Chapter Twenty-Nine

Twenty-Nine

Rhonda Lewis said she wanted to meet at the South Street Diner—a place I'd been to many times, especially during my college years. It was fun and atmospheric and something of a landmark, having stood in the same spot since 1947—crowned by a big coffee cup?shaped neon sign that everybody loved to take pictures in front of. Plus, it served good comfort food at reasonable (for Boston) prices. And it was open twenty-four hours. It was no mystery why the South Street Diner was largely responsible for my freshman fifteen.

Even though it had been decades since I'd devoured a bacon cheeseburger and fries at the South Street Diner at four in the morning after a few too many turns at the beer bong, I couldn't stave off the sense memories as I walked through the door. It happened every time I came here. I guess you could say the place made me feel young again—though, in this case, "young" meant unsteady on my feet and desperate for carbs.

The diner was packed, as usual, with a distinctly midday crowd: families and groups of tourists, a few contractor types tossing back beers, their workday having ended at two p.m.

I scanned the room for Rhonda, though I barely knew what she looked like. All I had to go on was the blurry image from the security footage. I'd been meaning to see if she had a Facebook or Instagram account last night, but with the shooting in the factory, the car chase with Moon's henchman, and Elspeth's unexpected arrival at my apartment, it had somehow slipped my mind. Go figure.

Fortunately, I was able to recognize Steve, the medical receptionist from Optima Urgent Care. He was sitting at a booth by the window, and he was waving at me. It looked as though he was wearing his scrubs and, from where I was standing, I could see his Tardis tattoo.

I was glad Steve was here. A meeting like this one tended to benefit from an introduction. I waved back and walked over to the booth.

Steve stood up as I got closer. "Sunny Randall, I'd like you to meet Rhonda Lewis," he said.

Rhonda was sitting across from him. She wore a pale blue fleece pullover. She didn't stand up, but she smiled at me, which was encouraging. Her eyes matched the pullover.

In person, Rhonda looked a lot smaller and saner than she had on the surveillance video, but still there was a sadness to her, a tiredness I would have noticed even if I didn't know about her background. As a cop, I'd been tasked with consoling family members of murder victims numerous times—an especially tough assignment that almost always went to woman officers. I'd noticed in so many of them this same hollowed-out look—as though an essential part of them had been ripped away.

"Thank you for getting in touch," I said to her.

"Thanks for coming," she said.

It was the first time I'd ever heard Rhonda Lewis's voice, and it wasn't what I'd expected. It was soft and measured—a nurse's voice. Steve stepped to the side and I slid into the booth across from Rhonda. I said hi to Steve and made room for him next to me, but he stayed where he was.

"I actually have to get out of here," Steve said as he pulled on his parka. "My shift starts soon."

I felt a little disappointed. "I'm really glad you were able to make this happen," I said.

"It was no big deal," he said. "All I did was give Rhonda your card."

"He also walked here with me," she said.

Steve shrugged. "Again, no big deal," he said. "I'll leave you guys to talk."

I cleared my throat. "You never fail to be kind," I said to him. It was a butchered version of a Doctor Who quote. Thankfully, Steve recognized it as such. His face broke into a smile. "Not bad for a New-vian."

"I told you I wasn't faking," I said.

"I'm impressed," he said.

"Allons-y," I said.

He laughed. "Okay, now you're just showing off."

Rhonda was looking at us with a mixture of confusion and mild annoyance, like we were a couple kids speaking pig latin. If I were her, my tolerance would have been running thin. I said goodbye to Steve.

"I hope you find this asshole, so you can move on to a more enjoyable assignment," he said.

"Thanks," I said. Though the thing was, I wasn't not enjoying myself. I did want to find that asshole—not so much for his own sake as for Lydia's. Whether or not he was guilty of the shootings, she wanted to be with her son again. For Bill's sake, too, even if he pretended not to care. And for Sky's. I wanted Sky Farley to have her best friend back. And if he'd betrayed and shot her, I wanted her to live to see him brought to justice. She'll live. She has to.

It surprised me how much I'd grown to care for these people in just twenty-four hours. And it was why I loved working cases like this one. The higher the stakes, the greater the reward—and more often than not, that reward was an emotional one. I wished I could explain this feeling to Richie…Steve was staring at me. Apparently, he'd said goodbye and I hadn't responded.

