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“And you know what that frame of mind is?”
“Yes. My stepfather killed himself.”
The officers looked at each other.
“I am so sorry,” said Patrick.
“I was eleven. Old enough to understand how morose he’d become,” I told them. “And Artie wasn’t like that.”
“We’re not working the Morleys. But I will tell the team that is that they should interview you.”
“They already have.”
“And you told them what you told us?”
“No,” I replied. “Not exactly. I was…I was in shock.”
They believed not a word, I could tell. But Felicia said simply, “I’ll tell them to talk to you. Again.”
“Okay,” I said. But it wasn’t okay. I wasn’t okay.
“And, you think Futurium may have been responsible for Mr. Orlov’s death?” Felicia asked, trying to get us back on track.
“I think it’s possible, yes.”
“Was he meeting someone from Futurium? If so, why?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t even know if he was.” Nevertheless, I told them what I knew about the crypto firm and Frankie Limback and Cleo Dionne’s murder or suicide or accidental drowning in a Grand Cayman bathtub, and Patrick was writing it all down, and while a small fragment of me felt horrible for the grief I was raining down upon Betsy and, thus, Marisa, this madness had to stop.
When I was finished, they said to me what I had expected they would tell me the night before, but they hadn’t: I shouldn’t leave town.
In Betsy’s opinion, I still needed a babysitter.
Seriously? One minute I was explaining to her how a blockchain worked or how to crack a password, and the next I was being sent to Ayobami’s to do my homework.
Which, just so you know, never took more than, like, eleven minutes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Betsy
On Sunday night, the sunset broken into cathedral-like columns of cascading light by clouds that would bestow not a drop of water onto the sand on which this surreal city was built, Betsy asked her friend, Ayobami, the blackjack dealer at the Luxor, to keep an eye on Marisa. Betsy had knocked on the woman’s door after getting off the phone with her sister. Then she drove like a madwoman out to Frankie’s house. Marisa wasn’t pleased that her new mother refused to leave her home alone, but Betsy didn’t know how long she’d be gone.
She also wasn’t sure what she would say to Frankie, but she decided she had to talk to him face-to-face, not over the phone. She was going to make one thing clear: he’d pushed her too far, and she wasn’t going one step further. Someone was dead, and she hadn’t signed up for that.
* * *
When she’d texted Frankie that she was on her way over, she’d gotten the impression he was alone.
But when she arrived, she saw two other cars in the driveway, and knew one belonged to Rory O’Hara and was pretty sure the other was Damon Ioannidis’s. She looked at the texts she had sent Frankie and they seemed firm, not frantic. But she had written that she was heading out to his place because a friend of her sister’s was found dead at Red Rocks, and she could imagine Frankie calling in the cavalry to support whatever explanation—translation, bullshit—he was going to offer.
Sure enough, when Frankie opened the door, she saw the two other men seated on corner sections of the massive L-shaped leather couch that was backed by the flat fountain waterfall and faced the glass doors that exited out onto the deck and his swimming pool. She felt outnumbered and, yes, outgunned.
“I thought you were alone,” she said.
“Nah. When you’re building a business, sometimes you have twenty-four/seven work weeks.” He kissed her on the cheek, a dry little peck, and wrapped an arm around her waist and escorted her into the living room. She noticed two new paintings, desert wildflowers with tousled effusions of color that were crude imitations of Georgia O’Keeffe. There were no papers on the coffee table, no tablets or laptops—nothing to suggest a meeting. She saw there was a glass of red wine and what looked like a tumbler with Scotch before each of the men, but both had barely been touched. She wondered if, indeed, the pair had just arrived, perhaps pulling into the driveway only moments before her. Neither of them rose when she walked into the room, but they both offered a small wave.
“So, I’m interrupting?” she asked.
