Eleven
The best way to describe my reaction was shock and aww, as in aww crap, I did not see that coming.
“Why are we not driving?” Aubrey asked.
But it was hard to drive when your jaw was dropped so low, it could have hit the gas pedal. “Lyla was Anani?” I said, more to myself than anything.
“What are you talking about, Ms. Anderson?” Aubrey asked.
“The email account on the phone is for a well-known yet anonymous gossip blogger.”
“Oh, I see,” Aubrey said.
“Oh you see? That’s all you can say. Don’t you get what this means?”
But of course, he didn’t. He shrugged. “Like I previously said, everyone has secrets, Ms. Anderson. Now that we have uncovered Ms. Davis’s, we can figure out what to do next.”
I’d spent a significant portion of my waking hours trying to guess the actual person behind Anani Miss. During one four-hour road trip to Vegas, Sienna and I concocted some ridiculous fantasy that Anani was reality star-du-jour Joseline Hunter turned Smith turned Miller turned Jones turned No Last Name Needed. Or so her “momager” claimed. The official reason was that the Joseline “brand” no longer required it. In reality, after four mini-marriages in a two-year span, it was hard even for Joseline to keep up with the latest hyphenated addition—much less the general public.
But Anani wasn’t a disgruntled A-list reality star with a mother who thought it was a good idea to Facebook Live her breast augmentation. She wasn’t even an A-list publicist. Lyla had been an assistant up until a few months ago. Nina’s assistant, at that. It had been a lot more fun when I thought Anani was a celebutante—and still alive. Because overexposed celebrity or not, Lyla Davis was dead.
“Where should we start, Ms. Anderson?” Aubrey asked.
“I honestly don’t know. Anani had tons of enemies. Enough for her. Us. The entire mainland population of China.”
“You mentioned wanting to kill her yourself just last month,” Emme said.
Indeed, I had. Not that it was relevant.
“We need to uncover who hired Javon Reid,” Aubrey said. “I will continue to look into Mr. Reid and see if we can uncover the person on that end.”
We didn’t have a name, so I’d secretly dubbed the person Geppetto, since they were pulling my strings like I was Pinocchio’s black cousin with equally wooden dance moves and a nose that also didn’t always cooperate with the rest of my face.
“You should pursue the anonymous blogger angle since that is more your field of expertise.”
Fine by me.
Sienna stared at Emme’s computer monitor like it was a visitor from outer space. One who came in peace straight from Krypton and had the glasses and cape to prove it. “No,” she said.
I nodded. “Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Sienna shook her head. “Maybe Lyla was a superfan like us and hacked her password.”
“The password that happens to also be the same as Lyla’s lock code?” I asked.
“Which is?” Sienna asked.
Lyla’s birthday, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell her that. “Nice try,” I said. Giving her untethered access to the Anani account would have led to the world’s first gossip overdose. How would I have explained that to Sienna’s family?
“Figured it was worth a shot. I just wish you could have kept the phone.”
We’d dropped it—and Aubrey—off at the police station before texting Sienna to come to Emme’s place. We’d thought it best that Aubrey dealt with the cops by himself.
“Emme checked it out while Aubrey was busy critiquing my driving,” I explained. “There was nothing on there. No texts, phone log, or even web browser history. Looks like she only used the cell to check her email.”
“At least we know why she was never outed all these years,” Sienna said.
She was right there. Anani had kept things sparse. Besides the blog, her presence on social media was slim to none. No official Facebook page. No Instagram. No Snapchat. And definitely no LinkedIn. She did occasionally tweet but not often enough. I spoke. “The lack of apps on her phone had to be on purpose, not because she’d forgotten her Apple ID.”
“Like you?” Sienna said.
She was right. Thank God for small favors and the fingerprint option.
“And we do have access to her emails.” I decided to go with a glass half full approach. “There’s definitely a clue there. We just have to find it. It’ll be easy.”
Sienna stared at the open inbox on Emme’s screen in complete and utter reverence. “Can you imagine what secrets are in there?”
I only cared about one.
