Page 117 of The Five Year Lie

Brainz pulls up in the empty driveway of the mansion on Chadwick Street and kills the engine. Then he pulls out his laptop and piggybacks a signal off his cell phone.

It only takes a few keystrokes to pause the Chime Co. camera feeds at this address for fifteen minutes.

From his bag, he removes a pair of latex gloves and puts them on. Then he removes a plastic baggie of Edward’s pain pills and shoves it into the pocket of his khakis before getting out of the car.

He walks casually around to the front door and opens it. “Hello, Edward!” he calls out cheerfully.

When no one responds, he isn’t surprised.

He walks quickly toward the office at the back of the house, finding Edward slumped over the desk.

“What are we giving him?” Ray had asked when he hatched this plan.

“Just homemade Rohypnol,” he’d said. “The pills will look identical to his regular meds, except they’ll knock him right out. All I need is a half hour to do some work on his terminal. He’ll never know I was there.”

He won’t, either. Because itwasn’troofies in the bottle Ray gave his brother this morning. And when Brainz slips two fingers to the side of Edward’s neck, there’s no pulse at all.

All right then.

He pulls the medication from his pocket and carefully swaps the prescription pills for the fakes. He sets the bottle—which has Ray’s fingerprints on it—back down on the desk and pockets the fakes.

Then he stands behind the dead man’s desk and makes a few adjustments to the network. The connection to LiveMatch is quickly eliminated. He’ll have to field a couple of calls from bummed-out cops in Lowden later when they realize their free toy is toast.

Then he flips over to the warrant system and does some more tidying up. The whole thing takes nine minutes. So he spends a few more writing pointless commands to the network—renaming directories and reorganizing cells in the spreadsheet that’s open on his screen.

It’s like packing peanuts—if someone wants to reconstruct Edward’s last moments on the Chime Co. network, they’ll have to dig.

But they probably won’t bother. His death will look like an accident or a suicide.

And if Drew fucking Miller ever tries to go public with LiveMatch and the fake judges, the cover-up will look like Edward’s. Not Ray’s. And certainly not his.

He leaves the Cafferty home thirteen minutes after he arrived.

At a traffic light in downtown Portland, he sends a single text, directly from his real number to Ray’s. It’s just incriminating enough to make Ray keep his damn jaw locked shut once he realizes what he’s actually done.

Ray won’t appreciate the breach of protocol. Their communications are supposed to go strictly through the encrypted app. So he doesn’t expect a reply.

When none comes, he thinks nothing of it.

42

ARIEL

Zain isn’t at the office when I arrive. It’s already after nine thirty, too. He’salwayshere by now. I send him another message.

Ariel: Hey! Call me. We need to talk ASAP.

“Ariel?”

Jumpy, I glance up so fast that my neck cracks. My uncle watches me from the doorway of his office with an unusually stern expression on his face. “Yes?”

“Can you come here, please?”

I get up and follow him into the office like a good girl. But I’m in full panic mode. “Have you seen Zain?” I ask in lieu of a greeting. “He sent me a weird text. And he’s not here.”

My uncle’s forehead wrinkles. He looks haggard today. “No, I haven’t. Why is he texting you anyway?”

“We’re friends. We used to sit next to each other. What’s so weird about that?” It comes out a little shrill.