Dr. Boyle had advised him to keep to a regular schedule whether he felt tired or not. Go to the bed at the same time every day. Get up at the same time every day. His body would become entrained to the schedule and his brain would follow.

  Of course, that was assuming he didn’t need to do any overnight surveillance jobs. Something like that would throw a wrench into the works. But so far, he’d been able to avoid any night surveillance while training his body and brain to a reasonable schedule.

  It wasn’t bedtime, so he needed something to keep him engaged and help him to unwind. After scrolling restlessly through his email and social networks, such as they were, he double-clicked the Skype icon and selected Lorne Peterson’s name.

  Even though Mr. Peterson—rarely Lorne, even though he’d told Zachary numerous times that he could call him by his first name—was more than twenty years older than Zachary, he was probably Zachary’s closest friend. He had been Zachary’s foster father for a few weeks after the fire that had destroyed not only Zachary’s family home, but also his family structure. His mother and father divorced and relinquished the six children to social services, wanting nothing more to do with them.

  Zachary hadn’t stayed with the Petersons for long. He’d celebrated his eleventh birthday while there, the first birthday that had ever actually been marked by a cake and a birthday present. But his needs and behavioral issues had been too much for them to handle, and Mrs. Peterson had insisted that he couldn’t stay there, possibly putting the other children at risk, any longer. Zachary had gone on to another foster family, and another, and a long series of homes and facilities for the rest of his childhood and adolescence. But he and Mr. Peterson had stayed in touch throughout.

  The call rang for a few minutes before it was answered. Then Mr. Peterson’s round, cheerful face was centered on the screen. He patted down his fringe of white hair.

  “Zachary! Good to see you! How are you doing?”

  Zachary relaxed into his seat. Mr. Peterson represented safety and security for him. The only person who had felt like family until his younger brother, Tyrrell had reached out and made contact with him, followed by Heather, his older sister. He hadn’t yet had any contact with the remaining three siblings.

  “I’m good. Picked up a new case today. How are you and Pat?”

  Pat moved into the frame behind Mr. Peterson, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. He bent down to look into the screen and smiled into the video cam. “Hi, Zachary!” He gave a thumbs-up. “We’re fine! Good to see you!”

  Zachary nodded and smiled. Pat clapped his hand on Mr. Peterson’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, then he moved out of the picture, off to the kitchen or whatever job he was doing next. Zachary kept his smile in place.

  “How is he…?”

  Mr. Peterson’s smile grew strained. He gave a little grimace. “It’s been tough, I won’t lie to you about that. But we’ve been seeing a therapist and I think we’re making good progress. His mood is better. But that could be the antidepressants.”

  Zachary felt a stab of guilt. He would have taken away Pat’s pain if he could. But he couldn’t bring back Pat’s friend Jose, who had been killed by a serial killer. And he couldn’t wipe out Pat’s feelings of responsibility for what had happened to Zachary because he had been investigating Jose’s disappearance.

  “Well… he’ll get through it,” Zachary encouraged. “He’s got a strong support system.”

  Mr. Peterson shrugged, getting a little pink.

  “Thank you, Zachary. I’m sure you’re right, he’ll get through it. We’re seeing progress.”

  Zachary nodded. The words made his apartment seem even more empty and hollow. He tried to focus on Mr. Peterson’s friendly features. Zachary still had support too. He might not have Kenzie, but she was not the only person in Zachary’s support network. Mr. Peterson and Pat were there for him, as well as his therapist, doctors, and support groups. Young Rhys Salter and his grandmother. Mario Bowman and other friends on the police force and consultants who provided other services he used in his PI business. Tyrrell and Heather and Heather’s husband. He had received a number of calls, emails, and letters of support from previous strangers after bringing Teddy Archuro to justice, both from people who were grateful or impressed by what he had done and by people who understood the trauma he’d been through and offered their support and encouragement.

  He had a big circle of supporters. He didn’t need to feel alone.

  “New case today?” Mr. Peterson prompted, leaning toward the camera.

  “Oh. Yeah. I don’t know if you would have seen in the news, a young woman named Lauren Barclay…?”

  “The intern at that investment company? Yeah, we saw that. I thought that was an accident.”

  “No determination has been made yet, but yes, the initial word is that it was an accident. But her friend is not convinced and wants someone to look into it.”

  “Well, great. That’s a good case. High profile.”

  Zachary nodded. “I doubt it will really go anywhere, but I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “It will at least put her mind at ease to know that it was an accident. Even though it seems unfair… I’m sure she’d rather know that it was an accident than to be worried that there might have been some kind of foul play involved.”

  “Yes, I think so. And maybe she just needs some time to process. It happened so fast, and she was the one to find the body. That’s a shock.”

  Mr. Peterson emphatically agreed. “The poor girl. She must be devastated.”

  “I think so.”

  “So you just started on that today?”

  Zachary nodded. “Just getting the initial information processed. Stopped by the medical examiner’s office to request a copy of his findings when they are published…”

  “Oh,” Mr. Peterson understood immediately. He and Pat had met Kenzie. Mr. Peterson cocked his head to the side empathetically. “You saw Kenzie?”

