Thirteen
Even in the dark of the parked car, I had no trouble sensing Layna’s disdain when I asked her to unlock the dead guy’s phone
again. “So you just want me to dive back into the trunk with the mansicle?” she said.
“I feel like you’re rising to the level of your incredible competence here,” I replied. “Puh-leeeese? Otherwise we can’t play
the voice memo.”
“Oh my god, fine! But you are a serious wuss.”
Outside the warmth of the Porsche, our feet crunched crusty snow as we walked a few feet down the alley to my Impala. Maybe
it’d all been some sort of joint hallucination. Maybe the dead guy would be gone. But the trunk light revealed his cramped
figure and shadowy, contorted face.
“Shine your phone flashlight in here to brighten him up,” Layna said as she reached in.
“I’d rather not,” I said. But I did it, breath held, hands shaking. Scratch marks from my nails raked the corpse’s waxy cheek.
“Do you think he could’ve stolen my keys, climbed in my trunk, and suffocated himself by accident?” This sounded immensely
preferable to the alternative—that I’d killed him myself.
“Oh, babe,” Layna said. “We’ve been over this before. Somebody clearly hit him over the head and stabbed him with your scissors.
So no, I don’t think he suffocated himself.” She handed me his unlocked phone and slammed the trunk shut.
“I’ll turn off auto lock so you don’t have to do that again.” With trembling hands, I went into the phone’s settings. “It’s
not working!”
“Give it here.” Layna stabbed at the phone with her index finger. “Glitchy piece of crap. Auto lock won’t turn off. But I changed it from ‘thirty seconds’ to ‘five minutes.’ That’s something.”
I grabbed the phone and hit play on the voice memo.
“Hey, buddy.” Whoever had left the memo sounded like he smoked two packs a day and ate gravel for breakfast. “Your payment
arrived. I haven’t been able to get ahold of Errol for a few days. Confirm you can meet his girlfriend, Baylee, at Burgdorf
on Saturday at one for the handoff. She’ll have the potato mashers and plans for Day of the Rope. A full layout of the capitol
building with targets. We’re twenty-one days out.”
“Saturday at one,” Layna echoed. “A potato masher is a hand grenade.”
“Jesus! Seriously?”
“One of the many things I learned from being a DA’s wife. And Day of the Rope—that’s an attack on the capitol.”
“An attack? On the capitol? I work at the capitol!” I wailed. It was one thing to know, vaguely, that political violence had
been on the rise for years. Another to know people were actively planning some kind of dystopian assault on the state house.
“Also, how could anyone possibly think the politics here aren’t right-wing enough? Insane!”
“I kept saying I was sick of being bored. I need to be careful what I ask for.” Layna rubbed her hands together to keep them
warm. “The only Burgdorf is the hot springs, right?”
“Yup,” I said. When I was a kid, Burgdorf Hot Springs was my summertime happy place. My mom would take me there for the weekend
and we’d stay in one of the historic cabins surrounding the warm soaking pools. “And a woman named Baylee will be there? The
dead guy sent Baylee a picture of his junk.”
“So maybe Baylee’s been cheating on her boyfriend with the mansicle,” Layna said.
Miserable with cold, I stomped my feet, wishing for warmer socks. “I mean, white supremacist gangs? A plan for a domestic
terror attack on the capitol? This is bigger than just this one dead guy.”
I thought of my coworkers at the Capitol Grill.
Wendy the cashier, who had big square glasses, a necklace of giant moles, and a dream of going to cosmetology school.
Fry cook Sammy, who was saving up to buy an amplifier for his boyfriend’s birthday.
Nancy, a server who made the best meatloaf and had seventeen grandchildren.
“I think I need to go to the authorities about all this.”
“But Tilly,” Layna said, “what if you did it?” The words lingered in the air before she rushed to fill the silence. “I mean,
not you. But your pole alter ego, Nikita.”
Not that the cops would get the distinction. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No. I couldn’t have done it.” I needed to convince
us both. But how the hell had I ended up wearing the dead guy’s hideous teal vest?
“Not to be a total downer,” Layna said, “but the cops could charge you with murder, set your bail at half a million, send
your kids to foster care.”
I’d been thinking the same. “Even if I’m not convicted in the end, my kids would be traumatized. Maybe for life.”
“The voice memo’s gone,” Layna said. “And one thing we know, if we tell the cops, they’ll already have a prime suspect.” She
gestured at me.
