She stuffed it into her school backpack with her books.

++++

Blake stared at Julianne’s body lying on Timothy Sabian’s bed.

“I didn’t kill her,” Timothy declared. “I found her.”

Blake wasn’t exactly sure what to think. “And you brought her here?”

“She was in my basement.”

“Not your car?”

“What?”

“You didn’t kill her when she was in the trunk of your car? That’s where she was in the photograph.”

He held out his phone and showed Timothy the picture of her corpse from the email.

“I don’t know anything about that photo.”

“You tell me that you didn’t kill her or send me her picture. Do you have access to the federal building in Manhattan? To the computers there?”

“I have no idea who sent that to you or how they might have taken that picture. No one else knew about . . .”

When he hesitated, Blake said, “What?”

“There was a man in a car who might have seen us together out by the riverfront.”

“Tell me about this man.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I didn’t get a good look at him. His car was some sort of sedan. But he had duct tape on his license plate. I noticed that.”

“Duct tape.”

“Yes. He saw me. He may have seen her. Maybe he’s the one who killed her and left me the note that she was in my basement. He could’ve also been the one who sent you the photo.”

The earnestness in the novelist’s voice led Blake to believe that he was being truthful.

Well, in that case, it resolved one issue—someone in addition to Timothy might have known about Julianne—but it left the bigger question unanswered: who was behind the photograph?

“Alright,” Blake said. “I want to look over your emails. The sent ones. If I don’t find any evidence that you routed that photo to me, I’ll leave. But if I find anything that leads me to think you emailed me that photograph of Miss Springman, we’re returning to the kitchen, and I’m going to pour you some coffee, now, while it’s still hot.”

++++

At our apartment, Christie and I found Tessa ready for school.

Christie walked her outside on her way to work, and I grabbed my computer bag and laptop.

It all seemed so typical, so normal, a slap in the face at the harsh travesty of Sasha’s death. Routine. Life goes on. In that mixed curse-and-blessing way, it has to. The metronomic movement of each day pulses past us, pressing us forward, on and on and on until we find death’s unyielding grip has found us too.