“Then you need some sleep. Like a solid eight to twelve hours.”
“And what are you going to do while I’m sleeping? Also sleep?”
“Maybe. Depends on how I feel when we get back. I could use a few hours.” Not as many as Sylvie needed, but I knew what she was getting at. No one was leaving her out of the action.
“Obviously,” she said. “But I thought you were Superman.” She smirked at me, and I didn’t fight the cocky grin that spread across my face.
“I’ve learned to rest when I can,” I said. “And unless someone else plants a bomb on us in the next twenty-four hours, I think we can take a break long enough to get some food and some sleep.”
“Okay,” Sylvie said. “I’m not going to fight you on that. I’m exhausted to the bone.”
“I bet,” I murmured. It had been a while since I’d seen someone take so many punches without going down. If anyone needed some restorative sleep and a few good meals, it was her.
“Then what?”
I was getting used to the way she pushed. Sylvie Calloway would never be satisfied with simple answers or excuses.
“I have some ideas,” I said. “I need to hit the office and talk to my team. Here’s what’s going tohappen—we get back, we both get some rest. You can work on setting up that laptop. It has a VPN, so if you go on the internet, you won’t be traceable geographically to Atlanta. But I wouldn’t communicate with anyone.”
“Can I log into my email, socials, and stuff?” She asked, one eyebrow raised, her eyes distant, as if she was working through her next moves as she waited for my answer.
I debated that. My gut wanted her off the radar completely. But she’d already gone to talk to the police. There hadn’t been a good way out of that. So, whoever tried to kill her almost certainly knew she wasn’t dead. And if they couldn’t trace her to a specific address, did it matter if she checked her email or socials? I couldn’t think of a reason why, and considering how little we had to go on, I answered her honestly.
“I don’t like the idea of using you as bait. I’d like you to keep your footprint as small as possible. Even if whoever did this can’t track you to your exact location, you’re giving them information by moving around online through your own accounts. Being so obviously alive might encourage them to try again.”
“On the other hand, we’re a little short on leads,” she said. “Unless that phone has a treasure trove.”
I thought about the way Maddox had said Emily Shaw’s information had appeared curated. Anyone with the chops to do that probably wasn’t careless with their phone.
“I’ll keep all that in mind,” she said, which I knew meant she’d be checking her email and her socials.
Smart for the case, but I still didn’t like it. “I have some ideas of where we go next, but I need a few hours in the office before I’m ready to talk about it.”
That was mostly true. I had some thoughts I wanted to run by Ryder. Questions for Maddox.
I expected Sylvie to press, but she let it go. I glanced over to see if she was asleep, but her eyes were alert, watching the road as we drove through the night.
“Tell me about the case,” I said. “The one where the police used you.”
“They didn’t use me. You make it sound bad,” she said. “I was there. I was going to do what I was going to do. And they needed the help.”
“Fine,” I agreed, though I didn’t like the idea of the police putting Sylvie in the way of a killer. What we were doing wasn’t far off, but it wasn’t exactly the same either. “Tell me.”
And she did, her clear, warm voice filling my SUV as she told me of a girl—fifteen, pretty, good student, lots of friends—and the boy who decided she belonged to him. I heard in Sylvie’s voice the passion for justice, her anger that this girl had lost her life so young.
I wondered what her podcast was like, because I kind of got it. It wasn’t my thing to listen to people talk for hours on end. But Sylvie’s voice, the way she told the girl’s story—this wasn’t about clicks or sponsors for her. Or if it was, only a little. This was about justice.
In my business, things were rarely black or white. We didn’t work in service of finding right from wrong. We worked for clients. Sometimes, nobody on a job was the good guy. Sometimes, the answers to our questions were all bad. But all of us liked it when things were a little more clear-cut. And I could see why this kind of work would attract somebody as fierce as Sylvie Calloway.
She went on to tell me about the case that had gotten her obsessed in the first place—the waitress who disappeared.
“We still haven’t found whoever killed her,” Sylvie said, “though some tips came in to the detective on the case after the season of the podcast aired.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
She let out a long sigh. “I think it was a crime of opportunity. I think whoever did it wasn’t local. I think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And those—those cases are really hard, unless you have DNA.”
“And do they?”
