“Of course. Won’t let a murder keep us from living it up. Oh, by the way, be a doll and tell Dean I’m still waiting for that beignet recipe. I know he’s already gone for the day, but he won’t mind if you call and ask him to make something special, especially if he knows it’s for me. I’d simply die if he could whip up those beignets for you to bring tonight.”
“Sure, I’ll give him a call. Wait, murder?” Colleen’s voice kicks up a notch as she clutches the scarf around her neck. “You really think someone was killed out there?” She’s gone very pale. Poor kid. Welcome to the neighborhood.
“I’m no detective, but people committing suicide or dying by natural causes generally have problems burying themselves.”
DETECTIVE SHAW
“You’ve been working on that thing for months,” Patel says, unfastening his seat belt before the car rolls to a stop. “You’re never going to get it.”
Spinning the sides of the Rubik’s Cube in my fingers, I stare at the scene unfolding out the windshield. A narrow street winds between a row of houses and the cypress grove. The crime scene has been taped off, with a crew swarming around it. The coroner’s already here, along with two paramedics and a cluster of news rats.
“Want to put money on it?” I toss the unsolved cube in my bag and exit the car as soon as it stops.
“Fifty bucks you don’t solve it by Valentine’s Day.”
“Done.”
“I’ll tell Amanda to make reservations somewhere nice. We’ll drink to your loss,” Patel says, following on my heels.
He doesn’t mean the comment to be an insult; Patel doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. Working with him for the last five years has solidified my early conclusions about his character. But he doesn’t know how badly I wish I could be making reservations with my wife. How I ache to pop open a bottle of champagne and celebrate our most recent birthday, anniversary, or promotion. For the rest of my life I’ll have to settle for a toast with a concrete headstone, and something inside me dies a little more every time I think about it.
The sound of Patel’s boots plodding through the muddy grass shakes me from thinking about Karen, and I’m thankful for the shift of focus.
Back to the crime.
We’re not going to walk down the trail. It’s closed off so we can take photographs of footprints. If early reports of the body’s decomposition are correct, it’s been buried for months, so I doubt any footprints we find will be of much use. But we have to unearth every secret of this place, look under every rock, to lock down the crime scene before we leave.
Thick ocean air rolls over the bluff, ruffling my coat, chilling me to the bone, and dragging with it the smell of sea and salt. Before disappearing into the cover of the grove, I take note of the trail up ahead. Wooden stairs zigzag down to the beach and the Williamson Wildlife Reserve. The dirt trail, muddy and potholed, is like a tongue lolling out onto the grass. We duck beneath caution tape and enter between two towering trees.
The trail is wide, clean, and well maintained, and the spindly branches of the trees arch overhead, creating the sensation of being in a cave. It’s surprisingly peaceful, like a cemetery at twilight.
“Still don’t know why you just don’t look up the formula on YouTube,” Patel says as we approach the crime scene. “You’d solve it much faster, and you’d be fifty dollars richer.”
Since I first decided to tackle the Rubik’s Cube—as a way to tolerate the eternal stretch of the late-night hours—I’ve come to realize that there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who want to solve it for the sake of saying they’ve done it, and the ones who want to understand how and why the advanced algorithms work. At first, when I held the multicolored square in my hands, I fell into the former category. I wanted to solve it as