“Jack’s real. And he knew about the poison.”

  Sanchez exhales into the line. “Okay, fine. Why don’t you catch me up to speed?”

  So I do: about Jack, about Fran’s bottle, about the swap.

  “Boy,” Sanchez says when I finish. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Murder doesn’t nap.”

  “Don’t hand it to the locals there,” Sanchez warns. “Fran and Harold might have friends on the force. I’ll hook you up with a guy I know in Salinas. Sheriff’s office. Name’s Delgado. Solid cop, keeps his mouth shut.”

  “Send me the address.”

  “Will do. And Jim? Be careful. You’re playing with rattlesnakes.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  I hang up as Cindy guides us toward the highway, the mist thinning and the landscape opening up.

  Salinas lies ahead... farm country. Rows of lettuce and strawberries blur past, the earth itself still smelling of damp soil and labor.

  “Steinbeck territory,” Cindy says softly, watching the fields blur past. “Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden… pretty much his whole canon. Wrote about this land like it was family.”

  I nod. “Read him in high school.”

  “The struggle, the heartbreak, the way he put ordinary people under a microscope.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” I say. “Though I might have added something about mice, men, and pearls.”

  “His novellas.”

  “His what now?”

  “Novellas,” Cindy repeats. “His short books.”

  I shoot her a grin. “I like short books.”

  “I know you do, Jim.”

  “Short books are books, too.”

  “I know. And they’re called novellas.”

  “Pretty sure you just made that word up.”

  “It’s a real thing, Jim.”

  “I want to believe you.”

  She smiles faintly, then turns to me. “Do you think Steinbeck would recognize this place today?”

  “Sure. He’d see the fields, the workers. Different century, same story: people overworked, land disappearing, heat and more heat.”

  In the compartment behind me, a plastic water bottle rattles in its lockbox, holding the last drops of poison that killed a young woman. Grim reminder of why we’re out here in the first place.

  “What he might also recognize,” I add, “are the dark hearts beating in some people.”

  Cindy nods. “Sadly, yes.”

  I exhale through my nose. “Let’s just hope this Delgado guy is as solid as Sanchez says.”

  Cindy places her hand over mine, firm and steady. For once, I don’t joke or pull away. We just drive, the two of us, as the road ahead narrows, winding its way toward Salinas.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Salinas Sheriff’s Office looks like a hundred other small-town government buildings I’ve seen before: beige walls, a flag out front, a couple of cruisers angled in the lot. Nothing about it says “trust me,” except Sanchez’s word, which is good enough for me.

  Inside, it smells of coffee, copier toner, and nervous sweat. Cindy and I don’t wait long before a stocky man in a plain brown detective jacket comes out to meet us. He’s built like a bulldog, square shoulders, cropped salt-and-pepper hair. His handshake is firm, dry, strong.

  “Jim Knighthorse?” he says. His voice has gravel in it, but not unfriendly.

  “That’s me. This is Cindy Darwin. You must be Detective Delgado.”

  He nods once. “Sanchez tells me you’ve got something delicate. Let’s see it.”

  We follow him down a short hallway into a cramped office with filing cabinets lining the walls. On his desk sits a half-empty bottle of water, a stack of case files, and, to my mild amusement, a dog-eared copy of The Grapes of Wrath.

  I make a mental note to be sure not to mix up the water bottles.

  I nod toward the book. “Angry grapes,” I say, then catch myself. “Sorry, that’s what we called it in high school. What I remember most is it highlighting the desperate conditions and injustices faced by migrant families at the time. The book gave them a voice.”

  Delgado’s eyes lift from the file. He studies me, and the hard edge in his face softens just a fraction. “Most people don’t remember what Steinbeck was trying to do. Respect, Knighthorse. The man had the eyes to see what others didn’t.”

  “Then you’ll appreciate this.” I set the towel-wrapped water bottle on his desk and peel it back. “Our prime piece of evidence in a poisoning back at the Gull’s Nest Inn.”

  Delgado leans in, studying it without touching. His expression doesn’t change, but I catch the flicker of interest in his eyes. The liquid has a faint yellow-green tint, just enough to make you wonder if it had sat in the sun too long.

