They both knew he was lying, but Nell was kind enough to pretend.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “One problem at a time. What are you working on?”
She turned her desktop monitor to face him.
“Resurrecting the dead,” she replied.
She had a garish website on the screen, obnoxiously neon, with the header Tomorrow’s Tech Today. The headline article asked and answered its own question: Is Nvidia’s new line of graphics cards right for you? Yes, it is! The writer’s name was “Liz Bisland,” but it was Nell’s face smiling from a bubble near the byline.
Tyler’s grim mood couldn’t keep the slow smile off his face. “Wow. I didn’t know you still had that site. Talk about a blast from the past.”
“I kept it around for a rainy day. All the articles were three years obsolete, but after a couple hours of scraping pieces off tech sites and slapping Liz’s name onto them, we have one solid—albeit plagiarized and shady as hell—one-stop shop for technology fetishists. PR flacks never look for originality, just sufficient bubbly enthusiasm, and I’ve got a fresh burner phone keyed to the number for Liz’s imaginary desk. Last time we used this trick, it got me backstage at an Apple keynote conference. I’m willing to bet it’ll get me in the door at the Weaver Group, too.”
“Might get you in,” Tyler said, “but they’re not going to let you talk to anybody important.”
She leaned back in her vintage wooden chair. It creaked dangerously. “Who’s there to talk? All I need is one well-timed bathroom break and a little breathing room to dig around behind closed doors.”
“You…do remember these people may have hired a contract killer to take out their opposition, right?”
“Right, the big scary ‘missionary’ who only Seelie has actually seen.”
Tyler’s brow furrowed. “You don’t believe her?”
She had to think about that.
“I do believe her,” Nell said, “which is the problem. I stood in the back of that theater last night, watching everybody who came in, scoping the ones who were sitting in the back when I got there. Nobody even remotely matched the description. And the woman who was there to kill Seelie is apparently a friend of a friend who she’s known for over a year and the roomie to the two, possibly three people who got dead in that apartment on Avenue D. Forget your feelings, look square at the facts: what does that tell you?”
Tyler marveled, sometimes, how Nell could turn ice-cold, objective at the drop of a dime; she wore her reporter’s mantle like wings, flying transcendent above the roughs and valleys of raw emotion, down where he lived. She could switch off her emotions. He had to be content with stuffing his in a bottle. Still, he gave it a try.
“It all comes back to the boyfriend,” he said. “The dealer. Amber was living with him, Seelie was buying from him…if I wore a badge, I’d read this as a dispute over drug money. Could even argue Arthur Wendt wasn’t the real target. There was never a hit man, it was Amber with the gun, and she went to his apartment to murder Seelie. Wendt was collateral damage.”
Nell held up a finger. “But. But that doesn’t explain why the dealer’s safe was still locked after the murders and the killer didn’t even try to crack it open. It also doesn’t explain the texts on Arthur’s phone or all this weirdness with my old history professor. It clicks until it doesn’t.”
“What’s your read on Ramis?” he asked.
“The Hamilton letters are real. Professor Ramis is telling the truth. At least, he believes he’s telling the truth. Seelie and Ramis both do.”
“But the letters don’t make any sense,” Tyler pointed out. “Why was he writing about Benedict Arnold getting hanged, when he wasn’t hanged? Or that weird stuff toward the end?”
Nell pursed her lips, eyes going hard as she stared into the middle distance. Not dissuaded. More like a chess player sitting down to a championship match, psyching herself up for the fight.
“Usually, dig up the right clues and a complicated story gets very simple, very fast,” she said.
“Sure. When we prove somebody is lying.”
“And what we have here are two credible witnesses who believe every word of their own stories. The testimony is true. The stories are impossible.” She drummed her fingernails on her desk. “We’re missing a piece. Something to tie it all together. So, yes, I’m going to play tech reporter and poke around at the murder