Page 99 of The Five Year Lie

Beyond that, I find the coroner’s report. I skim like crazy, because I don’t need to know how much his heart weighed. And the notes at the bottom sum everything up.Cause of death: heart failure due to opioid overdose.Then there’s a bunch of technical jargon about the drugs. I have to read it three times before it makes sense.

But the gist of it is this—the two half-dissolved pills in his stomach don’t seem to match the dosage listed on the pill bottle. If I’ve understood it correctly, there are two possibilities—either he took too many doses in a short period of time, or he took different, stronger pills than the ones found on the desk.

In either case, the overdose could easily be accidental. The lack of a suicide note raises the odds against intentional self-harm.

That’s diplomatic.

I replace the file at her bedside. And on my way back to the kitchen I pause in the door to my father’s office, a room I’ve avoided my whole life. The place is untouched, basically. The computer is gone, but the books on the shelves and the diplomas on the wall are unchanged.

My eyes land on the desk, where my father died on the same day that Drew came to this house.

Perhaps Drew stood right where I am now. And said what, though?

It’s hard to picture my father ending that conversation with a handful of painkillers. The man had an ego the size of New England. Whatever Drew had on him, he would have gone down swinging.

The office is so tidy that I feel as if I’m on the threshold of a shrine. My mother must have asked Maria to keep it clean, in spite of its emptiness.

I wonder if Uncle Ray will reclaim this space if he moves in. Or maybe that’s too much likeHamleteven for him.

The oven beeps to tell me it’s reached 500 degrees, and I hustle off to put our pizzas in.

After dinner and a lengthy story time, I put Buzz to bed. Fifteen minutes later he’s still whistling to himself up there.

Meanwhile, I’m on my hands and knees, cleaning my kitchen and wondering where Drew would go to start his life over if he had the choice.

The obituary said North Carolina. There’s a big army base down there. It’s certainly plausible. But if the death notice was meant as a misdirection...?

Above me, my phone buzzes with an incoming call. I sit back on my heels and grab it off the counter.Zain Calling.“Hey,” I say a little breathlessly. “Find anything?”

“No, but I thought we might try something,” he says. “What are you doing right now?”

“Trying to get cookie crumbs out from under my dishwasher.”

“Why are there—? Never mind. Can you come into the office?”

“Now?”

“Yeah. I know it’s late, but we had to take some systems down to restart and refresh. So there’s a lot of unusual traffic on the network. It’s a perfect time to”—he drops his voice—“find an old video of the warrant desk. Nobody will notice it in the logs.”

Oh. “You mean, like a needle in a haystack moment?”

“Exactly,” he says. “Let’s do this.”

“I can’t leave. Buzz is in bed upstairs. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh shit,” he says. “I didn’t think.”

I shake my head and ball up the paper towel I’ve been using. “You go ahead and watch it. If it’s really that interesting, take a video of the monitor.”

“Oh, genius! I’ll put you on FaceTime. Maybe in, like, ten minutes? It will take me a while to find the archive and then sort through the video files. Actually, I need the date...”

“It’s November sixth, 2015.”

Zain cackles. “Look who’s been sitting in the front row of class.”

“Shut up.”

“I’ll call you back in ten, on a video call.”