The Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco by Michelle Chouinard

Author:Michelle Chouinard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

I don’t know how long I sat staring at my laptop’s screen processing what I’d just seen.

Not the insider-trading part, that much seemed pretty clear-cut. What worried me was why Sylvia had kept the recording. Normally you’d want to get rid of information that could send good friends to jail as soon as possible. She’d made a specific decision to keep an admission that incriminated her friend, and there was only one reason to do that.

She intended to use it.

But how? Was it a coincidence that she’d demanded Nancy come over Monday afternoon for a reason she didn’t explain? The most likely explanation was that, due to her newly dire circumstances, Sylvia had decided the day to pressure Nancy had come. Had Sylvia wanted some sort of entrée into Luminous Face? But if that were so, she would have used the recording long before. More likely what she wanted was help from Nancy’s husband, the finance king. If he’d been willing to leverage inside information to help his wife out, maybe he’d trade a little more to help Sylvia, if it kept him and his wife out of jail.

And blackmail was an extremely compelling motive for murder. Nancy or Robert might have decided they’d rather get rid of Sylvia than be at her beck and call in perpetuity.

Thoughts whizzed and buzzed around my head like a cloud of meth-infested bees. The scenario would explain why Sylvia had gone out alone that night; she wouldn’t have wanted Philip to know she was trying her hand at blackmail, and a quick stroll around the corner to the Presidio to meet Robert and/or Nancy wouldn’t have seemed dangerous. It also explained why she left her phone behind—if she was doing something illegal, she wouldn’t have wanted location data to track her.

I only had Nancy’s word that Sylvia had asked her to meet Monday afternoon and not Sunday night. But why not pretend there was never any meeting to start with? Because she had to account for her phone call to Sylvia. The first thing the police would do is check Sylvia’s phone records, and they’d see she’d called Nancy the night she died. Or maybe Nancy really had thought she was coming to deal with Sylvia on Monday, but without telling her, Robert had dealt with the problem the night before.

It was a strong theory, and for the first time I had some solid evidence in the recording.

My eyes fell on the first memory card again. If Sylvia hadn’t bothered to password protect an incriminating video about her friend, what the hell was on the memory card she had felt the need to password protect? I needed to see for myself, but I couldn’t get into the card.

Luckily, I knew someone who could.

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