Jeffery Deaver - XO

Her eyes were on the motel room trash can as Boling’s phone rang once.

Twice.

Three times.

She disconnected fast.

Not because she’d lost her nerve about talking to him; no, another thought surfaced.

A to B to Z…

How did Edwin Sharp know that Alicia Sessions had stolen his trash?

That’s what he’d said in the hospital. Yet she’d never mentioned the fact. Dance had said only that Alicia had taken some things of his. That she had garbage bags in her apartment was never mentioned.

Slow down, she told herself. Think.

Could he have learned about it some other way? She decided no. At Kayleigh’s house last night he was unconscious for most of the time and only the medics spoke to him, not Madigan or Harutyun, the only others who knew about the trash. And Kayleigh and Dance were the first ones to visit him in the hospital.

A logical deduction on his part? If Alicia was going to plant something of his it made sense for her to have taken his trash.

Surely possible.

But another explanation was that Edwin had put the two bags of his trash in Alicia’s apartment, along with the notes supposedly forged by the assistant, but that he himself had produced. He’d then planted the evidence outside his own house, like the neatsfoot oil trace and the boot print, to implicate Alicia, suggesting she’d been spying on him last Saturday.

No, no, this was absurd. The shooting incident at Kayleigh’s house? That surely had been Alicia.

Or had it?

Rethink the scenario, Dance told herself. What had Kayleigh told her, Madigan and Harutyun about the attack last night?

Was there any possible way Edwin had orchestrated it?

Think.

A to B to Z…

Come on, you get into the minds of killers plenty. Do it now. How would you have set it up?

And the ideas began to form.

Edwin goes to Alicia’s, ties her up. He plants his own trash, Gabriel Fuentes’s gun case and the forgeries of Kayleigh’s note there. Uses her phone to send texts to Kayleigh and to his own phone about meeting at Kayleigh’s house, and he goes to the hotel near Alicia’s and uses her computer to send the request for the fourth verse to the radio station.

But there were two cars at Kayleigh’s. His own and Alicia’s. Well, maybe he pays a teenager or field picker to drive his car to the shoulder in front of Kayleigh’s house and leave it there, then vanish. Then he drives to Kayleigh’s in Alicia’s pickup, with her tied up in the back. Or maybe she was already dead at that point-the time of death, with a badly burned body, would be close enough.

But Kayleigh heard Alicia calling her name in the house.

A tape recorder!

Edwin could have threatened her back at the apartment to say Kayleigh’s name into a high-def digital recorder-the same one used to play “Your Shadow” to announce the impending murder.

With your eyes closed, you couldn’t tell the difference between someone really singing or the digital replay. Only a pro would have a recorder like that.

Dance recalled her reply to Kayleigh:

Or a fanatical fan.

He’d probably planned out several scenarios for the “rescue” of Kayleigh Towne-depending on where the singer was in the house when he arrived. If she was downstairs or on the porch, maybe the fight with Alicia would have occurred in the driveway or out by the road. But when he’d gotten to the house he would have seen her in the bedroom. That gave him the chance to get inside and masquerade as Alicia-all thanks to Dance herself, of course, who’d called Kayleigh and told her to barricade herself upstairs.

And Edwin’s wound? Well, if he was mobile now, the gunshot may have been dramatic but obviously it wasn’t that serious.

The bullet missed the carotid and his spine…

Dance pulled a portion of her own skin away from her neck. Yes, he could easily have shot himself and missed anything vital.

She tried to consider any other items of evidence that were unaccounted for.

The bone dust was the first thing that came to mind.

Human bone dust.

The guitar picks! Made not from a deer antler but from the hand of Frederick Blanton, the file sharer-the body part hadn’t been burned away; Edwin had cut it off before he set the fire. He’d lied about sending the picks to her earlier; how would Kayleigh know? Her assistant returned everything he’d sent, probably unopened.

Grim justice for a singer; using picks made out of the bone of a man who’d stolen her music.

It’s a wild theory. But…

Close enough for me, Dance decided and called Kayleigh. No answer. She left a message, telling her what she suspected, then called Bishop Towne and told him the same.

“Oh, fuck,” the man growled. “She’s having lunch with him right now! Sheri was at the convention center for the rehearsal. She left an hour ago to meet him.”

“Where?”

“Well, I’m not sure. Hold on.”

After an excruciatingly long time, he came back on. “The San Joaquin Diner, on Third. Do you-”

“If she calls you have her get in touch with me right away.” Dance hung up and debated calling 911 or the sheriff’s office. Which would be the shorter explanation?

She dialed.

“Madigan,” came the voice.

“Chief, it’s Kathryn. No time now but I think Edwin’s our perp after all.”

“What?” She heard a tap, an ice cream cup being set down. “But… Alicia?”

“Later. Listen. He and Kayleigh’re at the San Joaquin Diner. On Third. We need a car there now.”

“Know it, sure. He armed?”

“All the firearms we know about’re accounted for but it’s pretty easy to buy a piece in this state.”

“Gotcha. I’ll get back to you.”

Dance paced along the carpet, then hurried to the room’s desk, where her notes from the case sat. There were dozens and dozens of pages. If she’d been working one of her own cases, especially a task-forced operation, she would have organized and indexed them by now. But since it seemed that the case had been resolved and others would be handling the prosecution, she hadn’t yet bothered. Now, she spread the pages out on the bed-her conversation with the witnesses, the evidence Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs had analyzed, the notes from the interview with Edwin.

But as it turned out, Kathryn Dance didn’t need to parse her handiwork to determine if Edwin was or was not the perp.

P. K. Madigan called back and, in a voice uncharacteristically rattled, blurted, “She and Edwin left the diner a half hour ago. But her SUV’s still in the lot. And her keys were on the ground nearby.”

“She dropped them, to let us know he’d snatched her. Her phone?”

“Battery’s out or it’s been crushed. No signal to trace. I sent Lopez to Edwin’s house and the Buick’s there. But the place is empty, looks like he’s moved out.”

“He’s got new wheels.”

“Yep. But I checked. Either stolen or bought private. Nothing at DMV in his name, no rentals at any of the companies in our database. He could be driving anything. And going anywhere.”

ALIBI WOMAN HAD lied.

When Dance had spoken with her on the phone, twenty minutes before, seventy-two-year-old Mrs. Rachel Webber had once again-and very quickly-verified Edwin’s story about the time he’d been at her house on Tuesday.

But it took the agent only three minutes of trim questioning to learn what really happened: Edwin had found her in the garden early that morning. He’d forced her inside with a gun and gotten the names of her children and grandchildren and said that when the police came to ask her, she was to say he was there at twelve-thirty.