how I’d been spending my nights. Not until I had something constructive to share. I didn’t want to lie to him, but I didn’t want to say too much without a good reason, either. Not until all that moonlighting actually led to something worth sharing—
“Watch where you’re going, asshole!” someone screamed to the tune of their own car horn. I wasn’t sure if they were yelling at me or someone else, but I had just swerved onto Charles Street at the last second. The city’s been working toward more bike lanes for years now, without much progress. The motto of the road in Boston might as well be God Bless and Good Luck. I dodged another right-hooking truck, went around his left side, and kept going.
From there, it was a straight shot to the Public Garden, where Keats was picking me up. I ignored the burn in my legs and powered on. It was the fastest I’d ever biked in the city. And if I was being honest, part of that was about making sure Billy couldn’t give me shit for anything when I got there. This was my chance to be taken seriously again, and I wanted everything to go perfectly.
Then again, I always do.
By the time I was flying through the park, it felt like all the joggers, walkers, and other traffic were moving in slow motion around me. I goosed a yellow light to catch a left onto Beacon and saw Keats just up ahead, parked illegally on the opposite side. His flashers were on and his hatch was already up.
I checked over my shoulder, crossed both lanes in a fast diagonal, and hopped off my bike at a run.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Eight sixteen,” he said. “You’re late.”
“I’m exactly on time,” I said. I hoisted the bike into the back of the car and he slammed the hatch.
“If I’m waiting, you’re late,” he told me, with just a hint of sarcasm. Then we jumped in on either side and Keats accelerated away from the curb, heading west.
No slowing down now.
CHAPTER 32
“THERE’S A FILE on the seat,” Billy told me. “Take a look and tell me what you see.”
It was an ordinary manila folder with a red strip reading CLASSIFIED across the subject tab. Even there, I knew I was in new territory. Nobody had handed me a classified anything since I started at the Bureau, much less a case file like this one. I could feel myself getting drawn more and more deeply into this case, even as we hurried toward that high school. It may or may not have been an actual turning point for me, professionally, but it sure felt that way. Some part of me didn’t even want to open that folder—didn’t want to know about another victim, another murder, another piece of darkness, just waiting to seep into my brain.
At the same time, some other part of me was beyond anxious to know exactly what was about to happen and, for that matter, what had happened to put this new twist into motion.
So it was with something like the definition of mixed feelings that I flipped open the file and started reading.
A laser-printed school picture of a teenage girl was clipped to the top of the packet inside. She was white, with dirty-looking dreads set off by two big ladybug barrettes.
“Nigella Wilbur,” Keats said. I flipped past the school pic and to the report that lay underneath. “She’s been using the app for just over a week. We found all that”—he stabbed with one finger at whatever was inside the file—“forty-five minutes ago.”
“Please tell me she’s still alive,” I said.
Keats’s mouth constricted into a tight line. I guess that was the question of the hour. It was like a lateral move for my nerves. Nothing had been confirmed or denied yet, but there were still plenty of possibilities for a worst-case scenario here.
Or rather, another worst-case scenario.
My hands were shaking by the time I started flipping through the rest of the material in that file. I told myself it was because I’d been biking without gloves, but that wasn’t it. I could see that the next several pages were a transcript of text messages and conversation fragments, just like the ones I’d found for Gwen Petty.
Behind those pages were printouts of several images, presumably camera snaps sent back and forth between Nigella Wilbur and whoever this person was coming after her.
The pictures themselves were all over the map, from innocently playful