Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
SYLVIE
The apartment was empty when I woke up midafternoon, feeling a little more human but also like I could have slept for another twelve hours.
There was something about feeling so safe that was relaxing, despite the current mess my life was in.
The bedroom was a silent cocoon. The window had blackout shades pulled closed, the barest sliver of light intruding into the room. I’d slept like a rock.
One long shower later, I was dressed in another set of my new clothes, sitting in front of my new laptop, a cup of coffee steaming beside me.
I ignored my bowl of yogurt and granola to fiddle with the laptop.
Silver lining, it was a pretty slick little machine—better than what I would have bought myself since I didn’t have the bulk discount.
So that was good, at least, assuming I could afford it and that I someday could access my money again.
I had to admit, if only to myself, that a part of me wished I’d picked another case, another dead woman, and left Emily Shaw behind. Then I’d be somewhere else, my little van still intact, diving into the details of another mystery—one that most likely wouldn’t get me killed.
My stomach squeezed a little at the memory of the night before.
Eli’s chastisement had gotten under my skin.
Annoying, but mostly embarrassing because he was right.
What the fuck had I been thinking, climbing up the shelves and digging in the bin for that evidence after he told me there was a bomb in the building?
Was I a fucking idiot? I’d seen what a bomb could do up close, and yet I hadn’t been able to run.
A jet of cold fear filled my stomach at what could have happened. What had almost happened. If Eli hadn’t been there to stop me from continuing, I would have died. What was wrong with me that this case was apparently more important than my own life?
Something to examine later. In therapy. If I survived this.
If I could have, I would have torn down the whole box of evidence and taken off with it, but it had been too heavy and awkward. There wasn’t a ladder on that aisle of shelves. Climbing up to get the box had seemed like the simplest way, but then I couldn’t get it back down.
I was lucky I got the phone at all. The idea of leaving with nothing and the building blowing up behind us, erasing every scrap of evidence? I wasn’t okay with that.
I was glad I’d risked my life for the phone. But still, I could acknowledge it had been exceptionally stupid. Eli had been right to be annoyed.
I rubbed the heel of my palm against my chest. I wanted to find out what happened to Emily Shaw.
And despite my actions and how close I’d come, I did not want to die for that information.
Definitely not. Which meant I was going to have to be smart.
I was going to have to listen to Eli. We were in his world now, not mine.
This wasn’t friendly little interviews with people who’d known my victim—this was someone wanting to make me the victim.
I needed to stop thinking like a podcaster and think like someone on the run for their life.
At that, I sat up and looked around the safe house apartment.
That’s what I was: someone on the run for their life, probably like a lot of the other clients who’d stayed here.
And Eli was trying to keep me from dying.
“Next time,” I said aloud into the empty room, “when he tells me to run, I’ll run.”
An hour later, I got a text: Hungry?
Probably Eli, but just to mess with him a little—since I hadn’t given him my number—I messaged back, I don’t answer text messages from strangers.
It’s Eli, smartass, came the response. Are you hungry? How long have you been awake?
A few hours, I answered. I had some yogurt. I’m good for now.
Nothing for a minute or two. Then: I’ll be back in a few hrs with food.
Did they find anything on the phone? I texted back.
They’re working on it, he responded. Tell you more later.
I put the phone down, trying not to be annoyed. I was lucky they were letting me in on the case at all, but it wasn’t in my nature to sit around inside twiddling my thumbs when I could be out there doing something—anything.
Resigned to behaving myself, I went back to working on the laptop, connecting my cloud storage and downloading the apps I needed. I’d forgotten how long it took to get a computer set up from scratch.
I was just finishing when the door to the apartment opened, and Eli came in—a big white bag in his hands, the scents of meat and grease filling the room.
My stomach growled. “God, that smells good,” I said.
“It will be. Computer working out okay?” he asked, nodding at the laptop in front of me.
