So, I searched her bedroom. The furniture all looked new. It all looked like it matched. Thanks to too many hours of being forced, along with Rowe, to watch HGTV with Emma and Glo, I recognized the pieces as having a “mid-century modern influence”: clean lines, neutral-colored upholstery, dark wood. I didn’t find anything interesting in her dresser, or behind her dresser, or under the dresser. Ditto with the nightstands. I did find a box full of sex toys in the closet, including a wicked-looking alien tentacle dildo, but I left those for Holmes to discover. I wanted to see his face.

  The guest room-slash-office had a similar design with even less of interest, and while the office had an abundance of paperwork—all of it neatly filed in hanging folders—there wasn’t anything that I could make sense of, nothing that seemed to be immediately and obviously significant. Holmes would have to take a look as well.

  In the main area at the front of the condo, Holmes had moved into the kitchen. He held out a sandwich baggie that held a powdered white residue. Then he nodded to a wine bottle left on the counter.

  “So, what?” I asked. “We’re supposed to believe she committed a major theft, broke into Maggie’s vault, raced home, and—what? Used a bottle of wine to pulverize her pills, and then drank them down?”

  “It’s impossible to tell without a toxicology report, but her death appears to be consistent with an overdose. The glass on the table still has the dregs of the wine and a granular residue.”

  “But that’s bullshit.”

  Holmes cocked one perfect blond eyebrow.

  “She didn’t steal from Maggie, run home, and kill herself. In the first place, that makes no sense. Why commit the theft at all if you’re going to kill yourself? And it’s not like she got caught, so she’s not trying to avoid prison or—or whatever.”

  I decided on whatever because it was easier than saying, Or having your dad and his pet Moriarty feed her to sharks with lasers on their heads.

  “Perhaps she did get caught,” Holmes said. “Did you find the portable safe?”

  I shook my head. “Wait, you think someone beat us here?”

  Holmes returned the plastic baggie to the counter. He was silent for several long moments. The stillness in the condo was incredible; blood rushed in my ears like static.

  “I believe you are correct that, taken at face value, the pills and the wine and the way she is positioned are meant to suggest suicide. And I believe you are correct that such a conclusion does not seem borne out by the events of the evening, what we know of them. And I believe you are correct that someone wants the police to believe Lynnissa Baca killed herself.”

  “But?”

  “No buts, Jack. I don’t know who did this, but I believe I know why. Someone…recruited Baca to steal Watson’s safe from the vault. And that same person came here tonight, took possession of the safe, and killed Baca to silence her.”

  “Jesus.”

  “There’s bruising on her jawline—faint, because the process didn’t continue after death. Some broken hairs. It suggests a struggle. Someone held her head, perhaps.”

  “You think she fought whoever did this?”

  “Perhaps. Or—or she was partially drugged, and then, when she was disoriented, she was forced to consume the remainder of the lethal dosage. She may have struggled, but by then, it would have been too late.”

  “Someone killed her. Someone planned this. Someone knew they were going to kill her.” I could hear myself, hear how repetitive I sounded, the way I had earlier. Good. Good. Good. I was trying not to say, Your dad did this.

  “Did you find anything in the bedrooms?”

  I shook my head. “There were some papers. In the office.”

  He nodded. “I’ll look at them. Perhaps you’d like to wait in the hall?”

  “No, I—did you already search out here?”

  “Briefly.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  “If you’re uncomfortable—”

  “What, being alone with a dead body? Go look at those papers so we can get out of here.”

  Something creased Holmes’s mouth, not quite a frown, but he nodded, and after another moment, he hurried down the hall.

  I shuffled around the front room. I looked at the art prints hung on the walls. I slid them aside, in case they were hiding anything, and let them fall back into place. I checked the teak-and-wicker accent cabinet near the door and thumbed through the mail she’d tossed there. Her bag was propped against the base of the cabinet, and when I opened it, I saw a laptop, phone, tissues, a tube of lipstick—that kind of stuff.

