See, this was why Kevin’s superpower was so much better than mine. I could see stuff that happened in the past, but he could just walk around asking people, “Did you kill Josh?” until we found the killer.
Tedious, sure, but possibly effective in such a small town. It wasn’t like we needed to ask everyone in New York City.
Oh, man, I hoped we didn’t have to question everyone in New York City to find out what happened.
Putting my hands on my hips, I turned to him. “Hold up. You know she lied? Why didn’t you call her out?”
“Because calling someone a liar isn’t the most useful way to get information. She’d never believe I could see her lie, but whether she did or not, if I insulted, she’d make us leave. Or worse, she’d call the police on us when we go into the house. It’s better to continue investigating, armed with the fact that she thinks we believed her.”
“I hate when you make sense,” I grumbled. We crossed Josh’s driveway and stepped onto the porch. “But those are all good points. What did she lie about?”
“Later,” Kevin said as he unlocked the door. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
To be honest, I suspected Yolanda was more interested in any gossip we found in Josh’s house than how long we were gone, but he wanted to get back to Katrina. I didn’t blame him.
“I’ll move fast. You find the tin, and I’ll check for anything suspicious. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a signed note that says ‘I killed Josh’.”
He snorted and opened the front door with a flourish. “Okay, Hooch, you’re up. Do your thing.”
“Hooch?”
“Yeah, like in the Tom Hanks movie? Turner and Hooch.”
“Isn’t that about a dog?”
My brother shrugged. “Tom Hanks is the good-looking one. The dog sniffs things out. It seemed appropriate.”
“If we’re going to be an ongoing investigative team, you need to work on your metaphors.”
I started under the sink. There had been spilled liquid on the ground all around Josh’s body, so my first guess was that something in that shake killed him. An allergy would most likely have resulted in swelling before he died, so I was thinking toxin. But what?
“I got the tin,” Kevin said behind me. “Any luck?”
“There are chemicals under the sink that would have killed him, but most would have left signs,” I said. “Green lips, vomiting, something. I’ll keep looking. Can you grab a bar of soap and make a copy of the key so we can come back?”
Most of the chemicals under here weren’t something you ingested accidentally. Unless someone was here to doctor the shake before he drank it or Josh poisoned himself, none of this stuff killed him.
“It’s Star’s Ridge. I’ll go unlock the side door. No one will even notice.”
“Check to see if he’s got a video doorbell,” I called after him.
If Josh had a visitor the night he was killed, the police likely already knew about it. But still, it helped to be thorough. We couldn’t hang Mary’s freedom (and mine!) on being too lazy to look at the front door.
After Yolanda spotted Josh’s body through the front window, we’d come down the hall toward the living room, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to take in much of the space. Now, I looked around me, wondering where to start.
The layout of the house looked similar to Kevin’s. In my brother’s house, the home office was a small room off the front foyer. Maybe Josh kept his computer there.
Nope. Home gym. While it was possible that jumping on the treadmill and walking for a bit might give me a vision of Josh doing the same, I was prepared to assume that such a scene wouldn’t be particularly revelatory. The uncovered gym windows pointed directly at the street. Even standing in the doorway exposed me more than I was comfortable with, so there was no possibility of using the equipment right now. Quickly, I shut the door and resumed my exploration.
Across from the office, I found a dining room. Considering the lack of a table, I suspected Josh didn’t host dinner parties often. This room’s windows were also visible to the world, so I didn’t venture further inside.
Kevin and I met back in the front hall. Nothing in here but the route to the second floor and a closed door, heavy enough that it probably went to the basement and not a closet.
Kevin said, “This will be faster if we split up. You go up, I’ll go down.”
“Why can’t I go downstairs? It seems like secret science stuff would be hidden underground.”
“There are more likely spiders in the basement. If I find anything, I’ll call you.”
A fair point. Before he could change his mind, I bounded up to the second floor.
The bedroom was empty, as expected. A king-sized bed covered with a dark blue bedspread, pulled taut. Rows of clothes hung in the closet by color. Summer on the right, winter on the left. Not a speck of dust or stray sock anywhere. Josh was as meticulously neat in his home as his office. You’d think that would mean any evidence would stand out, but it really looked like there wasn’t anything to find. Maybe Josh had died of a heart attack, and all of this was futile. Could Lilia be wrong?
Nothing in the bathroom, either. No convenient heart medications or anything like that. Just some standard over-the-counter antacids and painkillers, all perfectly lined up in the medicine cabinet, arranged alphabetically with the labels facing out. Nothing missing that I could tell. There was, however, an extra bottle at the end. Prescription painkillers with Mindy’s name on them. It was dated almost a year ago. Interesting. Why didn’t she take it when they broke up?
Maybe it was as simple as not needing them anymore. The prescription was for thirty pills, and there were about five left. Had Josh overdosed? Had someone slipped him pills into his shake? Or did Mindy use them when originally prescribed? Until we found her, the answer was anybody’s guess.
