Lock’s question came next. “Did they hurt you?”
I tried to catch his eyes with mine, but he was too busy looking around my arms and legs for nonexistent injury. Would he be labeled the coconspirator, I wondered, or the idiot who believed the girl he liked? Either way, he was stained. No more cases from school friends. No more avenues in with the police. This one act might strip him of the future he wanted and I’d so easily dismissed.
“She’s bleeding,” Lock reported. And while he leaned over the front passenger seat to retrieve a small white box from the glove compartment, I looked down and found that he was right. Someone must have scratched my arm. They left trails of claw marks, two of which were a line of blood drops getting ready to drip down.
“Does she need the hospital?” Mycroft asked.
“Just a scratch,” I reassured his reflection in the rearview mirror, though I caught myself shivering. My thoughts still weren’t coming together well. “But I do need to go to the hospital. Alice isn’t answering her phone.”
“Sorry it took us so long to come get you,” Lock said. “I thought Mycroft’s car would be better than a cab.”
“How did you know to come over at all?”
Lock held gauze across my scratches, which instantly started to sting. “I couldn’t sleep, so I kept checking out the window to see if your house lights came on. I first saw the body at 5:45. It wasn’t there at 5:15. It was Constance Ross, yes? The woman who’d given a statement against you?”
I nodded. I must have been shivering again, because he held my hand still without taping the gauze down for a few seconds. I looked up at his eyes, which were bloodshot and glassy. “You didn’t sleep.”
“I told you I wouldn’t.” He tilted his head a bit and lifted a brow—his way of asking if I was okay. I didn’t answer.
“I need to go to Alice. I don’t think her mobile’s on, and she needs to know what’s happened.”
“Alice knows,” Mycroft said. “I told her as soon as Sherlock called me.”
“And you can’t go to the hospital. The police will be waiting there for you.”
Really, it didn’t matter if they were there or not. All that mattered was getting Alice and my brothers out of town as soon as possible. I thought to plead my case with Mycroft, but he looked pensive as he turned down a side street to avoid the traffic ahead. And when he caught me watching him, he shook his head, as if he somehow already knew what I was about to say and had already decided against it. So, when he rolled to a stop at a light, I made my own decision.
“I’m out of here, then.” I grabbed for the door handle, but the locks engaged before I could open it.
“Just a minute,” Lock said, his eyes moving back and forth as he calculated something. “If I can just find the reason . . .”
“Unlock it,” I said to Mycroft, trying my best to be commanding. “Neither of you should be seen with me. It’ll only mean questions and rumors.” I pushed to unlock the door manually, but it locked again immediately.
Mycroft sounded playful when he ignored me and said, “Sherlock will put it together eventually.”
“Seriously. Let me out.”
“She knew something!” Lock cried. “Constance Ross knew something important.”
“Yes. She knew that I’d tossed the murder weapon.”
Sherlock waved his hand through the air, like he could bat away my words. “No. It had to be something more important than that. Something bigger. Her statement about you doesn’t matter, because the police already have the sword. They’ve already heard the accusation. There has to be something else she might say if she’s medicated. Something about the killer.”
“There he is,” Mycroft said. “And that means . . .”
“I’ve been an idiot!”
Mycroft smiled widely. “That’s true on more days than not, but I’ll listen.”
Lock’s eyes were calculating again, but they were brighter from his discovery. “You were right. This isn’t Lily Patel.”
The minute he said her name, some pieces started to come together for me. Pieces like a high-end boutique that sells costume jewelry and handbags—the kind of bags that Lily collected. Like magazines culled from the doctor’s office where her mother worked. Like a little red dot sitting in Regent’s Park while my blue dot danced around it, all while I’d been standing near Lily.
She hadn’t had the burner phone. And I’d seen myself the way the little blue dot moved off while Lily stood right next to me. But the phone could have been passed off to someone else right before we got there. “It can’t be her,” I said with less vigor.
I’ll help you, she’d said. But we weren’t friends. We’d never been friends. And what was that she’d said about a killer and a thief? Did her family have a killer too?
“What is it?” Lock asked. “You’re frowning.”