Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

M ax had left a note on the kitchen counter: Pike Texted Back Later.

Why do guys leave notes like that? Of course he'd be back later, I had his ruck and his dog. He might as well have written "I'm not here."

Poppy walked in as I crumpled the note and tossed it in the trash.

"School today," I said, trying to be stern. She'd stayed home the last three days, but enough was enough.

Then I saw she'd been crying. For a kid who never cried, she'd been doing that a lot lately. PTSD. I had to get her some help.

Poppy nodded. "Can I take the Pathfinder to school?"

That stopped me. "Darius isn't picking you up?"

"We broke up." She met my eyes and then looked away.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

I wanted to know everything, but Poppy wasn't volunteering, so I said, "Max took the Pathfinder. Pike texted him."

"What about?" Poppy asked.

See? "No clue."

Poppy nodded, took out her phone, and texted somebody. She waited a minute and then put the phone away. "Mei says I can go with her."

"That's good." Maybe she could tell Mei what she couldn't tell me. "Overnight oats for breakfast?"

She nodded again and went to the refrigerator, and I really wanted to ask her what was going on with the gap year thing and Darius. And I really wanted to know why Max was out at Pike's since Pike wouldn't have asked him out there to chat; they could do that at Coral's. And I really wanted to know if somebody I knew had poisoned Melissa.

Nobody tells me nothin'.

Poppy polished off her oats and made William come down off the shelf so she could cuddle him, and then she patted Maggs and went out through the shop to go down the street to meet Mei at Lian's office, and I took my cup of tea to the table and looked at Maggs, who was stretched out in a patch of sun coming in through the bay window. "What now?"

Maggs yawned.

"You're keeping secrets from me, too, aren't you?" I said, and then someone rapped on the back door, and when I looked up to see who was there, bracing myself for somebody bearing cheap flowers or possibly a hand grenade, it was Dottie.

So, a knife.

She was dressed in USPS blue with her pith hat with the daisy. Everything about her was cheery and official except for her face, which was grim and nervous. Lip-biting nervous. She kept looking from side to side, like a bird.

I opened the door. "Dottie?"

She looked uneasy. "Rose. Is, uh, Reddy here?"

I shook my head. "He's out. Anything I can help you with?"

Dottie shifted nervously and darted a glance to the side again.

I stepped back. "Would you like to come in?"

She shook her head. "I did what Reddy asked. Rowan Masters. I turned the Eye on him."

"Right," I said, having no idea what "turning the Eye" meant, although the way she said it, it was probably capitalized. "You didn't hurt Rowan, did you?"

She shook her head, the daisy waving back and forth. "Nothing like that. Just something Lion and I used to do together"—her lip quivered—"so we . . . called it the Eye. As a joke. You know. The Eye on top of the tower?"

I thought she was maybe talking about the Eye of Sauron, probably not connecting it with being the essence of evil. She looked woebegone, so I tried to look sympathetic, although I'd think it would be a relief getting rid of Lionel.

She swallowed and went on. "When we focus on a subject, we turn the Eye on them. Look at everything we can find. And we can find out a lot."

I thought about those texts. That sounded like somebody was turning an Eye on me, and Lionel evidently had the skill and equipment to do that.

Dottie had stopped, uneasy now. "But not everything. Listen, I'm sorry about what happened to Poppy. I never would have said anything to Norman if I'd known he was working with Serena or what they would do."

"I know. It's okay, Dottie." I really did believe her. She was short-tempered, not evil—the Eye notwithstanding. "What about Rowan?"

"Best I can tell," Dottie said, "is that he's really researching a book. But there's no indication what it's about. He's a damn boy scout. The FBI vetted him several times because his work overlapped with their Behavioral Science Unit. He pissed a couple of the Feebs off with his serial killer book, but they couldn't get any traction on him. They pushed him to get some of his sources, but he didn't reveal anything."

Yeah, he hadn't revealed anything to me, either. Which meant he probably had something to reveal. "Why is he here in Rocky Start?"

Dottie shrugged. "Outside of the obvious, he's dark. Not pitch black but clocking in at around 90%."

I waited, and she went on.