  “Looks ordinary enough,” he says. “But I’ll run it.”

  “How long?” I ask.

  “A few hours for a prelim. Maybe a day for full tox.”

  “Hours I can handle. Days, we might not have. We’re looking for a little girl, too.”

  Delgado exhales through his nose. “Sounds like you ran into a buzzsaw up here.”

  “Been an interesting few days,” I say.

  He studies me for a long second, then nods. “You’ll get the first call when I know more.” His gaze meets mine, steady. “You’ve got Sanchez’s trust. That’s enough for me.”

  “Appreciate that. Same here.”

  He leans back, folding his arms. “Until next time. Now, what’s this about a missing girl?”

  I fill him in, careful to admit she’s not officially missing, not yet. But the worry sits heavy between us.

  Delgado’s jaw works side to side. “Let me know how I can help.”

  Chapter Twenty

  My phone buzzes just past midnight. As Cindy stirs beside me, I slip out of bed and walk over to the window, where I answer the blocked call.

  “Go for Knighthorse,” I say.

  “Delgado here,” comes the gravel voice. “You wanted results fast. You got ’em.”

  I straighten. “Talk to me.”

  “Autopsy came back first. Your Claire Holt/Andrea Clemmons died of poisoning. Strong, fast-acting stuff. Enough to put her down before she knew what hit her.”

  I close my eyes. Not good, but not surprising, either. Just confirmation of what I already knew in my gut.

  “And the bottle?” I ask.

  “Here’s where it gets tricky. The drops of wine you brought me? Yeah, it’s tainted. But not with a full lethal dose. Traces only. Enough to make somebody sick, not enough to kill ’em.”

  I rub the back of my neck. “So either she had a second glass…”

  “Or a second bottle,” Delgado finishes. “Which means whoever served her had access to more than one poisoned batch.”

  There’s a pause on the line. Then Delgado says, “There’s another thing. This isn’t just rat poison or some junk you grab off a shelf. The lab says it’s a restricted compound, something usually tied to agriculture. Pesticide-grade. Somebody had to source it.”

  “Well, we are in the Salinas Valley. Farm country.”

  “Exactly. Which means this runs deeper than a couple of innkeepers slipping poison into a bottle. Somebody funneled it in. And that somebody probably doesn’t want you sniffing around, either.”

  I thank him, hang up, and stand there awhile, staring into the night. Behind me, Cindy whispers from bed, “Bad news?”

  “Not bad news, per se,” I say. “Just bigger.”

  ***

  It’s a few hours later, gray morning pressing down heavy. The ocean crashes below the cliffs, loud enough you’d think someone could harness it for energy. Maybe Tesla can. Or Elon Musk. I tend to get those two mixed up.

  “Is Elon Musk also Tesla?” I ask Cindy innocently enough.

  “No, my dear. Elon owns a company called Tesla.”

  “He owns Tesla, but isn’t Tesla, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is he the face of Tesla?”

  “Yes.”

  I nod sagely. “Then Tesla is Elon.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Wait, which one is the inventor?”

  “Nikola Tesla. But Elon helped make the electric car viable, mass-producible.”

  “So Elon’s an inventor, too?”

  “I’d say Elon’s more of a businessman.”

  “Did he start Tesla?”

  “Yes. Well, he came in early.”

  I frown. “Did Tesla ever work at Tesla?”

  Cindy groans. “No, Jim. Tesla died in 1943. Pretty sure he never punched a timecard.”

  I sip my coffee, nod again sagely. “And I’m pretty sure none of this helped me.”

  “You still think Elon is Tesla, don’t you?”

  “Unless proven otherwise.”

  Cindy shakes her head. “God help us all.”

  “Indeed.”

  We’re sitting at the little table just outside our room, two steaming mugs between us, the poison report still fresh in my head.

  “So,” Cindy says, tucking her legs beneath her. “Restricted pesticide, huh?”

  I nod. “Not exactly something you pick up at Trader Joe’s.”

  “Which narrows our list,” she adds. “The question is, who here has access… and motive?”

