moved forward a week before the city approved their bid. In other words, they already knew they had won. In other words, the entire bidding process is rigged. If we get that, we can uncover the whole chain of corruption from the bottom rung all the way to the mayor’s office. We can expose everyone involved and name names. This could make the Buffalo Billion look like stealing money from a piggybank. It’s Pulitzer material. You know I’m right.”
“You know what I know? If she’s a witness to a murder, the cops are going to want a word with her. Know who else is? The guy who did it. Did you even think about that?”
“Then we’d better find her before anyone else does.”
There was silence on the line, just the muffled clatter of the newsroom, and then Tyler came back with a long-suffering sigh.
“What do you need?”
“You still have that contact with access to Microbilt?” she asked. “Assuming she hasn’t yanked the SIM card, we can track that phone. We find the phone, we find our witness.”
6.
Seelie didn’t know why she answered the phone. It sat in her hip pocket like a mystery, a dead man’s last bequest. Outside of letting her answer a call, it remained stubbornly locked, demanding a four-digit passcode. She tried every permutation of Arthur’s age and birthday, his wife’s…even her own, though she wasn’t sure if Arthur ever knew it. Every wrong choice made the screen give a warning jiggle, sending her back to the beginning.
The hazy summer sun found her walking the streets, sleepless. Two in the morning was too late to go knocking on familiar doors, too much of a burden to put on anybody, so she had spent the night wandering to stay awake and watching a nonstop mental replay of the shooting.
Arthur was worried that someone would come for him. Or for the phone, or whatever was on the phone. The man at the door, the cadaver in black who she mentally dubbed “the missionary,” had known Arthur. But Arthur didn’t know him. What did he call Arthur? “Four-Nineteen”? And what had happened in Philadelphia? He’d mentioned over dinner that he’d just come back from a business trip, but he didn’t say where. Arthur never liked talking about his job and she didn’t press.
And then the missionary had calmly stood over Arthur’s dead body, opened up a doctor’s bag, taken out a Polaroid, and started photographing his bookshelves. She couldn’t begin to explain that.
Seelie’s left hand rummaged in her jeans pocket. Her fingertips found a tiny bend of hard metal, dull with age and wear. She fished it out. The little race car, a token from a Monopoly set, caught the sunlight’s gleam in its tarnish.
She’d had nightmares when she was small. Screaming, cold-sweat terrors, night after night. She was also the kind of precocious kid who haunted libraries, living in the adult stacks and devouring every book that caught her eye. The Art of Lucid Dreaming offered her a solution if she was willing to work at it, a method to take control of her dreams, to banish the monsters that tormented her, to build a sanctuary in the land of sleep.
For that she needed a token, a physical object to remind her of when she was dreaming, to break a nightmare’s spell. It could have been anything; she wasn’t even sure, now, why she picked the race car. But she’d carried it in her pocket for half a decade, long enough that it was part of her, and she’d checked it diligently since fleeing Arthur’s apartment—hoping that this was just a nightmare and soon it’d be over and everything would be fine.
No such luck. She was wide awake.
She weighed her options. Going to the police wasn’t one of them. What was more believable: that a phantom assassin had come to Arthur’s door and murdered him in the middle of the night? Or that they got drunk on red wine, had a lovers’ spat, and she shot him herself? She knew what she would think if she were a cop. Even if they believed her, there was her legal status to think about.
Seventeen-year-old runaways didn’t get released on their own recognizance. They got held by child protective services and handed over to their grateful parents.
She would eat a bullet before she ever let that happen again.
As long as she stayed away from Arthur’s condo, or any of the places he used to take her, she’d be free and clear. She