He entered the house, shouted “Hello” into its interior just to make sure he was alone, then walked to the kitchen, hoping to find coffee. He was desperate for caffeine. There was a quarter of a pot left, and he poured it over ice and took a long, bitter swallow. He thought some more about Alice and John. What if they were still close? What if John had killed Bill and Grace as a favor for Alice, as revenge for their affair? It was ludicrous, but possible. Both Bill and Grace were dead, and the only one with a solid motive to kill them was Alice, the spurned wife. Alice had acted as though John and she weren’t close at all, but what if they were?

Harry remembered a few days earlier when he’d been looking through Alice’s desk and found the old photograph in her passport, a photograph of her and an older man. He put down his coffee and walked to Alice’s office. He found the photograph again in Alice’s desk drawer. A young Alice with an older man, his arm around her. Harry studied the man. It definitely could have been John, even though the man in the photograph had a full head of hair and was clean shaven. But he had the same strong, slim build, the same slope of the shoulders. It was impossible to tell for sure. Harry riffled through the papers in the desk drawer, looking for another photograph. He didn’t find anything, but he did find a Post-it note stuck to the wooden bottom of the drawer. Handwritten on the note was the phrase missmossypants. No caps, words all strung together. It had to be Alice’s password. Harry flipped open the laptop on the desk, and hit the power button, then, while it was booting up, he had another idea. He opened the Phone Finder app on his phone. It allowed you to find out where someone was based on the GPS location of their cell phone, but you needed their password to do it. He punched Alice’s phone number into the app, then entered her password. A map appeared, and an icon of a phone. She was near Kennewick Beach, just off Micmac Road on Scituate Avenue. Harry could picture the address, a three-story condo development, the same one his father had pointed out to him.

Chapter 31

Now

Alice hadn’t been to Jake’s condo on Kennewick Beach for over a decade. She’d passed it many times, of course, in the car, or while walking along Kennewick Beach, but since she’d been married to Bill she barely even noticed it anymore. It was a relic from the past, in the way her mother was long gone, and in the way that Jake, as she used to know him, was also gone.