Chapter 3

When I got back to the neighborhood,

I found I couldn't even get into my own home.

A makeshift shrine had been set up outside my door.

Red paint had been splashed across the security door, four large characters scrawled on it.

A killer pays with her life.

Casey Walker sat beside the funeral portrait, burning paper money.

A dozen Walker relatives crowded around the doorway.

Casey snatched up a fistful of the funeral money and flung it straight into my face.

"You still have the nerve to come back!"

"I'll hold my husband's funeral right here at your door!"

"Let him come find you every single night!"

The officers pushed through the crowd and stepped into my home.

Inside my closet they found a red coat.

Then they pulled up the enhanced footage from the accident and showed it to me.

The video caught it clearly. The driver in the car was wearing this exact red coat.

Wearing a face mask.

They kept searching. In the shoe cabinet, a pair of short boots spotted with mud.

Under the bathroom sink, a small bottle of Galaxy Silver car paint.

Under the bed, a bloodstained star-shaped emblem.

At the scene of the accident,

they'd found the same soil and fragments of the same emblem.

The officer on the case laid the items out in front of me, one by one.

"Louise Gilbert, how do you explain all this?"

I looked at that coat I'd never seen before.

"It isn't mine."

Frieda Walker had arrived with the police.

When she heard that, she let out a cold laugh.

"The evidence was in your room."

"Are you going to tell me my dead father put it all there himself?"

Watching the officers busy with the search, Frieda came to my side and lowered her voice.

"Louise, you killed my father, but seeing as we're neighbors, I'm willing to give you a hand."

"Your company just launched a new car, didn't it? With this scandal, your stock's already tanked, hasn't it?"

"Pay my family twenty million in cash, plus ten percent of your company's shares."

"And I'll write you a clear letter of forgiveness, stand behind you in public, let this whole thing blow over so it doesn't drag your share price down. How about it?"

I looked at her for a long moment, and I finally understood why she'd built this whole trap.

So it was my company's shares she was after all along.

When I said nothing, she stepped in closer.

"I know the car in your garage is a design your brother left behind."

"If you insist on being stubborn, I won't mind bringing people over to smash that car to pieces."

While my brother was alive, he never held back from helping the neighbors, the Walkers most of all.

Frieda's father was in poor health for years, and whenever their family had any heavy work, my brother was the first to jump in.

Back when her father was hospitalized, my brother even went and looked after him three nights running.

Now my brother was gone, dead in a car accident.

And she wanted to use the design he'd left behind to blackmail me, to take the company shares he'd left behind.

The thought of it made me spit at her feet.

"Animal!"

Frieda gave a cold laugh.

"This was your choice!"

Not long after, the officers finished searching my room and started walking me toward the garage.

Outside the garage, the crowd was packed so tight there wasn't room to move.

Countless lenses swung to my face at once.

"Louise Gilbert's out!"

"She's the driver who did it!"

"Look, everyone, they've already got the cuffs on her!"

Frieda walked at the front, holding her father's portrait, dressed head to toe in white mourning clothes.

Eyes red, she faced the cameras.

"I don't want anything. I only want justice for my father."

"Louise Gilbert has to confess in public, and hand over ten percent of her company's shares for my mother's retirement!"

"And that killer sports car has to be smashed in front of everyone!"