I spent the next hour poring over the appointment book, piecing together whether or not Elias Pratt and Alexandra Weston’s murder could somehow be connected. Several things didn’t add up in my mind. For one, Elias was dead. For another, Alexandra had just released a book about him. Still, it was odd Chelsea had seen her mother typing Elias’s name.
Alexandra’s appointment book listed her various engagements, but there was one glaring problem. The individual name of the person she met with on any given day was almost impossible to decipher. Most of the entries were initials in place of people’s actual names. So much secrecy. No wonder Chelsea couldn’t make sense of it.
Aside from a few meetings with Barbara Berry, I focused on two of the names I believed she’d written as initials in the book: SH and LP. I picked up my copy of the book Alexandra Weston had signed for me, cross-referenced it with the initials, and came up with two matching names: Sandra Hamilton and Loretta Pratt, Elias’s mother.
I closed the appointment book and set it down.
Finch entered the room. “Any luck?”
“Maybe. I’m more confused now than I was before.”
He bent down, picked something off the floor, handed it to me. “What’s this?”
I look at the item. An old photo. “I don’t know. There’s a sleeve in the back of Alexandra’s appointment book. It must have fallen from there.”
Finch stared at the photo. “Who do you think the guy is in the picture? He doesn’t look a thing like Porter.”
I was about ninety-percent sure I knew. “My guess, Elias Pratt, but I’ve never seen this photo before. It wasn’t in the first book she published about him, and it’s not in her latest one either.”
I scrutinized the photo further. It was small, folded to about a quarter of its original size. There wasn’t a name on it, but there was a year. 1982. A year before he was arrested. In the photo, Elias was smiling, holding a puppy in his arms. Wearing a simple white tank top and jeans, he looked innocent, his eyes kind and merciful, unlike the heartless killer he turned out to be. I rubbed a thumb across his face, studying his features, and that was when I recognized something I’d seen before.