I moaned. “But what if we tell them about this handoff at Burgdorf?”
“Cops are not going to remote hot springs accessible only by snowmobile with zero evidence other than the word of a woman
trying to wiggle out of a murder charge,” Layna said, running her hands down her hair extensions, as if still getting used
to them. “Besides, Burgdorf is in Valley County. They don’t even have a PD. They have a sheriff’s department that may or may
not be full of white supremacist sympathizers. Boise PD calls them up and asks them to go to Burgdorf? They’ll bust a gut
laughing.”
My innards seized. In the interest of the public good, I should go to the police and tell them about the IDIOTs and their possible plans for an attack on the capitol.
In three weeks! But I needed to be selfish right now.
For my kids’ sake. Turning over the body would be like handing the authorities a murder conviction—against me!
There had to be a better option. “How do you know all this?” I asked.
Layna’s husband was the DA. But that didn’t explain just how much she seemed to understand about this stuff.
“When I was in my twenties,” Layna said, “I wanted to be an investigator. But I would’ve had to start as a beat cop. Too dangerous,
the douchebag said. A good mother would stay home full-time. I didn’t need to work, he said. He’d take care of me. What he
really wanted was for me to run his life. And I did. But I lived vicariously through his work too. Studied the details of
every criminal case he prosecuted.”
So I had an armchair expert on my side. It wasn’t nothing. “Okay, so what’s my plan B?” I said. Connor’s phone buzzed in my
hand. Layna huddled near me as we bent over the glowing rectangle.
This is Baylee from a burner. Sorry I went dark.
“It’s Baylee!” I cried, as the three gray dots reappeared.
Baylee: Errol found out about us Sunday. he was pissed. texted me saying he was gonna kill u. LMK ur ok. I can’t wait to wank ur
noodle on Sat at Burdorf.
“We’ve got a cuckolded hothead threatening to kill Connor. That’s good!” Layna said. “Keep her texting.”
My heart fluttered and my thumbs flew across the screen. I spoke the words out loud as I typed. “That asshole! can’t wait
on the noodle wank.” I hit send.
“Now ask her about Errol!” Layna said.
what about errol? I typed.
Layna and I leaned in toward the phone, breath mingling in a cloud over the little pool of light until the next text came
in.
Baylee: ralphie is taking errol to lake cascade. on saturday.
I let my thumbs outrun my anxious brain. So sunday errol threatened to kill me?
“Ooh, that’s good,” Layna said as the gray dots appeared again.
Baylee: oh yeah he sent abt 50 texts telling me he was gonna rip yr lil connor off
“Ew!” Layna cried.
The phone buzzed again.
Baylee: He came by yesterday and smashed my phone. scary as hell. so pissed.
“Maybe after Errol murdered the dead guy, he was worried because he’d sent his girlfriend fifty incriminating texts about
it,” I said.
“So he smashed her phone,” Layna said.
“This is a lead!” I yelled, my legs wobbly with newfound hope. “A real lead! We need Baylee’s phone!”
“Screenshots?” Layna said. “Ask for screenshots.”
“can u send me screenshots?” I hit send.
Baylee: can’t. I told u. errol smashed my phone.
“Dammit!” I yelled.
“SIM card,” Layna said. “We need that SIM card.”
“You’re a genius!” I cried. Connor’s address was on his driver’s license.
I wrote: can u mail me yr old phone? with the SIM?
As the gray dots appeared, I held my breath. I didn’t think Layna was breathing either. Could it be that easy? A package would
arrive at Connor’s house. A smashed phone containing a SIM full of texted threats from Errol on the very day Connor was killed.
I’d swing by and scoop it off his front steps.
Baylee: haha no way. i’ll give it to you at burgdorf.
I swore as I paced a big circle between the Impala and the Porsche, gnawing on my thumbnail. It felt like Layna and I had
been out here in the cold darkness of the alley for ages. On the other side of the privacy fence, across the yard, my children
slept in their bunk bed. Hopefully Emmylou was dozing on the living room couch. It would feel so good to plunk down next to
her. But I couldn’t. Not yet.
“Clues are coming in faster than green grass through a Boise goose,” Layna said.
“We just need time,” I agreed.
“We could stash the mansicle nearby while we’re figuring this out.” Layna pulled a rubber band off one of her pigtails, wrapped
her hair in a low side bun, and secured it. The fact that she said we made me feel slightly less panicked.
