He Will be My Ruin

“And Grady gets jealous? Angry?” I can’t picture him angry.

But I also can’t picture him paying Celine for sex.

“Maybe. We don’t know that,” Doug says. “But Jace said that Grady wanted exclusivity and here she is dating another man.”

“She bangin’ Everett?” Zac asks.

“Don’t know. Do we know?” Doug frowns at me in question.

“He never said. I never asked.” If I had to guess, I’d say yes. Jace doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to last too many dates without one of them ending with breakfast.

“So, she’s dating Everett, getting paid to screw Grady, and then fast-forward almost two months, and with her mother’s medical bills mounting and the last-minute travel she’s booking, Celine decides to meet with an old client at a hotel to make some extra money. Everett sees her while she’s out with the client and ends it with her, that night we saw on tape. Everett screws his assistant not long after, and Celine finds out about it. Two weeks later, he finds the jump drive and blackmail note on his desk. He goes to her apartment and accuses her of it. She denies it. Assuming she’s telling the truth, then the question is, who would do that? Out of everyone in Celine’s life, only Grady has the skill to hack into her computer and her camera to watch her. And if he expected to have her all to himself, he wouldn’t have liked what he saw on that video. So he decided to blackmail Jace Everett with it.”

I frown. “Why not blackmail Celine, though? She’s the one he’s angry at.”

“Because she doesn’t have any money. Because he still cares about her. Because he wants to end any chance of Everett ever coming back. Plenty of reasons.”

“But she may have already ended their arrangement, like she told Jace she would the night they broke up.”

“If the guy’s been stalking her for the past however many months, it’s not over just because she says it is,” Zac says.

I guess that’s true. “How would Grady even get into Jace’s office at FCM?”

“Probably replicated a visitor pass card and got into the building security mainframe.” Zac waves it away, as if it’s all child’s play. “I’m working on the camera feed playback for FCM. It’s not as easy.”

“Okay. Fine. But then Jace doesn’t pay up, and nothing happens.”

“Maybe Grady has a change of heart,” Doug says. “Or maybe Celine knew enough about Grady’s computer skills by then to figure out that it was him who hacked her computer. Jace told you that he went to her apartment to confront her about the blackmail, right?”

I think back to the night of the charity ball, the night this entire case shifted. “Yes.”

“Maybe Celine questioned Grady about it and he panicked. Blackmail and invasion of privacy are serious offenses. He’d earn jail time if Celine went to the police. And with that, we could have our motive for killing her.”

I scan the board again. We have a lot of solid information, but it’s trailing off in too many maybes. My eyes settle on the bottom right corner of the whiteboard, a boxed-off section that reads “vase.” It’s an outlier, with no direct connection to the other sequence of events, but with dollar signs and a large question mark above it. “So where does this vase come in?”

“Celine bought it on November eighth, based on her records. That’s a week before she died. But there’s no mention of that bowl—the gift for Everett’s mother that you saw in his apartment—anywhere.”

True. I chew the inside of my mouth in thought. Why wouldn’t she document it, like she had everything else? A thought strikes me. “Because her records are for her collection. That bowl was always meant to be a gift.”

Doug pauses. “That would make sense. So she found the dragon vase, started researching it that week, got excited by what she thought she had found. Was ready to post about it on her blog. Was probably typing up the post when Jace Everett came over that night to pick up the gift.”

“He said she was drunk and emotional.”

“I can see why,” Zac mutters more to himself, shaking his head.

“So if what Jace says is true, and she was fine—albeit ‘drunk and emotional,’ but alive—when he left, then Grady could have used the window to slip in.” He says he fixed that lock a week before Celine died, but maybe he didn’t fix it until after, to hide his method of access. I have to question everything Grady’s ever told me. “But there were no signs of a struggle, no screaming or fighting that anyone reported.”

“Anyone being the two senior citizens with hearing aids?” Zac reminds us. “She’s got Ruby across the hall and Mr. Sherwood next door. Plus, she was drunk. Maybe they ‘reconciled,’ ” Zac air quotes, earning my frown.

Doug quickly dismisses it. “Autopsy says there was no evidence of sexual intercourse that night.”

“So Grady slipped the drugs into her drink without her knowing. And then took her phone and diary, to hide anything that might connect the two of them.”

“They were talking, and she tells him about the vase—she would have been excited, how could she not tell somebody?—and then she passes out and he can’t help but take it.”

“Or maybe Jace somehow smuggled it out in that box when she wasn’t paying attention, and Grady killed her out of anger and fear, and it has nothing to do with the vase.”

Doug sighs. “Maybe.” He sets the marker down. “Or maybe no one killed her. Maybe that part happened just like the police report said it did.”

I still refuse to believe that, even though the logical side of me says I should at least consider it. That there was much more going on in Celine’s world than I had any idea of, and in a moment of weakness, it might have felt like too much for her to bear.

How much of what we’re conjuring is true? All of it? None of it? While these revelations about Grady make me sick, I feel like we’re getting closer than ever to the truth.

My ringing phone cuts into the sudden quiet in the basement. I don’t want to answer it, but I could also use the distraction.

“It’s Hans,” I mutter, looking at the screen before I answer. “Hey.”

“I just got a call from my friend over at an auction house in the Garment District. You are not going to believe this!” He’s practically stumbling over his words, he’s talking so fast. “A man by the name of James just left a message for him on his voice mail, asking him to call him back about a vase that he would like to have appraised. He left a phone number and everything.”