Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
“Okay,” Ziya said slowly. “Okay, so … okay.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Amie murmured, reading the message for the seventh time.
Behind them, David shifted. “So someone …” He paused, as if collecting his thoughts. “Someone was blackmailing Benny.”
“With a photo of him and the woman he was cheating on his girlfriend with,” Amie finished. “But what was he being blackmailed to do? Was that why he was in Savannah’s apartment?”
“What do you mean?” Ziya asked.
“Maybe whatever he was being blackmailed to do involved Savannah.” Amie pointed to David. “Benny said that he felt like Savannah was haunting him. What if that was stemming from guilt about something he did to her? Like … murder?”
A bolt of adrenaline raced through Amie.
She might’ve just broken into the apartment of a murderer.
Sure, the pursuit of this discovery was the main reason she’d broken into the apartment in the first place, but now that Benny was confirmed as a very possible murder suspect, the reality of the situation was finally hitting her.
“Another option,” David mused, “is that Savannah was the one blackmailing him with the photos.”
Amie sat up, grabbing Ziya’s arm with excitement. “Could that have been why he was in her apartment?”
“He was looking for the photos to get rid of them.” David circled back to the front of the couch and picked up the paper.
“But why?” Ziya asked, looking back and forth between them. “If he’d already been broken up with, why did it matter if he got the photos back or not?”
Amie deflated, then noticed she was still holding on to Ziya’s arm. She retracted her hand. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Ziya said quickly.
“Okay.” David set the letter back down and returned to his chair. “Let’s say Savannah was blackmailing Benny for something.”
“That gives Benny a motive for killing her,” Amie said.
“So even if he didn’t necessarily need the photos back,” David continued, “their mere existence in Savannah’s store or home is enough evidence to draw attention to him as a murder suspect.”
“Just to play devil’s advocate,” Ziya said, rubbing her arm thoughtfully as David stood to attend to the squealing tea kettle, “what if it was Savannah’s husband who was blackmailing Benny?”
“For what reason, though?” Amie asked.
“Well, we don’t know the reason Savannah would have been blackmailing him, either,” Ziya pointed out, seeming determined to continue her pursuit of satanic litigation. “But it would still explain why Benny was searching their apartment.”
Amie frowned, sorting through her very thin mental file on Andrew Harlow.
Her strongest memory of the man was seeing him at Eons the afternoon of the time loop.
She recalled the barista he spoke to going to the back, returning empty-handed with an apologetic expression.
Unlike his wife, who would have absolutely made a fuss over whatever she’d asked for not being available, Andrew had quietly left.
“It’s possible, I guess,” she said, unconvinced. “Andrew always seemed like a pretty nice guy. Nice enough to make someone question why he was married to a person like Savannah.”
“Tea, anyone?” David called from the kitchen.
“No, thanks,” Amie and Ziya replied in unison.
“I’m just saying, we know the bookstore was struggling,” Ziya continued. “Savannah wouldn’t sell, so maybe Andrew was blackmailing Benny for money.”
“You really want it to be the husband, don’t you?” Amie asked wryly.
A smile split Ziya’s face. “Well, I called it pretty early,” she admitted. “It’d be very impressive of me if I ended up being right.”
“Unfortunately,” David said, returning to his chair with a steaming mug of tea, “really wanting a person to be the culprit isn’t enough to determine their guilt.
Plus—” He raised his voice, and only then did Amie realize she and Ziya were still chuckling with each other and paying very little attention to what he had been saying.
She turned her focus back to David, feeling her face warm.
“—it doesn’t really matter which Harlow was doing the blackmail,” David continued, having regained his audience.
“If Benny believed it was Savannah, that’s enough motive for him to have killed her.
” He took a sip of tea to punctuate his point, then hissed with pain.
“Ah, that’s hot. Forgot I just poured that. ”
“I wonder if he got the photos,” Amie murmured, flipping the message back over to look at the image on the back. “I didn’t see any in his apartment.”
“Have we considered that we’re living in the twenty-first century?” Ziya asked. “If Savannah—or Andrew—had the photos, they could just be on a phone or computer somewhere.”
“But how—” David snapped his fingers. “The printer.”
“Explain,” Amie requested.
David set his mug down on the coffee table, likely to avoid more absentminded tongue-burning. “How did the blackmailer even get access to the photos in the first place?” he asked. Then, answering his own question, he said, “The bookshop offers printing services.”
“Benny went to the bookshop to print the photos,” Amie said, following.
