Page 6

Back in my office, I pull off my jacket, unwind my silk scarf. They both go on a hanger, and I adjust my blinds so the outside is blocked—as if someone might want to see what I’m doing. I sit down to type at my laptop, speedy pecks of keys, entering the Gmail account and hitting search. I already know from my Google research this morning that the name alone returns millions of hits. It’s too common.Maybe that’s the reason they chose it.But nothing comes up with the Gmail account, either.
No social media tied to it. No image of a person.
I huff in frustration and repeat the same search, this time adding the name Hannah Greer to the Gmail account—still nothing usable comes up. My phone vibrates from my purse, and I pull it out, annoyed by the interruption.
Sam.
Again.
I need to cancel tonight, so I swipe to answer.
“Hi, Sam.” I stare at the tiny cactus on my desk, the one that’s shriveled into a collection of brown, dead spikes—a sign that I should not be in charge of the care of any living creature.
“Hey. Sorry to interrupt your day, but I thought I’d see if maybe you wanted to come to my place tonight,” he says. “I can cook us some dinner. I’ve been told I make a mean chicken piccata.”
Sam and I don’t have that type of relationship. He’s a nice guy, a handsome police detective who will probably make some lucky lady a great boyfriend or husband someday, but that’s not what I’m looking for, and I was up frontabout that from the beginning. He’s been good with our arrangement, too. Though lately, I’ve suspected he wants more. “I think I actually need to cancel tonight. I have a lot of work to finish up for this class I’m teaching.”
“Oh. Then maybe we can just hang out like usual and do dinner another night?” A car door slams shut, and the city sounds in the background go quiet. “I caught this call last night. I’m going to be pretty busy with it for a while, at least once the autopsy comes back in tomorrow.”
The wordautopsymakes me go still. “Someone died?”
“Well, yeah. It’s New York City. We average more than one homicide a day.”
My voice climbs an octave. “That’s . . . that’s awful.”
“You get used to it, sadly,” he says. “Looks like an older-man-younger-woman thing this time.”
My eyes flare. “What happened?”
“The suspect was his mistress. We can’t find her. She took off, but no one else had motive.”
I swallow back the rise of fear. “How much younger was she?”
Sam chuckles. “Not getting ideas, are you? Killing an older man you’re sleeping with?”
“Of course not.” I force humor into my voice, levity. Inside, though, I’m sinking deeper into a dark place. Nothing about the last twenty-four hours feels like coincidence right now. “How would I ever get that home-cooked meal then?”
“I could make dinner at your place while you work tonight. You gotta take a break to eat sometime, right?”
I open my mouth to tell him I can’t. The last thing I need is to spend time with a police detective right now, but the scrap of paper on my desk catches my eye, gives me an idea. “Hey, I have a question.”
“What’s that?”
“Is there a way to trace an email address?”
“Just an email address? Or anemail received?”
“The address.”
“An email address by itself can be tough. But you can usually trace an email received back to the approximate location of the sender using their IP address, as long as they’re not using a VPN. Though you would need an incoming email for that.” He pauses, and the wheels turn in my head. “You need to track someone down?”
“Just wondering.” I chew the end of a pen, practically hearing the curiosity on his end as silence fills the line. “One of the students in my fiction-writing class had a character track someone’s location from their email in their story. I didn’t know if it was accurate or not.”
“Oh, gotcha.”
“Listen, Sam, someone just walked into my office,” I lie. “So I have to run. Maybe we can get together next week?”
“Yeah, okay.”