I forced a laugh. "Sorry," I said. "Just time-traveling."

—

After Steve left, a server came to take my order. I glanced at Rhonda. There was a cup of tea in front of her, along with two pieces of rye toast she'd yet to touch. I ordered coffee and a blueberry muffin.

When the server left, Rhonda opened her purse and took out her wallet. She removed a picture and slid it across the table to me. I looked at it. It was a class photo of a girl in a cheerleading outfit. She had wavy brown hair, rosy cheeks, a dimpled smile. Blue eyes identical to Rhonda's. "This is Daisy," she said.

"Beautiful girl."

"Does she look frail or unhealthy to you?"

I cleared my throat. "No," I said. "Not at all."

"She doesn't look that way to me, either," she said. "But that's how those lawyers talked about her. They made it seem like she was hooked up to an iron lung and I should have been watching her at all times. Not letting her see friends. They made it seem like it was my fault she died."

"That isn't fair," I said.

"Daisy wasn't aware of it, and neither was I," she said. "We had no idea she had a heart condition. How would we know to check for that? She was active in sports. She was a kid ."

The waitress returned with my coffee and blueberry muffin. I wasn't hungry anymore. "I assumed you knew," I said.

She shook her head.

"Even if you did know about her condition, it wouldn't make any difference," I said. "No one should lose a child like that. I'm so sorry."

She cringed. "That's what they said. The lawyers. That little COO. ‘We're so sorry for your loss, ma'am,' but they're not sorry. They're liars. I could burn their offices to the ground. They still wouldn't be sorry."

She said it all in that same measured tone, but there was a different look in her eyes—a hardness when she'd said that little COO . It nearly made me ask Rhonda where she'd been today between eleven and noon, when Sky had been shot. But instead I sipped my coffee and bided my time. When all was said and done, Sky's shooting was police business. I was here to find out what Rhonda might know about what happened to Dylan Welch.

She carefully put the photo back in her wallet. Then she drank her tea, that hardness in her eyes slowly dissipating.

"So," I said, "what questions do you have for me?"

She placed her cup back on the saucer. "Okay, first of all," she said, "who hired you to find Dylan Welch? Was it anyone involved with Gonzo?"

"Sort of." I picked at my blueberry muffin.

"What do you mean?"

"It was his mother who hired me," I said. "She's a primary shareholder in the company and I believe she's chairman of the board of directors. But she didn't hire me in…um…that capacity."

"She wants her child back."

"Yes."

"I understand that feeling."

"I'm sure you do," I said. It was, after all, why I'd relayed that information about Lydia.

She sipped more tea. "Do you know where he is and if he is alive?"

"Those are the questions I wanted to ask you."

"So you don't know," she said.

"Not yet." I swallowed my coffee. I wasn't going to tell her about the audio messages and texts he'd sent Elspeth—though, thinking about them now, I felt a little sick. In a way, Dylan was like Gonzo—there were good people who loved him, but that still didn't mean he wasn't disgusting.

"I hope he's alive," Rhonda said.

I blinked at her. "What?"

"Dylan Welch," she said. "I hope he's alive and well."

"Why?" I asked. "I mean, I know you saved his life once. But I figured that was just like me looking for him."

"How so?"

"It's the job. It isn't you."

"Well, it wasn't me." Rhonda opened her purse again and removed a piece of paper—a printed-out email, dated three weeks ago, from Dylan Welch to her. The subject line read Daisy . "My feelings about him changed when I got this."

I read it.

Dear Ms. Lewis,

I hope you don't mind, but I got your email address from a mutual friend. I know I shouldn't be writing you, and no one knows I am. (Please don't tell!) But I just want to say how deeply sorry I am about your daughter's death. To be honest, I've been spiraling ever since Daisy passed—drinking too much, using drugs. Hurting people. Over the summer, I even stalked an old girlfriend like a psychopath. I'm not looking for excuses. That was wrong. It was one of a metric ton of fucked-up things I've done in my life. But of all of them, Daisy's death is the worst. Or it feels the worst to me, at least. I wish I could make it up to you, but there's no way to make up for a loss like that. I am hoping I might be able to do something to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

I'm so sorry.