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah. It was… weird. She didn’t yell or anything, but it was… awkward, I guess.”

  “Hopefully, some of that will fade. You guys are still going to run into each other, both being involved in crime investigation. You’ll keep bumping up against each other. Best if you can be civil, if not friends.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to still be friends, but she doesn’t. Not yet, anyway. I’m trying to … give her the space she needs. Maybe sometime down the road… we can still share a meal together as friends… talk about cases. We don’t have to be dating to do that.”

  “No, of course not. You’re probably right about her needing her own space. You don’t want to smother her.” Mr. Peterson shifted, moving his head the other direction and considering his question carefully before voicing it. “There is no chance of the two of you getting back together again?”

  “No… I don’t think so. She says not, anyway. I would… I’d like to give it a try. We got together pretty well… I wasn’t really ready to break it off.”

  Mr. Peterson made a noncommittal noise. Zachary looked at the screen and considered the matter. It had been Kenzie who had said that they were over. But he had been avoiding her before that. He had been the one with a problem.

  “Or maybe I was,” Zachary admitted. “Maybe I knew it wasn’t working.”

  “You need to put work into a relationship,” Mr. Peterson said. “It isn’t something that just magically happens and is self-perpetuating. Once you’re comfortable and committed… things start to chip away at the relationship. Personality conflicts, irritation, other relationships, work… you have to keep building it up to make it work.”

  Zachary nodded his agreement.

  “You have been through a lot. Things that challenged you and your relationship. If you’re not willing to put the work into fixing it…”

  Zachary opened his mouth to argue that he had been working at fixing it. He had been talking to his therapist, trying to work through his reflex reactions to intimacy since the assault. It had stirred up a lot of old issues, and the avalanche of old memories and emotions had been too much to deal with all at once.

  He had been trying. He and Kenzie had been talking about it and trying to work through it together. They’d been making progress.

  Until Zachary discovered that Kenzie was talking to Mr. Peterson and Bridget, trying to get details of Zachary’s past relationships and abuse. It had been an invasion of his privacy that he couldn’t accept. If they were going to have a relationship, then she had to be willing to wait for him to work through his past and share it with her in his own time. For her to go behind his back to talk to his foster father and ex-wife about such intimate issues was beyond the pale.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “We were working on it… but I’m just… I’m not what she wanted, Lorne. I can’t change what happened to me and I couldn’t share it with her… so how could we have the relationship that she wanted?”

  To his credit, Mr. Peterson didn’t come out with some glib answer or try to sweep away Zachary’s feelings. “Maybe not, Zach. It seemed like the two of you were good together. She was a much better fit for you than Bridget ever was. But I can’t tell you how to deal with it. I don’t mean to imply that you didn’t work on the relationship. Just that… when it’s the right relationship… it’s worth it to forgive and try again. When it’s the right relationship—and you’re the only one who can decide that. You and her.”

  Zachary sighed. He had been telling himself that it was all Kenzie’s fault. She was the one who had betrayed his trust. She was the one who had then broken it off and didn’t want to continue to see each other or be friends. But that was only half of the story. The truth was… he had been struggling and she had been trying to help, in her own way. He had felt betrayed and had shut her out. He had effectively ended the relationship some time before she had come to the apartment to pick up her things. It hadn’t been her at all.

  “I’ll think about it. But I don’t think she’d be willing to try again even if I said I wanted to.”

  “You’re the one who knows best. I’m not going to meddle in your relationships.”

  “Thanks. You’ve always been really good about accepting whoever I was with, wherever I was.”

  “And there have been some doozies,” Mr. Peterson laughed, and Zachary knew he only meant one—Bridget. “But who am I to say what will work and what won’t? A lot of people told me to go back to Lilith. To mend fences and find a way to make it work. But I never would have been happy staying with her. And I never would have met Pat and been able to have the relationship I do with him, if I was still with her.”

  Zachary swallowed. “Yeah,” he agreed, wondering whether Mr. Peterson could see how pink Zachary’s face was getting on the camera. Zachary always felt awkward talking about Mr. Peterson’s and Pat’s relationship. Zachary liked and respected Pat enormously, but he didn’t want to know the intimate details of their relationship.

  He changed the subject and still didn’t tell Mr. Peterson the news about Bridget.

  5

  Barbara had indicated that Zachary could come to her apartment in order to see the scene of the accident and to pick up Lauren’s phone and computer. Then he could get the names of her friends, contacts at Chase Gold, and see whatever else he might need to see in the apartment and her possessions. Not that Zachary expected to find anything, but he’d been surprised before. Most cases, he’d found exactly what he’d expected to. But every now and then, there was one that blew up big, turning out to be something very different from what he’d initially thought.

  Barbara opened the door and silently ushered him into the apartment. She stood there, not sure what to do or say at first. Then she took a deep breath.

  “I’m going to go out. You can stay here as long as you need, just lock the handle and pull the door shut when you’re done. Shoot me a text when you’re on your way out. I just—” she looked around the front room of the apartment, “—I really can’t be here while you’re going through her things or looking at… the accident scene. I don’t want to talk to you about it and walk you through it. You already know what happened, between the paper and what I told you. I don’t want to relive it.”

