Owen closed the voice mail app, his fingers firm on the edge of the case so as not to accidentally hit a delete command out of habit. He’d be listening to that message again. He was sure of it.

What the fuck was this guy playing at?

Jonathan, the Jonathan, put his head up like a prairie dog in the middle of all of this shit and acted as if Marcelline had died at the scene. He seemed completely unaware that Owen knew, firsthand, that she hadn’t. Which, if he wasn’t lying, would only mean that he hadn’t spoken to her since that night. And that meant she’d been telling Owen the truth. She and Jonathan weren’t partners.

The air felt thick in Owen’s throat.

The other possibility was that perhaps she’d not made it far after her little joyride in the Mercedes. Maybe she’d tried, but never made it back to Jonathan and their plan. Maybe she died of a blood clot or sepsis as a fevered Jane Doe in some undiscovered place, and Owen had for years been looking for someone who didn’t exist anymore. It would explain some things.

He caught himself gripping the seat’s edge in his fist. He flexed the painful lock out of his knuckles and blew out a big deep breath. Now what?

There was no coincidence that Jonathan had surfaced after all this time, ho-humming aloud—today—if Owen knew that the painting was still available. You’re a ham-handed little asshole sometimes, aren’t you, Jonathan?

The delivery of the message had been smooth enough, but the real question still blared out around the polished edges. This wasn’t simply about what Jonathan wanted Owen to think of him. This was about what Jonathan wanted to know. Had Owen seen the video? Jonathan wanted to know what kind of trouble he was in, and then how to get out of it.

And what kind of trouble was he in from Owen?

The Anningers had cooled toward Owen considerably after what had gone wrong that night. Blue blood had stripped cunning from them as surely as it had dialed up the sensitivity in their asses for a pea under a stack of mattresses. Their punishments were blunt and unsophisticated. Petty. They rolled their eyes at him and had relegated him to a series of dull special projects that made him want to break jaws just to keep himself awake.

He had an ear and an eye for the structure of it all, why they were the way they were. But he never had a reason to talk about it outside the few conversations he’d had with Marcelline. He’d lost himself in that connection, in those exchanges that brushed the line of what was not okay to say about the people they both worked for.