I dropped Nathan off and headed home. When I got there, a newscaster’s baritone leaked out into the hallway from Erin’s slightly open door. My pulse quickened; I’d had enough surprises lately. “Hello?” I said, knocking and pushing the door open a bit farther. An image flashed into my mind of Erin on the floor, naked and spread-eagled, a pool of blood gathering beneath her charred body. I shook it off and stepped inside her condo. The TV played to an empty room.

From the back of the apartment, Erin called out. “Channing? That you? Just a second.”

My whole body relaxed and I started breathing again. “Okay,” I called back.

A moment later, she came rushing down the hall and engulfed me in a hug. “Are you okay? I heard about the murder on the news. How awful.”

Her hair smelled of lavender and she radiated heat like a red dwarf in a nearby solar system. I backed out of the embrace. “I’m okay. Ryan Rizzetti, however, is not.”

Erin picked the remote off the couch and muted the TV. “Did you know him?” Her brown eyes searched mine for the pain she thought I was denying. Oddly, after the initial jolt of finding the body had worn off, I hadn’t been that shaken. Yet. I knew it would hit me in a day or two. Maybe after I located Heather and found out what was going on my emotions would cut loose.

“Yeah, I knew him. He was dating Heather.”

For a second, Erin seemed blank. Then a spark of recognition ignited. “Lauren’s sister, right? Oh, that’s so horrible. Have you spoken to her? How is she taking it?” She sunk to the couch and nodded to the space next to her. I dragged a chair from the dining table so I could face her while we talked.

“I … uh, I haven’t spoken to her.” I swallowed and my blood flushed cold for a second. “She’s been missing for a week or so.” I launched into the details of my search for the elusive Heather, answering Erin’s questions along the way. When finished, I leaned back in the chair and crossed my arms. My exhaustion was catching up to me.

“Wow. I can see why you’re upset. This isn’t fair, Channing. Not one bit.” She sounded a little like Lauren. Not the voice, but the compassion behind the words.

“Like my dear mother used to say, ‘life isn’t a-fair, it’s more like a-circus.’” I waited a beat for Erin to stop wincing. “As you can imagine, everyone at the club’s terrified. First J.J.’s killed. Then someone burns down Artie’s townhouse. And now this.”

“Sounds like someone’s got it in for you and Artie. Make any enemies lately?”

I explained about Reed’s attempts to sign J.J. and buy us out. On the surface, everything pointed to Reed. But I still wasn’t buying it.

“What do you think?” She cocked her head to the side, as if she were listening to some unspoken dialogue below the surface.

“I think Dempsey’s involved somehow. Going after Heather’s lovers. Making some kind of statement or sending some kind of message. Power, control, leave my daughter alone. Maybe he’s trying to tell her something.”

“Like what?”

“I have no freaking clue.” I glanced around and noticed a few books open on the coffee table. Had they been there all along? “Am I interrupting you? Were you working?”

“Yes and yes. But it’s okay,” she said. “I know how rough this must be and I want you to know you can interrupt me any time you need to talk. Friend to friend. Okay?”

I found myself nodding. “Okay. Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

“What are friends for?” She held my eyes for a few seconds, then broke away. “What are you going to do now?”

“Keep looking for Heather. Stay away from Heather’s father.”

A look of fear passed over Erin’s face. “You and Heather?”

I held up a hand. “No, no. We weren’t ‘dating.’ I’ve been helping her with her act. Ever since Lauren…since the accident, she’s had to develop a solo act. I’ve been her coach, that’s all.”

“Heather’s father should be grateful for that,” she said.

“You don’t know him. He blames me for Lauren’s death.”

This time, it wasn’t fear on Erin’s face, it was anger. “How dare he? It wasn’t your fault. Some nutjob ran you guys off the road. That’s who he should be pursuing. Not you.”

“Yeah, well, the cops investigated and their conclusions were ‘inconclusive.’ No one really knows what happened that night,” I said. “But I’ll be sure to tell William Dempsey who he should be gunning for the next time I see him.”

Erin’s eyes flashed for a second, then her head dropped.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to be flip. It’s just hard to talk about sometimes. Frustrating not remembering, you know?”

Her head bobbed up and there was something in her face. “Forget it. Just make sure nothing happens to you, okay?”

“Trust me, I’ll do my best.” I yawned and hoisted myself out of my chair.

We said our goodnights and I crossed the hallway to my condo, Erin’s deadbolt clicking shut behind me.

I peeled off my clothes and flopped into bed, but couldn’t find deep sleep. Too many unpleasant thoughts and unformed theories clattering around in my fatigued brain, like dirty, jagged stones in a rock tumbler.

I drifted in and out. During each period of wakefulness, I tried to connect the dots using the information I knew, hoping the resulting vector would lead me in the right direction. J.J. and Ryan had both been murdered. Ever since I’d found Ryan’s body, I’d been going on the assumption that Heather was the common link. Her disappearance roughly coincided with the beginning of all the trouble, and she’d slept with both victims. Plus, she’d gotten a gun. But what if Heather wasn’t the link, what if she were one of the data points? What if J.J, Ryan, and Heather had all been targeted because of their stand-up comedy?

Technically, Ryan wasn’t a stand-up comic. But according to Nathan, he held aspirations, however ephemeral. Of course, this “theory” begat a slew of questions: Who wanted to kill comics? Why? And were other comics in danger? I tried to wrap my head around these questions and come up with a more detailed explanation, at least one that made sense. Unfortunately, nothing popped out at me. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I was weaving fantastic tales from the whole cloth of speculation.

After two hours of fitful sleep, I slipped out of bed and padded to the living room. Retrieved a photo album from the bookcase and returned to bed.

I folded my pillow and jammed it under my neck. Got comfortable. Lauren had arranged this album, merging our pictures. Two lives becoming one. Some were from my childhood, some were from hers, and there were some from our lives together. A “hers, mine, and ours” theme. I flipped it open to the first two facing pages. A baby picture of me “smiled” at a baby picture of Lauren.

I paged through the album. My mother and me in front of some theater in New York. Lauren, Justin, and Heather at her family’s mountain cabin—where Lauren and I spent a great weekend once—holding fishing poles. Lauren and me downtown, horsing around on the Capitol steps. Until recently, I’d never believed someone could feel so happy and so sad at the same time.

I gently closed the album and turned off the light, praying Lauren would visit me in my dreams.