THE ONLINE STALKING COULD EASILY BE ACCOMPLISHED ON HER OWN laptop, and in her own hotel room—alone and isolated in her own Avery Mason bubble of safety. But tonight she refused to allow rational thought to win out over mirthful. She and Walt felt they had made a small break in the case, and she felt a thrill from working together. She was enjoying his company and knew that working late in his hotel room was a potential conduit to intimacy. When this first occurred to her after they finished reviewing the crime scene photos, Avery’s instincts had been to grab her purse and leave, her mind dominated as it were with troubling worries that being intimate with a man would somehow expose her as a fraud. But she decided that her entire existence could not be spent in a perpetual state of flux and fear. At some point she would have to either merge her two lives—the fraudulent with the honest—or decide to leave one of them behind.

This battle was taking place inside her head as she sat next to Walt on the couch while he typed the names into the search engine. They had decided to start with the spouses, and it didn’t take long to find Cameron Young’s widow and Victoria Ford’s widower.

“Jasper Ford is a real estate agent here in New York,” Walt said. “That’s how they met.”

“Who?”

“The Fords and the Youngs. They met when Jasper Ford sold Cameron and Tessa the Catskills home. They became friends after that. Tessa Young mentioned it during one of her interviews.”

They stalked Jasper Ford for a while but found nothing interesting. Eventually, they turned their attention to Tessa Young. Cameron Young’s widow was a fifty-five-year-old professor of English literature at Columbia. She was remarried and, according to Whitepages.com, lived in a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. She had a twenty-year-old daughter who was a junior at Boston College.

“Look at this,” Walt said. He had Tessa’s Facebook page open and was scrolling through her timeline. “Nearly every post from this summer was made on her sailboat. And she belongs to the New York Yacht Club.”

Avery leaned over to look at the images.

“That’s another part of their history,” Walt said. “Tessa and Cameron were avid sailors. They invited Jasper and Victoria out for a sail after they closed on the Catskills mansion. They became friends after that.”

“The lady would certainly know how to tie a bowline knot,” Avery said. “And if Tessa had found out about the affair . . .”

Walt sat back from his computer and took a deep breath. “Let’s not jump to conclusions we can’t prove. Other than a flimsy theory on knots, nothing puts Tessa Young at the crime scene.”

Avery looked back at the monitor. “Maybe I’ll reach out to her.”