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“So what’s his play?” Mac asked.
“I think he’s hoping Theo will crack under the pressure and confess.”
Theo exhaled. “Well, that’s just…lazy.”
Mac laughed. “And what now?”
“We carry on,” Gus said. “I presume the media will discover Mac’s place quite soon.”
“Yes, I think you’re just going to have to accept the attention of the media until they find out what really happened.” Jacqui shook her head. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to hide. The police might be willing to—”
“We’ll hire security,” Mac said curtly. “Let’s not be beholden to Mendes.”
Gus agreed, but he refused to return to Mac’s house himself. “I’m going to be pretty much living at the office for the next few weeks anyway.” He glanced at Jacqui. “I’m in more danger from Hayes than anyone else.”
Theo didn’t try to argue with him. Hopefully the media wouldn’t bother waiting if Gus was rarely there.
“What are we going to do?” she said.
“I thought we just decided that.”
“No…I mean about finding out who really killed Dan, and Burt Winslow, and now Mary Cowell.” Theo looked around at each of them. For a moment, Veronica’s advice that she not appear too interested in the investigation returned, but she continued regardless. After today her name would probably be too tainted for Day Delos and Associates anyway. “We can’t just wait for the police—they’re not looking for anyone else, and frankly I’m a little fed up with this nightmare.”
“Hear, hear!” Gus applauded against the table. “What do we know already?”
“Mary Cowell’s throat was cut in much the same way that Dan Murdoch’s was,” Mac said. “She died on the back porch of Benders. Her body was placed on a bench and covered with an old blanket. The poor woman who found her mistook her for one of the homeless until she tried to move her on. Apparently they do sleep there sometimes, although the heaters are turned off at two in the morning, and the police believe she came in sometime after that.”
“How do we know all that?” Theo asked.
“Mac did some digging around while they were questioning you,” Gus replied.
Theo nodded. She should have known. Mac had probably hacked the police database or something. “What was Mary doing at Benders after two in the morning?”
“My guess is that she was meeting someone,” Mac replied.
“How would they have gotten in?” Gus asked.
“The back porch of Benders is not all that secure,” Theo said. “Laura sometimes leaves the door open when it’s cold…in case someone needs somewhere out of the wind to sleep.”
“Mary wasn’t from Lawrence. She wouldn’t have known that,” Mac said.
“So whoever she was meeting did.” Jacqui wrote herself a note. “We’re going to have to look closely at Benders’s regulars.”
“I can do that,” Theo said.
“What?” Gus stared at her. “Theo, you can’t—”
“The people at Benders know me; they’ll talk to me,” Theo said earnestly. “And, unlike the three of you, I don’t have a job.”
Gus was adamantly against the idea. “Downtown is crawling with Dan Murdoch’s deranged fans, who all seem to think you killed him—”
“That’s interesting, isn’t it?” Mac interrupted.
“Interesting?”
“Yes…why are they so convinced Theo is a murderer?”
“Mary Cowell’s article.”
