Chapter Thirty-Nine

Thirty-Nine

"You're holding back on me," I told Lee Farrell. I was in my car, in heavy traffic again, on my way home to walk and feed Rosie before meeting my dad at The Street Bar. Blake had reminded me about our standing drinks date—again—when I went back to the office to answer emails, shut down my computer, and listen to Blake's updates. Sadly, none of the contacts on Lydia's list had returned our phone calls, and there had been no replies to Blake's emails, either. I couldn't even share in Blake's disappointment because I could hardly speak. I was that tired. One thing was certain: I planned on taking an Uber to The Newbury. After all the time I'd spent in my car over the past few days, I really needed a break from driving.

"What do you mean, I'm holding back on you?" Lee said.

"Hello? Dylan's Rolex. Found near Trevor Weiss's body. I had to find out from Lydia Welch."

Lee let out an enormous sigh. "I needed a positive identification on the watch before I could even consider it evidence. It would have been pointless to tell you about it this early," he said. "And anyway, you're holding back on me, too."

"What do you mean?"

There was a long pause. I waited. The only thing I was holding back on was that final call from "Dylan" to Elspeth—and I'd promised her I wouldn't come forward with that…for now.

"Seriously, Lee," I said finally. "What do you mean?"

Lee chuckled. "Okay, okay," he said. "I was just trying to fake you out."

"Good one," I said—which beat the hell out of Whew .

"I try," he said.

"It's actually kind of ironic," I said. "Because the reason why I called is sort of the opposite of holding back."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes," I said. "I've gathered a lot of information within the past few hours. And if you have time, I'm just going to lay it all out, and you and your team can use it however you want."

"I have time," he said.

"Okay," I said. "Here goes…"

I was about ten blocks away from my loft, but the streets were congested to the point where the rest of the trip home would last at least fifteen minutes. And so I took up a good percentage of that time telling Lee everything I'd learned—starting with Sky's surprising skill at deep-fake audio recordings, and the fact that close to ten years ago, she'd made one of Dylan's voice that was accurate enough to fool his own father. From there, I moved on to Sky's much-lauded acting talent when she was at Harvard, and Teresa's recollection of her being able to "burst into tears at the drop of a hat," making her sudden "recollection" of Dylan shooting her more suspect—to me, anyway—than it had been at the time.

I spoke then about the "highly addictive" alkaloid substance that Lee already knew about—placed into a baggie and sewn into the lining of Trevor Weiss's jacket. The doomed Trevor Weiss, who was recruited by Sky to work on Gonzo's new formula and had seemed unusually "intense" in recent weeks, according to his supervisor, spending a lot more time than usual on the phone. At least one of those calls may very well have been to Dylan, whose mother had overheard him say, What's the point if there's no buzz?

"Can you guess what the point was?" I said it to Lee as though I were a grade-school teacher.

And Lee answered like the conscientious young honors student that he'd undoubtedly been. "They put the alkaloid blend in the new Gonzo formula without listing it in the ingredients—even though it's technically as legal as those crazy mushroom tinctures they advertise online as ‘immunity boosters.' The alkaloid gets customers hooked. Sales go up. Everybody's happy."

"Except Trevor, who felt guilty and contacted the one higher-up he knew of who had no idea what the hell was going on."

"Let me get this straight," he said. "You don't think Dylan Welch is responsible for either of the shootings."

"No."

"You think Sky pieced together fake audio messages with Dylan's voice and convincingly scared Elspeth into getting Dylan's gun for her, as well as deleting files. Stuff like that."

"I think that was one of three things she accomplished," I said.

"What were two and three?"

"Well, she also made sure that Elspeth kept quiet about anything Trevor might have told her—which is why I think she targeted her in the first place."

"Because Elspeth went out with Trevor a few times."

"Yep," I said. "And the third thing this plan did was, if Elspeth were to get fed up and go to the police, she'd give them the audio messages as evidence that Dylan killed Trevor—which, in my opinion, would be much more convincing than some stupid watch."

