And then, of course, Blackfriar had killed her.

  I turned for the door; I’d go back down to the garage, and I’d work my way back up more slowly, taking time to note anywhere Baca might have potentially used as a hiding spot—

  My Stan Smith slipped on an envelope.

  It wasn’t enough to make me fall. I caught myself, stepped free of the fallen piece of mail, reached for the door.

  And stopped again because all the Christmas lights in my brain went on.

  Why was Baca’s mail here, lying on the floor? The obvious answer was the search, but that wasn’t correct. Baca’s mail had been piled on the teak accent table the night Holmes and I had found her dead. And that didn’t fit with anything else in Baca’s condo. It didn’t fit with the coffee table free of magazines, or with the desktop clean of paperwork, or the dresser without a single Taco John’s receipt, even though you were only keeping them because you told Holmes that taquito was so bad you deserved a refund. In other words, no clutter in the condo. Not anywhere. So, what were the odds that, of all things, the mail was left in a pile by the door?

  Not high, I guessed, and a heatwave rushed through me. Not unless you’d stopped for the mail on the way up, and you were surprised by a supervillain waiting for you inside your condo.

  Why stop for your mail? If you’re on the run, if you’ve burgled one of the most powerful people in the state—maybe even in the country—and everything went wrong, why stop to see if you’d gotten the Kroger ad?

  I reached for the door and stopped again.

  Mailbox key. I needed the mailbox key.

  The one Baca had used would have been taken with the rest of her personal belongings, I guessed—or, worst-case scenario, had been taken by Blackfriar. There was a chance that he’d come to the same conclusion I had. But still, I had to see. Baca would have had a spare key to the mailbox. She might have kept it in the office, or in the kitchen junk drawer, or in some random place I wouldn’t normally think of. I looked at the chaos in front of me. It would take hours to find something in this mess. It might take days.

  Unless, a part of my brain said—and it sounded a little like Holmes—unless she kept it where she leaves the mail.

  The drawer of the accent table was open, and when I glanced inside, I saw nothing. But I gave the table a shake, and something rattled inside. I pulled the drawer out, and a small, silver key slid into view.

  Bingo.

  I don’t really remember going downstairs. I took the stairs; I remember that, because the elevators took too long. And I remember the sound of movement behind the neighbor’s door, the realization that I was dealing with a Grade-A snoop. But after that, it’s a blur of movement, me taking the steps three at a time, the relative darkness of the stairwell, the sound of my sneakers squeaking against the concrete.

  I found the mailroom in the lobby. The tile and the high ceiling echoed every sound, and it sounded like there was someone else with me, somebody else coming with me. And there should have been. Holmes should have been. The hurt of that was a kind of counterpoint to the daze of this moment. Because he had said, Solve it yourself. And I was about to do just that.

  The little key fit neatly into the lock of Baca’s mailbox. I turned, opened the door, and the rush left me lightheaded.

  Because there it was, small and oblong and black.

  Watson’s safe.

  Chapter 27

  Watson’s Safe

  For lack of anywhere better, I carried the safe to the truck and sat there and stared at it.

  It was black, and although the outer material felt like plastic, the weight suggested there was metal involved in the construction. It was somewhere in size between a glasses case and a dopp kit—big enough for a phone, your wallet, keys, maybe a nice, fat watch. When I held it in both hands, it seemed so small. People had died for this. Even more people had been hurt for this. It wasn’t like Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool-size vault. The safe was trembling, and a distant part of me recognized that no, I was the one shaking.

  I thought about calling Holmes.

  Then I opened the cover plate to expose the combination lock, and I set to work.

  Holmes had told me (it felt like years ago, although it had only been a day or two) that Watson’s original message had said the safe was meant for me. Which meant, in theory, I should be able to open it. The key part of that sentence was in theory, because I’d never gotten any secret communication from Watson, and there weren’t any family secrets about a four-digit number, and I’d never owned a decoder ring or any cool shit like that.