  She was dead, so she wasn’t staring at me. You couldn’t call it that, anyway. But every time I looked over, her gaze seemed fixed on me: half-lidded, the eyes themselves barely visible, but following me. I stared back for a while. Death looked different at different times. Right then, it left her features drooping, her body limp. Her concho chain belt was twisted, and I thought about going over and fixing it for her. I was supposed to be getting used to it—to her, I mean. I thought I’d stop feeling it. Or it would stop affecting me. Or whatever I was supposed to say, however I was supposed to say it.

  I didn’t know why finding her, seeing her, hit me so hard. I didn’t know her. What I did know—she was a thief, in debt, and had been dumb enough to get herself killed—wasn’t good. Finding Watson hadn’t affected me like this. Or Mr. Campbell, or Kazen Bates. Not even Dawson, and he’d been something like a friend. I’d been shocked. Frightened. Upset. But not this.

  Since December, though, everything had been different. It was hard to pinpoint exactly when. The night I’d been run off the road in the middle of a blizzard, and a man had tried to kill me—with all those eerie echoes of the night my mom had died. Or learning that she had been a Watson, and by extension, I was too. Or losing Holmes. After Mom died, I hadn’t thought anything could hurt me again. Not like that. But, once again, I’d been wrong.

  I tore my gaze away from Lynnissa Baca. The door mat was askew, which I hadn’t noticed. For lack of anything better to do, I bent to straighten it, and when I pulled it into place, I found that it had been covering a dark stain. Crouching next to it, I gave it a longer look. Oily. Black. Still wet, I thought. And definitely shaped like a shoe.

  “H,” I called.

  He appeared next to me like a ghost, his face intent as he studied what I’d found. “Men’s size eleven, I believe. Or twelve. Part of the print didn’t take—” He gestured to where the print was incomplete and then used his phone to snap a picture. “—so it’s difficult to say for certain. Well done, Jack.”

  “Did you find anything in the office?”

  “Nothing obvious. There may be something significant, but it would take more time.”

  “We’ve got time.”

  “I’m not sure we do, and there’s something else we need to check while we have the opportunity. Bring her bag; the police will wonder, but I’m not willing to leave it behind.”

  Holmes set the lock on the latch and pulled the door shut behind us. Then he took my disposable gloves, balled them up, and stored them in a pocket of the overalls. We rode the elevator down, but instead of returning to the parking garage, Holmes stopped on the first floor.

  When we got out, it looked like the lobby of your typical apartment building: the locked vestibule that connected to the street, a mail room, a multipurpose room currently filled with children’s toys, and then a door with MANAGER on its pebbled glass. Holmes picked this lock too. The door inched open as the elevator dinged, but Holmes moved without any apparent haste as he hip-checked the door and tilted his head for me to go first. I did, and Holmes slipped into the office behind me, and the door began to swing shut.

  From the elevator came a man’s voice, older, rough: “I’d throw my own son out of a moving car if he talked to me like that; the fuck chance do you think you have?”

  A younger, campier voice answered him: “Daddy, I said I’m sorry!”

  I caught Holmes’s eye by chance, and for some reason, his face lit up with a blush.

  The office was small and crowded with too much furniture: hardbacked, stackable chairs that probably got hauled out and set up in the multipurpose room for condo board meetings and book clubs and maybe the occasional light cult worship; an L-shaped desk with a computer; white laminate filing cabinets. Everything was a little battered, a little chipped, but you could tell they’d been going for Crate and Barrel by means of Ikea. Again, too much HGTV with Glo and Emma. Someone had spoiled it by hanging a poster on the wall that showed what was, by my best guess, a guitar-playing rock-and-roll wizard. I got the sense that whoever had designed it had believed fervently in psychedelics. From the trash can next to the desk wafted up the reek of microwaved turkey loaf and brown gravy.

  Holmes moved unhesitatingly toward the desk. He donned a fresh pair of gloves, held out a pair for me, and then powered up the computer.

