“Thanks, ladies,” he said, once I’d finished my story. “Leave your details with my assistant, Kate. We’ll probably need to speak to you again, but you can head inside for now.”
I stepped in his path. “I’m a private investigator. I should be allowed to stay.”
Royce looked me up and down with an arched eyebrow. “You’re a P.I.? With a license?”
I flushed, knowing full well my license was tucked away in the suitcase upstairs. “I don’t have it with me, but—”
“Who do you work for?”
“Myself.”
“In the Chicago area?”
“No, in London, but—”
Royce laughed. “Look, I don’t know how they do things across the pond, but here in the States, we have to follow procedure. P.I.s don’t get to hang around and pretend they’re one of us. If you get a client, that’s a different story.”
I pointed at Megan. “She’s my client.”
“Honey, she ain’t paying you anytime soon. Kate!”
A woman kneeling near the body, scribbling extensive notes, glanced up. Royce beckoned her over. She flipped her notebook shut and jogged toward us.
“Need something?” she asked. Concealed beneath an enormous black coat, it was hard to make out any of her defining features.
“Take this lady’s information down,” Royce said flippantly. “And keep any other busybodies away from the scene.”
Once Royce had taken his rightful place beside Megan’s body, Kate grinned apologetically at me. “Sorry about him.”
“It’s fine. I’m sure he’s tired.”
“No, he’s just an ass,” she replied. “I’m a detective too. He’s supposed to be showing me the ropes, but all he does is ask for coffee and make me pick up his dry-cleaning.”
“What a stand-up guy,” I deadpanned.
Kate chuckled and flipped to a fresh page in her notebook. “You’re handling this pretty well. Do you have experience with dead bodies?”
“You could say that.”
When I didn’t elucidate, I expected the young detective to press me for details, but she only nodded and uncapped a pen with her teeth.
“Name?”
Since Royce refused to let me stick around, I lingered outside the border of the crime scene tape with the crowd of reporters and rubberneckers who’d appeared when word of the murder spread. They’d covered Megan’s body with a white cloth. CSI placed number tags around blood spatters and other details they found interesting. As they did so, I jotted notes and took pictures on my phone, hanging on to the slightest hint of information.
When Royce noticed what I was doing, he walked over and forced me to lower my phone camera with his meaty hand. “No pictures,” he shouted over the crowd. “This is a closed scene. Get out of here.”
No one much listened, but the crowd created enough movement for me to slip into the alleyway unnoticed. Beyond the lights of the scene, I blended into the darkness and watched the investigation unfold. When Royce drew too close to my hiding place, I stepped backward, deeper into the mouth of the alley. The heel of my boot came to rest against something soft.
I glanced down and spotted a leather journal beneath my foot. It lay in a puddle of melted snow, and the pages were completely soaked through. I hesitated, unsure if I should pick it up or bring it to the attention of the police. Curiosity bent my back and stretched out my hand. I grasped the journal and unstuck the cover from the first page.
Something clattered in the dumpster behind me—a rat or raccoon probably—and brought me back to my senses. I darted to the opposite end of the alleyway, away from the crime scene, and entered the Saint Angel through the back door, with the damp journal hidden beneath my shirt.
Marie and the bridesmaids had returned to the bridal suite. Freshly showered, they were piled in the massive king-sized bed, huddled together as they awaited news of the scene downstairs. Evelyn, still stinking and sweating, guarded the door.
“The police are here,” I reported wearily. “I’m sure they’ll take care of everything. Sleep tight, ladies.”
After making sure her sister would be okay without her, Evelyn followed me back to our own room. “Well?” she prompted once we were both inside. “I assume you stayed down there to eavesdrop on the police. Any idea what happened?”
“It was definitely a homicide.” I peeled off my coat and hung it by the door. “She has defensive wounds.”
“But she fell.”
“Yeah, after someone tortured her.”
The journal fell out of my shirt and smacked against the floor.
“What the hell is that?” Evelyn demanded.
Calmly, I laid a towel on the desk and placed the journal on top of it to dry out. Lifting my shirt, I noticed the bleeding blue ink had stained my skin. “I found it in the alleyway.”
“So you took it? You didn’t show it to the police?” She groaned and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “This is how you get into trouble, Jack. I thought you’d stop this kind of crap once you were licensed, but you clearly haven’t learned from last year at all—”
“You don’t have any right to tell me what to do,” I shot back. “I saved your butt tonight, Evelyn. I planned the entire party, and you acted like a complete fool. Hell, you’ve been acting like a conceited jerk ever since I got here. What is going on with you?”
Evelyn, stunned, didn’t reply. She turned on her heel, stalked into the bathroom, and slammed the door. Since the silent treatment was her favorite way to punish me, she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. After showering, she climbed into bed and fell asleep with her back to me.
I stayed up long after, reviewing the timeline of events Megan had shared on her social media accounts before her death. I read everything three times, looking for discrepancies or changes in Megan’s posts. The tweet from this morning confused me the most. She had never gone home to Florida, so who logged on to her Twitter and posted a status for
