I fan them across my bedspread so I can assess them as a whole. “She’s beautiful.”
“She sure is,” Phillipa replies, making me realize I said my statement out loud.
I swivel my tongue around my mouth to loosen up my next set of words. “Is that her fiancé?” I’m reasonably sure the ginger-haired man in the third photograph is Julian McMahon, but I rarely paid him any attention when google alerts popped up for him. I was too busy scanning his images for Melody to pay him any attention.
Before Phillipa can confirm the man’s identity, I make an inquiry about another. “Who’s the guy in the suit?”
“Guy in a suit?” Even tipsy, Phillipa is a shit liar.
When she catches my glare, she rolls her eyes. “He’s the reason I’m batting my eyelashes and wearing a push-up bra under my negligee. I need your help to identify him. We got partial DNA from a glass he left in the bakery, and a good set of prints, but other than that, we’re walking around blind.”
“Did you run his DNA through CODIS?”
She nods. “More than once. We never got a hit.”
“Facial recognition?”
She glares at me like I’m stupid. “I’ve done everything. He has either never left New York or someone—”
“Is cleaning his steps?”
Air rustles down the line when she briskly nods. It comes to an immediate halt when I ask, “Do you think it could be the CIA?”
“Following Melody or covering his steps?”
I half-heartedly shrug. “Both.”
Phillipa takes her time deliberating a response before saying, “Possibly.”
She doesn’t sound convinced until I disclose, “Melody’s father worked for the CIA. The cover-up I cited in my reports to have his accident ruled a homicide was because the CIA didn’t want to admit they’d failed one of their own—”
“Allegedly,” Phillipa pushes out, breathlessly. “You need to choose your words wisely, BJ. You don’t know who could be listening.”
Although her reply was straight-up honest, it piques my interest more than it panics me. “Why do you call me BJ?”
When her eyes float up and to the right, I lift my phone off its charging dock in preparation to hit the end call button.
She unearths my plan of attack in less than a nanosecond. “I heard Melody call you BJ in the home videos from when you were kids. It kind of stuck.”
“What home videos?” My mom shoved a camera in Melody’s and my face many times when we were young, but not once do I recall being video recorded.
“Liam recorded some of your drills. He used them to strategize new plans of attack.”
Although creepy, it does make sense. One thing doesn’t, though. “Why would home videos of the Greggs be stored in the FBI database?”
I grow an appreciation for video chats when Phillipa’s throat works hard to swallow. If we were communicating the old-fashioned way, I wouldn’t have known she’s rattled. “I didn’t technically find them in the Bureau’s records. I discovered them when I was working on another case.” I wait and wait and wait for her to elaborate. Mercifully, she doesn’t leave me hanging for long. “I was the agent assigned to Tobias’s case. When hunting for evidence to help convict Leesa, I stumbled upon a first edition copy of War and Peace by—”
“Leo Tolstoy,” I interrupt, smiling. I’m not surprised Tobias had more than one copy. No one can predict where they’ll die, not even a man as smart as Tobias. “You found Tobias’s anagram?”
“Yes,” Phillipa confesses. “It didn’t think much of it at the time, but once Leesa was convicted, it played on my mind for weeks on end.”
“Did you decipher it?”
Even through a video lens, I can see her ego sparking in her eyes. “It took me almost a year since I didn’t have a key to work with, but I got there in the end.” I almost ask if she fully deciphered it, but she continues talking, saving me from spilling information that isn’t mine to share. “There was a six-sequence code I couldn’t work out. I thought it might have corresponded with one of the files in Tobias’s home office, but when I looked for it, the file wasn’t there.”
My throat grows scratchy, but I hold back a relieving swallow. I’d hate for Phillipa to know I hid Isabelle’s file in a place no one would expect to look.
My Adam’s apple bobs up and down without thinking when she adds, “That’s where I stumbled onto the Greggs’ home videos.”
“Tobias had a file on Melody?” I swear I sound like I haven’t hit