  “I understand. That’s fine, as long as you trust me to be here by myself.”

  “I know how to find you. If something disappeared or I thought you were messing with my stuff, I would go to the police, believe me. But… I do trust you. I’m comfortable around you, and I’m a pretty good judge of character. So I’m just going to go with my feelings, and if I’m wrong… I’ll have to deal with it.”

  “I won’t get into your things or make a mess. Just point me at Lauren’s room, and I’ll proceed from there.”

  Barbara indicated one of the bedrooms. “That one.” She swung her handbag up to her shoulder. “Good luck. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He went to Lauren’s bedroom and heard the front door click shut behind her.

  He didn’t mind the fact that she had left. Far from it; it was easier for him to concentrate without somebody hanging over him. He disliked clients who hovered. With Barbara gone, he’d be able to immerse himself in Lauren’s life and learn all he could from her possessions.

  The bedroom was remarkably sparse. He’d seen students’ rooms before, and they were usually full of clutter. Posters on walls, bookshelves, boxes that hadn’t been unpacked, bags shoved under the bed. But Lauren’s room was nothing like that. It was like a hotel room, with hardly any personal furnishings. He looked in the closet. Her clothes were neat and well-cared-for. Not much by way of casual blue jeans and tees; she mostly wore black skirts with white blouses. Some workout clothes in the drawers. He checked the bottoms and backs of the drawers and didn’t find anything racy hidden away.

  Her drug supply consisted mostly of headache pills of various sorts, caffeine and herbal remedies for alertness and mental acuity. No narcotics, no coke, no pot. No seizure medications or insulin. Though insulin, he remembered, would be in the fridge. He’d have to double-check that for his report.

  She had a few pictures. Parents and a sister, it looked like. No cuddly fiance photos or groups of young people out partying.

  There were books and notebooks full of scribbled notes on her computer desk. Flipping through them, they were much more complex math than Zachary was qualified to analyze. If he hit a dead end, he might have to find someone who could interpret what she had been working on to see if he should be looking in another direction. Maybe she had discovered some new way of predicting or manipulating markets.

  She had a little shower caddy with all of her toiletries in it. Zachary poked through them. Nothing unusual; they all looked like brands he seen at the grocery store or on TV.

  He checked all of the usual hiding places. Under the mattress, behind the nondescript artwork on the walls. He unscrewed the plates over the light switch and wall outlets. In the closet, he searched for any hidden panels or safe, checked the pockets of the clothes hanging in the closet—why did women have so few pockets?—and the purses that hung neatly on hooks inside the closet. The purses contained only the usual miscellany. Combs, cosmetics, and feminine supplies, together with coins, gum, tissues, and crumpled receipts.

  He went through the room one more time for hiding places. Her computer and phone were on the desk waiting for him, as well as a music player. He left them all there and went to the bathroom.

  The scene of the accident.

  There was nothing to indicate what had happened there. No blood, no fingerprints blackened with powder. No flower memorials. Just a scrubbed-clean bathroom, like he would find in any other apartment in the building. Probably cleaner than any others. He suspected Barbara had spent several hours cleaning it after the police and paramedics were gone, wiping out every trace of the horrible accident her friend had suffered.

  Zachary looked at himself briefly in the mirror. He didn’t like to look in the mirror. He was a small man, dark-haired, not particularly attractive, with various scars on his face from childhood accidents and abuse growing up in foster care and institutions. He had shaved for his initial meeting with Barbara, but not since, so dark stubble shaded his jaw.

  He pictured Lauren standing there. A pretty girl, as evidenced by her pictures in the news articles and the family pictures in the bedroom. Hair the color of dark honey, tall and slim, probably athletic in high school. But from Barbara’s description, Lauren had been wearing thin. She probably had bags under her eyes, hidden as best she could by the miracle of modern make-up, and lines of fatigue at the corners of her eyes and across her forehead. She had probably stood there, wondering how much longer she could continue to go at that pace.

  Shower or bath? If it had been him, he would have been worried about falling asleep in a bath. He would have had a shower. A cold one to wake him up, not a hot one that would make him more drowsy. But she’d drowned in the water in the bathtub, so she’d made the opposite choice. Getting ready for work in the morning, knowing she had to get there before her boss, instead of starting the shower and jumping in and out in two minutes, she had drawn the bath to have a soak.

  He stepped into the tub. Of course, any evidence of the accident had already been cleaned away. But he wanted to take a closer look anyway.

  There were no anti-slip decals, but the bathmat should have prevented a slip-and-fall. It seemed to be in good shape. The tub was larger than the one in Zachary’s apartment, and jetted. Not a huge soaker tub, but big for an apartment. Those jets probably felt great on sore muscles and feet at the end of a long day at the office. But she’d had a bath in the morning, not on coming home from work. Or so Barbara had assumed. He’d need confirmation of time of death to be sure.

  He looked at the faucet and handles for any tiny spatters of blood, but found nothing, not even hard water spots. No dents. No cracks in the plastic tub surround. He couldn’t tell by looking at it what Lauren had hit her head on.

 

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