Lock adjusted his hand to lace his fingers through mine, but he didn’t say anything.
“Do you understand what I would give up for them?”
He didn’t answer again. I didn’t need him to. All I needed was for him to come with me. To focus with that beautiful brain of his and see what I couldn’t see. It took him a few beats, but his expression finally shifted from worry to determination. “To find the black van, then?”
“No.” I held up my mobile, which was already running the app Jason Kim had loaded onto my phone. “We’re going to follow this.” I took Sherlock’s hand in mine. “And whoever’s at the other end of this burner phone is going to wish they’d never heard my name.”
Chapter 21
Sherlock and I got off the bus at Regent’s Park and wandered through the closest entrance. We followed paths I’d never seen before, trying to get my little red dot closer to the blue dot that was supposed to be the burner phone. But the blue dot didn’t stay still, and the app didn’t work well on the unmapped expanse of park. Sometimes the dot would disappear altogether only to reappear in a place far from where it had been. I was so turned around by the time the dots were almost on top of each other that I didn’t realize where we were until I heard overly boisterous laughter followed by a voice I recognized. “Cheers to that as well! Cheers to that bloody woman you married!”
It was Lily Patel, kneeling in the mud and facing the tree where her father’s body had been found. Behind her, the clearing was cluttered with the scattered remains of a mixed-flower bouquet and four crumpled, empty beer cans. She poured a bit of liquid onto the ground from the can she held, then drank deeply, not coming up for air until foam was escaping from the corners of her mouth.
“Cheers!” she cried again, crashing her beer can against the tree trunk so hard, it sprayed up a bit onto her head. She took turns laughing and coughing.
“Looks like I was right,” Lock said quietly.
I looked down at my phone, which showed the blue dot moving in weird stuttered circles around my dot despite the fact that we were both being relatively still. But it didn’t matter what the app said anyway, because if it was Lily, there was one way to find out for sure. I shoved my phone into my pocket and pushed through the brush toward Lily right as she lost balance and started to tip over in slow motion.
I caught her before she fell completely and righted her. “Okay, let’s be done with this, yes?” I pulled the beer from her hand, which was practically empty, but she grabbed it back with both hands and scowled at me.
“No! This is mine.”
Sherlock released a soft laugh, and I glared at him through the growing shadows of dusk. “A little help maybe?”
He managed to hold her up so I could focus on keeping the girl from drinking any more. “Can we share more of this with your dad?”
Lily smiled and let me tip her hand enough to pour what little remained onto the ground at her knees. She instantly smashed the can in her hand and tossed it over her head to join its brothers. Before I could stop her, she had the last unopened beer in her hands. Luckily, her depth perception was gone, and she couldn’t get her hand on the pull tab. She winked one eye shut and still couldn’t make her fingers land on the top of the can. Nor was she a patient drunk, it seemed. After three misses, she held the can out in front of her and whined. When I didn’t immediately take the can from her hand, she whined more loudly and bounced her whole body against Sherlock until I relented.
“Open,” she commanded.
“I’m pretty sure your dad’s had plenty. Maybe save this one for next time?”
Her face crumpled a bit. “There is no next time. Give it.” She lifted her arms and made grabby hands in the air. She even crawled toward me on her knees a couple of steps.
I knelt down next to her and tried not to wince away from the smell of alcohol on her breath when she whined pitifully. “Enough,” I said.
She shook her head for a good ten seconds before she said, “No, no. You don’t understand what she did. She took it, but it was mine.” Lily grabbed for the can, and when I held it too high for her to reach, she yelled, “I hate you! Just like her!”
At least the alcohol was making her honest for once. I shifted my body a little and slid the can behind my back out of her sight line. It felt familiar, this game, playing hide the booze from the angry drunk. “What did she do?” I asked, to distract her as I patted down her coat pockets. I shook my head at Lock. No phone.
“She took it all.” Lily’s expression dropped from anger to despondence in the time it took me to blink. “That was for me and Dad, but she took it and threw it away.”
“What did she throw away?” The phone wasn’t in the pockets of her trousers either.
Lily started to tip forward, and Lock caught her before she scraped her face on the bark of the tree. “Dad’s beer. She found where I’d stashed most of it.” Lily waved her hands around her head at the cans behind her. “Those are all that’s left.”