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“Did it occur to you that maybe that’s exactly what Liisa wanted? To make it look like I’m somehow involved.”
“If so, she did a damn good job.”
He looks up at her with pained eyes. “Why can’t you just trust me?”
“I…” Holly spins away and hurries out of the restaurant. She doesn’t stop until she reaches the traffic light on the corner. She glances over her shoulder, but Aaron is nowhere to be seen.
As she walks along the side street to her parking spot, she reviews their conversation in her head. She wants to believe Aaron, but she can’t risk doing so blindly. Not with such a huge unexplained coincidence like Liisa’s call to his office hanging over them.
As Holly reaches her car, she hears a noise and turns toward it. She can’t see much in the weak glow of the streetlights, but she hears what sounds like the rapid patter of footfalls. She thrusts a hand in her bag and fumbles to find the small can of pepper spray that she always carries. But the footsteps fade away.
Holly hurls herself into her car and slams the door shut, locking it immediately. Her hands shake as she yanks the car in gear and jerks it away from the curb.
Am I being paranoid?
She realizes there could be multiple harmless explanations for what she just heard. But she can’t help thinking of the glasses case she found lying outside her car door. And she remembers how Detective Rivers said that whoever broke into her car would have either used a sophisticated tracking device or one of Holly’s own keys.
Her hands freeze on the wheel.
I left my backup key at Aaron’s when I moved out.
CHAPTER 51
Friday, April 26
“Where’s Salvador?” Baljit demands, as she strides past Simon and into his house, clasping an aluminum mug that wafts the scent of espresso behind it.
“Didn’t you see the group text?” Reese asks from the chair where she has been sitting since she arrived five minutes earlier.
“Nope,” Baljit says. “I decided not to read the obits today.”
“Does everything have to be a cruel joke with you?” Reese snaps.
“Enough, you two!” Simon has to stop himself from adding a comment about catfights. Just the idea makes him imagine the two of them leashed and oiled up. But he forces the invasive fantasy out of mind. “Salvador said he had a work emergency.”
Baljit plunks herself down on a chair across from Reese. “An emergency for a fashion designer? That’s a thing?”
Reese shrugs. “Maybe he’s just scared of being anywhere near the rest of us.”
“Can you blame him?” Baljit asks.
It’s hard to argue Baljit’s point. Especially when Simon considers that, according to the Newport Beach Police Department’s Twitter feed, Liisa is still missing.
Reese looks from Simon to Baljit and back. “Maybe we should go speak to that detective who came to see you, Simon?”
Baljit grimaces. “And tell him what?”
“What we know about Liisa,” Reese says.
“Like what?”
“Among other things, like how she suggested that Dr. Danvers might have molested me, too, while I was under ketamine.”
“Not you, too?” Baljit squints at her. “She pulled that same crap on me!”
“You serious?” Simon groans. “Liisa was deliberately spreading false rumors about Dr. D?”
“She must have tried to plant that seed with all the women in the group,” Reese says. “Who knows if Elaine would’ve ever gone down that rabbit hole without Liisa’s encouragement?”
