to Checker, and Arthur researching him. Playing the music when you ask …
This was D.J. It wasn’t me.
“Thanks for looking, anyway,” I said stiffly to Checker. “Maybe we’ll find something in his papers.”
“You’re not good at this, Cas.”
“What?”
“Beating around the bush. We’ve got buildings blowing up, and you want to know if it’s my fault.”
I hadn’t expected him to be so blunt about it, but my mouth pounced on the hypothesis before my brain could moderate it. “Well, you do have a connection to a homicidal bomber, don’t you? It’s a logical question.”
“And I promise you, I’m looking for the answer, okay? I’m pulling all the CSI data from the police investigation at your office, to see if I can find any sort of—of signature match with the building explosions we know D.J. did or—or with other ones. I’m doing everything I can. I swear I am.”
“I … didn’t think you weren’t.” I swallowed. I’d been insisting to myself that this was D.J. so hard, I’d let what that would mean for Checker fall out of the equation. His anxious self-recrimination made me hate myself.
But it’s different. Arthur never held any of that against him …
“We need to consider all possibilities,” I said. Hypocritically. “And that includes D.J.”
“I know.”
“Start by telling me if you know anything that would help us track him—or is it her?” I’d never quite figured that out. “Anything that would help us track them down.”
“Him. I think,” Checker said. “And I don’t. I really don’t, Cas. I tried—a year ago, when D.J.’s trail showed up again, I followed up on everything, I pulled all the police records—but he disappeared. And then I started tracking—explosions, bombings, anything that might—and I couldn’t—God, Cas, between that and trying to track down your past, I didn’t sleep for months. I was behind on work, everything was going to shit—”
I winced. I hadn’t thought I could feel worse, but I knew why I’d missed it all now. I had been holding a grudge against Checker during those months and … not speaking to him.
“And I finally said, ‘I have to stop, this isn’t healthy,’” he continued. “And I stopped. I made myself stop. But the point I’m trying to make is that I wasn’t getting anywhere. I wasn’t finding anything, I was chasing shadows and then obsessing over them, and of course I’m looking again now, but I don’t have any reason to believe I’ll be any more successful than the last time. And I could spend two days straight telling you about D.J. and still not tell you everything I know, and that wouldn’t help you either, but I promise you, if I can think of one single thing that would, I will dial you so fast, I’ll sprain something. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. Arthur hadn’t stopped looking, I thought. Checker had stopped, but Arthur hadn’t. Because that was the kind of thing Arthur did for people.
“Meanwhile, you can skip Arthur’s apartment unless you have no other leads. He argued with me about a security system there too, the moron, but I put my foot down, and it’s running perfectly fine and shows nothing unusual.”
“Okay,” I said again.
“Cas, I…” He sounded miserable.
Pilar held something up and waved at me.
“I gotta go.” I didn’t know what else to say, anyway. “We’ll update you.”
“Yeah,” he said, and hung up.
I let the hand holding my phone drop and turned to Pilar. “What’ve you got?”
She passed me a business card. “Did Arthur ever ask you about this?”
My heart felt like it gave an extra thump as I took the card, but a quick scan of the raised blue text on ribbed cream showed nothing familiar, nothing related to me at all. I tried not to show my relief and read it more closely. The person on the card was some sort of doctor at a place called the Bimini Restorative Wellness Center, with an address out in Ventura County. Arthur had circled the doctor’s name in ballpoint, and below it was scrawled, Mathematical formula—ask Sonya or Cas?
So not about me—just about math. Math, I could handle. But Arthur had never spoken to me about this.
“No,” I said. “He didn’t ask me.”
“Should we call Professor—”
“I’m on it,” I said, my fingers moving on my phone.
“Hello?” said Professor Sonya Halliday. Sonya was a legitimate mathematics professor and a childhood friend of Arthur’s, and I was pretty sure she was the reason he’d put up with me to begin with. Maybe I’d just been a stand-in for her