Page 12 of Not a Word

I don’t like to ask you’ve been so generous already. Don’t think I’m not grateful

The most recent exchange had been earlier that day.

I need to c u

Maybe tomorrow

Today. Feeling pretty down

OK. C at arts lunch, gone till afternoon

McCabe had a hunch. She got out her own phone, entered the number of the person Leah Kennard had been texting with, tapped on it and waited.

She heard a low-level buzzing sound. It wasn’t coming from the phone on the bedside table, but from somewhere else in the room. McCabe let it keep ringing until she found a phone in a pair of slacks tossed onto the floor on the man’s side of the bed.

She declined the call.

So Brent had a second phone. Didn’t want his spouse picking up his regular phone and reading texts with his mistress.

Speaking of the wife.

Now that it appeared certain Catherine Chartwell was not the deceased, McCabe very much wanted to find her. If those two numbnuts hadn’t allowed Reece to leave the scene, she could have asked him, once she’d told him his mother was not the woman in that bed, where to find her.

So, McCabe thought, almost smiling to herself. Now we’ve got ourselves a potboiler. A cheating husband. A mistress. A betrayed spouse. Maybe, for all McCabe new, a cuckolded husband.

There was a word you didn’t hear every day.

It didn’t have to mean that this still wasn’t a slam dunk, but it did prompt McCabe to think of one of her favorite, and most apt in her line of work, clichés:

The plot thickens.

Five

Diana popped her head into the office of her department head, a woman named Sheila. She could see from Diana’s expression that she was in some distress.

“Family emergency,” Diana said. “I’m gone.”

“What’s happened?” Sheila asked. “Is there anything I can—”

Diana kept on walking. She hurriedly crossed the municipal building’s parking lot, phone in hand, bringing up Gage’s number on her cell. Once in her car, she tapped it and let it ring five times before it went to voicemail. She ended the call without leaving one and then entered his number again. If he was ignoring her, repeatedly calling would send the message to pick up.

Four rings into the second call, he answered.

“Yeah?”

“You home?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

What the hell did that mean? Diana wondered. You were either home or you weren’t.

“So you’re almost home?”

“Kind of heading that way.” She thought she could hear the wheels of his skateboard rolling along asphalt. How did he do that? Talk on a phone and whiz along on that thing at the same time? As dangerous as she considered his skateboard to be, at least he hadn’t yet saved up enough money to buy one of those one-wheel gadgets, a self-balancing electric skateboard with a single wheel that he’d been eyeing online.

“Got something else to do first.”

“Do it later. Where are you? I’ll pick you up.”