Darker Than Any Shadow

Chapter Nine

“Okay, so here’s Lex in the center.” I wrote his name and drew a big circle around it. “And we’ll put Rico here.” I drew a satellite circle and connected then with a line.

“This isn’t a flow chart. It’s a bubble map.”

“Whatever. What do I do next?”

“Next you illustrate the other connections.” Trey wrote his name down, circled it, then drew a line from himself to Rico, and two lines from himself to Lex.

“But you didn’t know Lex.”

“I spoke with him in the parking lot, so that’s one connection. Plus I secured the scene after you told me he was dead.” He tapped the paper. “That’s two.”

“But he was dead! That’s not a connection.”

“Of course it is. And if I’d had motive to kill him, that connection would become significant because it would have allowed me to alter the scene.”

“But you didn’t alter the scene!”

“That doesn’t matter. I was there. It’s a connection.”

I knew he was right. Means, motive, and opportunity—the unholy trinity of murder.

“So I have to track not only the how and the why, but the when and where as well? For everybody who had a connection, even myself?”

“Yes, but you’ll need more than a bubble map.”

He got out of bed and went to his desk in the living room. When he returned, he had several sheets of graph paper. He climbed back into bed, and I watched him sketch out a rectangle divided into squares and other rectangles.

“This is the main seating area,” he said. He counted squares and then drew in another rectangle. “And this is the podium with the mike stand and the speakers. The equipment was behind here.”

He sketched in the DJ station. I pointed. “And here’s the door to the back.”

“No, it’s here.” He darkened a stripe. “Twenty feet from the wall.”

“How do you know that?”

“I paced it off when we first arrived. In case of an emergency.”

“So you really were expecting trouble?”

“No. I always do this in a new environment.”

I watched him finish shading in the diagram, remembering each area as it formed on the paper. I could see the space now in my mind’s eye, and the people inhabiting it. I could hear the laughter, the din of people talking too loudly, the clink of glasses and ice. I could smell the mingled perfumes and fried shrimp and floor wax.

And I remembered the bathroom. So I went back to the yellow pad and wrote “secured crime scene” across the second bubble, then drew in a third bubble and a fourth, one with my name and one with Jackson’s.

“We both found the body. Either of us had the opportunity to alter the scene. Not that I did, mind you…well, except for dragging Lex into the hall. So those connections go down too, right?”

Trey nodded, satisfied, but his focus was weakening. I could see it in his eyes, which dulled to a gunmetal blue when he was tired. They were past that stage, as gray and flat as an overcast sky.

I rubbed his shoulder. “You need to sleep.”

“Not yet. You need to draw another map with Rico in the center.”

“But he’s not the victim.”

“He’s the hub of your personal involvement, not Lex. See?”

Trey flipped to a clean sheet and drew lines from all of the other characters to a central bubble for Rico. A new pattern emerged. Suddenly all the people I’d only been looking at as potential murderers sorted themselves into new contexts.

“So Rico’s the key?”

“No, he’s one part of the solution, not a solution by himself. But this maps your perspective. It’s your reason for looking, which alters how you see things. You have to be aware of that and be able to shift that information into a new matrix.”

He tapped the other diagrams. Suddenly, his approach was making sense, in the same way that quantum physics made sense—only if I didn’t try to understand it rationally. I examined the various pieces of paper, trying to see the patterns, but it was too much information spread out in too many places.

I laid the diagrams in a row. “So is there a way to combine these charts?”

Trey didn’t reply. He was leaning back against the headboard, eyes closed. I lay a hand on his arm, and his eyes flew open.

I pushed his shoulder. “Go to sleep. I mean it.”

He rolled over without protest. In two minutes, his breathing deepened, and he was fast asleep. I tucked the notepads under my arm and slipped out of bed, catching a glimpse of his dark head against the ivory pillowcase. If I ever forgot how vulnerable he really was, if he seemed bulletproof and ten feet tall, all I had to do was watch him sleep, and I remembered.

I turned off the light and shut the bedroom door behind me. The condo’s living room was never completely dark—the lights from Downtown and Midtown sparkled in the distance, somewhat dulled by the late summer haze, but bright enough to reflect a burnished glow through the picture window. I rummaged in my tote bag for my new computer, a flat tablet only slightly larger than a paperback novel, and settled in on the sofa.

I pulled up Google and typed Lex Anderson in the search box. There were a zillion hits, most of them social networking sites—Twitter, MySpace, Facebook—but the first link was the goldmine. Lex Anderson’s very own website.

One hour and a dozen websites later, I had before me one very shiny and totally superficial person. I had tons of info about the music he listened to, the designers he favored, and his appearance schedule. I had seven YouTube performances and a slew of colorful graphics and photos, every single one of them professional, polished, and totally connected to the stage. But not one of the hits was from his high school reunion, or his workplace, or casual shots on his friends’ pages.

In short, there wasn’t a real thing about him. And yet he was real, flesh and blood and dead-on-the-floor real. I remembered speaking with him in the hallway—his attitude, his bravado, his presence. I surveyed the accumulated data, like myriad slivers of light in a prism.

“Who were you, Lex Anderson?”

No answer presented itself. So I gathered my materials and piled them into my tote bag, turning off the light behind me as I padded barefoot onto the terrace. The night held no sway over the heat, which still pressed the city under its weight like a leaden glove. Below me, hundreds of serpentine headlights drizzled down Peachtree. This I could see from thirty-five stories up, even if I couldn’t make out the individual faces of the people weaving their drunken way from bar to bar.

First, second, and third degree connections. Rico connected to Lex, I connected to Lex (barely), Trey connected to Lex (even more barely). And the rest of them, how did they connect to Lex, and to each other? I knew some of the stories, but they were sketchy, and all the more tantalizing for their gossamer insubstantiality.

I checked my watch and cursed quietly. Still nothing from Rico. He’d be paying for that come morning.

I knew I needed to get to sleep. Unlike Trey, I didn’t have an appointment with the pavement, but I did have a client to meet at the gun shop. I tiptoed into the bedroom. Trey was in deep slumber, his breathing slow and steady. I envied him that, that he could chart things and then fall asleep instantly.

When I crawled in beside him, he moved to accommodate me, not waking. He was warm, the sheets as soft as an old handkerchief. I stretched myself against him, my very own private mystery wrapped in an enigma and tied pretty with a riddle.

My familiar stranger. My boyfriend.

Interesting, he’d said. Yes, indeed.