AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We could. But we can’t find a Britt Collins who’s a writer. At least not yet.”
“I gave you her number.”
“It didn’t work. Maybe she wrote it down wrong. Confused a few digits.”
“Well, I wasn’t talking to a hologram. I’m sure there are cameras near the Cocoon.”
“We’ll check. But you are definitely on the Red Rocks cameras. Both at the visitors’ center and on the cam that grabs the sunsets. It’s a photo shoot of some sort.”
I returned to them and sat down.
“I showed you our texts. Why would we have been texting if we were together?”
“Nothing about them said you weren’t there together. Maybe you were fifty yards apart. Maybe five hundred.”
I considered showing them to the detective once again, but I realized that was how people dig their own graves.
“There’s you and a photographer,” she continued. “A guy with blond hair who seems to be about your age. You’re doing what looks like a Diana publicity shoot.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?”
There it was. The question. It appalled me to think that only recently I had been worried about Betsy’s safety. I’d even fretted that she was in trouble.
“That was my sister,” I said. “Her name is Betsy Dowling.”
“And your car? You lent it to her?”
“No. I did not.”
“Then how did she get it?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m sure you’re on the casino cameras here retrieving it,” said Felicia.
“I assure you, that will be her, too. Dressed to look like me. Or Diana. And using the key that should have been in my purse.” I gave them her phone number and address and suggested they talk to her. “I considered calling you about her last night. After you left.”
“About Betsy?”
“Yes. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but I think the company she works for—Futurium—may be responsible for Yevgeny’s death. I think they may even have been responsible for the Morleys’ deaths. After all, they’re trying to buy this place.”
“The Morleys were suicides.”
“They weren’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I saw Artie just before he was killed. He told me Richie was murdered—that Richie didn’t kill himself. And Artie wasn’t depressed. He…” I stopped midsentence. I was telling two detectives who already thought I had something to do with the death of Yevgeny Orlov a different story from what I’d told their associates after Artie Morley had died. I thought of how Eddie Cantone and Artie had asked me to lure a U.S. congresswoman to my dressing room so “friends” of theirs could threaten her. Tell her, as Artie had put it, to order her people to back off the BP.
I needed a lawyer.
I needed to talk to Eddie Cantone.
“Go on,” said Felicia.
I sighed, exasperated with myself. “He didn’t seem at all of the frame of mind of someone who would kill himself.”
