Except for the view, I found it all pretty vomitrocious. And it hit me that, serious and brilliant as she clearly was, it most likelywasSky who had chosen Gonzo’s corporate office décor.
People are complicated. And they keep proving it again and again and again.
I moved from the living and dining room area into the bedroom, which was much easier on the eyes, if plastered in pastel. For Sky’s sake, I hoped she spent most of her time here, and when I saw the desk in the corner—which housed a computer that made the one in her office look antiquated—it was clear she did.
I noticed two framed pictures on the desk—one that looked to be taken in the nineties, of a pregnant woman in a sundress with a smile identical to Sky’s. Obviously, this was her late mother.
The other framed picture was the same Gonzo staff photo that I’d seen on Dylan’s phone. I picked it up and gave it a closer look. The happy group picnicking in the Common, toasting the camera with their then-brand-new product. Besides Skyand Dylan, I now recognized Elspeth, Kaitlyn and Henry from Marketing, Maurice Dupree, and even Martin Jennings, the dour CFO.
It was always interesting to me—which pictures people chose to go that extra mile for, framing and displaying them in their offices and homes. In Sky’s case, her most cherished images were of a mother she’d barely known, and her work friends. It was a little sad.
I gazed at Dylan. He looked so different in the staff pic. Healthy and happy, with Sky to his right, Elspeth to his left, all of them relaxed, Dylan’s blond curls gleaming in the sun. It made me think: Maybe it wasn’t these people that Sky cherished. Maybe it was the day—that long-ago springlike day in the Common, when Dylan appeared to be sober and everyone was in good spirits, Maurice’s arm around Sky, Sky’s arm around Dylan. A photo taken before Rhonda’s daughter had died, back when Gonzo was a brand-new start-up and no one could imagine a metal detector in the corporate offices or a young chemist found dead on the factory floor, when these disparate people shared the same silly dream and the only thing anyone was guilty of was being overly optimistic about that dream’s chances at becoming real.
I put the photo down. I was giving Sky’s life way too much thought. She wasn’t the one I was looking for, after all. It was Dylan. Where was Dylan? Would I be able to find him before he destroyed more lives?
Thirty-Six
I moved quickly to Sky’s dresser to gather her things, placing them in the duffel bag she said I’d find on her closet shelf. From a shoe rack in the same roomy and well-organized closet, I took the pair of Chucks she requested—the red ones she’d been wearing yesterday, when we met. Next, I grabbed her toiletry bag out of the primary bathroom.
As I was about to leave the bedroom, my phone dinged. It was a text from Lee.
Thanks for talking to Sky. We have her on tape now, identifying Welch as the shooter.
No problem, I responded.You hear back from the lab about that baggie Trevor Weiss was carrying?
His text arrived quickly, crossing paths with mine:Lab thinks the substance in the bag is a designer drug that contains a very powerful distilled alkaloid.
I replied:Like cocaine?
More like a much stronger nicotine, he wrote.Not much of a high. Whole point is that it’s highly addictive.
I typed:Why would Dylan want that?
Lee responded:Your guess is as good as mine.
I stared at my phone, thinking about, of all things, what Lydia had told me the other evening. When I was talking to her over my Bluetooth, just before I got into that high-speed chase with Moon’s baseball cap−wearing flunky, she told me about Dylan’s phone conversation with the “research scientist,” how skeptical she’d been about it—and how she’d overheard Dylan saying,What’s the point if there’s no buzz?
I had a thought. It was a compelling one that had come to me quickly, Lydia’s voice in my mind and that staff picture right in front of me, those raised cans of a then-harmless new product. Things were adding up a little too quickly.
Thx, I texted Lee.
I put down the duffel bag and moved over to Sky’s computer. I turned it on, thinking of Blake, his sudden love for Gonzo, how strange he’d been acting over the past few days, and of the awful crash once I forced him to quit cold turkey. Blake—who normally thought of sugary soda as poison—had downed an entire case…
The whole point is that it’s highly addictive.
I started to scan the desktop. I felt bad for doing this. Sky had been through so much already. Yet Rand Carlson, that fetus-faced lab supervisor, had said it himself:Mr. Welch isn’t the kind of person who likes seeing how the sausage gets made.
Sky was, though. Sky—the ultimate pleaser, who lived and breathed Gonzo to the point of turning her living room into an eyesore, just to match the cans—was more than willing to make the sausage herself. After seeing the company take a hit following the death of Rhonda’s daughter, Sky, Carlson told me, had asked for his “best and brightest” to come up with a new formula. Which brought us straight to the doomed Trevor Weiss, the baggie of this “highly addictive” substance sewn into his jacket.
According to Rand Carlson, Trevor Weiss had worked closely with Sky and other corporate people on that formula, this tiny brain trust, devoted to the same project for weeks, if not months. Who wouldn’t grow close in a situation like that? Yet one day after his tragic death, Sky—kind, empathetic Sky—had referred to Trevor as simply “that lab tech.”
I remembered the text on Dylan’s phone:WHERE R U?Somehow, on some device somewhere, the two of them had arranged a meeting. Maybe it wasn’t because Trevor was trying to extort money from Dylan or sell him drugs. Maybe he was trying to alert him as to what his COO had done to the formula—without knowing Dylan was in on it. And maybe that’s why Dylan had shot him, later bragging about it in that audio message to Elspeth.
Was Sky Dylan’s accomplice—or was it the other way around? And if that was the case, why had he tried to kill her?
I scanned Sky’s desktop. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for—research papers on the addictive effects of certain alkaloids when mixed with carbonated water and caffeine, maybe. Or a nondisclosure agreement regarding all scientific work on Gonzo’s new formula, made out to and signed by Trevor Weiss.
Of course, I had no such luck. There were no documents in sight. The screen was filled with audio and video files, which made sense, I supposed, for someone who had double-majored in data sciences.
