Page 88 of Skin and Bones

“We set a trap,” Dash said.

“How?” Deidre asked. “Don’t get me wrong. I like all this excitement. But I’m not forty years old anymore. I can’t keep up this kind of pace.”

“We should go on that seniors cruise when this is over,” Bea said. “Those senior cruises are like a game of chance. Once you get out to sea those old people start dropping like flies. They keep all the bodies in a cooler down below.”

“I’ll go,” Dottie said. “But I want to hear about this trap we’re supposed to set. And then I’m going to take a nap. I’m full of carbs and indigestion. Go ahead, Sheriff.”

Dash looked like he wanted to yank Bea’s sidecar out of her hand and knock it back. But he showed admirable restraint.

“We let it be known that Frank has come forward,” Dash explained. “That he saw everything that night and is prepared to identify Elizabeth’s killer in a lineup.”

“Won’t that put Frank in danger?” I asked, concerned.

“We can protect him,” Dash assured me. “But we need to force the killer’s hand—make him panic, make him act.”

“And when he does,” Walt said, nodding with approval, “we’ll be ready.”

There was a knock on the door and I could see Deputy Harris through the glass before he let himself in. He held a manila envelope in his hand.

“Must be something good in here,” Dash said, studying Harris’s face.

“It certainly paints a picture,” Harris said.

“What about text messages?”

Harris looked every bit of his twenty-two years as excitement flushed his cheeks. “You’ve got those too.”

Dash pulled out the papers and laid them out of the table. “Huh,” he said. “I guess Reynolds was right. We were looking in all the wrong places.”

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

“Holy Moses,” Dottie breathed, leaning so far over the table I thought she might fall face-first into the phone records. “Would you look at that?”

My finger traced the pattern of calls laid out in neat columns and timestamps. Twenty-three calls between Vanessa Garfield and Jason Brooks in the two weeks before her death. The last one—a seventeen-minute conversation—just hours before she’d been strangled.

“There it is,” I said, a chill creeping up my spine despite the warmth of the kitchen. “I guess Reynolds was right.”

His words from the boathouse echoed in my mind—It wasn’t about the Harbor Development. That was just a cover story. You’re looking in all the wrong places.”

Walt adjusted his reading glasses, jabbing his finger at the call log. “Look at the pattern. Short calls every couple of days, then suddenly a flurry of activity the day before she died.”

“Maybe she was threatening him,” Hank suggested. “Blackmail usually starts with a calm negotiation before it turns ugly. And then there’s the ten thousand dollars.”

I scanned the text message log Harris had included, noting the increasingly frantic tone of the exchanges.

Need to talk. Important.

This isn’t something we should discuss over text.

I’m not playing games. Meet me or I go public.

The final text from Vanessa, sent just hours before her death—I know what you did to Elizabeth. $10,000 by midnight or I go to Beckett.

“Jason Brooks,” I said, the name feeling like a betrayal on my lips. The charming attorney who’d flirted with me, who’d asked me to dinner—who’d killed not once, but twice. “What a jerk! I can’t believe he wanted to go out with me.”

“Murderers are looking for love too, Mabel,” Bea said, patting me on the back. “There’s a whole reality show about it.”