“The nail file from my party was the murder weapon?” Lysa says.
“Unfortunately, yes.” I add a sigh. “I don’t know what it means, but I’m pretty sure it’s the reason Rachel keeps looking at me like I’m a ticking time bomb.”
“Well, that proves for sure it couldn’t have been me.” Journey inspects his fingernails. “Anyone who’s seen my nails knows I have no use for a nail file. That’s what teeth are for.”
I flash him a quick smile. “Besides, where would you get my nail file unless I gave it to you?”
“Where would anyone get your nail file unless you gave it to them?” Spam wonders.
“Good question,” I say.
Lysa raises her hand. “Oh. I overheard there was a partial footprint in blood at Miss Peters’s house, but Journey’s shoes came back clean. I was in the hall when my father took that call from the detective.”
Journey looks relieved. “Sweet. Maybe I’ll get my Nikes back.”
“Is that all?” Spam looks at me.
“There’s the size-eleven Nike footprint I found in my bedroom.”
Spam and Lysa silently shift their gaze to Journey’s feet. He says, offended, “Yes, I wear a size eleven and I have a pair of Nikes, but did you not just hear Lysa? The police have had those shoes since the first night. It couldn’t have been me.”
Spam offers Journey a small wink. “Way to rock an alibi.”
Journey smiles. “I try.”
“Good point,” I say. “Lysa, Spam, you guys have been suspicious of Journey this whole time. Well, Lysa just confirmed that the police have had his shoes since that first night. Can we finally agree that Journey is no longer creepy or a suspect and accept him as part of the team?”
Spam and Lysa exchange a nod. “Yes. Okay,” Spam says.
“He’s in. No more weird looks,” Lysa agrees.
“Thanks,” he says. “And I mean that.” Then he turns toward me. “No one has been in your bedroom since that night though, right?”
“Not that I know of.” I paw through the evidence in the small bag. I isolate a small Ziploc bag and hold it up. “Oh. There is one last thing, a torn scrap of paper I found stuck in the seat-belt clip on Journey’s van. There’s some writing on it and Journey says it’s not his. Chromatography doesn’t tell us much but I’m going to run a test on it anyway. And that’s it. That’s the extent of our evidence.”
Now that I say it out loud … it’s not much. But I know from Victor’s books that even the smallest, most unlikely piece of evidence can tell you something.
“Okay. Here’s what I’ve got.” Spam pulls some folded sheets of paper out of her back pocket and curls her foot up under her on the sofa. “Miss P’s cell phone account was, as I predicted, extremely easy to hack. I’ve checked out all the calls to and from her cell for the last three months. There was only one number that looked sketchy.”
“Whose was it?”
“I can’t tell.” Spam gives me a shrug. “It’s an old landline: 555-8446. I tried calling it but it just rings, no voice mail.”
“Wait.” I blink a couple of times, training my gaze on the ceiling. “Why is that number so familiar?” I pretend to dial it on my phone. “It’s two numbers off from Rachel’s work number.”
“Where does she work?” Journey asks.
“The police station. She’s the 911 unit supervisor.” Spam answers Journey’s question because my brain is busy trying to figure out what a number close to Rachel’s could mean.
“Are you saying the calls were to someone at the police station?” Journey asks.
“It’s possible,” Spam says. “They often link business phone numbers in sequence like that.”
“But wouldn’t there be voice mail?” Lysa asks.
I’m wondering the same thing. My paranoia kicks in. “How many calls were there?” Did Miss Peters discuss my DNA hunt with Rachel? No. If Rachel knew about that, she would have been all over me. Besides, the number isn’t Rachel’s, it’s just close to it.
Spam scans the printout. “The calls went both ways, to Miss Peters and from her. There were one or two last month, but more than ten right before…” She trails off with a sigh. A quiet moment follows while we all reflect on what we’ve lost.
No question, we are truly and irrevocably changed.
When the silence threatens to pin us to the floor, I get to my feet. “Be right back.” I lightly skim down the ladder and bound through my bedroom, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. There’s a drawer where Rachel keeps all the weird things that don’t belong anywhere else, like take-out menus, rubber bands, and her collection of little screwdrivers. Underneath all the junk is an old address book from before she put everything on her cell phone. I bring it back upstairs.