  So, because I’m a Boy Genius, I tried my birthday.

  Nothing.

  I tried again, because my hands were shaking, and I thought maybe the tumblers hadn’t set quite right.

  Still nothing.

  Ok, I thought. I tried my birth year.

  Nope.

  I tried Mom’s birthday, Mom’s birth year.

  I tried the date of the accident.

  I sat back and stared at the safe. I told it, “You’re making me look stupid.”

  Holmes wouldn’t have said anything, but I could imagine the look on his face.

  Part of me understood that if it had been something as simple as my birthday, a Holmes or a Moriarty would have had this safe open in seconds. They were all geniuses; a four-digit combination should have been child’s play. I grinned reluctantly as I rolled the tumblers back and forth, the stamped metal rough under the pads of my fingers. That must have driven them crazy. I bet Holmes could do the math in his head, tell you how many possible combinations there were. I wondered if Maggie had tried it that way, running through each possibility, scratching them off some giant cheat sheet.

  I tried Dad’s birthday. I tried his birth year. I didn’t know when my grandparents had been born—I’d only known my Dad’s parents, and they’d died when I’d been little. Ok, I thought, and I did a mental knuckle-crack. I multiplied my birthday by Mom’s (and yes, I had to use my phone and, in the process, ignore the missed calls from Holmes and Dad and Rowe and Emma and Glo). There were too many digits, so I tried adding them together. Then I tried subtracting them. Then I had a stroke of genius. Dad’s birthday plus Mom’s birthday equals me, right? I mean, kind of. So, I tried that.

  When it didn’t work, I was glad I hadn’t shared that stroke of genius out loud.

  For a while, I stared at the safe again. The last of my nervous energy burned itself out, and the shakes left me. My neck and shoulders ached from hunching over, so I forced myself to lean back, rest my head on the seat. Holmes and I had only gotten a couple of hours of sleep last night. We’d been…busy, and then Holmes had wanted to leave at the ass crack of dawn, and although I was sure I’d slept the night before, I was having trouble remembering where and how much. Noneley’s cabin, I thought. And the way Holmes had tucked himself into me.

  My head came up with a start, and my neck hurt in a new way, and my eyes were all gummy. I most definitely had not drooled on my shirt.

  The safe had not miraculously opened itself while I’d been, uh, thinking.

  It was stupid. That thought came to me as I stared at the black box. The whole thing was stupid. This was a stupid way to live your life. People were supposed to have jobs and go to school and fall in love and find meaningful things to do with their lives. You weren’t supposed to get caught in these elaborate games that the three families played—

  My hands moved across the surface of the safe.

  The three families.

  But not the Watsons.

  I was doing it wrong. That was the problem. I was going at this the wrong way. I was trying to play this game like a Holmes, trying to be as smart as them, trying to be as clever. But that was a mistake, because I wasn’t all that smart (Exhibit A: my chemistry grades) and I wasn’t all that clever (Exhibit B: Dad busting me the first time I got high because I ‘hid’ my vape at the back of my underwear drawer). I wasn’t a Holmes. I wasn’t much of a Watson, either, I guess, because the Watsons didn’t traditionally pick fights with the Holmeses and ruin any chance they had, even though they were desperately in love. I mean, not historically, anyway. But I was still a Watson. And a Watson had sent it to me. And she’d done it because she’d believed I could open it, even though we’d known each other only briefly, even though she hadn’t given me a single clue about any of this.

  So, start there, I told myself. It’s got to be easy. Whatever it is, it’s got to be something you can figure out. I’d tried birthdays, and those hadn’t worked. What else?

  Well, hell, I thought, a smile pulling at the corner of my mouth.

  I tried 1-2-3-4.

  Nothing.

  I thought about it and tried 4-3-2-1.

  Nada.

  And then it hit me, and I laughed out loud.

  2-2-1-2.

  The final two was a substitution, because B was the second letter of the alphabet. Holmes and Watson’s London address.

