He was stunned for a beat. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The murderer is a guy named Scott Keyes, but he changed his name to Abbot about a couple of years ago. Before that, I bet you he had some other family name. He’s changed it a couple of times,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “Something tells me there’s a strong family resemblance in the Keyes clan.”
Grady asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“His alibi. He said he was at his stepbrother’s funeral. You said he turned up in photos. I bet you a dollar it wasn’t him. He’s a lying liar who lies, and a murderer, too. You need to go arrest him, like, right now.”
“You know better than that.”
“Okay, then get ready to arrest him!”
“Come on, Leda. You know good and well that’s not how it works. Wait, hang on,” he said quietly. Leda got the distinct impression that he was in a room full of people, and he was trying not to sound too crazy in front of them. In the background, she heard murmurs, phones ringing, and a general patter of conversation. Then, a few seconds later, he was up to full volume. “I was in a meeting, sorry. Now I’m out. What do you mean it was Keyes? What’s this business about a Scott?”
“Scott Keyes is Abbot Keyes. He changed his name. He’s the one who did it, Grady. He murdered all the people!”
“Do you have any proof, or is this just a psychic flash telling you this?”
“Can’t it be both?” she asked desperately. She threw her car into gear and hit the road.
“No!” he told her, a dash of exasperation shining through his voice. “Psychic feelings don’t count for jack squat in the legal system! Can you prove it? If you’re that certain, then you need to… to… find a way to make everyone else certain. Help me help you, as they say.”
Her thoughts raced through her head, and her car raced through a four-way stop. “Meet me at Castaways. I need my murder board. I don’t know if I can prove it to you, but I can definitely show it to you. Please go pick him up.”
He sighed, and she could practically hear him squeezing that little spot between his eyebrows with frustration. “I can’t go pick him up, because I don’t have any evidence that he’s done anything wrong. But I’ll call in a favor or two and see if I can get eyes on him.”
“What does that mean?” She cut somebody off on the way to the interstate on-ramp. The other driver flipped her off and honked, but she barely noticed and didn’t even flip them off in return.
“It means I’ll see if I can get someone to track him down so that we can bring him in, if it turns out that you can give me probable cause. I’m sorry, but you have to give me more than your personal paranormal confidence.”
“I understand, I do. I get it,” she said. “Just meet me at the bar, that’s where I’m headed right now. I can show you. I can lay it all out, and you’ll see. I’ll make you believe me.”
Before he could reply, she hung up on him and threw her phone back into her purse.
Both hands now on the wheel, she gunned it for Cap Hill.
Thirty minutes later, she finally found a parking spot within two blocks of Castaways, around the corner from a popular indie bookstore and a defunct KFC. It was a tiny private lot between two buildings, in a space that might have better served the city as an alley, but it was almost rush hour and she’d have to take whatever she could get—even at ten bucks an hour.
Maybe she could get Ben to pay for it, if she did a few songs.
But first.
First, she had a murderer to unmask.
She clicked the door-lock button and kicked the door shut. Where was she again? She checked the nearest street sign and oriented herself, made a mental note of where she was leaving Jason the Accord, and darted toward Castaways—just as it started to rain in earnest.
Behold, the first real downpour of fall, signaling the absolute end of summer. No more final gasps of warm air, no more pretty, dry days. In another couple of weeks, the time would change and it’d start getting dark around three or four o’clock, and Seattle would return to its uniform normal: gray, chilly, and damp… for the next six months at least.
Leda welcomed it.
But for half a second, she did wish she had an umbrella. Locals didn’t typically carry them, because a good, hard rain didn’t happen that often—mostly it was just a dull drizzle, and a hoodie would suffice to protect her hair. But she wasn’t wearing a hoodie, her travel umbrella was unhelpfully stashed in her car’s glove box, and she was already halfway between the lot and the bar when this fact occurred to her.
It didn’t matter. She could be soaking wet and still spell out a case for arresting Abbot Keyes.
Leda ran the rest of the way, her hair slapping her face and her feet getting wet. Puddles and rain soaked up her boots past her jeans to her knees, but she ignored it. She shoved the door open and brushed past Steve, who was still collating the two-dollar drink discount tickets that Ben had printed off at the nearest Kinko’s.
“Hey, Steve!” she said over her shoulder.
“Leda, how you doing?”
“Fantastic!” she shouted without looking back.
Tiffany laughed from somewhere behind the bar, but Leda didn’t pause. She skidded to a halt outside Matt’s office, where Matt was actually located—just this once.
He looked up, startled. “Oh… hello? Is everything okay?”
Leda pointed at him, and then the corkboard behind him. “I need that!” she announced.
“Now?”
“Now!” She vaulted over his desk. “We have to catch a killer!”
He pivoted in his squeaky rolling chair. “Right now?”
She grabbed her index cards from his top-right drawer and a marker from his mug full of writing implements. “Right now!”
“Well, hell. Let me get out of the way.” He pushed his chair back as far as he could so she could turn the board around without braining him.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t know you’d be here…” She started scribbling on cards and laying them out on his desk, where seconds before he’d been entering employee hours into his laptop.
Matt closed the laptop and tucked it under his arm. “What happened? Do you know who did it?”
“I do!” she declared, equally triumphant and frantic. She had to get it all down while it was fresh in her head. She finally had the solution, she knew what had happened, and it all made sense. Tod’s killer was practically within her grasp. All she had to do was stick the landing.
She reached back into the drawer to retrieve a ziplock baggie full of magnets and pulled out a few of the boring dots. She picked them apart from one another and started slapping cards onto the board—adjusting their location and annotating them as she went. “I was in the storage unit with all of Tod’s old stuff, and I was eating this burrito… and… and I got a migraine, but it all came together.”
“All hail migraines. And burritos, I guess.”
She accidentally knocked off the marker’s cap, then picked it up and stuffed it into her mouth to hold it while she kept writing. “Yes. Burritos. Food of the gods, right there,” she murmured. “Tod used to love burritos, did you know that?”