She opened the attachment, which was a jpeg photograph taken with her own phone. She saw herself. Justin had taken a picture of her in front of a restaurant called The Crab Shack on Gandy Road. They’d eaten there several months earlier and spent hours over beer and Chesapeake-style blue crabs, hammering and picking meat from the tiny bodies. It was a happy memory. She looked carefree in the photo, with a big smile on her face, mugging and pointing her thumb over her shoulder. The restaurant, which was a tin-roof dive, was behind her, its exterior packed with kitschy decorations. A Landshark surfboard. A neon lobster in the window. Beer buckets and scrap metal crabs.

Peach studied the photo, and when the glow of her memory faded, she looked at it again and thought: That’s not right.

Something was wrong, something odd, but the more she looked at it, the less she trusted her instincts. It was just an old photo. She’d seen it before. No big deal. And then she thought: Why would Justin send me this again? Why that photo? Why that night of all nights?

She sat in the darkness, but she had no answers. She clicked the Send button, and almost immediately her phone beeped as the e-mail arrived at her account.

Peach opened the second unsent message. This one was to Ogden Bush. It read simply: I need to see you.

Justin was trying to meet with Bush the night before he was killed, but he never sent the e-mail. Something secret was going on between Justin and Bush. That was what Deacon had suspected: Ogden had him under his thumb.

Peach logged off the account and switched off her monitor. The office was black, so she took a flashlight from her desk drawer. Following the light, she left her cubicle and made her way along the rear wall to Bush’s office. The door was closed and locked, but that didn’t matter. This had been Deacon’s office until Bush bumped him out to a smaller desk during the campaign. Peach had a key, and she let herself inside.

The office smelled like Ogden Bush, which meant it smelled like heavy, expensive cologne. She cast her light around the room. Even in the short time he’d worked here, he’d filled the office with personal memorabilia. Photos of himself with Democratic politicians and Miami hip-hop celebs. Headlines from winning campaigns and from scandals that had engulfed his opponents. Plaques from Florida charities. College trophies for tennis. He carried his huge ego and his high-powered connections with him wherever he went.

Peach spotted the filing cabinet behind his desk. Using her flashlight, she quickly opened and shuffled through his desk drawers. She figured he kept a backup key in the office, and she was right. When she yanked open the bottom-most cubbyhole drawer, she found a silver key taped underneath it.