I thought about the girl at the sink, elbow-deep in champagne flutes, telling me she hadn't seen it. I thought about Marcus, very sure about the cup and very unsure about anything else. I thought about how a piece of silver flatware—barware, I mentally corrected myself, because apparently that distinction mattered to some people—didn't simply evaporate from a catering cart.
"So you’re saying somebody built something into that straw," I said slowly. "On purpose. Ahead of time. Not an accident, not a coincidence, not glass in a drink. Somebody made a weapon and dressed it up as a piece of Evelyn's fancy heirloom bar set, and then took it back out of the crime scene before anyone thought to look at it twice."
"That's the working theory," Hollis said.
“How charming,” Allison said faintly.
“Diabolical,” Vivienne said.
Reginald shook his head. "Bizarre. That takes skill." Reginald said quietly. "Mechanically. Whoever did this would need to understand metalwork. Small-scale engineering. You don't rig a spring mechanism inside a straw with a butter knife and a prayer."
"No," Hollis agreed. "You wouldn't."
“Bold assumption to think it would actually work,” Taylor said. “What would spring the mechanism?”
It was a valid question I had no answer to.
The silence that followed had a different texture than the one before Hollis had walked in. That first silence had been nerves. This one felt like the room recalibrating, four adults simultaneously doing the same math I'd just done and not loving where it landed.
"So we're looking for someone who can do metalwork," Allison said, a little too brightly, a little too fast, the tone of someone racing to say the obvious thing before anyone could look at her sideways for not saying it. "That's—I mean, that narrows it down, doesn't it?”
No one agreed or disagreed.
"I'm telling you what the evidence says,” Hollis said. “That's it. That's the whole purpose of this conversation. I’m not asking any of you to solve this crime. Just if you think of anything or know anything, let the police know."
Teddy chose that moment to emerge from under the table, having apparently given up on the begging strategy in favor of a more direct approach, and planted both front paws on Hollis's shoe.
"Not now, buddy," Hollis said, without looking down, though his hand found the top of Teddy's head anyway, a small, automatic gesture that undercut the whole detective posture he'd been holding for the last five minutes.
Teddy, satisfied, curled up on his foot instead and went still.
"What happens now?" Vivienne asked.
"Now we find out who had the skill to build it and the access to plant it," Hollis said. "That's a shorter list than 'everyone who disliked Evelyn Carrington,' which, from what I'm hearing, was most of the Garden District."
"That's not narrowing," I said. "That's a Venn diagram with two circles that are probably the same circle."
"Maybe," Hollis said. "Maybe not. Skill and access aren't the same thing as motive. Some people have all three. Some people have one and think that makes them look guilty when it doesn't." He looked around the table, not unkindly, more like a detective trying to see who flinched.
Nobody flinched.
"What about the straw itself," Allison said, still working her cardigan tighter around her shoulders despite the heat. "If somebody built something into it, wouldn't that take time? A workshop? Tools? That's not something you'd do the morning of the gala."
"No," Hollis said. "Which means whoever did it planned this well before Thursday. Possibly weeks."
"So we're not looking for a crime of passion," Vivienne said, and there was something almost clinical in the way she said it, the documentarian in her already sorting the facts into a shape she could use later. "We're looking for somebody who decided, calmly, in advance, exactly how they wanted this to happen."
"That's the read I've got," Hollis said.
Taylor set his mug down harder than he probably meant to. "That's so much worse than I was picturing. I was picturing, I don't know. Somebody grabbing whatever was nearby in a fit of rage. Not somebody sitting at a workbench for a month mad scientist style."
"Welcome to homicide," Hollis said, without much humor in it.
“What can we do to help?” Taylor asked.
"I want the straw back," Hollis said, straightening. "I want whoever moved it, and I want to know why. That's today's job. Yours is to eat your breakfast and stay out of catering carts."
"No promises," I said.
