Luke’s helpful ride to school this morning takes on a new meaning. The harping on about Suzanne driving me.

“We have to get serious about all of them,” Ben says. “Find out why Luke is lying, how far Grace would go, and why Gabriel was brought in for questioning.”

“And Mayor Bergen,” I pipe up. Ben doesn’t yet know my latest revelation.

“He’s having an affair,” I assert. “I overheard him arguing with Diana Martinez this afternoon. The police are asking her about it.”

“Is he sleeping with her? Secretary cliché?”

“No, not Diana. She said she hoped she was wrong about who it was. It can’t be her.”

I cross the room to the murder board. Fiddle with the note card labeled MAYOR BRADLEY BERGEN. Trace the red thread to a card about the screaming match before the game. Ben appears with a new note card that says AFFAIR and pins it to the board. There’s nothing about the medical examiner’s report or the insulin. That’ll stay our secret.

“Natalie must have known about her father,” he says. I wind a fresh line of red string around the pushpin, trace it back to the mayor’s card.

I nod slowly, piecing it together. “The fight wasn’t only about a dress.”

“Blackmail,” Ben says, completing my thought. He completes a lot of things. I follow his jawline and land on his ocean-blue eyes.

“Thanks for doing this with me,” I say.

“I should be thanking you,” he replies. “If your whole Grace theory is correct, I need to watch my back. And you should be careful, too. If Suzanne was collateral damage, I might have to spend a lot more time with you.”

I find I don’t mind the idea of that. But his comment also brings me back to the Grace theory. Which conflicts with the Natalie-dad-blackmail theory.

Ben catches my pout. “What?”

“If it is Grace, then none of the rest of it matters. The mayor, Luke, Gabriel. Natalie’s blackmail scheme. It seems too…”

“Coincidental?” Ben finishes for me.

“Complicated,” I say. “Convoluted. So many people had a reason to hate Natalie, and so many alibis are up in the air. So many threads. We’re no closer than when we started. If anything, we’re worse off.”

“Then we’ll kill several birds with one stone. You said you have the school master key?”

“Yeah, why?”

“We’ll check the CCTV footage from outside the stadium. See who went where and when. It’ll catch us up with whatever the sheriff knows, since you said Amber’s not sharing much anymore.”

“You mean now?”

Panic streaks through me, picturing us clad all in black, breaking into the school under the cover of night.