  The lock clicked open.

  I tried to take deep breaths, but I couldn’t seem to slow myself down. My hands were shaking again. I lifted the lid and found four envelopes tucked inside the safe. White, business-sized, the kind you’d pick up at Walmart for cheap. Their corners were bent from sliding around inside the safe. I opened the first one, and a flash drive fell into my hand. I opened the second and found another flash drive. The third held four small plastic baggies that held hair—two blond, two brown. I remembered what Rivera had said, about DNA evidence, and I wondered if that had been Sarah’s plan as well, a way to frame the Holmeses if she needed to. I opened the fourth envelope, and a silver chain slithered out.

  For a moment, I couldn’t even breathe. I stared at the chain. My fingers wanted to close around it, but they didn’t move. I knew that chain. It was a necklace, with a little artsy geometric pendant. Dad had bought it for Mom when we’d gone to this mining town thing, with all its Old West vibes, and a million tourist attractions like ‘local’ artists. Mom had liked it anyway; she’d worn it all the time.

  I was shaking harder now. I turned the safe upside down. I shook it. Nothing fell out. This was it. All that death and pain for this.

  The last year had taught me to be cautious, so even though I wanted to clutch Mom’s necklace, even though I didn’t want to let it out of my sight again, I returned it to the envelope. I closed it in the safe with the hair samples and scrambled the tumblers, and then I considered the flash drives. It would take me over an hour to drive back to Walker, and even there, there was no guarantee I’d have a chance to look at the contents of the drives. Dad was going to skin me alive and hang me from the flagpole as a warning to other teenagers. I’d be lucky if he let me out of my room again before I turned thirty. I could drive back and use one of the computers in the library, but that meant no privacy. Maybe the computer lab, later, if I waited until campus closed for the day—

  Then I shook my head, opened the door, and climbed down from the truck.

  Dumbass, I told myself, but the thought felt distant, padded by a layer of shock, and I was still shaking.

  I jogged back to Baca’s condo building. I let myself in through the garage again, rode the elevator up to the lobby, and found the condo office, a thick piece of plywood covering the missing window. The office was closed, of course; it was a weekend—although I’d lost track of whether it was Saturday or Sunday by this point—and the strip under the door was dark. My Albertson’s card let me in, and I shut the door quietly behind me. I kept the lights off as I moved across the office, rounded the L-shaped desk, and made my way to the computer.

  It seemed to take an eternity to power up. Holmes had told me the password, and it let me through the lock screen. I took a deep breath and set the safe on the desk. When I inserted the first flash drive, I got the usual message about whatever whatever, and then a moment later, I could see the files. Or better said, file. One. A video.

  I clicked on it, and it began to play.

  For a moment, the angle and the dark were so disorienting that I didn’t know what I was seeing. Then my brain reconfigured, and I understood: I was looking down a steep slope. The footage was grainy, probably because whoever was recording this had used the zoom feature gratuitously, but I could still make out a surprising amount of detail. At the base of the hill sat a Lexus, and the car looked like it had been through hell: headlights smashed, windows shattered, a tire blown. The roof had a slightly crunched look. A numb part of me thought, That’s what happens when you roll.

  My breaths were short and shallow and fast. Dizziness pulled at me, and I grabbed the desk.

  The Lexus. That thought was clear, at least. And then, a little clearer: Mom’s Lexus.

  A man entered the frame, stumbling on the uneven ground, something held low against his side. I let out a breath and leaned closer. I knew this guy. The colors were washed out in the dark, but I knew he had a peach-colored face. I knew the way he walked. I knew how he held a gun low against his thigh. I knew he had a scar now, one that I’d given him. This was the same guy who had tried to kill me a few months before, when he’d run me off the road. And now I was seeing it happen again, only it wasn’t again—it was before.

  They had told me he was trying to help, a distant, childlike voice said. They had told me he was carrying a tool.

