Chapter 63

THEY HAD THEIR answer.

Dance, Dennis Harutyun and Pike Madigan were in the tiny apartment of Alicia Sessions, and they were surveying the evidence they’d just uncovered. Cowboy boots, with needle-sharp toes, like those that made the prints behind Edwin’s house. And in the kitchen was neatsfoot oil for treating Alicia’s equestrian tack; Dance recalled her quarter horse bumper sticker and her love of riding. They found cartons of Marlboros in her apartment. The dwelling also was in the Tower District, near the hotel from which the email request for the fourth song had been sent.

But far more incriminating were the two garbage bags full of Edwin Sharp’s trash stolen from his house in Fresno, including receipts and some mail addressed to him in Seattle—to plant at Kayleigh’s, to convince the police and jury that Edwin was the one behind the attacks and that he had killed Kayleigh. And hidden under Alicia’s bed was Deputy Gabriel Fuentes’s pistol case—without the weapon—stolen from near the theater when the cop was tailing Edwin.

“Alicia knew where Gabriel was,” Dance had reminded them. “She was in the briefing at headquarters.”

At first they’d been unable to come up with a motive for setting up Edwin Sharp. But a moment ago Dance had learned the answer. To Madigan and Harutyun, she was displaying two dozen sheets of paper, all pretty much the same—attempts to forge Kayleigh’s handwriting on a note that read:

To who it may concern

Just want to say a few things to the people close to me if anything happens to me on the road … Can’t help but thinking about Patsy Cline in that airplane…. Well, if anything does, I’d like Alicia to take over as front for the band. She knows the songs as good as me and can hit those high notes better. And one more thing, I want you to have one hell of a party and make sure she sings “I’m in the Mood (for Rock ’n’ Roll),” which she inspired me to write.

I see you in heaven, luv you all!

Kayleigh

“Jesus,” Madigan muttered, “Kayleigh’s the fourth victim. The last verse. ‘Trouble can find us in the heart of our homes.’ Alicia’s going to kill her in her house.”

Dance ripped her phone from the holster and punched in the singer’s number.

I SHOULD WRITE a song about things like this, Kayleigh thought, thoroughly enjoying the bath, the soundtrack of Loretta Lynn, the violet scent of the candle she’d lit.

“The small pleasures,” she sang. No. “The little pleasures.” Scans better. The extra syllable helped.

It would be about how the tragedies in life, the things we can’t control, are often diminished, if not cancelled, by the small things.

“An antidote to pain.”

Nice line, she thought. Nobody’d ever used “antidote” in a song that she knew of. Good. But then … wait. Hold on. You don’t have to write a song every five minutes.

But she didn’t actually write them. She never did. That was the secret. They wrote themselves.