“More likely it was the woman he was seeing.” Ziya sat back into the couch. “Doesn’t seem like something a guy like Benny would do.”
“Plus,” Amie added, “this was the woman Benny was cheating on his girlfriend with. Why would he want any more physical evidence of that?”
“Good points all around,” David said. “So the woman he was seeing went to the bookshop to get the photos printed. Savannah recognized Benny in the photos, somehow knew that the woman wasn’t his girlfriend, and made extra copies for herself.”
“Or she showed them to Andrew, and he made the copies,” Ziya added.
“If Benny wasn’t able to find physical photos to get rid of,” Amie said, “then he could still be looking for digital copies. We need to find these photos.”
“We need to turn this over to the police,” David corrected her.
“What?” Amie and Ziya exclaimed.
David threw his hands into the air. “Am I the only one who remembers Amie almost dying twenty minutes ago? The sleuthing needs to stop before it gets any more dangerous.”
“Come on,” Amie pleaded. “You were just getting into it.”
“And now I’m getting out of it.” David picked up his mug, this time giving it a tentative sip before going for a bigger one.
“How is she supposed to explain to the police how she got this?” Ziya asked.
“Breaking and entering is technically a crime, and last I checked, the cops don’t super love people who do those.
Even if they’re done by someone trying to uncover a different, much worse crime.
Unless that person is also a cop, which Amie is not. ”
David waved his free hand. “Just say you found it in the dumpster or something.”
“The whole point of this was to try to get the police’s attention off of you,” Amie said, knowing this was a half-truth. “What’re they going to think if you pop up in the middle of their investigation again?”
“And that’s why I didn’t want to be involved in the first place!” David exclaimed, his tea threatening to spill over the edge of the mug. “You can bring the letter to the police and leave my name out of it.”
“And what if they fingerprint the letter?” Ziya asked.
Amie and David both looked at her questioningly.
“You think the blackmailer’s fingerprints would be on the letter?” Amie asked.
“No,” Ziya said, rolling her eyes. “Anyone with half a brain would wear gloves while handling a blackmail letter. That’s, like, Criminal 101. I’m talking about David’s fingerprints on the letter.”
Amie flashed back to the very recent memory of David picking up the paper to look at it.
“Oh, goddammit.” David rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Idiot.”
Ziya continued over David’s grumbling. “I’m pretty sure they’d see through the dumpster lie, anyway. No paper would come out of there without some mysterious substance on it.”
“Just give me a couple of days,” Amie said to David, who was sullenly sipping his tea. “If I can’t find anything else, we’ll take this to the police and try to keep your name out of it. Okay?”
David let out a long-suffering sigh. “I’m not going to sign off on any more dangerous snooping,” he said. “But you can have your couple of days.”
“Are your friends mad at you?” Amie asked as she and Ziya walked down the hallway.
Ziya looked up from her phone, the screen angled away from Amie as she tried to understand the question. “What?”
“For leaving them at the club. Are they mad?”
“Oh. No, they’re not mad.” She dropped her phone into her clutch, closing it with a definitive snap. “Just being annoying. They say hi.”
“To me?”
“Yeah, to you.”
“How did I come up?”
“I told them I was with you.”
“Are they mad at me?”
“No, they love you. That’s what they’re being annoying about.”
“How so?”
“Oh, look, we’ve reached the end of the hall. How time flies.” Ziya pulled open the door to the stairwell. Amie’s unanswered question was left hanging in the air behind them as she followed.
“Sorry you wasted your time coming here,” Amie said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “You probably expected a little more excitement than coaxing me down from the balcony like a cat stuck in a tree.”
Ziya snorted. “Firstly, a cat would’ve been way easier and way less nerve-wracking to get down. Secondly, helping you escape a potential murderer and discovering a blackmail plot is incredibly exciting. Thirdly—”
“Hello, girls!”
Amie had just pushed open the stairwell door to the lobby. Elena was standing by her mailbox, a couple of envelopes in hand, beaming at the two of them.
Excellent, Amie thought with consternation as Ziya waved to the older woman. She braced herself for Elena to make things weird.
To her credit, Amie’s neighbor wasted no time. “Two visits in one day,” she observed cheerfully, closing her mailbox. “Just couldn’t stay away from our Amie for too long, could you, Ziya?”
Ziya let out a stilted laugh, dropping her gaze to the floor. Amie blinked with surprise. Was Ziya embarrassed?