Alice and Juby watched Merrily stalk away.
“That was weird,” Alice said.
Juby glared at her. “It depends on your definition of weird. The bar is high.”
Speaking of bars. Alice hailed the waiter. Things might be clearer with a gin and tonic in her hand.
“Did we have a fight at some point?” Alice said.
Juby sighed. “You and me? No.”
“You and Lillian?”
Juby looked away.
“About me,” Alice said.
Juby leaned over her elbows on the table between them. “Sometimes you’re able to see clearly through the garbage to the finest sliver of truth, and sometimes you’re a fucking brick, you know that?”
“Me? Specifically me?”
“Total brick.”
“Tell me, then. What am I such an idiot about?”
Juby stirred her drink with her finger, sucked at it. “Let me tell you a story—”
“I would love nothing more—”
“And you shut it while I do.” Juby sat back, crossed her legs. A man at a nearby table turned to admire her. Alice made a face at him. “When I first started helping out at the Doe Pages, I was so excited. I was too excited. I thought I was going to solve every case, that all I had to do was pick up a little slack and I’d get match after match. You probably felt the same way.”
Alice knew better than to answer. The waiter returned and put down her drink.
“I made a mistake,” Juby said, when they were alone again. “I got really into this Empty case out of California and decided I had found the UID match, some remains in Oregon. The timing of the woman going missing was right, the age, the racial makeup, the clothes. She had the mole, right here, on her upper arm. My first match. I thought. You know Don and Jenn’s strict rules about what happens next. You submit to the site managers. They decide if they agree. They reach out to the family of the missing—”
“Oh, no,” Alice breathed.
Juby raised an imperious finger. “Right. I went around that. I reached out to the family because I was so sure. And you can imagine the rest. It was not a match. The body I was convinced was their mother, sister, aunt—that UID had already been considered and ruled out. It was not her, and I broke their hearts all over again. I inserted myself into a situation without knowing enough, and all I did was hurt people. Left, right, center, I hurt people.”
“You were only trying—”
She raised the finger again. “I went about it thinking only of my own feelings, my own goals. I didn’t think about the people who had the most to lose. I didn’t think. I was impatient. I flouted the rules put in place by people with far more experience than I had, than I have now. I was too busy trying to tell people how and what and when and why, instead of letting the information rest its own case.”
Juby reached for her drink, the finger now put to use stirring again. Alice waited. “And?”
“And so that is what I’m doing right now, even though it is not my style.”
Alice thought of the impervious stack of pages she’d gained and then lost. “It’s Lillian’s.”
“After much discussion, we’re going with the Slapdash model. ‘Slapdash’ is sarcasm, if you haven’t figured that out by now. Lillian’s style is to collect information, all information, too much information, until you think you’ll drown in it. And then we surf it, we sort, we swim in it until we know . . . everything. She makes me crazy, but it’s the way she does it, and it works. She’s had how many matches?”
“Two,” Alice said.
“Two matches in fifteen years.” Juby shook her head. “I don’t think I have it in me. But that’s how Lil does it. That’s how Don and Jenn do it. The people who caught the Golden State Killer, the guy who matched that body in Kentucky thirty years after she was found. Tent Girl. Do you think Todd Matthews woke up one day thirty years in and just matched Tent Girl out of the blue? This is a marathon.”
Alice pictured Lillian, always breathless. In her pocket, her phone buzzed. Rnn. She ignored it. “This reminds me of a story my dad tells about construction,” she said. “You know, how the little daily projects that don’t seem like much still add up to the cathedral. You’re putting down the stones or you’re building a cathedral, it’s all in your perspective. The skyscraper—or the six-story parking structure, I suppose. Either way, you have to put down the foundation.”
Juby looked at Alice over the rim of her glass, then crunched on an ice cube. “And if the foundation is rotten?”
“Oh, you’re totally fucked.”
Juby nodded. “Did you get a chance to look at the information Lil put together?”
Alice sucked in a shaky breath. “It was stolen.”
“It was—” Juby stuttered but found no further words.
“That’s the break-in I told you about.”
“Your office was burglarized and they took three inches of Doe research?”
“And my wallet.” Alice’s phone buzzed again. She took it out to silence it and saw a text from a number she didn’t know. When she clicked on it, she saw it was not the first message from this secret admirer but the third, at least. She’d block it later. “And my laptop. And some stuff from our vault.”
“Vault? Like black velvet bags of diamonds or what?”
“Just company information, nothing valuable.”
“Then why take it?” Juby said.
The very question. “I don’t know.”
“Corporate espionage?”
“From competitors, you mean? Maybe.” Alice didn’t want to incriminate Jimmy yet, not until she understood it better.
But without admitting she knew the thief, Juby didn’t get her anxiety. “He got an old computer and your wallet,” she said. “It sucks, but it doesn’t seem like anything to be scared about.” Juby yawned into the back of her hand. “Just call the cops.”
“I will.” She sounded defensive. “I didn’t want to face it all on my own. I guess I got worked up over nothing. I’m more calm now.”
“So . . . place to crash tonight or no?”
Juby’s mother feeding her and tutting over her, finding the clean sheets for the couch—it was tempting, to be fed real food. Adopted, Juby’s word. What would that feel like? To be mothered by someone who wanted the job? My kidnapper wanted more than my own mother— But this was the darkest thing Alice had ever allowed herself to think. The black wings were beating at her peripheral vision. That fucking bird. She drowned it with her drink.
“I’m fine,” Alice said. “You should go home to bed.”
After Juby left, Alice stayed at the table, waving the waiter off a second drink. She would have to drive home to Glen Park, the safest suburb in the world, where the security cameras didn’t need to feed anywhere. She had a few bucks from her emergency stash in her car, but Merrily had thrown down enough for all of them. When Alice’s phone buzzed in her pocket again, she took it out and gazed at the texts, all from the unknown number. Caller Unk., she thought.
The first message: Some pleasure reading?
The second message was blank, but had an attachment. The third was another attachment. Dick pics? While she tried to decide if she ought to click—were viruses spread this way?—she got another one and chanced it. The attachment was one of the articles from the teetering stack Lillian had pulled together.
Jimmy King, taunting her.
But why? Why bother using a burner phone to send her the things he could have simply returned? All this to make her life miserable?
Jimmy, she typed. She stopped herself, deleted the draft, stood, and headed for the exit.
Yeah, she wasn’t scared anymore. She was mad. Let him play his little game. It was Fine versus King, and he was losing. And he had no idea.