Page 136 of Murder on Charity Lane

62

SOPHIE

As I walked home from work, I kept my back straight and my chin up. I refused to hunch despite the news. Despite the murder. Despite hearing that Mrs. B and Ocean had found Sunny Wheeler butchered in his car.

A cold body in a blood-splattered car.

I was okay. I was fine. Maybe not as completely fine as I’d pretended, though. The knowledge that bright, safe, sweet Santa Barbara concealed such brutality disturbed me. So when I reached the Cottages, I didn’t even bother stopping at home: I knew Nicholas was still at work.

Instead, I knocked on Hamilton’s door. Anthony greeted me, his expression as flat as ever, except for the faintest twinkle in his eyes. Which surprised me, given the news.

“What’re you happy about?” I demanded.

“Camping next weekend.”

That lifted my spirits. “Oh! You and Lily-Ann?”

“Me and Miles and his friends. Lil does not camp.”

I squeezed his bicep in a friendly, man-to-man sort of way. “That sounds like fun.”

“You’re welcome to join us,” he said, as I stepped inside. “You and Nicholas.”

Which was tempting, though not as tempting as the romantic weekend in Portland that Nicholas kept talking about. So I made noncommittal noises, saying hey to Hamilton and Lily-Ann as I flopped onto the cushioned chair beside the reading lamp. I kicked off my shoes, dropped my bag, and stretched away the tension of the day, the dread of the murder.

“Bail doesn’t exist in California,” Hamilton was saying to nobody in particular. “Mrs. B didn’t pay bail. We only call it bail because of linguistic inertia.”

“Drink?” Anthony asked me.

“Anything cold and normal,” I told him.

His lip twitched, and he headed into the kitchen while Hamilton paced in front of the whiteboard continuing his seminar to nobody. “… bail infrastructure is wrapped around a process called RAIs. Which is an upgrade. Bail forced people to spend months in jail if they couldn’t scrape up a few hundred dollars. However, now an RAI algorithm decides how likely you are to flee or cause harm to the community, and I know what you’re going to say, Lily-Ann.”

“Do you?” Lily-Ann asked, not looking up from her laptop. She was dressed elegantly, as usual, in an eggplant short-sleeve knit dress so perfectly simple it had to be Max Mara or something.

“That studies show judges assign bail based on things like the temperature, football results, and racism. However, the algorithm data uses those same decisions to—”

The door crashed open, and Ocean and Mrs. B stepped inside, looking shaken. I bustled across the room and hugged each of them in turn. Anthony set my lemonade down, then pulled them into hugs, too. Mrs. B claimed she was okay but she looked tired—especially after Hamilton started nattering about RAIs again.

“Hamilton,” I interrupted. “Let’s talk about the, uh, dead guy in the parking lot.”

“Nicholas isn’t here yet,” he told me, as if I hadn’t noticed.

“We can start without him.”

“Oh! Okay. Sure. No problem. Um, but does anyone want a prune?”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“I have both pitted and non-.” He furrowed his brow. “Or do I mean un-?”

“Three questions immediately present themselves,” Lily-Ann said, ignoring Hamilton. “That is, other than, who killed Sunny Wheeler and why?”

“Do we know it was Sunny Wheeler?” I asked.

“Hamilton’s police contact confirmed that,” Lily-Ann told me. “But they can’t explain the killer’s presence in the back seat of Wheeler’s car. We don’t know if they intended to shed so much blood or—”

“We need to stop this investigation bullshit.” Ocean scrubbed her hair with her fingers. “We found a man slaughtered in a parking lot. A man who Sophie and Nicholas met at the party where another man died. We are in so far over our heads.”