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Lopez smiled. “I do what I can. Let me get back to it and see what else I can find.”
Jo and Arnett quickly refilled their coffee on the way back to their desks.
“While you look over those transcripts, I’ll start looking at the alibis,” Arnett said as he veered off into his chair.
“Perfect.” Jo grabbed a handful of highlighters in a variety of colors, then dove into the text transcripts. Starting with Naomie’s exchanges with Julia, she highlighted as she went along, yellow for Naomie, pink for Julia. She moved chronologically, through exchanges about Julia’s divorce, a variety of issues involving Triple-B, and then, shock about Madison’s murder and navigation of details for the memorial. Jo read through them a second time, paying close attention to the content, searching for something that matched the concern lurking in the back of her brain. When she found nothing she started again, this time focusing on voice rather than content—howthey phrased their texts. Julia’s texts were shorter and more direct, edged with sarcasm, while Naomie’s were more casual, with a friendlier tone.
But whatever it was her brain was trying to tell her, nothing in the texts brought it forward.
“This isn’t looking helpful so far,” Arnett said. “Brad, Kiernan, Chelsea, and Sandra are all in the same position—they didn’t really have alibis for the afternoon or evening of Naomie’s death, regardless. It may make a difference for Rhea, but that’s hard to say.”
“Keep the faith,” Jo said. “There’s no reason to send a fake text unless you’re setting up a fake alibi.”
“Yep,” Arnett grunted.
Jo turned to Naomie’s exchanges with Rhea. A few were friendly and personal, but most were about administrative details for Triple-B. Nothing in the content spoke to her, and Rhea’s texting style fell somewhere in between Naomie’s and Julia’s. Next she went over the conversations with Chelsea, which focused far more on pregnancy, shopping, and gossip. Chelsea’s texts leaned toward slang, laced profusely with LMKs and AFs, acronyms anywhere she could use them. Naomie rarely used any shortcuts, preferring complete sentences.
Pushing down her growing frustration, Jo flipped over the final page of Chelsea’s texts. Next up were Naomie’s conversations with Chris, the thickest section of the printout. She dove in, gulping coffee as she read through the predictably domestic texts. Messages navigating errands, meal choices, timings of events, all typical of a marriage long out of the newlywed phase—affectionate despite small spats here and there. She smiled at a series of texts that turned snipey about the money Naomie was spending—they could be word-for-word exchanges between Sophie and David.
Halfway through her second reading, what had been nagging at her brain hit her full force. Naomie’s voice didn’t match the text sent from the park—in very specific ways.
She flipped back and stared at the text sent from inside the park:Had a stressful day, can’t seem to shake it. Gonna go for a walk to re-center. Shepherd’s pie needs an hour in the oven, pull it out if I’m not back.
Naomie normally spoke in full thoughts, as though typing out a business letter. But this text dropped out subjects, saying ‘had a stressful day’ rather than ‘Ihad a stressful day.’ And, ‘gonna go’ rather than ‘going to go.’
Jo flipped through the pages again, checking every yellow-highlighted utterance. Not one of them dropped the subject, nor did she ever use the contraction ‘gonna.’
But everywhere she looked, Chris did.
* * *
“Chris,” Jo and Arnett blurted out simultaneously.
Jo’s head snapped around to Arnett. “Did you just say ‘Chris?’”
“I did.” He pointed down at his notes. “Chris has an alibi for the time after six, but no alibi for the time just before that. He claims he was out on an insurance call, but he could have finished that with plenty of time left over. He could have gone home, talked Naomie into a walk—which would explain why she was willing to go out for one when her friend had just been murdered walking alone—then hurried back to work after killing her. Why did you say his name?”
Jo showed him the texts and explained what she’d discovered. “The text is in Chris’s voice, not Naomie’s.”
Arnett nodded. “The problem is, he has no motive to kill her.”
“Do we know that? We never bothered to find out what the state of their marriage was like. And there’s evidence right here that Chris wasn’t happy about the money Naomie spent. They remind me in tone of Sophie and David’s, which at first I thought was cute, but the more I think about it frankly isn’t the best indicator of relationship health.”
“Fine, maybe, but what about Madison and Helen?”
Jo squeezed her eyes shut and her hands flew to her temples. Arnett was right—he barely knew Madison, and he didn’t know Helen at all.
Or did he?
“Hang on. We’ve said that Triple-B is the connective tissue here. Chris is a part of that. He spent time there, and he knew the people there. He could have run into Helen there, and we know Madison and Chelsea visited Naomie’s house.”
“Sure, but what possible motive could he have to kill them?”
His words caused Julia’s to echo in her head:Why would I kill Helen?
Jo had answered with a Hail-Mary pass thrown out by her subconscious—that maybe Helen had been a decoy, to deflect attention and confuse the police. “What if both Helen and Madison were decoys? What if Naomie really was the intended victim all along, and he just bookended her murder with two others to make it look like a serial killer was at work, one obsessed with Lucifer Lost, to make sure we paid attention and the public got riled up? You even said on the scene it felt like some sort of three-part ritual the killer had to see through for some reason.”
“But Chelsea saw the strange man outside the juice bar, in the dark sedan. Chris drives a white Chevy SUV,” Arnett said.
