What was most concerning was the tweet’s life. It had lasted for all of thirteen seconds. The social media manager’s software scoured Facebook and Twitter regularly, so if a tweet existed at all that they needed to know about, they heard about it. Killing a tweet didn’t make it cease to exist. It only made the tweet more worrisome.

Tomorrow’s story could be anything. It could be about a new poll revealing Conroy’s lead. Or it could be about something else entirely. But given that Casey, and Denkler, hoped to dominate social media with their change-the-conversation news in a few more days, she didn’t like the enemy playing in her sandbox, nor preening over it in advance.

That’s why she was at the art gallery Rebel on Third and Seventy-Sixth, nibbling on a cracker and pretending to sip wine as Conroy chatted up donors in the corner. He stood next to a pricey piece of abstract art, and she half wondered if some of the wealthy patrons backing him had created the image of two red squares inside a blue one.

She’d infiltrated the event in the simplest way possible. She’d found it online, then bought a ticket under a fake name via Eventbrite. The cocktail party was being thrown to thank the biggest donors to the campaign so far, and Casey hoped she’d be able to pick up a clue, any clue, simply by circulating. She’d figured out the thin, baby-faced man was the press spokesperson, that the blond man was the chief of staff, and that the guy with slick dark hair was the campaign manager. She’d put those pieces together from her earlier digging into Conroy. But she couldn’t figure out who the guy in the suit with the short dark hair was. He wore thick, black glasses, and he had the press guy’s ear, whispering throughout the event.

She took her phone from her purse, pretended to scroll through photos, and snapped a shot of the two of them.

Casually, as if she were just anyone in attendance, she mingled and circulated, walking past them a few times.

But by the time the event started to wind down, she’d learned nothing more about tomorrow’s papers, so she hoped it had simply been a social media slip-up. Surely those happened all the time. Even so, she dumped the photos in a reverse image search when she returned home to her laptop. She found the guy with glasses. He was second-in-command at a strategy firm that specialized in campaigns. She Googled him some more, and found his nickname

The Spin Doctor.

The moniker made her skin crawl. She closed her laptop. She fired off some of the photos to her brother, adding her usual assortment of silly captions.

Good thing she hadn’t given up the sex toy business to become a detective, she mused. Besides, it was probably just an errant tweet.

Michelle looked at Jack as the plane landed.