The silver Audi went west on 270 and made a quick exit onto High Street, southbound.
When we reached 161 and headed east again, I sat up straighter.
We were sort of going back the way we came.
Leila kept driving past Arthur’s print shop and got back on 71, going south this time.
I hung back a quarter mile at first, unsure of what was happening. Had she noticed me? Not likely, unless she really had an eye out for a tail. Sure, my car was distinct, but not in heavy midday traffic. And though caution might not have been one of my virtues, I was pretty good at following people.
Leila’s car maintained a steady speed rather than zooming away from me. So maybe she hadn’t noticed me. Maybe she was just an absent-minded driver. I gave it five miles before I got any closer. I kept to the outside lane, several cars and two lanes between the silver Audi and me.
Then Leila merged right so she was in the lane beside me and braked suddenly.
I shot ahead a few car lengths.
The silver Audi eased over one more time. Right behind me.
Now I had the tail.
I looked to the rearview mirror. Leila’s eyes were concealed behind the sunglasses. She was smiling, gesturing mildly, the way you do when you chat with a friend. She didn’t look like she was paying attention to me at all.
Through the less tinted glass of the windshield, I could finally make out her passenger.
Cheekbones that could cut glass.
It was Nate Harlow.
A twisty feeling of dread wound through my torso. Even though I was in front, I was no longer in charge of this situation.
I exited the freeway at Eleventh.
They exited too.
“Okay,” I muttered. I flipped off the radio. I needed the silence so I could concentrate. I drove west toward campus for a while, then left on Summit. So did the Audi. But I stayed in the inside lane, while the Audi sped up in the center lane. Pedal to the floor, like we were drag racing. I sped up too because I didn’t want to lose her.
Sixty.
Seventy.
Too fast for this street.
I let up off the gas a bit, crying uncle.
Then it happened.
The Audi swerved in front of me without warning, braking hard. I slammed on my own brakes but there was nowhere to go, no way to avoid it at that speed, barely even time to brace myself as I plowed into the right half of the Audi’s bumper. The impact was deafening—metal crunching and groaning, my windshield spiderwebbing up the side—but the sound was nothing compared to the jolt of it, the seat belt biting into my throat as it yoked me back.
For a second I couldn’t get any air into my lungs, couldn’t move. The collision spun the Audi ninety degrees and into the next lane. I sat there with a hand over my chest, trying to relax the muscles in my throat enough to allow a breath.
Meanwhile, a station wagon with a ladder tied to the roof rack had stopped behind me. I fumbled with the buckle on my seat belt as a pair of young guys in hipster attire—white tees, skinny jeans—ran toward me.
“Oh my God, are you okay?” one of them said.
The passenger door of Leila’s car opened and Nate got out, rubbing his shoulder. “Is everybody okay here?” he said. He was taller than I would have guessed, six-two or so, lanky but strong. His hair was short on the sides and longer on top, like a fifties heartthrob’s. He was clean-cut, good-looking, his eyes muddy brown like a roadside ditch, hard and shallow.
Leila emerged too, shaken. “I am so sorry,” she said, “there was a cat, a small white cat, did you see it?”
“I saw it, babe,” Nate said. “It got away. Don’t worry. And don’t say you’re sorry.”
He looped an arm around her waist.
What the hell was going on here? I finally got in a breath and opened my door and struggled out of the car. I said, “I just want to talk to you.”
They both blinked at me like they were innocent as lambs.
“I called the police,” one of the hipsters said. “That made the loudest fucking sound. How fast were you going?”
“No—” I wheezed.
“You’re bleeding, you need a doctor,” Leila said. Her accent was soft and I couldn’t place it; something like Beirut by way of London. Her eyes went to the base of my throat. I touched the area, found a wide gash and a slick of blood, courtesy of the seat belt. “Here,” she continued, thrusting a wad of tissues at me. “I’m really sorry. So, so sorry.”
Nate said, “It wasn’t your fault, babe. She was speeding. Don’t say anything else.”