"When we turn the Eye on a suspect, we rate how transparent their personal lives are to an electronic survey. Rowan Masters is dark. Not 100%. That's pretty much impossible these days. Someone like Max, a pro, is close to 100%. Most people have all their stuff out there in the ether. More than they can imagine." Dottie got cheerier as she warmed to her subject. "We know them better than their shrinks. Better than their spouses. We know everyone they communicate with. Their financial records. Where they like to eat out. What they buy at the grocery. How much alcohol they consume. What medications they're on. Their porn preferences. Hell, what kind of coffee they like."

This was the happiest I'd ever seen Dottie, which was good news since it was a way in to get her to tell me things. She was gloating, tilting her head like a happy bird now, her little dark eyes bright and avid. It was kind of scary. I imagined a dark room full of Dottie birds lit only by the glow of their computer screens, heads tilting, bright-eyed voyeurs twittering as they peered into the lives of complete strangers, and it chilled me.

"But Masters has always been cautious," she went on. "And now, it's like, he's almost dark. He's staying in Bearton but paying in cash. I tracked him here from Washington, D.C., not by gas receipts but by where he charged the Cybertruck. He's a man who knows people are watching him, and he doesn't want people to know what he's doing."

This was why Ozzie had gotten so upset when Poppy wanted to put the store online.

"I mean," Dottie added, "there's tons of stuff about Rowan Masters on the internet. He's a public figure. But nothing solid about him as a person. I did find out he's single." She smiled, looking happy about that.

So Rowan had made an impression on Dottie, too. I couldn't wait to see what happened when he met our local sexpot, Louise. They'd probably spontaneously combust.

Then her smile faded and she went on, as if anxious to say what she needed to and get out. "The one thing Masters hasn't done, though, is take his Cybertruck offline. I can track that. If he took it offline, a lot of the features in it wouldn't work, especially the self-driving and adaptive cruise control. That's how I know he's been spending his nights in Bearton. And he's driven all around here, including the forest roads in the mountains."

"What's he looking for?"

Dottie shrugged. "I can't extrapolate without data." She sounded a little like a machine when she said that. She took a step back from the kitchen door, as if realizing she'd been talking for too long. "You'll pass it on to Reddy?"

I did notice she was looking around, trying to peer down the hall to the front of the store, her head tilted in that bird look again.

"Absolutely," I said.

But she'd made me think. Evidently, people's secrets weren't as nailed down as they thought if Dottie and Lionel were watching everybody. I wondered how much they were watching, if they dipped into computer feeds and looked at search histories, if they could get into cellphones and listen to messages, just what their limitations were.

And I wondered if Lionel had a burner phone.

* * *

Alone at last, I cleaned up the dishes in the sink and then went out front and sorted all the papers and ledgers Ozzie had crammed into the drawers under the front counter. They were mostly invoices, bills marked "Paid," packing slips. It looked like any time Ozzie got a piece of paper, he threw it into one of the drawers. Once I had the receipts sorted, I put them into labeled envelopes, not sure I'd ever need them but figuring proof of paid bills was always a good thing to have. Plus, there was a chance there might be info I needed to get the shop moving again, so I put the envelopes back into the counter drawers and turned to the ledgers. Those, I figured, would really tell me about the shop, about the way Ozzie ran it, give me an idea of the chances of making it profitable.

They were four old, beat-up green books, their covers threadbare, so they evidently hadn't been used in recent years. Still, information. I picked up the first one, surprised to find it heavier than I expected, and opened it.

It was full of plastic sheet protectors, those plastic envelope things you buy to put papers in. Except instead of paper, the ledger was full of green. One-hundred-dollar bills.

I took a deep breath and began to count. By the time I finished the last ledger, I had another fifty thousand dollars in my hands.

I was starting to think the rumor of millions might be right.

My phone buzzed, and I looked at it.

Don't worry about Dottie

I'm watching out for you

That's when I lost my breath. Somebody was watching me right now.

I shoved the ledgers in a drawer and locked the shop door and turned the CLOSED sign out and put my back against it, trying to slow my breathing, be calm, think.

Somebody definitely had an Eye on me.

And now I'd bet it was Lionel.