Jessie started to go back through the suspects she’d reviewed previously to look at them through this new prism of passion rather than fear. Just then an email alert popped up on her laptop. It was from the Media Tracking Unit. The message was a single line:

“One media engagement found one requested matter, with relevant video.”

The video was attached. She opened it. Immediately, a news hit from a local station began to play. It was from yesterday, detailing the sad death of a young woman in the Studio City home she rented. As footage from the scene played, the voiceover said the police weren’t commenting but her roommate confirmed that the woman was stabbed to death.

Just before the reporter’s concluding standup, there was a small clip of B-roll showing several investigators walking around inside the house. The glare from the window made it hard to see much detail. The camera zoomed in to get a better view. It was still hard to discern identities. But one of the investigators was a tall brunette with her hair in a ponytail. If someone already knew what she looked like, they would easily be able to identify her as Jessie Hunt. Clearly, Xander Thurman had been watching and done just that.

Equipped with that information and the address of the house, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to have learned the victim’s identity, find the LOL site, hire or threaten someone to hack it, and read the same texts she had, ultimately drawing his own conclusion as to the killer’s identity.

If he was on the side of the angels, we could actually use his skills.

The dark irony that her father would have made a pretty good profiler made her smile slightly before she got serious again. She had to assume, based on this new knowledge, that her father wasn’t just blowing smoke and really did know who killed Claire. So she could take as credible his words to Ryan: “You’re wrong. Look again.”

That answered her first question: What does that mean?

Of course her second question—why is he saying it—still hung over her like a cloud threatening to open into a downpour. But for now, she chose to ignore it.

Armed with something approaching certainty, she went back through the suspects, looking for anyone who might be motivated by passion. But still, there was nothing. Well, not quite nothing. She did notice something odd that she’d missed before.

In one of the text exchanges between Claire and Milton Jerebko, several weeks after they’d clearly been seeing each other, he asked for her email address. She gave it in her next reply. There was no other reference to the request in future texts, which continued for weeks until the whole blackmail thing reared its head.

Why ask for her email address and then keep communicating via texts on the app? It didn’t seem to make any sense.

“Hey,” she said, looking up at Dolan and speaking to him for the first time in what felt like hours.