“You were in an accident,” the other hipster kid said to me, his eyes wide with concern. “Do you know where you are?”
I pressed the tissues to my neck and glanced at the front end of my car: broken headlights and some damage to the fender and hood, but it in no way looked like it had been through the same accident it felt like I had. I was dizzy, and I balanced with my hand against the doorframe.
“That old German craftsmanship,” Nate said. “It’s why you drive a car like that, right? If you’re gonna be reckless, I guess you should.”
“Hey, dude, chill out. She’s hurt. Maybe you should sit down, ma’am,” the first kid said.
“Who are you?”
He looked at me, alarmed now. “Brian Peters?” he said.
I heard sirens wailing toward us. It wouldn’t be much longer.
I looked at his friend next. “Austin O’Neil.”
“I am so sorry, really,” Leila said. Tears welled up in her eyes, and Nate made a sympathetic noise. I started to wonder if I was losing my mind. “The cat—I was only thinking of the cat. I didn’t even know you were behind me.”
The hipsters nodded assent. “It happened so fast.”
“Did you see a cat?” I demanded of them.
“Maybe she hit her head or something.”
“No, I did not hit my head—”
“Just try to stay calm, hon,” Leila said, patting my shoulder.
SEVENTEEN
A paramedic listened to my lungs and looked down my throat and into my eyes with a penlight and then she pronounced me A-okay. “You’ll be sore for a few days, but that’s it. Good thing you didn’t hit your head.”
Jesus, everyone was awfully concerned with my head.
“Lucky girl,” Officer Stan Kelly was saying. “Those old European imports are built like tanks. Plus you got your guardian angel looking out for you, Roxie—your dad.”
I nodded, impatient. Stan Kelly had known my father—like every other cop in the city—and I supposed I should’ve been grateful to be dealing with a semi-familiar face. But I was barely able to restrain myself from telling him to shut up. One, I wasn’t in the mood for his patriarchal condescension, and two, I was trying to hear what Leila and Nate were saying to the other uniform down the block.
It wasn’t going well.
They were standing up the sidewalk in front of a row of town houses. Leila glanced over at me a few times, but she didn’t look nervous, anxious, or impatient—just friendly, happy to help, moderately concerned. I squinted at her, half wondering if the crash had wiped my memory clean somehow. Maybe this woman wasn’t the one I’d followed at all. Because she certainly wasn’t acting like someone who’d made me as a tail and then staged an elaborate intervention.
“I’ll tell you what, they don’t make them like they used to,” Stan Kelly went on. “Even a brand-new Benz wouldn’t hold up like this, but some of these new little subcompact rice burners you see on the road? Forget about it—we’d be picking you out of a ball of tin foil after that.”
“Okay,” I said, having heard enough at that point. “Listen, is this going to take much longer? I’d really like to—”
“Aw, no you don’t. There’s nothing more important than your safety, Roxie.” He was talking to me like I was a silly twelve-year-old. “Now just sit tight for one second, okay?”
I leaned against the busted hood of my car and watched as Kelly cha
tted with his partner. I closed my eyes and tried to come up with a way to breathe that didn’t hurt my whole body.
I opened my eyes when I heard a jangle of keys approaching me.
“Hello,” Nate said.
He wasn’t smiling anymore. Without the all-American smile, his features turned cold.
Especially when I noticed that he was holding a small switchblade.
I barely had time to react before he plunged it into my driver’s-side rear tire and sliced a jagged hole in the wall of it as the Audi rolled up beside us, its busted bumper trailing dangerously close to the ground.
Nate said, “Good luck following this time.”
He got into the car, and they drove away.
“Fuck,” I muttered, slapping my hood. A bad idea. It sent a jolt of pain through my chest and down my arm.
“Everything okay?” Kelly called as he walked back over to me.
“Yeah, great,” I said. I reached into the car to pop the trunk for my spare. “I might need a hand with this, though.”
Kelly took in my tire. “Well, how the heck did that happen?”
