By the time I got back to my office, Blake had woken up—barely. He was sitting at his desk, slack-jawed and bleary-eyed, with the worst case of bedhead I’d ever seen.
“Wow,” I said once I got a good look at him. “For the very first time, I can honestly say that you look how I feel.”
“Did you find Dylan yet?”
“Nope.”
“Dang.”
“Trust me, Blake, if I solve a case, you’ll always be the first to know.”
“Awesome.” His eyelids fluttered. His head started to droop, but he jerked it back up quickly, then slapped both sides of his face.
“You…uh…feeling okay?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s my fault,” Blake said. “I usually know my limits.”
“I’m sure you’ll be good as new in the morning,” I said.
“I’d better be. I feel so…so old. Like I’m forty or something.”
I cringed. Time for a change of subject. “You hear back from any of those Dylan Welch contacts you emailed?”
“Not yet.” He gave me a tired grin. “Trust me, you’ll always be the first to know.”
I smiled. “Good one.”
“You wanna know what?” He picked at a fingernail. “You were right.”
“About what?”
“Gonzo,” he said. “I don’t know why I got so into it like I did. It fuckin’ sucks, man. Always has, always will.”
“Live and learn,” I said, taking off my coat. “You won’t be able to drink it anymore. Just like I can’t drink Ouzo because of this bad Greektown experience I had back in college. Your body will remember. You won’t make the same mistake again.”
“I hope not,” Blake said.
I hung my coat on the hook near the door. “Your body always remembers,” I said. For some reason, it made me think of Richie. I pushed the thought out of my head.
“I’m assuming Spike and Elspeth are in my office,” I said.
Blake nodded.
“You make any of that good coffee?”
His face brightened a little. “No, but I can. You want some?”
“I could use a cup.” I peered at him. “You probably could, too.”
He made for the breakroom. I made for my office, where Spike and Elspeth sat on my leather chairs, deep in conversation.
They didn’t look up until I closed the door behind me.
I stared at Elspeth—the purplish circles under her eyes, the smeared mascara. She looked exhausted, as though she hadn’t slept in weeks. She was still wearing my white suit, dried blood caked on the sleeves and smears of it across the lapels. Poor thing. That was all I could think. All she’s been through in these past few days…Elspeth was keyed up, her whole body tensed, that eyelid of hers twitching.
“Is Sky going to be okay?” she asked. She was gripping the arms of my chair so tightly, I was worried she might hurt herself.
“Yes,” I said. “I just saw her. She’s going to be fine.”
Elspeth deflated, some of the tension draining out of her. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Thank God.”
Spike looked at her, then at me. “Did she say who shot her?”
I nodded. “Dylan Welch.”
“I don’t get it,” Elspeth said. “Sky was so nice to him. She was his friend.”
I shook my head. “She knew about some bad stuff he was doing—financial stuff,” I said. “But from what she told me, she’d been trying to protect him, so I don’t get it, either.”
Elspeth tensed up again. “What’s wrong with him?” she whispered.
“What isn’t?” Spike said.
I nodded. “Good point.” I thought about Sky again. “It took her a little while to remember who shot her,” I said. “She told Lee Farrell she didn’t know at first. I thought she might be covering for Dylan. But she seemed to have this breakthrough with me…”
“Trauma,” Spike said. “It can mess with your head.”
Which made me remember Sky’s interview again. That phantom reporter she’d spoken to just prior to it. “She lost some of her memories before the shooting, too,” I said, which made me think of something else. If she’d spoken to a reporter about Trevor this morning, the interview was almost assuredly online by now. It was time-sensitive information, after all—and very newsworthy, since Sky’s own shooting had taken place moments later.
I quickly excused myself, opened the door, and shouted out to Blake, “When you get a chance, can you google Sky Farley, Trevor Weiss, and shooting? See if anything was posted today that has quotes from Sky?”
He shouted back, “Can I finish making the coffee first?”
I told him there was no hurry, whenever. Then I shut the door and apologized to Elspeth and Spike. “I would have forgotten if I didn’t say it right then,” I said. “Too many things in my head at once.”
