignored.

She closed her eyes and made a new silent promise to him, because he had chosen her and she had chosen him: they were going to get away with it.

“I suppose if you were ever involved in anything like this,” he said, the after-laugh smile still on his face, “you’d know exactly how to get away with it.”