else. I called Tessa from my watch during my long walk home. “I need your help with one more Edie-related thing,” I said. “I promise I’m not being obsessive. I just need you to look someone up for me. I feel like she’s probably in the case files somewhere, but I missed her. I’ll check on Facebook when I’m home, but her name is Jenna something.”
A BMW gunned through the red light just as I stepped off the curb; I jumped back, heart pounding.
“You said it’s Jenna?”
“Yeah, Jenna. She was one of Edie’s old roommates. I didn’t know her at all and Edie literally never mentioned her, but Greg said they were close.”
Tessa was quiet for a second, presumably taking notes. “Wait, you talked to Greg?”
“Yeah, I just happened to run into him on the street. Craziest thing. He was—”
I stopped talking as a new theory crashed through me: In the video, Sarah said that Jenna had been busted for selling drugs. Could that explain the Molly in Edie’s system that night?
Was Jenna still living in Calhoun when Edie died?
“Lindsay, you there?”
“Sorry, I’m here.” I motored around an old woman. “Can I call you again later? It’s kinda hard to hear.”
“Sure. I’m on it. I’m actually still at work, want me to come over?”
A curl of happiness that someone wanted to see me. Yet I hated the idea of making small talk while I should be at my computer, picking this final lock. “I think I’m just gonna order in. Kinda need a quiet night.”
“A White Lotus Thai kind of evening?”
“Pad See Ew know me too well,” I cracked, and she giggled appreciatively. We hung up and I headed home, hope billowing in me for the first time in weeks.
* * *
First I tried Greg’s Flickr; the account existed, but the password didn’t work. I emailed, texted, and called him from my watch, figuring a full-court press was my best bet here. Then I set to work finding Jenna.
An hour later, she was yet another digital ghost. I’d found her full name in an old email, but it was laughably generic—Jenna Smith—and I had no other identifying details to go on. Still, I sent it to Tessa and kept searching. The name returned thousands of hits, which I waded through with mounting annoyance: LinkedIn profiles and Instagram feeds and Twitter handles all devoid of real info and fitting neatly into my vague notions about this mystery woman—brunette, unremarkable, born sometime in the eighties. I couldn’t picture her clearly, and no one with the name seemed to fit into my Calhoun network, no common Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections. I shot off a few emails and messages to Jennas who sort of seemed to fit the profile, politely asking if they’d lived in Calhoun around 2009, but half the messages bounced right back.
I rewatched the video of Kevin and Sarah at the Levee. I wanted to smack myself for overlooking this: Here Sarah had offered up that Jenna had been busted for selling, but the drugs were Anthony’s, and the two of them were probably sleeping together—meaning Jenna might have been the mystery caller who had brought Anthony to the scene. I filled out a FOIL request for the drug arrest records from that month—the Jenga video had a date, June 6—but I knew my lack of specificity about the actual day and charges would likely result in a rejection, or at best, a slower-than-usual retrieval. I hit submit and groaned in frustration, grabbing a fistful of hair and tugging it against my scalp.
Was this her? Was she just on the other side of all of this, somehow aware that I’d been investigating and feeling endangered enough that she’d cracked open Edie’s email and sent me a vaguely threatening email? I answered my door to a dazed-looking man, holding out my bag of Thai food and looking winded from the climb. I thanked him and watched him slowly turn around, as if he’d been counting on more repartee.
Tessa finally called around nine, splintering my hope that she’d have more luck than I. “I can’t find a damn thing,” she reported. “There are a lot of Jenna Smiths, obviously, but I can’t find anything tying one to Calhoun or even Bushwick. We could try to track down the lease—Will says they aren’t confidential unless there’s a confidentiality clause, which I doubt—but we’d need the landlord to hand it over.”
“Well, he’s dead.”
“Shit, that’s right.” Tessa clicked her tongue.
“Ugh. And here I