“What’s that?” Lock asked.
I ignored him and lifted the card to get a better look at the envelope. “No postal mark.”
Lock took the card from me and studied it while I opened the second letter. This one was postmarked Camden High Street, which was just north of the park. The minute I ripped down the side, the smell got my attention. The thing reeked like some kind of chemical—like the glue Freddie used to put together his models. The smell only got worse when I slid the paper out and unfolded it.
Like a clichéd scene from an ancient crime show, this letter was a message made up of cutout letters that had been pasted on the page like a collage:
ADMIT YOUR CRIMES OR A WITNESS WILL COME FORWARD.
If I was meant to feel afraid or intimidated, it was a colossal failure, because I almost instantly started to laugh. “Honestly. What kind of dramatics are these?”
Lock sat up and pulled the letter from my hands. He grinned at first. “Clever.” But his amusement quickly faded. He just kept looking back and forth between the drawing and the collage, painting them both with his gaze like I’d seen him do at a crime scene once.
“It could still be my father. He does love to cause a scene.”
Lock shook his head and held out the collage. “A woman did this one.”
“A woman?”
He looked between the items once more. “Both might have been done by a woman, but not the same woman.”
I grabbed the message back from him, sure that I’d see that he was just guessing. But he wasn’t. Not this time. He’d seen what I didn’t even look for—where the letters had come from.
“Cosmopolitan,” I said, like we were playing a game of “Tell Me When You See It.”
Lock smiled, because I’d found the first clue. “Glamour,” he added.
Take a Break magazine, ELLE—every letter had been taken from a magazine’s title page. The word “witness” was a blaring clue all on its own. The letters all seemed to come from Women’s Fitness magazine, like she’d just taken the bright pink F off and replaced it with the gray W from “Women’s.”
Lock was staring at me when I looked up.
“It could still be from him. He could have asked someone else to do it,” I said.
He shook his head. “She has to be in her forties at least. She probably has a son.”
“The model glue.”
Lock looked pleased at first, possibly that he didn’t have to explain to me all that he’d found, but then he frowned and looked at the drawing. “I think we should be very careful from now on.”
“Of a woman in her forties who owns a stack of cut-up magazines?”
“Of two women,” he corrected. “And possibly this man, who witnessed your crime. And of a fourth unknown figure who dropped a rotting body part in your bin. We don’t know what any of them want. Not really.”
Four people playing games with my life, according to Sherlock, but he had failed to mention the fifth. My father. And I knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted me dead.
Chapter 7
I’d been to the West End Central Station a few times—enough to know that guests weren’t often allowed to bypass the front desk when they visited. So when Detective Day sneaked us in on the level of the holding cells, I had to wonder if maybe mine wasn’t an approved visit. It was fitting, though, to start my first meet up with my father in a hallway filled with holding-cell doors on both sides, the rustling footsteps, groans, and snores of strangers echoing out at me.
Day was quiet as we walked, though that wasn’t the blessing it should have been, as it only gave me too much time to ponder things, like what I was even doing there? To show my father I wasn’t afraid of him? I wasn’t. Not really. I was afraid of me—afraid I’d launch myself at him and make an ass out of myself, that he’d somehow take the upper hand while we spoke, that I’d give him what he wanted and get nothing back, leaving him to return to his cell with a self-satisfied smile that I’d be unable to scratch from his face.
I’d arranged the meeting to make him tell me what he was planning, but the closer I got to the room where Day had stowed my father, the more my confidence waned. I knew he wanted me out of the way so he could get out and reclaim my brothers as his sons. But did I really expect he would tell me how he planned to accomplish that? It was more likely he would leave me to guess. And if I guessed wrong, if I planned wrong, then we would all be in danger. Somehow, I had to get him talking, get him angry and make him tell me something.
And I always could get him angry.