“Well, we’re about to squeeze something else in there,” Spike said.
“Oh, yeah?”
Spike leaned forward in his chair, his thick fingers laced together. “Elspeth needs to tell you something,” he said. “But the thing is, you can’t tell the police. Not now, at least.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll put me in danger,” Elspeth said. “For real.”
“Who told you that?”
“Dylan,” she said.
I stared at her. “What’s happened now?”
“Okay.” She took a deep, trembling breath. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You can,” Spike said. “You just have to trust us. Your secret’s safe. Right, Sunny?”
I exhaled, thinking of Lee. His case versus the safety of a young woman who was putting all her trust in Spike and me. It didn’t take me that long to make a decision. After all, I’d already gotten Sky for him…“Right,” I said.
“Here you go, guys.” Blake walked in with a tray. On it were three cups of coffee, a pitcher of cream, and some packets of sugar. “Don’t mind me.”
Still trembling, Elspeth smiled at Blake as he set down the tray. He smiled back. “It’s really good coffee,” he said. “Nutmeg and cinnamon. That’s what does it.”
“I saw that on TikTok,” Elspeth said.
“Me too!” Blake said. “What are the odds of that?”
Elspeth laughed a little.
Blake did, too. He still looked rough, but it was good to see he was getting his people skills back. In better circumstances, he might have asked her for her number. She’d have given it to him, too. I could tell these things. It was kind of a sixth sense.
After Blake closed the door, Elspeth sipped her coffee. She closed her eyes. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
“You got this,” Spike said encouragingly.
“I know,” she said, opening her eyes again. “I know I do.” She put her cup down at the edge of my desk and took a few deep breaths. “So…first of all,” she said, “most of what I told the cops is right.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Meaning I was at the Loews at the office Christmas party. I had left my Secret Santa present in my desk. I did go back to get it…And that is when I found Sky.”
“All that’s true?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I just left one thing out.”
I looked at her, then at Spike, who was stirring cream into his coffee.
Elspeth cleared her throat. The eyelid twitched again. “What I left out was that I was told to leave my Secret Santa present in my desk,” she said. “I was told to go back and get it, as well as exactly what time I was supposed to go back.”
“Dylan gave you those instructions?” I said.
“Yes.”
“In an audio message?”
“No. On the phone. He called from a blocked number.”
“When?”
“This morning. Before everybody left for the party. He made me go somewhere private to receive my ‘latest assignment,’ he called it. I went into the bathroom.”
Elspeth clutched her coffee mug with both hands, as though the gesture would keep them from shaking.
“I didn’t know Dylan was going to shoot Sky,” she said quickly. “I tried to ask him why he wanted me to go back to the office, but he wouldn’t answer. He just kept repeating the instructions. Then he hung up.”
Spike nodded. “He wanted you to find the body.”
“Yes,” she said. “You know, when I got that call, I felt like I always do when he contacts me. Like I was going to throw up. But I still had this little bit of hope. I mean…if you want to call it that.” She drew a frail, trembling breath. “I know this sounds kind of morbid,” she said. “But I was thinking, At least if something happens to me, there’s evidence of what he’s been doing on my phone. The texts, the audio messages. You know? If he killed me, all that stuff would point right to him.”
“But then,” I said, “your phone got stolen.”
“Yeah. It did. How did you know?”
“Lee Farrell told me,” I said.
Spike put his coffee cup down and looked at me. “You think Welch took it?”
“Or someone else,” I said, the idea crystalizing in my mind. “You know…it would be pretty hard for him to shoot Sky, clean up, escape from a skyscraper unseen…and then, at some point during all that, steal someone’s phone.”
“You think he’s been threatening other people besides me?” Elspeth said.
“Either that or he’s got someone on the inside at Gonzo,” I said. “Someone who’s working with him willingly.”
Spike picked up his coffee and took another sip. “Any ideas about who that might be?”
“None whatsoever,” I said.
There was a knock on the door, and then Blake opened it slightly. “I googled what you asked me to and found a bunch of articles about the two shootings,” he said. “But nothing quoting Sky Farley.”