“Yeah, it’s great. Just finished getting all of my stuff on it. How’d your day go, dear?” I asked with a sweet smile designed to poke at him. I liked riling him up.
He raised an eyebrow back at me. “Frustrating.”
The tease fell off my face. “Ugh. Well, that sucks. Nothing from the phone, then?” The disappointment was a weight in my chest.
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s the encryption on the phone. Not civilian level.”
“Really?” I said, relief flooding in. I’d been right that Emily Shaw was more than she seemed. “Am I the only one who’s thinking Emily Shaw was not a run-of-the-mill data analyst?”
Eli lifted his chin. “You are not the only one,” he said grudgingly.
I wondered if this revelation had anything to do with why Sinclair Security had been investigating her. I wasn’t going to ask. Eli was talking. Too many questions would shut him up. I just raised an eyebrow.
“Maddox, Emmett, and Lucas were all fairly impressed by the amount of security she had on that phone. They were pulling apart the code and oohing and aahing like fanboys, which, just so you know, is not a good sign, because those three are scary good. If they’re admiring the code, whoever wrote it is God-level.
And I can’t think of any reason our run-of-the-mill ‘work from home in a suburban neighborhood in Knoxville’ data analyst would know how to write code like that or have it on her phone at all. ”
“Much less get blown up in her driveway,” I added.
“Exactly.”
“Plus, the way they buried the case so fast…” I murmured to myself.
“I think you had some bad luck when you chose Emily, because she’s not your average murder victim.”
“No,” I said, “she’s really not. She still deserves answers.”
Eli nodded his agreement and started unpacking our food from the white plastic bag. “She’s a person who died because someone else wanted her out of the picture. And since they’re after you,” he said, “we can’t walk away.”
“Well, you could,” I said.
Eli just shook his head. It was obvious there was a lot more going on here than he was saying. But I’d already discovered that demanding answers wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I could be patient. I didn’t have a choice.
We spread out the food—loaded burgers and onion rings.
My appetite roared to life at the first taste of juicy hamburger.
Too absorbed in the process of enjoying my dinner, I didn’t even try to speak until my plate was cleaned.
Sucking a strand of cheese off my thumb, I looked up to see Eli’s eyes on my face.
Chocolate brown, melty warm. I felt heat fill my cheeks and pulled my thumb out of my mouth.
I’d been so hungry I hadn’t thought about table manners—I was sucking on my fingers like a kid.
I stood, taking my dish to the sink and washing my hands. “Thanks,” I said over my shoulder. “That was exactly what I needed.”
Eli only grunted in response.
“What’s all this?” he said, looking at the other end of the table where I’d laid out the contents of my backpack.
“Everything I have to my name,” I said, half as a joke, trying to push away the stab in my chest at the truth of that statement.
It was what it was. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by being upset about it.
“I lost my best mic. My second-best was in the backpack, but it got a little banged up. I need to see if I can fix it.”
“You’ve got your tablet too, and some notebooks. Not too bad, all things considered,” he said, moving to study my meager pile of belongings.
“No,” I agreed. “Could have been worse. Not too much worse, but still.”
He picked up the mic. “You want me to take a look at it?”
“Sure,” I said slowly. “You do small appliance repairs on top of all the rest of this?”
He grinned. “Not exactly. If your toaster breaks, don’t send it my way. But this, I might be able to help you with. Now, if you had a broken bomb, I would definitely be your guy.”
“None of those,” I said. “The only bombs I’ve been around lately seem to have worked as planned.”
“Unfortunately,” he agreed.
Eli brought his plate to the sink and cleared away the trash from dinner. “Hold on a sec.” He went down the hall, came back with a small black case not much bigger than my cell phone, grabbing my microphone off the table. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I think it’s where the cord plugs in.” I pointed to the base of the mic. “I usually unplug everything before I put it away, but I guess I forgot. I left the cable plugged in, and then when I fell, when the bomb went off, I must have landed on it.”