With a sigh, I moved on to the next room. A perfectly kept guest room, so neat I wondered if anyone had ever slept in it. Empty closet. Moving on.
Then I opened a door halfway down the hall and poked my head inside. My heart pounded. Josh’s home office was absolutely beautiful. Bookcases lined the wall, groaning under the weight of the books. Even those were dust-free. Every title lined up with their spines in precisely the same position. Arranged alphabetically by subject, then by title. Several textbooks were familiar.
A massive desk took up most of the shortest wall, with a printer stand on one side and a filing cabinet on the other. Not a loose paper in sight.
Most importantly, a laptop attached to two screens sat on the desk. Twin screensavers danced across the front, showing gorgeous photos taken by a space telescope. If Josh were still alive, we would have had a lot to talk about.
Please don’t be locked, please don’t be locked, I begged silently as I approached the computer. When I sat, the leather chair cradled my body. The arm of the chair pushed up against the desk, just enough to move the mouse. The screen saver disappeared. Ta-da! Thank you, Josh, for not password protecting your home office.
Of course, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. He didn’t have a desktop file conveniently titled “People Who Might Want to Kill Me” or even “Witches I Know.” There was actually only one file other than the system defaults, a folder titled Project X.
This might have something to do with the FDA approval, so I clicked on it. It sprang open, revealing several more folders. One titled “Research” immediately drew my attention, but I left it alone for now. Reviewing the science might help me draw some conclusions about the product, but would also take ages to read through. “Business Filings” was next. There were only a few documents in there, so I started with the oldest, called only Notice. When I clicked it, I found what appeared to be an announcement, telling people that Montenegro, LLC was soon going to be filed with the Secretary of State. Not the catchiest name, but appropriate. This sounded like one of the documents Kevin had already found.
The second file, “Articles of Organization”, told me that Josh and Brian Montenegro planned to start a business together. No surprise there. Kevin would have been able to understand more of the content than me, so I left it for him.
Moving over to Outlook, I did a quick search for emails to or from Brian. There were thousands. The most recent one was definitely interesting: about a week ago, Josh sent Brian an email letting him know that their FDA approval hadn’t come through. My vision from the faculty office must have been recent! Was that the last face-to-face conversation Brian and Josh ever had? I closed my eyes, trying to recall the vision.
They’d been in the faculty office, so whatever happened, Brian hadn’t murdered his brother on the spot. Josh could have encountered any number of people between leaving there and arriving home. Of course, that didn’t exactly clear the brother—they could have come back here together so Brian could try to convince Josh to keep working on the formula. He had several days to show up and doctor the powder after that email was sent.
I really wanted to take the computer back to Kevin’s, where we could pore over the contents together. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a thumb drive on me to copy the files. Using my phone to take pictures of everything would take ages—not to mention the difficulty of reading a picture taken of a computer screen.
Opening a private browser window, I pulled up Dropbox and entered my ID and password. This account had been opened during my time at the community college in Sacramento, and thankfully, it still existed. As quickly as possible, I exported all of Josh’s emails into a ZIP file, then moved it to the Dropbox. Followed by his entire Documents folder.
If this were a TV show, forensics would be able to tell that someone had copied and transferred all these files. I didn’t know if that was possible in real life, so I had to hope that the Star’s Ridge Police Department didn’t have the technology. Or any interest in continuing the investigation now that they’d concluded Josh died of a heart attack.
Five excruciating minutes later, I logged out of my account, closed the private window, and deleted recent cookies for good measure. Even though it shouldn’t have been necessary, why take chances?
When I shut the window, Facebook Messenger appeared in the open window behind it. At some point before Josh died, Brian had sent his brother a video.
I needed to get out of here, but first, what was this? I clicked the play button. To my disappointment, a club scene filled the screen. A bunch of guys doing shots to loud music. In the background, women danced on poles. The message, which Josh had already viewed, said, “See what you’re missing?”
Josh never replied, and now he never would. How sad.
Before leaving, I took a moment to open Brian’s page. A ton of videos started going up around four o’clock on Friday afternoon. All of them of drinking, gambling, and general merriment. He’d been in Atlantic City with a large group when his brother died. There was nothing on his page to indicate whether he’d come back yet. He might not even know what happened. If that was true, then it wasn’t the brother, after all.
Someone else must have confronted Josh after the argument with Brian. But who?
Leaving everything as close to where I found it as possible, I wiped my fingerprints off the keyboard, then pushed Josh’s chair back. Time to get out of here.
Kevin and I met back in the kitchen.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Cleanest basement I’ve ever seen. He’s got a small lab down there, but I can’t get in.”
“Any chance he uses a keypad?” I asked.
“Nope. Regular deadbolt. Four of them. We’re not getting in today. Did you have any luck?”