I shook my head and tried to extract information about Leila and Nate from him, but he wouldn’t play. Then he explained that the hipsters had seen me speeding, so it was impossible to tell who was at fault here: Leila for cutting me off, or me for failing to yield.
“But it really is your lucky day,” he said, heaving a jack out of my trunk and onto the pavement. “Any other cop and you probably woulda got a citation, Frank Weary’s kid or not.”
Strangely enough, I didn’t feel so lucky.
* * *
As I walked into my apartment I called out Shelby’s name, mostly to determine if she was there so I could strip in the hallway and pour a drink immediately. I was dirty and sweaty from changing the tire, and I also looked like someone had tried to slit my throat.
“In the kitchen,” she called back.
I stopped in the bedroom to swap out my shirt for a tank top. As I got closer to the kitchen, I smelled freshly baked bread and rosemary. I said hey and stood in the doorway, taking in Shelby’s expression of abject horror as she brandished a small canister of garlic powder. “This expired nine years ago.”
“Shit.”
“Seriously, how does someone who owns a brand-new bread maker not even have spices bought in this decade?”
I toed the now-open bread maker box. “It was a gift.” I wasn’t even sure who’d given me the bread maker, or when. I had a number of similar appliances stacked in one corner of my kitchen, gifts from someone who mistakenly believed I had interest in food preparation beyond guessing the correct amount of water to make a bowl of instant oatmeal. Measuring cups might have been a better gift, come to think of it. I tried to ignore the siren song of the liquor cabinet and added, “I’m more curious about what happened nine years ago that made me buy garlic powder in the first place.”
“It was probably left over from whoever lived here before.”
We both laughed.
“I’m making pasta, if you want me to—” She stopped as she finally looked up at me. “OMG, Roxane! What happened?”
I touched my neck. I wasn’t used to having someone in my house to observe what condition I was in when I returned. “Fender bender,” I said. “It’s okay, the car is mostly okay, I’m fine.”
Hands on her hips, she studied me. “Is that true?”
“Yeah, it’s just,” I said as I leaned against the doorway, “it hurts, but it isn’t the end of the world. I see you figured out how to use the gas stove.”
She nodded. “YouTube. You should go rest or something. And I can make you up a plate when this is done. Okay?”
I nodded, though I didn’t particularly want spaghetti.
I wanted a drink.
Shelby was here.
So I shouldn’t.
But I wanted one. It was like an itch, but in my brain. An itch with a very specific remedy.
I brushed my teeth—a sorry excuse for whiskey, but at least a minty-fresh flavor to enjoy for a while—and sat down at my desk, forcing myself to ignore the itch.
I opened my laptop and looked over the info I’d pulled the other day on Leila Hassan. It revealed no new information. I didn’t know what to make of her. Especially now that I knew she was willing to wreck her own car to keep me from following her further.
Unless there really was a small white cat.
I gingerly touched my collarbone.
There hadn’t been a cat.
I tried the hipster boys next—Brian and Austin, both of whom had a completely normal digital life. Facebook, Change.org petitions, swim-team results, a gaming forum. Too normal to be anything other than normal. So they probably were just Good Samaritans.
I was furious at myself, though I didn’t know how I could’ve avoided it. Hang back further, maybe. Not follow in the first place.
I opened a new browser tab and tried to figure out whose office Leila and Vincent Pomp had been in, turning up a website for a defunct restaurant furniture sales catalog.
That probably wasn’t it.
I stared aimlessly at the internet for another few minutes, until Shelby appeared with two plates of spaghetti.
“It’s nothing special,” she said, “but I saw from the dishes in your sink that you usually eat peanut butter for dinner.”
“Not just peanut butter,” I said. I moved to the couch, trying not to wince with every step. “Sometimes I have a piece of cheese.”
She cracked up. “You do need a role model.”
“Well, here you are.”
“I would’ve had us eat in the dining room, but you have stuff all over the table and I wasn’t sure if it was clues.”
