Chapter 62
SOPHIE
As I walked home from work, I kept my back straight and my chin up. I refused to hunch despite the news. Despite the murder. Despite hearing that Mrs. B and Ocean had found Sunny Wheeler butchered in his car.
A cold body in a blood-splattered car.
I was okay. I was fine. Maybe not as completely fine as I’d pretended, though. The knowledge that bright, safe, sweet Santa Barbara concealed such brutality disturbed me. So when I reached the Cottages, I didn’t even bother stopping at home: I knew Nicholas was still at work.
Instead, I knocked on Hamilton’s door. Anthony greeted me, his expression as flat as ever, except for the faintest twinkle in his eyes. Which surprised me, given the news.
“What’re you happy about?” I demanded.
“Camping next weekend.”
That lifted my spirits. “Oh! You and Lily-Ann?”
“Me and Miles and his friends. Lil does not camp.”
I squeezed his bicep in a friendly, man-to-man sort of way. “That sounds like fun.”
“You’re welcome to join us,” he said, as I stepped inside. “You and Nicholas.”
Which was tempting, though not as tempting as the romantic weekend in Portland that Nicholas kept talking about.
So I made noncommittal noises, saying hey to Hamilton and Lily-Ann as I flopped onto the cushioned chair beside the reading lamp.
I kicked off my shoes, dropped my bag, and stretched away the tension of the day, the dread of the murder.
“Bail doesn’t exist in California,” Hamilton was saying to nobody in particular. “Mrs. B didn’t pay bail. We only call it bail because of linguistic inertia.”
“Drink?” Anthony asked me.
“Anything cold and normal,” I told him.
His lip twitched, and he headed into the kitchen while Hamilton paced in front of the whiteboard continuing his seminar to nobody.
“… bail infrastructure is wrapped around a process called RAIs. Which is an upgrade. Bail forced people to spend months in jail if they couldn’t scrape up a few hundred dollars.
However, now an RAI algorithm decides how likely you are to flee or cause harm to the community, and I know what you’re going to say, Lily-Ann. ”
“Do you?” Lily-Ann asked, not looking up from her laptop. She was dressed elegantly, as usual, in an eggplant short-sleeve knit dress so perfectly simple it had to be Max Mara or something.
“That studies show judges assign bail based on things like the temperature, football results, and racism. However, the algorithm data uses those same decisions to—”
The door crashed open, and Ocean and Mrs. B stepped inside, looking shaken.
I bustled across the room and hugged each of them in turn.
Anthony set my lemonade down, then pulled them into hugs, too.
Mrs. B claimed she was okay but she looked tired—especially after Hamilton started nattering about RAIs again.
“Hamilton,” I interrupted. “Let’s talk about the, uh, dead guy in the parking lot.”
“Nicholas isn’t here yet,” he told me, as if I hadn’t noticed.
“We can start without him.”
“Oh! Okay. Sure. No problem. Um, but does anyone want a prune?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“I have both pitted and non-.” He furrowed his brow. “Or do I mean un-?”
“Three questions immediately present themselves,” Lily-Ann said, ignoring Hamilton. “That is, other than, who killed Sunny Wheeler and why?”
“Do we know it was Sunny Wheeler?” I asked.
“Hamilton’s police contact confirmed that,” Lily-Ann told me. “But they can’t explain the killer’s presence in the back seat of Wheeler’s car. We don’t know if they intended to shed so much blood or—”
“We need to stop this investigation bullshit.” Ocean scrubbed her hair with her fingers. “We found a man slaughtered in a parking lot. A man who Sophie and Nicholas met at the party where another man died. We are in so far over our heads.”
“Okay, but what about—” Hamilton started.
“You’re the only one guaranteed not to find a body, Hamilton!” Ocean snapped.
He ducked his head and fell silent.
“I’m going to have nightmares for a year. I can’t stop seeing him. The stains on the window, the way his sleeve was…” Ocean shuddered. “We’re in too deep.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Yes,” Anthony said.
I turned to him. “You agree?”
“Someone’s out there with a knife.”
