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  67. 3:46 a.m.

Sorry it’s been so long. Been a CRAZY couple weeks. The worst weeks of my life. I’ve been staying at Uncle Ray and Aunt Joan’s for the past week, sharing a bed with Megan.

My mom and Bob are getting divorced.

Bob moved out and he is staying at a hotel.

Markus is staying with my mom.

He thinks this is all my fault.

He says that he hates me.

I don’t blame him.

I should have taken the car.

::::

My dad stops reading. I don’t want him to stop. I want him to keep going.

“Poor girl,” I find myself saying.

I don’t know if it was my dad’s plan to read this particular journal entry so I would relate with this young woman’s contempt for her mother, that I would somehow become emotionally involved in finding her killer.

If it was, it worked.

I’m almost as pissed off at this girl’s mom as I am at my own. She offered her daughter a car to keep her quiet, to conceal the affair from Bob (who I assume was Jennifer’s stepfather, one whom she loved dearly.) Her affair not only destroyed the family, created an irreconcilable rift between she and her daughter, and caused the little brother to hate and blame Jennifer for the family falling apart. It also inadvertently sent her daughter down a road of blackmail, one that would eventually get her killed.

I want to dive into the case headfirst with my dad. I want to read the entirety of her journal entries. To spend hours poring over the case files from the DC detectives.

But I can’t.

I have bigger fish to fry.

I tell my dad that he should keep pressing on the case and to keep me updated, then I grab my laptop and head to my room.

I have two new emails.

The first is from Ingrid, detailing everything that has happened in the last couple days. Her mother is still in a coma, but the neurological scans look promising and they just have to wait and see. Her dad is going crazy, and she was forced to introduce him to Candy Crush on her phone, which appears to at least temporarily take his mind off his wife for short stretches. They are taking turns keeping vigil at her mother’s bedside and going home to shower and eat. She misses me and she even misses Lassie and Murdock, and she can’t wait to move back into the condo when she returns. Kisses.

I email her back quickly, then open the second email.

It’s from Mike Lang at AST.

Henry,

This is all I could dig up. It was easy enough, no charge.

Mike

P.S. Bummer about your grandparents. And on V-Day, no less. My condolences.

I open up the zip drive he’s attached to the email. There are four PDFs.