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I opened my phone and showed them our text chain from the afternoon.
“See?” I said. “He seemed just fine.”
They studied the texts, and I could see Felicia scrolling up. Suddenly this felt like an invasion of both Yevgeny’s privacy and mine. Moreover, I couldn’t recall right away what specifically I might have asked him about Futurium or Erika Schweiker. So, I asked for my phone back, and the detective returned it to me and said, “We may want that again—depending upon where the investigation goes.”
“Certainly,” I agreed, though I felt the sharp tip of anxiety. “But any of our texts are on his phone, too.”
“His phone is gone. Wasn’t on him. We’re searching for it at the accident scene and the park right now.”
“I’m sure it was an accident,” I said, though I didn’t believe that any longer. Not for a second. “I can see him, enamored, near one of those peaks. And then he slips. I think that’s more likely what happened than that”—my voice choked, envisioning his murder—“he threw himself over the side.”
Felicia sighed, and for a moment the three of us sat there in silence. Finally, she asked, “Did he ever mention anyone who was angry with him—or anyone he was mad at?”
“In other words, did he have any enemies? Was he meeting someone there or surprised by someone there who was willing to heave him off a cliff?”
“Yes.”
“I have no idea.”
“Because there are three possibilities: He fell. He jumped. Or he was pushed.”
“I understand. But I’ve spent three nights with him in my life. And zero days. I liked him. I liked him so much. But we hadn’t had the chance to get to know each other all that well,” I insisted, but my eyes had begun welling up and my voice broke. I didn’t sound especially firm. It was unlikely I inspired confidence in my veracity.
“Excuse me,” I said. I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my blouse and went to the bathroom for a tissue. I could feel their eyes on me. I tried to gather myself before I returned to them, and I succeeded by breathing in Crissy and breathing out Diana. When I left the bathroom, I sat down once more in the reading nook and said in the voice of an ever-stoic royal, “Well, now. What happens next after this sort of beastly unpleasantness?”
They looked at each other reflexively, before turning back to me.
“He had a suitcase, right?” Felicia said in a tone that was professorial—the Socratic method at work.
“Overnight bag. Leather. Gorgeous. Italian.”
“We’ll need that. And you’ll need to give us anything he unpacked.”
“His razor. It’s stunning—for a razor. Silver. His toothbrush? It’s…a toothbrush.”
“We’ll take that, too.”
“And then?”
“We continue to work the scene and talk to people who knew him. He seems to have had a wide circle. We await the autopsy and the toxicology report. By now someone has informed the next of kin.”
“And who would that be? He once mentioned to me a younger sister.”
“You have a name?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Can you give us that number for Britt Collins?”
“Yes, of course,” I told them. “I’ll go find it.”
“One more thing.”
I waited.
“Your next show is Tuesday, correct?”
“Yes.”