“I’m sorry to say, no key ring. But I found lots and lots of documents that I don’t understand.” I waved my phone triumphantly. “All in the cloud now, just waiting for us to download and read at our leisure. And by us, I mean you. My vision said the business wasn’t going well. This should confirm it.”
My brother grinned. “Well done. Let’s go home. Yolanda will be wondering what took us so long.”
I itched to go down and check out this personalized lab basement, but it could take hours to find the keys, if they were even in the house. What if Josh left them at work for some reason? It caused me physical pain to walk away when we seemed so close to the place that would yield answers, but I couldn’t ditch Kevin and go down by myself. I’d come back and break in the old-fashioned way, with lock picks.
Besides, if Yolanda came to the house looking for us and caught us ransacking the place to find a hidden key ring. I didn’t even want to think about how she might respond.
“You’re right. Darn it,” I said.
We moved toward the side door where we entered, but my feet stopped. Something made me pause, like my brain itched.
Yolanda had mentioned that Josh was always trying to convince her to eat healthier. He was drinking something that smelled weird when he died. While the mess had long since been cleaned, the original container should be here somewhere.
I went to the pantry and looked at row after row of meticulously stacked health foods. No added preservatives or artificial ingredients were in sight. Just lots and lots and lots of plastic containers advertising various health benefits.
Why did anyone need fourteen tubs of protein shake powder? Did Josh hide stuff in them? Maybe one was full of drug money, and that’s why he got killed. Made more sense than anyone needing a lifetime supply.
Pulling the nearest container toward me, I unscrewed the lid. The world shimmered.
Often when a vision hit me, my mind was transported to another place—like watching from a dream. But now, I still stood in this exact pantry. I blinked several times, trying to make sure my eyes weren’t just blurring, but the vision remained. I stood in the pantry, in the same spot, but somehow different. I held what appeared to be this exact jar of protein powder with hands that were not my own. Gloved hands, wearing a pair of ordinary black leather gloves.
I reached forward, screwing open the lid. The jar went back on the shelf. Then a plastic bag appeared. It contained a white powder, seemingly identical to the stuff inside. The bag flipped over, and whatever was inside streamed out. My hands screwed the lid back on, shook the container, then wiped everything down with a paper towel.
When I turned around, Josh’s kitchen came into view. As pristine as the first time I’d seen it.
Wow. That was extra disorienting.
“Aly? Are you okay?” Kevin’s voice helped ground me.
“Definitely not natural causes. Someone poisoned the shake containers. At least this one.”
“Did you see who?”
I shook my head. “Just a pair of hands in black leather gloves. Anyone could have been wearing them. What do we do now?”
“Put it back. I’ll call in an anonymous tip to the police when we get home. Maybe that will be enough to get them to reopen the investigation. They can order an autopsy.”
“First, I’m grabbing a sample in case someone takes this container for evidence before we can come back. Then I’ll test it, see if I can figure out what they added.” It only took a second to find a plastic bag and carefully shake some of the protein powder into it.
Watching me, Kevin asked, “You can do that with your magic?”
I shot him a withering look over my shoulder. “I can do that with science. Biology degree, remember? I also took a couple of chem classes.”
“Right. Sorry. But you can’t do that right now, unless you want to drive back to Maloney to use the on-campus lab.”
I didn’t want to do that—but I had the lock picks back at the house. Later today, I’d come back and get into that room.
“That shouldn’t be necessary,” I said. “We’ll see. While you go through the research, I’ll call Lilia and tell her what we found. Whether it was a heart attack or poison, this guy did not die from magic. Meanwhile, you can tell me what Yolanda was lying about.”
Kevin shook his head. “Not until I drop off this tin. You wait on the sidewalk. Your poker face is terrible. She’ll know in a second that we’re onto her.”
At the end of the driveway, I tapped my foot impatiently for two minutes until he returned. “Okay, spill.”
“She knows Mindy. I don’t know how well or why she would lie about it, but for whatever reason, she didn’t want us to know. That seems fishy.”
“Do you think Mindy killed Josh and Yolanda helped her cover it up?”
“Right now, I don’t think anything other than Yolanda either knows where Mindy is or how to contact her.” He pulled out his phone and tapped around a bit. “I also know, now, that they’re Facebook friends.”
“Wow. Your generation’s obsession with sharing their lives online sure comes in handy sometimes.”
“Excuse me,” he said. “Yolanda is not ‘my generation.’ She’s at least twenty years older than me.”
“Yet you’re still using Facebook to crack this case.”
“Not exactly cr—” He came to a dead halt. His face was white.
“What’s wrong?”
“We have a mutual friend.”
“You and Yolanda? In a town of like 500 people? That’s not surprising.”
“Not me and Yolanda. Me and Mindy. ”
“Okay. So?”
“It’s Katrina.”