"Interesting," Lee said.

"Isn't it?"

"There's only one problem," he said. "Somebody shot Sky. She didn't do it herself. Not from that distance or that angle. If it wasn't Dylan who shot her, who was it?"

I winced. "Shit," I said, immediately thinking of Elspeth—the panic attack that sent her to the emergency room, those last instructions from "Dylan"—which were issued not via audio message, but on an unrecorded phone call. Did Sky finally come clean with Elspeth…only to threaten her even more severely into shooting her in a nonlethal spot?

If Sky trusted Elspeth enough to believe she could do that, she's crazier than I thought . Luckier, too.

"We never tested Elspeth for gunpowder residue," Lee said. It was as though he'd been reading my mind.

"Jesus," I said. "The poor kid."

"Yeah," Lee said. "But only if this theory of yours turns out to be true."

I sighed heavily. "Come on."

"Look, don't get me wrong. Everything you've said makes sense," he said, "but an overheard phone call, a bag of turbo-nicotine, and info about Sky's hobbies back in college couldn't indict a ham sandwich."

I frowned. "I don't think that's the saying," I said.

"Whatever," he said.

"Fine. You're right. A prosecutor wouldn't like any of this," I said. "There's no solid evidence. Yet."

"You know it's true," he said. "Intriguing though it is."

"Think about it, okay?"

"I'll do more than that."

"That said, can you do me a little favor?"

"I suppose you're going to tell me I owe you one."

"If you don't now," I said, "you will later."

Lee chuckled. "Can't argue with that," he said.

"I'm looking for an old friend of Dylan's, but all I have is a phone number that doesn't work and an email address from Lydia that's probably ten years old," I said. "I think Dylan's been with her recently, though. I saw photos…She may know where he is."

"Have you tried checking her social media?"

"My assistant, Blake, did, but it's private," I said. "Here's the thing, though. Lydia Welch says this girl's been in a bad way with drugs, so I'm thinking she may have been arrested at least once."

"Worth a try," Lee said.

"Okay," I said. "So her name is Annabella Horton. Probably five-six, white, with dark hair, brown eyes, tan or spray-tanned. Dylan's age, so twenty-seven, twenty-eight—"

"Say her name again."

"Annabella Horton? I think she's been going by Bella recently."

"Hold on a sec."

I heard Lee talking to someone, but I couldn't make out the words. I waited, inching ever closer to my home. At this rate, I thought, I may not even have time to change clothes before drinks.

I was about five blocks away from my building and debating parking here, despite the cold, when Lee came back to the phone. "Well, I've got good news and bad news about Annabella Horton," he said.

"Good news first."

"I know who she is," he said. "I recognized the name right away."

"Who is she?"

"That's the bad news," he said. "I knew the name because it belongs to a body we just identified."

My heart sank. "Oh…"

"She was found in the Charles a few weeks ago. Floating. Cause of death probable opiate overdose."

I gripped the steering wheel, thinking of Lydia, what she'd said about two lost souls. "When you say a few weeks ago," I said, "when exactly do you mean?"

"Well, the ME estimated that when she was found as a Jane Doe, she'd been dead for less than twenty-four hours," he said. "And that was a week before Thanksgiving."

I didn't say anything for a long while. It wasn't until Lee asked me if I was still there and the breath exited my lungs in a whoosh that I realized I'd stopped breathing.

"That's it," I said, those texts on Dylan's phone blazing through my brain: MURDERER, MURDERER, MURDERER… All dated around Thanksgiving, when Dylan left his phone in his messy desk drawer—and, in the dead of night on a holiday weekend, escaped his office and his day-to-day life. "He blames himself for Annabella's death," I said. "And whoever sent those texts scared him into hiding."

"I think you lost me," Lee said.

"It's okay," I said. "I'm just theorizing again."