  Perched on the edge of the desk, I took my time with the gloves, snapping them against my wrists so that Holmes flicked me a look.

  “How are you going to do this?” I asked. “Let me guess. You’re going to rear-admiral the cloud-connected synthesized intermodulation. And if that doesn’t work, you’ll copy the 1080 HTTP feed into the mainframe.”

  “What is it with you and mainframes?” he muttered in a distinctly un-Holmes-like manner. Then he tapped a few keys and made a satisfied noise.

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked.

  “Password is still the most common password. Even for admin accounts.”

  “Good Christ. So, what now? We poke around and hope we find something interesting? Actually that kind of sounds like what we did that night in your bed.”

  Holmes’s shoulders tightened, and he hunched over the screen, but his clicking and typing didn’t slow down.

  “Are you looking for—”

  “The security camera footage,” he said. “And I’ve found it.”

  “You have got to be kidding me.” I slipped off the desk and came around to see if he was lying, but he was Holmes, which meant he never lied about anything—well, apparently only earth-shattering stuff. On the screen, he’d pulled up what looked like a cloud-based dashboard for the building’s security system. “Ok, fine, I’ll ask. How?”

  He pointed to a sticky note at the corner of the monitor, where someone had written in blue ballpoint a web address and, below it, a username and password.

  “For the love of cocks,” I said.

  Holmes shrugged, but his words were clipped. “Most people do not imagine they will themselves be the victim of a crime, so they fall into patterns of what is easy, not what is best.”

  “Are you mad at me about the poking around comment? Because I had fun poking around. You know. In case you were wondering.”

  In the glow of the screen, the color in his face deepened, but he sounded more like himself when he said, “I saw some alphabet blocks in the nursery next door. As well as a train. Perhaps you can find a way to keep yourself amused.”

  “Ok, that was pretty solid.”

  “Less talking, Jack.”

  I pitched my voice higher. “Daddy, I said I’m sorry.”

  “I will remove you from this office if I must.”

  That was how you knew he ate this stuff up.

  Instead of leaving, I watched as he checked the feeds of the security cameras. They showed the outside of the building, as well as the lobby, the second floor, and the third. The feed from the parking garage, however, was only a black screen. As was the camera from the elevator. And the fourth-floor hallway.

  Holmes took a moment to delete the footage that showed us emerging into the lobby, and he deactivated that camera. Then he went back to the parking garage feed and scrubbed backward. For a little over an hour, the feed was black. And then it changed to white. The white lasted for several minutes, and then the camera feed looked normal again. Holmes let the video play forward again.

  As we watched, a black car came down the ramp into the parking garage. It didn’t have any plates, but Holmes made an annoyed noise.

  “What?” I got closer, leaning on his shoulder.

  Holmes tried to shrink away, but he couldn’t do it without both of us ending up on the floor, so finally he said, “Jack.”

  “Uh huh?”

  “It is—could you move your arm, please?”

  “What’s the deal with that car?” On the video, it was pulling into an accessible parking space. “Do you recognize it?”

  Holmes was still grumbling and muttering and trying to shoulder himself free of me.

  “H?”

  “It is my car. Would you please—”

  “Holy shit. Is that a Bentley?”

  “Jack, please.”

  Before I could tell him to cowboy up, or something similarly encouraging, the door to the Bentley opened. I waited for our killer to emerge, but instead, I only had a glimpse of a hand, and then the screen lit up with white. Moments later, it went black.

  Holmes swore under his breath.

  “What?” I asked.

  He played the video again. And again.

  “How’d they do that?” I asked. “With the camera, I mean.”

  “A high-lumen flashlight. Followed by a piece of tape.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “No, Jack, I do not know who it is.”

  He switched the feed to the elevator, but we got more of the same—barely a glimpse of a hand before the flashlight blinded the camera, and then, moments later, the screen went dark.

  “I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman,” I said. “Light skin, I guess. Relatively light, anyway. That’s something, right?”

  “Yes, Jack. In the state of Utah, where the population is over ninety percent white.”