“It’s true that this is easy for me to say,” Hamilton said, with an uneven note in his voice. “We all know I’m not going to leave the house. But walking away means leaving CJ to the tender mercies of the justice system.”
“We can’t stop investigating,” Lily-Ann said. “There are too many unanswered questions.”
“We were doing this for Mrs. B’s weird sense of friendship,” Ocean told her. “Not for your weird need for resolution.”
“And for you, Ocean,” Lily-Ann said. “Your feelings for CJ.”
“Are you okay with dropping it?” I asked Mrs. B.
She looked up from digging in her purse. “I am. CJ’s not in danger anymore. The murderer struck again, and this time the police will establish a time of death that clears her name.”
“Are you sure she has an alibi?” Hamilton asked.
“Of course! Modern life provides so many. If she was on her phone, she can prove her whereabouts at the time of the crime.”
“Oh, now you understand how phones work,” Ocean muttered.
“That’s a good point,” Lily-Ann said. “However, even if she didn’t kill Sunny—”
Mrs. B pulled an emery board from her purse. “Which she didn’t!”
“Then two wealthy men, good friends, both died violently in the past few weeks. That is not a coincidence.”
“You mean the same person killed them both?” I asked.
“Or one death led to the other, somehow. They’re almost certainly related.”
“Why is that almost certainly?” Ocean demanded. “Because it’s too messy otherwise, and you can’t stand mess?”
“Yes,” Lily-Ann said.
“What the hell, Lily-Ann? Maybe you should stop with crimes and focus on your Wordle.”
Her hazel gaze settled steadily on Ocean. “I didn’t see the body, but—”
“I did! I did, and now I can’t unsee it. Let the cops handle the killing. Let them handle both deaths.”
“You want to trust the police?” Mrs. B murmured, starting to file her nails.
“We haven’t unearthed a single clue, Golda. We’re not one inch closer to proving CJ’s innocence—much less who the knife murderer is.”
“I didn’t see the body,” Lily-Ann repeated, “but I know what it feels like to find a man standing over you with a weapon in his hand.”
That stopped Ocean. It stopped me, too. She was talking about how her ex-husband had attacked her with a claw hammer.
Not thirty feet from where she was sitting right now.
I hadn’t realized that Piotr’s attack still affected Lily-Ann, which was horrible of me.
Of course she hadn’t shrugged off a murderous assault from a man she’d thought she loved.
Yet I’d simply thought, Oh, Lily-Ann is so tough and cold and impenetrable, she’s probably fine.
That wasn’t okay. I needed to be a better friend to her, and I saw the same realization in Ocean’s face.
Hamilton, on the other hand, focused on pouring himself another kombucha.
At least Anthony shifted on the couch until his knee touched Lily-Ann’s thigh.
She didn’t flinch away.
“So we need to talk to CJ,” I said. “And ask about her alibi.”
Ocean nodded. “Okay, fine. If this stabbing gives her, um, reasonable doubt because she was elsewhere? Then our job is done.”
“If her alibi is strong,” Lily-Ann said, “the police will still claim she pushed Frank DeYoung. They’ll just say that, in an unrelated incident, another assailant stabbed Sunny Wheeler.”
Ocean hesitated. “You think?”
“Yes,” Anthony said.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about that.”
Lily-Ann closed her laptop. “If the police want to disentangle the two investigations, we should attempt to braid them more tightly together. Like you said, reasonable doubt about CJ’s guilt is easy to raise if there’s a murderer running around, targeting another guy at the same party.”
“For all we know,” I said, “the killer was after Sunny, and Frank just got in the way.”
“Excellent point.” Lily-Ann opened her laptop again. “I’ll add that to the—”
The door burst open and Nicholas strode inside, his eyes wild. “She’s gone.”
“Oh, no!” Hamilton said. “That’s terrible! Who?”
“CJ! She didn’t check in with the cops, she’s supposed to check in every—” He turned to focus on Mrs. B. “They can’t find her. She didn’t come home. She’s gone.”
“Fuck,” Mrs. B said.