Dylan

"He's the only one to apologize," she said. "I don't mean that ‘I'm sorry for your loss' bullshit. I mean an honest, sincere apology. So many people involved in that fucking company, and he was the only one."

I looked at her. "You got this email after you saved his life."

"Yes," Rhonda said.

"But he doesn't mention it," I said.

"Honestly," she said. "I don't think he recognized me that night. He was a mess, and so was the girl who brought him in."

"So he didn't know you had helped him."

"Nope. There was no quid pro quo. He just felt bad," she said. "He wanted to share that with me. And it's funny, because of all the higher-ups at Gonzo, I probably blamed him least for Daisy's death."

"But he's the CEO."

She shrugged. "In name only. He was never in court, sticking up for their warning labels. And as far as I know, he didn't have much to do with the branding of the drink or the formula or anything like that."

"He's a figurehead."

"Exactly," she said. "And you know…when he was at Optima and we were reviving him, he seemed like kind of an idiot."

"He is."

"Yeah, well. Leave it to the idiot to be the only one with a conscience."

"Is it okay if I keep this printout?"

She nodded. "That's why I brought it."

"Because you wanted me to see…what?"

"That he's worth looking for."

I folded it up and put it in my purse. "Thank you," I said. "I needed that." I meant it sincerely.

She drank her tea. I drank my coffee. This conversation was going in a very different direction than I'd assumed it would go. "Who was the mutual friend?" I asked.

"The one who gave him my email address? I have no idea. Obviously, we travel in very different circles. I figure he just went through whatever channels he had to track me down."

I found myself thinking again about how complicated people were, how contradictory. Even the shallow ones. Even the ones I had long believed to be wholly disgusting.

"I really do hope he's all right," Rhonda said.

And for whatever reason, that made me remember Dylan's phone, what I'd seen on it. "Can I ask you one more thing?"

"Sure."

"If you don't blame Dylan for Daisy's death, and you never really did blame him," I said, "why did you call him a murderer?"

Rhonda looked at me as if I'd just sprouted horns. "I never called him that."

"I saw his phone," I said. "There were five or six texts from you, calling him a murderer. They were sent right before he went missing."

Her eyes grew even wider. "I've never texted him in my life," she said. "Why would I even have his personal phone number?"

I stared back at her. "You're right," I said.

I knew she was being truthful. This was a woman who had defaced property in front of security cameras. She'd yelled at Sky and pounded on the walls until she was forcibly removed from Gonzo's corporate offices. She clearly saw herself as someone with nothing to lose—and so she had no reason to lie about sending a few texts. Plus, her shock was the type that couldn't be faked. "These text messages you saw," she said. "They were from my phone number?"

"They were from an anonymous number," I said. "I was told they were probably from you."

Her shoulders relaxed. "Ah," she said. "I get it."

My cheeks flushed. "I'm sorry," I said.

"It's all right," she said. "I'm just relieved my phone didn't get hacked."

I was angry with myself. Disappointed. It was always wrong to assume things. It ruined investigations. Got innocent people in trouble and set the guilty ones free.

Still, a lot of people in law enforcement and ex?law enforcement were prone to assumption—and Maurice, I realized, was one of them. I remembered the contempt in his eyes when he spoke about how Dylan wanted Rhonda "roughed up." What he said was he wanted us to track her down so he could send her a message. He'd programmed his mind to believe the worst, when, in reality, Dylan had literally wanted to send Rhonda a message —an apology email, in fact.

He went through whatever channels he had…

I sighed. "The problem is, I'm now stuck with even bigger questions."

"Such as?"

"Somebody out there sent anonymous texts to Dylan Welch, calling him a murderer," I said. "If it wasn't you, then who sent them?"

"It wasn't me," she said. "I swear. I don't think of him as a murderer."

"I believe you," I said. "Which leads me to my other big question: Who does think of him as a murderer…and why?"

She broke off a piece of rye toast and put it in her mouth, chewing it slowly. When she was done she picked up her napkin and dabbed at her mouth and looked at me with those lost, sad, powder-blue eyes. "Maybe he's done something really bad," she said. "Something that has nothing to do with me."