  “Hey, dummy, I’m trying to help.”

  “If you want to help, get off me.”

  “Nope. I’m too comfortable, and besides, you were mean to me about the letter blocks.”

  Holmes did some more grumbling, some more of those plaintive, distressed, totally fake noises. But he didn’t break my arm or flip me on my head or use even a single pain compliance hold, so I figured deep down, he was loving this stuff. I figured it was like catnip to him.

  The rest of the blacked-out camera feeds tracked the killer’s progress through the building. In each one, we’d catch the momentary appearance of a hand, and then a white-out that made it impossible to see anything else. I wanted to say it was a guy because I wanted it to be Blackfriar Holmes. But if I were being honest with myself, I couldn’t tell. Man or woman. Young or old. It could have been almost anybody.

  Holmes was uploading the footage to what looked like a private cloud server, presumably so he could obsess over them for the foreseeable future. I tried to think about what it meant, that the killer could move so easily through the building, could make sure that the only possibly identifying feature was the car, which looked conveniently like Holmes’s own. I tried not to think about what it meant to be this close to Holmes again, my hip bumping his, the familiar architecture of his rib cage, the dense musculature of his shoulder. I tried not to think about having a semi, which was totally inappropriate, but also, I was seventeen, and I wasn’t made of stone.

  From the hallway came another ding of the elevator, and then a woman’s voice. “—because it’s simple. Do you know how to read numbers? Do you know numbers one through ten? That’s all you have to know. They’re on the front of the fucking building.” She paused and must have spoken over whoever was on the other end of her call. “I should not have to put up with this to get my fucking Enchirito!” More distantly came the sound of the vestibule’s door crashing open, and then I heard her shout, “Excuse me!” Then, mercifully, her voice cut off.

  “Let’s say it’s a he,” I said, and I tried not to think Blackfriar’s name too loudly. “Whoever he is, he knew the layout of the building, right? He knew where every camera was. He was prepared.”

  Holmes made a noise of acknowledgment as he uploaded the video files.

  “On top of that, he was prepared to kill her. Right? I mean, the way he came into the building, making sure none of the cameras caught sight of him, and then taping them, and then getting into her apartment, and—oh shit. H, did he get here before or after Baca?”

  Holmes shot me a sharp look, and then his hands flew over the keyboard. A moment later, he replayed the footage from the parking garage. Baca’s parking spot was empty.

  “Well done, Jack,” he murmured. “Very well done.”

  Ok, most of the time, I know I’m Jack Moreno, Boy Genius. But it was hard not to let that go to my head. “He gets here before her,” I said. “How? Why?”

  “For the killer to arrive before Baca, he must have anticipated her behavior.”

  “Or been working with her. He knew where to go because he was in on it.”

  Steps squeaked in the lobby, but no talking accompanied them. Hopefully she’d gotten her goddamn Enchirito.

  “He arrives early because he intends to kill her,” Holmes said. “Probably to drug the wine. He would have offered her a drink—celebratory, congratulatory. She had, after all, successfully stolen something incredibly valuable. They both would have wanted to celebrate.”

  “Wouldn’t she have found it creepy that he was inside her apartment waiting for her? Wouldn’t that have set off her internal alarms?”

  Holmes was silent. Headlights reached us through the window, tracing a pale arc across the wall, and then the office was dark again.

  “I understand that you believe my father was behind this—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Jack, please.” His voice was flat. Heavy. On someone else, I would have called it defeated.

  “Ok,” I said. “But I’m open to other possibilities.” Not technically true, but hey. “What do you think?”

  “We don’t know the nature of the relationship Baca had with her killer. He—or she, Jack—”

  “Yes, I know, it definitely could have been a woman.”

  “—might have been a lover, or a friend, or for all we know, they might have arranged for him to be in the apartment, waiting for Baca, so that the transaction could be completed as quickly as possible. We simply don’t have enough information, and it is a mistake to theorize without sufficient data.”

 

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