Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Ernest Cunningham, #1)

by Benjamin Stevenson

My name would be useful, I suppose. I’m Ernest Cunningham. It’s a bit old-fashioned, so people call me Ern or Ernie. I should have started with that, but I promised to be reliable, not competent.

“It’s two hundred and sixty grand.” Reader, you and I already know it’s actually two hundred and sixty-seven grand, but it still struck me that while he hadn’t had time to call an ambulance, he’d had time to roughly count the cash. Otherwise he’d have said two-fifty, a round figure, if he was guessing.

monstrosity. I bet all his stuff’s at Lucy’s place anyway, just as he left it. They were still together when he went to jail, remember?” She shook her head like she was stating the obvious. “I’m not following.” “Ask him what’s really in the damn truck, Ernie.”

Marcelo had lied to cancel dinner so he could go somewhere. For more than six hours.

He was helping them get the ringleaders. But, most of all, they wanted the dirty cops.” He paused to let it sink in. “Dad’s death wasn’t a stick-up gone wrong. They were coming for him.”

If this was true, it meant Audrey didn’t only mistrust the police because she thought the bad ones had killed her husband. She thought the good ones, the ones who’d promised my father a way out, had got him killed.

But, to be honest, I don’t really remember the day at all. I have huge black patches. All I know is that when Jeremy died, I was sitting next to him.

“With the density of the ash on his cheeks, and the depth of the wound in his neck, I’d say he had a bag with ash pulled over his head, tied tightly, and then removed postmortem.”

car, in their garage, their hands zip-tied to the steering wheel. There were indentations on the roof, as if someone had stood on it, and a leaf blower discarded on the floor. The killer would have poured the ash in through the sunroof and stuck the leaf blower down afterwards to stir it up. It was the same with the lady who came through our ER. Zip-tied, in a locked toilet with the window and fan taped shut, except for something to put the blower through. That’s the way they like to do it. Slowly.