“We might be SOL,” Emme said from next to me. “There’s gotta be 10,000 messages in here. At least.”
As proof, she kept scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling. We watched in horror. I finally took mercy on our collective souls and physically stopped her from scrolling any further.
Blurg. I hoped the glass was half full of vodka. It was becoming very, very difficult to stay positive. “Hypothetically, how long would it take to go through all these messages to find any threats?”
Sienna raised her hand. “Me! I volunteer, as a tribute! Even if it takes me days and days and days. I will read each and every message because I am that dedicated to solving this case.”
Emme and I looked at her, then looked at each other. I spoke first. “So how long … ”
“IDK,” Emme said. “I could do a search for kill or dead.”
Sounded good to me. If someone threatened Anani, chances were they would use either of those words. And use it they did. Emme’s searched yielded over 1,000. It’d take time to go through each one. We needed an easier way to narrow them down.
I combed my brain for another key word we could search for in the Anani inbox and found the crime scene photos in a crevice. Lyla and Junior crossing paths hadn’t been a bad twist of fate like we’d originally thought. Someone had wanted them at the same place at the same time. Someone who’d want to know exactly where Lyla would be at the exact moment before she died. Someone who’d have to make sure she was there. Of course, Junior could have just followed her from the party, but Omari would have seen him. He hadn’t.
“Could you look up the word bank?” I asked.
Emme tapped the screen a few times. “Only thing I see is something about Kandy Wrapper having sex in a Wells Fargo vestibule.”
Sienna literally gasped. “Blind item #4. March 13th, two years ago. I knew it was her.”
She went to grab her cell, probably to message Fab. We were all silent for a bit. Sienna text-gossiping. Emme tapping buttons. Me lurking behind her like she was a message board. Finally, I thought of something else. “There were two email accounts, right?”
Emme nodded. “Second one was empty.”
“Did you check the trash or sent messages?”
“Not yet.” She was already logging into the account. The password was, wait for it, Lyla’s birthday. A kajillion thoughts flashed through my brain in the .0761 seconds it took for the inbox to load. As with the casts of The Bachelor, they were all variations of the same thing: Please let us find something. A clue buried in the confines of a sent folder. A key bit of info hiding in junk mail. A lead playing hide-and-go-seek in the archives.
Instead we got nothing. Nada. Rien (thank you one year of high school French). Not even an invitation for a penile enlargement. “Who doesn’t even get spam?” I asked. It was an inalienable right, along with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“No spam means it’s probably a new account,” Emme said. “Would also explain why there’s not much here. Just a draft from a couple weeks ago.”
She pulled it up. It was written the same day as Lyla’s murder. The problem was that it wasn’t addressed to anyone. Not even a subject line, a la Why do you want to kill me {Insert First Name of Killer} {Insert Middle Initial} {Insert Last Name of Killer}?
In fact, it only said one thing.
Hello …
It was clearly something she’d started but never gotten around to finishing. “Remind me of the name of the second email account again?”
“Viv3000.”
It was random. In fact, Viv wasn’t even a word. At least not one that could stand on its own. It could have been short for vivid. It could have been initials. It could have been a nickname. It should have been a lot easier to figure out. I’d done enough posthumous online stalking of Lyla to know her middle name wasn’t Vivian or Viva or anything that even started with a letter at the end of the alphabet. It also wasn’t the name of any family members. And nothing about the word vivid or the initials V. I.V. related to Anani. The same with the numbers on the end.
I glanced over at Sienna, who wasn’t paying us one iota of attention. Her eyes were glued to her phone, probably texting Fab how unfair we were being.
I began pacing, chasing a lead that didn’t seem to exist. “So basically we have an email account with too many messages and an email account with no messages. Let’s figure out a plan to go through the inbox and sent message folder of the main Anani account. I’m going to—”
“Now can I get the Anani password?” Sienna practically shoved her cell in my face. Her Twitter app was open to an Anani tweet that was just a couple of weeks old. I read it out loud.
“Pretty funny when your big blind has people so pressed you’re getting death threats. #Yawn #RevealDayisComing #SorryNotSorry”