So, I’m probably high, Nell thought, imagining herself in the mystery woman’s shoes. That or strung-out, at loose ends, and all I have—my only souvenir from the murder that went down right in front of me—is Arthur’s phone. If I’m curious, industrious, I want to unlock it and figure out what kind of trouble he was in. If I’m low on cash and looking to score drugs, I want to sell it to someone who won’t ask where it came from.
Both possibilities tugged her gaze across the street, to the hole-in-the-wall camera repair shop, its windows plastered over with vintage ads. Some people’s bones ached when the rain was rolling in. Nell had her own form of bodily radar: the tip of her highly trained nose itched in the presence of shady business. Her nose rarely led her astray. She rubbed her finger across its sharp bridge and crossed at the next light.
“I don’t know anything about anything,” said the sleepy-eyed kid at the register. She knew better. She’d seen the nervous look in his eyes when she started talking to him. Then the shift in his hips, like he might break and run for the back room, when she asked about the woman. She laid one of her business cards down on the counter.
“I’m not a cop,” Nell said. “Whatever kind of hustle you’ve got going here, I don’t care. I’m hunting for a story and you aren’t it. Tell me what I want to know, and you never have to see me again.”
He shot a nervous glance at the card. “And if I don’t?”
She put both hands on the counter and leaned in close.
“Then you and me,” she said, “are going to be best friends. I’m not a cop. That doesn’t mean I don’t know any cops.”
She gave him a second to think about that.
“I didn’t think she’d be any trouble,” he said. “This guy I know, he called ahead and vouched for her, said her name was Seelie. Seemed cool.”
“Tell me about her,” Nell said.
“Just a kid. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Looked like an art-school chick.”
Nell’s brow furrowed. She wondered if she’d missed something in her background on Wendt, some daughter she didn’t know about. Then she remembered the burgundy silk sheets and the wineglasses, and the smell of sex still lingering in the air.
“Was she high?” Nell asked.
“Nah. Not that type. Trust me, I deal with a lot of junkies in the, uh…”
He trailed off, and she offered him a lifeline. “The camera-repair business.”
“Yeah. Not her. She was clean. Focused.” He waved at his face. “Bags under her eyes, though, looked like she’d been running all night.”
That part sounded about right. “Was she looking to unload the phone or unlock it?”
“She wanted me to crack the passcode. Which I did. Thing was damn near factory default, though. Only nonstandard app on it was WhisperMe, and like I told her, getting that open is outside my skill set. She took it with her, and that was the end of that.”
Nell glanced upward, to the discreet nozzle of a security camera in the corner of the shop.
“Is that recording?” she asked.
“You’re asking a lot,” he said.
Technically, bribing a source was a no-no. Technically, Nell didn’t give a damn. She counted off a pair of twenties from her purse and ten minutes later she had a string of captured stills on her phone, showing Arthur’s mystery woman in living color.
“So,” the clerk said, “what kind of trouble is she in, anyway?”
Nell thought back to the scene at Ducky’s apartment and the puzzle left behind for Detective Jordan to unravel. Two corpses, one in the living room and one on the kitchen floor, and a bucket of blood in the bedroom that didn’t belong to either one.
“Three victims,” Jordan had told her, “and this psycho didn’t just kill ’em. He stole a dead body.”
“You should think about locking up for the day,” she told him. “Just to be safe.”
12.
Seelie stood frozen by the deli counter. The bent-eared cat butted her arm with his head, looking for more attention, but all she could focus on was the deadly calm voice in her ear.
“I can’t identify you,” Seelie breathed. “I haven’t gone to the police and if I was going to—”
“There is no need for alarm,” he told her. “No need for…less-than-civil behavior. I’m fully aware that you’re no threat to me. Neither is your lovely friend Amber, and I’d be happy to let you both go unharmed. But I need something from you first.”
“Name it.”
“Before your abrupt departure, Mr. Wendt gave you something.”
His words felt like a trap, more vague than they needed to be. Unless he searched Arthur’s place, found the empty cubbyhole behind the flag, and doesn’t know what was inside it, she thought. He’s just assuming there was something to find.
She weighed the pros and cons of playing dumb. There weren’t any advantages, not with Amber’s life hanging in the balance. They weren’t particularly close, weren’t particularly friends; if it wasn’t for Ducky, their mutual connection, they wouldn’t know each other at all. But Amber was only in trouble (and Ducky is dead, she thought, swallowing down the leaden lump in her throat) because Seelie led a killer to her doorstep. She had to do the right thing.
“A phone,” Seelie said. “He gave me a cell phone.”
“And?”
She wasn’t anticipating that, or the expectant sound in his voice. What else could there have been? She remembered Arthur being stressed, pressed for time with the gunman knocking at his door, but he hadn’t fished anything else from that hiding place.
She thought back to her transcribed texts. Better yet, they had what we need. He’s coming home with a prize. Of course. Arthur’s trip. From all the pieces she’d put together, Arthur had done something, met someone, out in Philadelphia. He’d come back from his trip with something his anonymous friends needed. Something the killer needed, too. Whatever it was, he’d stashed it somewhere more secure than his condo.
Seelie took a deep breath. Amber’s life depended on making him believe her. Just because she was telling the truth didn’t mean he would listen.
“There’s no ‘and’,” she said. “He took the phone from a hiding spot, a cubbyhole in the wall behind the flag in his office, and pushed it into my hands. He told me to keep it safe, and then…then you shot him. And I ran. That’s all. I don’t even know why he gave it to me.”
Silence on the line. Not even the ghost of a breath. She curled her toes tight until her feet started shaking.
“Did you examine the phone?” he asked her.
“It’s locked,” she said.
She tapped the cogwheel on Arthur’s phone, pulling up the security options.
“I propose a trade,” he said. “That telephone, for the release of your friend.”
She felt like she was grabbing at straws, fistfuls of false hope, but that was all she had. “And you’ll let us both go?”
“I have no reason not to.”
Seelie didn’t believe that for a second.
“Deal,” she said. “But we meet somewhere public.”