  But I wasn’t fifteen and hurt and disoriented from a car crash. I wasn’t heartbroken and traumatized in a hospital room. I was here, now, watching an indisputable video recording of the man carrying a gun. I watched as, in the video, the younger me threw open the back door and ran. I looked so much smaller, part of me observed. I had been smaller. I had been a child.

  The peach-faced man stopped to glance into the car, and then he continued walking. Coming after me. To kill me. Waves of hot and cold electrified me. I felt like every hair on my body was standing on end.

  And then a second man entered the frame. This one, I knew from the first instant: the oily grace, the unnatural smoothness. Like a bead of mercury. Like smoke and shadow.

  Blackfriar Holmes approached the Lexus. He looked through the driver’s window, and then he reached inside. He yanked, the movement of one arm savage, his body telegraphing the fury behind the motion. And then he turned and walked away. Something hung from his hand. Something thin, something that would have been invisible on a camera at that distance, except that the silver caught in the headlights and glittered.

  Mom’s necklace.

  The one Cecilia Holmes had included when she’d done her sketch of Mom.

  When Blackfriar exited the frame, the video ended. There had been no audio, but in the crushing emptiness of the office, silence rushed in on me. My ears rang with it. My breathing was still so fast, so light, like stones skipping over water. My hands ached around the edge of the desk.

  Questions fragmented inside my head: Where? How? Why? And one word, again and again: No.

  Displaced air alerted me a moment too late. I started to turn. Holmes had already made his way around the desk. His face was ashen, and he looked, if anything, more exhausted than ever: the dark hollows around his eyes, the sag of his shoulders, the way his injured arm hung at his side.

  “Jack.” He sounded hoarse. “Thank God. I tried calling.”

  “My phone was silent—” I furrowed my eyebrows. “H, how did you find me—”

  He streaked toward me with a speed I thought he’d lost. I was still turning, trying to bring myself around to face him, my body slowed by the one-two combo of surprises: first, the video; and second, now, the impossibility of Holmes being here, of him darting toward me with that strange look on his face.

  I didn’t realize he was holding a needle until I felt the prick in my neck.

  It was like someone started blowing up a balloon inside my body—not a sense of pressure, but of everything swelling, distorting. I tried to say, “What the hell?” but the sounds that came out didn’t match the words in my head. I stumbled and threw an arm out. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to punch him or grab on to him. The office tilted. When I reached for the desk, it slid out from under my hand.

  Then Holmes’s good arm was around me, the woodsy heat of him filling my chest, and he was saying something, although I couldn’t make out what. The words, like the world, got bigger and bigger, inflated by whatever Holmes had jabbed me with. I was on the floor now, staring up at Holmes, only his face was wrong, like I was looking at him in a funhouse mirror. He rolled my head, touched my neck, combed back my hair. He floated above me like the moon, while that balloon in my head got bigger and bigger.

  And then it popped.

  Chapter 28

  Little Brushes

  A man was talking.

  I jerked upright, choked on my spit, and hacked to clear my airways.

  “Easy,” the man said. His voice was neutral but hard. A cop voice. “Stay there for a minute.”

  But I rolled onto my hands and knees, still coughing. My head felt like it was packed with clouds. My body ached. Exhaustion tried to drag me under again, and for a moment, when I closed my eyes, I felt myself slipping. I forced my eyes open again and struggled to get to my feet.

  “I said stay right there,” the cop-voice said.

  “Kid,” a second man said, “stay down.”

  Holmes. The thought was a beacon fire, burning through the fog of my thoughts. Holmes had been here. Holmes had—

  The needle. The world swelling up. The fall.

  When I moved too fast, the world lagged a half-second behind, but I managed to find the desk. I was still in the condo office. The computer was there, but the flash drives were gone, and so was the safe. I craned my head. I’d been right about the cops; they wore blue uniforms with patches and badges and radios, all the stuff cops lug around, and one of them was shining a flashlight at me even though—well, I didn’t know what time it was, but I could tell it was still day.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35