I came across some screenshots taken from Instagram, all of scantily clad influencers in suggestive poses. I didn’t want to think about why he’d saved these.
Amid all this brain bleach−worthy material, though, was a shot of Sky and Dylan and a few of their coworkers holding up Gonzo cans in the middle of the Common. The picture stood out for its wholesomeness, everyone in it happy and healthy and wearing plenty of clothes. I took out my own phone and snapped a picture of it. The influencer shots, too. Maybe he actually knew some of them. The other images I had no need for. (And I was willing to wager that the women he sent them to felt the same.)
Once I was done, I filled up my tank, charged my phone, and got back on the road.
Instead of thinking about anything complicated, I focused on Siri’s directions.
It was quite soothing—just stopping at red lights and making all the necessary turns to get to Soldiers Field Road, without letting my mind wander into more complicated places, such as my future, whether or not I was willing to give up the work I loved for the man I loved, or even how Trevor the Chemist had wound up dead when he had plans to meet Dylan Welch.
Traffic eased up once I got closer to the waterfront. After about ten more minutes, I reached a desolate stretch of industrial buildings—warehouses and manufacturing plants. In five years or less, they’d all be gutted and renovated into high-endcondos. But for now, it was exactly the type of area where you’d expect to find a dead drug dealer.
I stared at the bleak road, my hands on the wheel with nothing on my mind, as though the car and I had morphed into one. I heard Blake’s voice in my head.Morphedis a sick word…And I realized that I should have told Blake to get a Christmas tree for the office. He’d been bugging me about that for weeks—Blake loved Christmas almost as much as he loved Rosie. But I’d been putting him off, refusing to believe that Christmas would be here soon, and then New Year’s, another year behind me, and what would the coming year bring? Changes? Mistakes? Missed chances? Wrong turns?
There I go again…
“You’ve reached your destination,” Siri said, bringing me back to reality.
I looked at where I was—the cop cars teeming outside, lights flashing. I’d expected a vacant lot, a dark alley, a secluded garage—the type of place where Trevor the Chemist would secretly meet up with a wealthy scumbag like Dylan Welch.
But that wasn’t the case at all. The address Lee had given me was a working factory. Save for the cop cars, the parking lot was mostly empty—but that was because, as Sky had told me, it was closed for the month. I noticed the lit-up logo. The familiar red letters:Gonzo Manufacturing. Weird place to meet a drug dealer.
Seventeen
Trevor “The Chemist” Weiss was not a drug dealer. He was an actual chemist, who, until this afternoon, had worked in product development—i.e., the lab—at Gonzo’s manufacturing plant. According to Lee Farrell, who, at this point, had only Trevor’s phone, a lanyard taken from his desk drawer, and the driver’s license found in his pocket to go on, Trevor Weiss was even younger than Dylan and Sky. A kid, really. And so, as I stood next to Lee in the basement level of the Gonzo factory, gazing down at Trevor’s lifeless body, which lay between two enormous mixing tanks, blood pooling beneath, I was moved by the cruelty of it all, the waste of a life that had barely begun. He’d been shot through the heart at close range. According to one of the techs from the medical examiner’s office—a woman named Giselle who was now bagging Trevor’s hands—he’dprobably died instantly. No pain. Most likely, he hadn’t even been afforded enough time to be surprised.
This was not a place where anyone would expect to find Trevor Weiss, dead or alive. He worked in the testing labs, which were three floors up from where we were now. And besides that, as Sky had told me earlier today, the factory was closed for the month of December. Had Trevor Weiss really come down here to meet Dylan—and if so, why? I said all that to Lee, but it was more intended for myself. Thinking out loud, as it were.
“I’m not sure on the why,” Lee said. “But an empty factory is as good a place to meet as any if you need privacy. Plus, Dylan Welch and Trevor Weiss presumably had access to the key codes, so they could get in without setting off alarms.”
“True…”
I thought about my own run-in with Dylan six months earlier—how wasted he’d been at the time, sweating, shaking. Off-the-rails paranoid to the point of delusion. I remembered how he’d held a gun on me. And how, though I’d been relatively certain he didn’t know how to shoot it, I’d been equally sure that he was willing to try.
“It’s a good, quiet place to kill somebody, if that’s what you’re looking to do,” Lee said.
“Yes,” I said noncommittally.
Lee was looking at me in a way I didn’t like—as though there was something important I wasn’t telling him, which was, in fact, true. But Lydia Welch had specifically said she didn’t want the police involved. And though it appeared thatshe’d soon have no choice in the matter, I owed it to my employer to let her know about Trevor Weiss’s death before Lee learned (which he would, with or without my firsthand information) that Dylan Welch definitely had access to a gun.
“Dylan has been missing for two weeks,” I tried. “Wherever he is, he doesn’t have his phone on him. I find it hard to believe he’d rematerialize just to meet some random lab tech from his own company…”
“And kill him,” Lee said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Unless that lab tech had something on him,” Lee said. “Something that might have scared him into disappearing for two weeks.”
I swallowed hard. Lee was making a little too much sense. “Who found the body?”
Lee gestured at a middle-aged man standing about twenty feet away from us, talking to two uniforms. “He didn’t know either one of them,” Lee said.
“Who is he?”
“Ted Blankenship. Works on the assembly line,” Lee said. “Apparently, he’d been down with the flu since December first, and so he wasn’t able to clear out his locker for the month. He felt better today, and showed up at around six to get his stuff. He saw the blood first. Thought it was leakage from one of the tanks, so he went to investigate. That’s when he came across the body.”
“Allegedly,” I said.
“Allegedly,” he said.
