“I do.”
“You do?” I said, almost surprised. Had I actually been good at this investigating stuff?
“But let me check something first, because that ridiculous name does sound familiar,” he said as he searched his email. “Here. He wrote to me when my first Dashing Henry story was published. He was upset and called me all sorts of colorful things.”
“Spinless nincumpoop, snowfleek server of the cancellled culture, hater of all things matcho...” I read on David’s computer screen from one of Troubelmakr’s emails. “He has a flair for the dramatic. If only he could spell. And I guess we can assume it’s a man.”
“We can assume, yes. I can show you even more colorful stuff. He kept emailing me for a couple of weeks. In the end, I talked with the security team at the newspaper, and I don’t know exactly what happened. I guess they reported him to the police and sent him some lawyery letter, but he stopped emailing me.”
“And that was before they fired you?”
“Yes. But whatever legalese they threatened him with must have been scary enough because he didn’t make contact again even after I was fired.”
“What if it was him who pretended to be you and lured Henry here with those emails in your name?”
“Why would he do that?” David tried protesting.
“I don’t know! To make sure Henry finally showed up. He must have known he’d sued you.”
“You haven’t convinced me, but we need to keep looking into this Troubelmakr.”
“So, what do we do now? Try to find him and make him confess?”
If that were a screenplay I was writing, this would be the perfect time to insert a chat between the sexy, pining-for-each-other investigators and their first suspect. But I assumed in real life things tended to be a bit different and most certainly slower—and happened in a more boring fashion.
“We can see what’s out there,” David said, and what he did next astounded me a little. I hadn’t anticipated a seasoned, award-winning—perhaps only award-finalist, but still—investigative journalist like him doing something so basic and mundane, but he did. He went to Google, typed “LA Troubelmakr,” and browsed through the results.
“You need to start somewhere,” he told me when he saw my disbelieving expression. “Or do you have any better ideas?”
I didn’t, but he didn’t need to know that. Up until that moment, I’d been convinced he’d have some secret investigative method known only to his profession. Like some ultra restricted browser with which to find the geographical location of every possible source or person of interest, or some other made-for-TV nonsense like that.
“Why does this guy look familiar?” he asked me then. David was reviewing the Google search results and had found a couple of images of someone responding to the name LA Troubelmakr. He looked like a man in his thirties, of medium build, and wearing anLA Misconductswhite hoodie. He had short bleached-blond hair and the kind of creepy smile you hope never to see up close in person.
I shuddered uneasily because the fact was, Ihadseen him in person.
14
My phone rang then and made us both wince. The phone identified the caller asLawyer. I answered immediately.
“Elena, your mother said you’d be calling me,” my dad said in a concerned tone. It wasn’t his signature style to skip over the good-mornings, how-are-yous, what-did-you-have-for-breakfasts, and all of his usual dad repartee.
“I was going to ring you and then things got complicated,” I tried to explain. For a moment, I felt I was seventeen again, and he’d caught me smoking a cigarette while picking me up after some party.
“More complicated than the police wanting to talk to you?” He scoffed.
“What?” I said, confused. For someone who prided herself on being articulate, I kept catching myself saying the same interrogative word over and over that morning.
“Fortunately, we have friends at the LAPD and they did me the courtesy of calling me first,” my dad explained. “But they want to talk to you again.”
“What?” I sounded like an idiot. “Why?”
“Something about a certain article at theVoiceand you possibly lying to them about being alone the night of Henry’s death.” A dash of frustration colored his tone.
“Oh, that,” I said, still sounding completely dumb.
“Yes,that,” he replied, unamused. “And Elena, will you do me a favor and tell that irresponsible, idiotexof yours that he’s also wanted at the Downtown police station for further questioning?”
“What makes you think I know where he is?” David was standing no more than a few inches in front of me, looking at me with scrutinizing eyes.