“Oh yeah, I see.” He tugged on the bottom of the mic where the housing was bent around the area where the cable connected. “Let me get in here and take a look. You might just have a few loose wires.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem. I like a puzzle,” he said, nudging out a chair in front of my pile of gear.
“Me too.” I flipped on the light over the table and sat beside him, pulling my phone from my back pocket.
“Not a surprise,” he said, “given what you do for a living.”
“True,” I agreed.
As he started tinkering, I opened one of my favorite websites—it was a wild card of puzzles. Every day, a different one, sometimes word-based, like a locked-room mystery puzzle. Sometimes it was numbers or shapes. Those weren’t my thing quite as much, but I liked figuring stuff out.
“This is the one I’m working on right now.” I showed Eli the latest puzzle that had me stumped.
He stopped his work on the mic and studied it.
It was a jumble of letters, kind of like a crossword.
No hints. There was a pattern there—I knew that much.
But despite the puzzle being made of letters, this wasn’t a language- or text-based puzzle.
This was math, hiding behind words, and that type of puzzle wasn’t my forte.
It was, however, Eli’s. He slid a letter into a blank space and then another. He reached for the third and stopped. “What’s next?” he asked.
I bit my lip, staring at the screen. I tried an O and then a U, sliding them into an empty spot only to have them bounce back into the pool of letters at the bottom of the screen.
“You’re not going to give me a hint?” I tried fluttering my eyelashes, and his eyes crinkled at the edges, but he didn’t tell me the answer.
“You’ll get it,” he said, his mouth curling up at one corner.
A few minutes later, I did—dragging something that looked like a T, but I thought might actually be a mathematical symbol or just a made-up whatever, beside the U that Eli had moved. From there, the rest of the puzzle just seemed to make sense.
That was the thing I loved about my work and about puzzles in general: the way the beginning felt so random, you didn’t know where to start.
There weren’t any answers, nothing connected, and then, piece by piece, you found what you needed, until that moment—the click—when everything came clear.
And even if you didn’t see everything at that point, you knew where you were going. The picture started to make sense.
“I wish we were there with Emily Shaw,” I said absently.
“Where?” Eli asked, looking up from the tangle of wires and plastic that was my second-favorite mic.
“The click. You know?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew exactly what I meant. He nodded. “So far, all we’re getting are more questions.”
“Where are we going tomorrow?” I asked. “What’s next? You said you’d tell me later—and it’s later.”
“We’re going to Hollow Creek, South Carolina,” he said.
“Where Emily Shaw grew up,” I filled in, sitting back and staring up at the ceiling, delving into my memory. “She hadn’t been back to Hollow Creek in years. As far as I could tell, she didn’t have anything to do with South Carolina after she went to college.”
“I’ve found, often when you don’t have anywhere else to go, you have to start back at the beginning,” Eli said.
“We tracked down her parents’ house. That’s what I was doing this afternoon.
She still owned it, though it’s vacant. I’m not sure how much of Emily Shaw is real and how much is construct, but from the information that exists—and I’m not sure if it’s real or she put it there—she had parents at some point, and they lived in a house in Hollow Creek.
The power bill is consistent, indicating no one lives there, the heat and air on only just enough to preserve the house itself. ”
“But you found a variance?” I asked, guessing that was where Eli was going with this.
“We did. Someone’s been there. Maybe it was Emily. It seems worth checking out. It’s a thin lead, but it’s a lead.”
Eli didn’t look excited about it. He should have been, as this was pretty much all we had to go on as a next possible step. The fact that he wasn’t, told me I was missing something.
“What?” I asked. “You don’t want to go to Hollow Creek? Is it that we just got back from Knoxville and you don’t want to leave again?”
He picked up a set of tweezers and concentrated on aligning a wire with the tiny circuit board from inside the mic housing. I waited. I’d learned from interviewing people that sometimes it was good to press with questions, and sometimes you got more if you let them fill the silence.