I laughed. “I wish it was clues. Pretty sure it’s just laundry. Clean, I think. Thank you for making dinner. I’ll move the crap on the table.” I looked over at my computer. “Eventually. Definitely by tomorrow.”
“Well, take your time. I’m going to that cabin tomorrow. And I know you’re a total workaholic and you’re going to look for clues on your computer all night, not put away your laundry.”
I spun a hank of spaghetti onto my fork and chewed. I wouldn’t have described myself as a workaholic, not exactly. Just a person with an obsessive need to resolve the things that I got paid to resolve. “I’m pretty boring,” I said. “When I have a case, all I do is work. When I don’t have a case, I mostly just sleep.”
“Is that why people hire you? Because you can solve their cases in two days?”
“Sometimes. Or sometimes it’s because they want a detective who isn’t a jerk. There are a lot of jerks in the business. People assume because I’m a lady that I won’t be a jerk. Fools them every time.”
“Very funny.”
We chewed in silence for a while. Then she said, “Do you like being a detective?”
I thought about that. It was an oddly complicated question. It almost didn’t matter if I liked it, because it was the only thing I could do. I needed to do it, whether I wanted to or not. It was impossible to imagine being anything else. But I said, “I think so. It’s satisfying, to figure things out. And some of the time I help people. And that’s good too.”
“But it’s dangerous.”
“It’s honestly not usually dangerous. It’s usually just Googling stuff.”
“What kind of case are you working on now?”
“I’m not sure yet. You’re nosy enough to be a detective yourself.” I set down my fork. “But don’t do that. Real job security is in being a dental hygienist. People are always gonna need their teeth cleaned.” She looked at me blankly, so I added, “That’s what my dad used to tell me. He was deeply disappointed when I showed zero aptitude for hygiene.”
“My dad wants me to be a chef,” Shelby said. “And I thought I wanted that too, I mean, I do like cooking. But cooking doesn’t help people. And there are a lot of people who need help.”
“It can help people. Anything can.”
&
nbsp; “I guess that’s true.”
I wondered if I was actually helping anyone right now, though.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep. Part of it was the bruise blooming across my sternum. But most of it was my brain. Tessa Pomp’s funeral was at ten in the morning, and I was planning to go—whatever I had witnessed between Vincent and Leila that afternoon made me think she might be there, and I didn’t know how else to get back on her trail. That was hours away, though, and didn’t do anything about right now.
Shortly after three, I gave up. Usually when I couldn’t sleep, I’d just put on some music and start the day early. But Shelby was the next room over. I didn’t want to wake her up, and I also didn’t want her to worry. I crept out of my bedroom and made myself a cup of tea, snatching the kettle off the burner just before it started to make noise. I poured the hot water over a chamomile teabag, added the smallest splash of whiskey, and took my computer out to the porch. The night air was almost cool, but not quite. The street was dark and quiet. Everyone was sleeping, even Bluebird upstairs.
That, at least, was a blessing.
I lay down on my porch swing, knees bent over the armrest. Disorienting, but if I tilted my head backward, my torso stopped aching and I could almost see actual stars above downtown. I was frustrated. Usually, case-related frustration stemmed from being unable to find out anything. But here, I’d uncovered quite a lot—I just didn’t know what it meant, or how it fit. On one hand, there was Marin Strasser—shot to death behind her ex-sister-in-law’s house—some long-standing family resentment, and contested legal documents galore. On the other hand, there was the shooting at the print shop, where a document-forging operation had probably been taking place right under my client’s nose. I knew I should ask him about it, but at the same time, I didn’t want to talk to him. I knew what he’d say. He’d say he didn’t know, which wouldn’t mean anything. The only thing linking these two separate paths seemed to be Leila. She was in the middle of everything—she was Marin’s friend, according to Arthur, though he originally told me his fiancée didn’t have any friends; she lived in Vincent Pomp’s building and delivered supplies to a secret office; she was in some sort of a relationship with Nate.
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