Page 105 of Without a Clue

“I’m up,” I say, jolting up with the realization I was drifting asleep again.

I look around, disoriented.

I’m sitting on top of my bed, surrounded by papers and my computer and tablet. My hair is in a high bun flat on top of my head. My glasses are crooked since I slept in them. I look like I was plotting a heist. An Ivy League law student who forgot to study for the final exam. A corporate executive in one of those movies who ends up leaving the life of the city to find her huntsman in the woods.

I reach up.

Nash, quite unjustly, looks remarkably well.

He stands in front of me holding out a cup of coffee.

“Thank you,” I say, which, unfortunately for me, comes out far more like a croak than in the sultry tone I would have preferred.

Let’s just say, it would be very nice to be more put together than I am right now.

“No problem, Kermit,” he says with a smile. He gestures to the pile surrounding me. “So. Are you . . . pulling off a heist?”

“I kept brainstorming after you fell asleep,” I say, adjusting my glasses.

“And this is the method to your madness?”

“Little bit, yeah.”

He picks up one of the handwritten pages I obliterated with haphazard writing.

Turns the page horizontal.

Turns it another ninety degrees.

“Hugh always said you were a mad author waiting to happen. This is definitely mad author behavior.” He looks to his right. “Did you pin notes to the wall?”

“I’ll tag it to Crystal’s bill.” I take a restorative sip of my coffee.

“Did you”—he squints at a sheet on the wall—“make up your own personalized background check for the guests on board? ‘Donna Richardson. Fifty-eight. Two dogs. Questionable son. Could be link. Martin Richardson, son of Donna Richardson. Twenty-nine. Norton, Indiana. Second DUI in 2007 . . .’”

His voice fades as he looks at me.

It’s the face of someone who saw their crush pick a lock with a dryer pin the night before and then woke up to said person hanging stalker-level research on the walls.

Like I say, it’s good Nash knew me through my more composed season of life.

I shrug. “I realized something fully last night. I can’t trust Pogache as far as I can throw him. So I’m going to do my best myself.”

“How many people have you gone through?”

“One hundred and seventy-three. Twenty-two are on the highly suspicious list. I’m going to dig deeper into them today when I’m not interviewing.”

He drops the page from his fingers and it flutters to the top of the bed. Picks up another.

“Hugh has gotten at me plenty of times for how much I research. But this—”

“That’s why Hugh needed me. At least, that’s why he said he needed me. I like to see things up close and personal, from every angle, before making a decision. And once I make it”—I swallow, remembering the years dedicated blindly to Michael—“it’s final. For better or worse. So. I like research.”

I look around the room that yes, more so than usual, looks like the science laboratory for Frankenstein.

“Did you find new suspects?” he says.

“Only about a hundred.”