There was a long pause. I waited. The only thing I was holding back on was that final call from “Dylan” to Elspeth—and I’d promised her I wouldn’t come forward with that…for now.
“Seriously, Lee,” I said finally. “What do you mean?”
Lee chuckled. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I was just trying to fake you out.”
“Good one,” I said—which beat the hell out ofWhew.
“I try,” he said.
“It’s actually kind of ironic,” I said. “Because the reason why I called is sort of the opposite of holding back.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve gathered a lot of information within the past few hours. And if you have time, I’m just going to lay it all out, and you and your team can use it however you want.”
“I have time,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Here goes…”
I was about ten blocks away from my loft, but the streets were congested to the point where the rest of the trip home would last at least fifteen minutes. And so I took up a goodpercentage of that time telling Lee everything I’d learned—starting with Sky’s surprising skill at deep-fake audio recordings, and the fact that close to ten years ago, she’d made one of Dylan’s voice that was accurate enough to fool his own father. From there, I moved on to Sky’s much-lauded acting talent when she was at Harvard, and Teresa’s recollection of her being able to “burst into tears at the drop of a hat,” making her sudden “recollection” of Dylan shooting her more suspect—to me, anyway—than it had been at the time.
I spoke then about the “highly addictive” alkaloid substance that Lee already knew about—placed into a baggie and sewn into the lining of Trevor Weiss’s jacket. The doomed Trevor Weiss, who was recruited by Sky to work on Gonzo’s new formula and had seemed unusually “intense” in recent weeks, according to his supervisor, spending a lot more time than usual on the phone. At least one of those calls may very well have been to Dylan, whose mother had overheard him say,What’s the point if there’s no buzz?
“Can you guess what the point was?” I said it to Lee as though I were a grade-school teacher.
And Lee answered like the conscientious young honors student that he’d undoubtedly been. “They put the alkaloid blend in the new Gonzo formula without listing it in the ingredients—even though it’s technically as legal as those crazy mushroom tinctures they advertise online as ‘immunity boosters.’ The alkaloid gets customers hooked. Sales go up. Everybody’s happy.”
“Except Trevor, who felt guilty and contacted the one higher-up he knew of who had no idea what the hell was going on.”
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You don’t think Dylan Welch is responsible for either of the shootings.”
“No.”
“You think Sky pieced together fake audio messages with Dylan’s voice and convincingly scared Elspeth into getting Dylan’s gun for her, as well as deleting files. Stuff like that.”
“I think that was one of three things she accomplished,” I said.
“What were two and three?”
“Well, she also made sure that Elspeth kept quiet about anything Trevor might have told her—which is why I think she targeted her in the first place.”
“Because Elspeth went out with Trevor a few times.”
“Yep,” I said. “And the third thing this plan did was, if Elspeth were to get fed up and go to the police, she’d give them the audio messages as evidence that Dylan killed Trevor—which, in my opinion, would be much more convincing than some stupid watch.”
“Interesting,” Lee said.
“Isn’t it?”
“There’s only one problem,” he said. “Somebody shot Sky. She didn’t do it herself. Not from that distance or that angle. If it wasn’t Dylan who shot her, who was it?”
I winced. “Shit,” I said, immediately thinking of Elspeth—the panic attack that sent her to the emergency room, those lastinstructions from “Dylan”—which were issued not via audio message, but on an unrecorded phone call. Did Sky finally come clean with Elspeth…only to threaten her even more severely into shooting her in a nonlethal spot?
If Sky trusted Elspeth enough to believe she could do that, she’s crazier than I thought.Luckier, too.
“We never tested Elspeth for gunpowder residue,” Lee said. It was as though he’d been reading my mind.
“Jesus,” I said. “The poor kid.”
