I SAT IN THE kitchen drinking another cup of coffee that I needed about as much as I needed more shoes.
The phone that I’d pulled out of Lisa Morneau’s back pocket was on the table in front of me. It was more than just her phone, I knew, whether it was a burner or not. It was evidence in a homicide investigation, one on which one of my best friends was running point. I also knew that the woman currently in charge of Homicide at the BPD, a captain named Glass, had never approved of my friendships with Lee Farrell, or Frank Belson, and did not much like that I occasionally got favored treatment from both of them because my father was Phil Randall. She would approve of me far less if and when she found that I had removed evidence from Lee’s crime scene and had not yet told anybody that it was Tony Marcus who had discovered the body and not me.
But I did not view this as being their case. I viewed it as mine. In some way that I did not yet fully understand, I was at least partly responsible for two women being dead. I promised myself I’d get to the bottom of it.
I picked up the phone. I had put my gloves back on. I didn’t know if someone other than Lisa had ever touched the phone, so was just being careful, in case I did ever feel the need to turn the phone over to the police.
It occurred to me again that the phone felt about as small as a credit card. I did not know enough about phones like this one to know what kind of memory it had.
It did have a call log.
She had placed only two calls on it. The first, I saw, was to Tony Marcus’s number, one I had been calling a lot over the past week with only occasional success. The second call was placed more than an hour before Tony had called me, and thus much closer to the time when she had to have been shot. Maybe Lee Farrell would eventually tell me what the ME had established as the time of death, if he was in a mood to share information. All I knew was that by the time Tony had called me he had found Lisa at The Fens and returned home. I did not know where his primary residence was these days. I wondered if anyone other than Junior and Ty Bop knew.
I did not recognize the second number.
But Lisa had apparently called somebody after she had called Tony.
The phone, I saw, had plenty of battery power left, and thus was still operational.
I sipped more coffee, feeling silly holding my cup while wearing crime scene gloves. I was thrilled to see that despite all the caffeine in me, my hands had only a small case of the shakes. Small favors.
It was seven o’clock in the morning by now. The person Lisa had called was likely still sleeping. Unless, of course, that person had gone on the run the way Lisa had been on the run.
There had been no phone on Callie Harden when her body had been discovered at Joe Moakley Park, nor had one been found at her apartment. So her killer had taken her phone with him. Or her.
This time the killer had left a phone in Lisa’s jeans. Had the shooter simply not checked once she was dead and on her back? Or been careless. Or had to leave in a hurry?
It seemed a logical assumption that the same person had shot both of them, but I couldn’t take that as fact yet. I remembered the joke from the old Odd Couple TV show, Tony Randall standing at a blackboard and breaking up the word assume in a courtroom scene.
“When you assume,” he said, “you make an ass out of u and me.”
It was now official that I’d had way too much coffee.
I picked up the phone again. I had already used a SIM card reader I had once bought on another case, and USB drive, to copy any other information that might be on Lisa’s phone. Spike was a gadget guy. He could check it out for me later, see if there was anything else useful in the phone’s memory before I turned it over to Farrell and apologized for being a bad, bad girl.
For now, even wearing the gloves, I carefully tapped the last number Lisa had called, and soon was listening to one ring after another.
I waited to be sent to voicemail, perhaps a generic message that told me nothing about whose phone it was. Or maybe it would just keep ringing into infinity, and no one would ever answer.
Then someone did.
“This is Gabriel,” he said.