The thought of trying to move the corpse was beyond unsavory, even horrifying. But I certainly couldn’t keep zipping around
town with a dead guy in my trunk. Stowing the body might be necessary to buy me a couple days.
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “If people start looking for him, I could text from his phone, make sure no one thinks
he’s missing. Maybe there’s evidence at Connor’s house.” It made me squeamish to say the dead guy’s name out loud, but sending
missives from his phone somehow made it real that he had one. “And . . . and . . . this is going to sound insane, but if there
isn’t more evidence, I need that SIM card.”
Those threatening texts from Errol to Baylee would link Errol to Connor’s murder.
It was the first evidence that didn’t point squarely at me.
Baylee would be at Burgdorf Hot Springs with her smashed phone, and grenades, and plans for an attack on the capitol.
Would it be possible to go there and convince her to give them to me?
No, I told myself. Absolutely not. I couldn’t leave my kids to go off to the snowbound woods to wrest evidence from a strange woman romantically involved with an arms dealer and a domestic-terrorist-turned-corpse!
It was too dangerous. Still, I hearted Baylee’s last text, then pulled up Ralphie’s contact and typed a thumbs-up emoji.
“What are you doing?” Layna said.
“Making Ralphie the Lizard think Connor is alive, well, and planning to meet Baylee at Burgdorf,” I said, hitting send. We
stared at the phone as if it was a grenade. A moment later, it buzzed with another voice memo.
“Hey there.”
The words came not from the phone, but from the darkness of the alley behind us. Layna and I both screamed. For a split second,
I thought it was a phantom. But it was only Oat Willimena wearing a straw hat that gave her the silhouette of the Flying Dutchman
from SpongeBob.
“Oat Willimena!” I said. “You scared the bejeezus out of me.”
“I noticed earlier you didn’t put your recycling out,” she said. “Want me to grab it?”
“I’ll get it,” I said, my voice strained.
“All right,” Oat Willimena said. “Back to the garage. I’m going to listen to Women Who Run with the Wolves on audiobook while I throw a few more Basque mugs. My bestsellers. You and the girls really should come see them.”
“We’ll do that,” I said, knowing we wouldn’t. “Night, Willimena.”
“Oat Willimena,” she corrected. “It’s a play on Oat Willie, a cult comic book character from Austin. He was mashing oats when—”
She must’ve sensed my impatience. “Oh, never mind.” She disappeared through her gate, her walk defeated.
“Jesus, that old lady scared the shit out of me,” Layna whispered. “Do you think she heard anything?”
“I don’t think so. But I do think she has a crush on my babysitter-slash-duplex neighbor.”
“You should set them up,” Layna said.
“Do you think I have time for matchmaking right now?” I said.
“Maybe your pole name should be Buzzkill.” Layna snatched the dead guy’s phone from my hand and tapped at the screen to keep it from locking. “You ready?”
I nodded. We leaned together, our breath joining in one steaming cloud. She hit play.
“Let me hear your voice, my brother,” Ralphie the Lizard said.
Layna let out a string of expletives that would’ve made Ali Wong blush. “They must only communicate in voice memos so they
know it’s not a cop.” She got to work transforming her other pigtail into a side bun. As she finished the task, she said,
“But you know, I actually think we can figure out who did this.”
What was this slightly unbalanced almost-divorcée doing in this alley with me anyway?
“Why are you helping me?” I asked. “Being bored is not a reason. Not for this.”
“I spent twenty years keeping my husband’s life in order. Maybe I want off the sidelines. My own chance to finally be an investigator—even
if just an amateur one! And I don’t want you to take the fall for murdering this POS. Being married to a DA for so long, I’ve
seen how this kind of thing can go. I like you. I don’t want it to go wrong for you.”
“Aren’t you worried if you help me it’ll go wrong for you?”
Layna shrugged. “The douchebag hasn’t just been cheating. He’s been doing all kinds of shady shit. I’ve got dirt on him—serious
dirt! Not just the usual DA party tricks. He turned a blind eye on some criminally shoddy construction work on some multimillion-dollar
downtown condos. If I go down, he goes down with me, and he knows it. He’s the Ada County district attorney. I’d say that
gives me a fair amount of wiggle room. Besides”—she shrugged—“everything I read about divorce is all: Self-care! Self-care!
Self-care! But I don’t need self-care. I need an adventure.”
I nodded as I let this information soak in. “All right, then. How would you feel about helping me stash a mansicle?”