Influenced Eva Robinson (polar express read aloud .TXT) 📖

His mind whirled. Now both cases were clearly connected to Rowan. But she wasn’t the only one in that social circle. He needed to find out exactly where she’d been that night, and who else was there.

Sixteen pieces of chili pepper went into the sauce, along with a little salt. He washed his hand to get the chili juices off, then dumped a box of spaghetti into the boiling pot.

When he sat down at his laptop again, he scrolled through TOI.com. One more photo from that night had been deleted from her feed—a selfie with her eyes half-lidded, unfocused, her hair stuck to her forehead. The flash hadn’t gone off, so the light was coming from a bright moon and a few lanterns hanging from the trees.

She’d written some inane comment underneath it, but his attention was on the people in the background. One of them—a man—looked like he might’ve been Peter, but he was in shadow. The other person looked like she was creeping up behind Rowan, the lantern beaming on her. Hannah? It was the friend who’d replaced Arabella in the photos.

He saved the image to his laptop, then blew it up, trying to adjust the contrast and the lighting. The other woman almost looked like a double of Rowan—her hair styled the same, the kind of dress she would wear—but tidier, without Rowan’s train-wreck situation.

As he read through the thread, he found one comment after another celebrating Rowan’s “breakdown.” It was a pure feast of schadenfreude. This was the end game for them, wasn’t it?

When his buzzer rang, he rose and crossed through his living room. Ciara announced herself on the intercom, and he buzzed her up then unlatched his door. While he waited for her to come up the stairs, he cast a look around the room—a science magazine lay on his dark grey sofa, and he snatched it up, tucking it into the walnut magazine stand where it belonged. Other than that, everything was in order.

The door creaked as Ciara pushed it open. “It smells freaking amazing in here.” She slid off her shoes, glancing around the room. “Do you live here?”

“You know I live here.”

“There’s no stuff in it. It looks like… like a catalog.”

Bookshelves lined two of the pewter walls, and apart from that, a sofa stood against a wall of exposed brick. “Okay.”

She slid off her laptop bag. The rain had dampened her curls and her button-down shirt. “That was a compliment.”

“Thanks.” He led her into the kitchen. “Hungry?”

“Starving. I’m digesting my organs again.” She sat down at the small, square table in his kitchen. “And I also have leads. I spent all day looking over security footage for the education department. Guess who I found the day Peter’s laptop was stolen?”

“The Red Sox woman?”

“Yep. The one with the skull sweater. It’s the same person.”

He uncorked the wine and poured her a glass. “Rowan ties them both together. She was working with Peter on a fundraiser. I found a photo she deleted, and I think she might have been with her the night she died. She was at a party at Fresh Pond.”

“What? How do you know?”

He sat at the table next to her; it was small enough that their knees were nearly touching. Turning his laptop to face her, he said, “Rowan was at Fresh Pond four nights ago. Drunk out of her mind, writing nonsense posts on Instagram that she deleted a few hours later. But everything is catalogued on TOI.com. Her post showed her location. I think Peter might be in the background, with her friend Hannah lurking behind her like a creep.”

Ciara leaned in closer over his shoulder, invading his personal space again. But she smelled faintly of rain and coconut shampoo, and he didn’t mind. “Okay. Do you know where Hannah lives?”

“No, why?”

“Because I used Find My Mac again. I found Peter’s password in his office. Someone turned the computer on near Cambridge this time, but near Fresh Pond. Not at a home—at a pizza shop across the street from the pond.”

Michael typed, Hannah Moreno, Cambridge, into his search engine, and her image came up right away. School psychologist, Woodhurst Charter Schools. Perfect. “Hang on. I can figure this out right now.”

He pulled out his phone and called his friend Katie—a chemistry teacher at Woodhurst High School. It rang twice before she picked up.

“Michael? Who calls on a phone these days? Such a cop.”

“Well, it’s something I don’t want to text.”

“Mysterious. Am I a suspect in a crime? Do you need to search me? Will there be handcuffs involved?”

He and Katie were just friends, but she flirted like the devil himself. He shot a nervous glance at Ciara, wondering if she could hear. Her arched eyebrow suggested she could.

Of course. Americans were so loud.

With the phone against his ear, he rose to drain the pasta. “Do you work with someone named Hannah?”

“Hannah?”

“School psychologist.”

“Oh! I did. She had some kind of nervous breakdown and quit.”

The steam heated his face. “What do you mean, ‘some kind of nervous breakdown’?”

“She just walked out in the middle of the workday and left the rest of the department to run her meetings. It was a whole thing. Very dramatic. I think she kind of ruined her career.”

“Any idea what happened?”

“She started seeming increasingly frazzled at meetings. Writing her reports last minute. The reports kept getting shorter. Everyone was complaining. She showed up late to a few meetings. Honestly? I feel like the school psychologists flip out all the time. They last, like, one year at a time. It might be that their jobs are hard, but who doesn’t have a hard job? At least they’re not in classrooms in front of twenty-five kids. I don’t know. I think a lot of the people interested in mental health stuff are a little, you know, mental.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Oh, right. Well, you changed fields.”

The sauce had now simmered almost to perfection, and he added a