Page 275 of Innocent

Her eyes already look glassy, the pupils constricted as she stares at her hand, where I took the glass from her. She’s still holding it in the air and slowly wiggling her fingers, turning her hand back and forth, like she lost the glass and can’t figure out where it went.

I snap my fingers in front of her face. “Grace?”

She blinks, frowning for a second before she tries to focus on me. “What’s wrong with me? I feel…weird.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you, honey. I think you drank a little too much too fast. Three martinis on an empty stomach. Told you earlier you should have let me call in a pizza. You look sleepy. Why don’t you lie down?”

For a moment, she doesn’t react. Then she sort of flops over with a heavy sigh, blinking a few times before her eyes flutter closed.

I tap her personal laptop’s trackpad with my knuckle to keep the computer from going to sleep. Although I have her password for that, too, because she’s an idiot.

Same password she uses for Netflix and Amazon.

Oh, and it’s the same password for her Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, and a few other personal accounts.

She also doesn’t know I changed her privacy settings a couple of weeks ago in her Amazon account, so that Alexa doesn’t store her voice texts or commands.

Yes, I am my Daddy’s boy, and learned my lessons about privacy protection well. Alexa, Siri, and whatever Google’s flavor is called aren’t allowed in Leo’s apartment, much less in the White House or Elliot’s residence.

I pull on my blazer. I don’t want to accidentally forget it here. The paper listing the dates and cities of Elliot’s campaign stops flutters from her lap to the floor, and I grab it, folding it several times and tucking it into my blazer pocket. I’ll run it through the shredder when I return to campaign headquarters. There’s nothing suspicious on it, anyway.

Then I don a pair of black nitrile gloves I brought with me. I arrange Grace on the couch like she’s watching TV, and sort of point her face-down toward the cushions. Her breathing’s already shallow, her pulse weak.

As I have on nearly every visit I’ve been here, I type a couple of searches into her browser.

For local drug rehab facilities. Because I quickly sussed out she never clears her browser history or her cache.

I might have also browsed books on addiction and recovery while logged into her Amazon account over the past several weeks.

I click on one of the links in the search results. This facility is a well-known, exclusive local program that frequently works with members of Congress and their families.

They also have a 24/7 emergency intake number.

Leaving the info on the screen, I grab her iPhone—her personal phone—hold it in front of her face to unlock it with Face ID, and check her texts.

Past voice texts she’s sent to me by the Alexa app are mirrored there, with nothing to show at first blush that they weren’t sent from her phone.

Perfect.

Next, I enter the facility’s emergency number into her keypad, like she was going to call it. Then I wrap her fingers around the phone and place it on the couch.

She’s still breathing—barely. It won’t be long.

Working fast, I wipe down the outsides of the baggies of the drugs I brought, including the empty packages for the drugs I’ve already dumped into her drinks. Then, I press her fingers all over them, dip two of her fingers from her left hand into the Fentanyl residue, so it appears there, and leave the empty Fentanyl baggie and one of the unused packages of E on the coffee table within her reach.

I take the other baggies, including the empties, and another baggie of Fentanyl, to her bedroom and tuck them into her top dresser drawer, where I’m pleasantly surprised find she also has a bag of pot, rolling papers, and a lighter.

Nowthatis a happy coincidence.

I leave the drawer ajar enough that anyone looking inside it can see the pot and bags of drugs.

The zip-top baggie I carried everything in, I wipe it down and carefully roll it up and put it in my pocket. I’ll toss it somewhere else.

My timing from this point on has to be nearly perfect. It’s the only part of my plan I don’t have nailed down exactly, because there was no way for me to do a dry run first. I walk to her bedroom, close the door, pull out the burner phone, and turn it on. On it, I call up the Amazon app.

Logged in as her, natch.

Other than the very first time I powered it on at Leo’s, the only times it’s been powered on are when I’ve been here, at Grace’s.