  I drum my fingers on the table. “Whoever used it had to keep an eye on it, and keep it hidden.”

  Cindy tilts her head. “Fran and Harold are obvious. But they’re not the ones crawling around the basement and fixing boilers.”

  I nod. “That’d be Eddie Owens.”

  “The handyman. He might have access to something like that.”

  “Or know someone who does.”

  “Yikes.”

  “So, Mr. Boiler Room,” I say. “Who nobody saw the night Claire died.”

  “But since it was poison, it didn’t really matter where he was.”

  “True. The evil act had already been committed.”

  “By Fran,” Cindy says, her voice low.

  I tap the table. “Claire basically spelled it out in that letter. She thought Fran and Harold were dirty, and now Fran’s switching bottles at dinner.”

  “Exactly,” Cindy says. “But the poison in the bottle wasn’t strong enough to kill her.”

  “Unless,” I add, “she wasn’t meant to die. Just meant to get a warning.”

  “Like a message: back off.”

  “Yeah. But it’s not like pesticide comes with murder instructions. Wrong dose, wrong victim, and things get out of hand.”

  “So maybe the wine alone didn’t do it,” Cindy says slowly. “What if someone finished her off later? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “The sand dollar?”

  “Yes!”

  “You think someone dipped it in poison and shoved it into a still-living Claire to finish the job?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Would’ve been easier to just smother her with a pillow.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Just saying. But one thing’s certain: there was poison in that wine bottle, even if not enough to kill her.”

  “Jim, will they try to match what was in the bottle to what they found inside her?”

  “Delgado said they would. Might take a few days to confirm.”

  “I’m betting they match,” Cindy says, folding her arms. “Which means…”

  “Fran’s been a very naughty girl.”

  “You think she had help?”

  “Maybe. Somebody had to make her scheme work. And Eddie’s the guy who knows every corner of this place: basements, crawlways, service halls. If that girl Mrs. Ringwald saw in the hallway was being trafficked, Eddie’s the one who could make her vanish. Slip her through the walls, move her like freight.”

  Cindy’s eyes widen. “So he’d be the usher. Sneaking kids in and out like ghosts. Nobody questions the handyman.”

  “Exactly. You see him with a toolbox, you figure he’s fixing pipes. Not smuggling people.”

  Silence stretches heavy.

  Finally, Cindy says, “So the letter, the poison, the wine, the girl in the hallway… it all circles back to Eddie.”

  “You’re pretty good at this, Professor Darwin.”

  “I learned from the best.”

  I smile and take a long sip of coffee. “Our Mr. Fix-It might just be fixing things nobody’s supposed to notice.”

  And that makes him ten times more dangerous than Fran.

  Cindy pushes her cup aside. “So what do we do now?”

  “Find Eddie,” I say. “If anyone knows where the skeletons are buried in this place, it’s him.”

  “Or hidden,” she adds.

  “Exactly. And if he’s not around, then we check his favorite excuse.”

  “The boiler room.”

  I stand, grabbing my jacket. “Let’s see if Mr. Fix-It is fixing anything today.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The stairs to the basement creak under our weight, every groan seemingly echoing throughout the whole damn place. Cindy’s right behind me, her breath steady but quick.

  The air grows colder the farther down we go. Damp concrete. Rusted pipes and random screws sticking out of the concrete foundation. A strong smell of mildew mixes with motor oil. It smells like things left abandoned.

  At the bottom, a bare bulb swings, throwing jittery shadows across the cinderblock walls. The boiler itself looms in the corner, squat and hulking, pipes hissing faintly, a giant coiled metal snake.

  “Eddie’s domain,” I whisper.

  I scan the cluttered shelves: tools, coils of wire, a stack of paint cans. Everything looks ordinary. Maybe even too ordinary. Anyone searching for something nefarious might stop right here, and chalk the place up as an everyday basement.

  Perhaps an ordinary detective.

  I use my phone’s flashlight to check the floor. Thick dust. Some scuff marks. A faint drag line, like something heavy had been pulled across the concrete.

  “Here,” I murmur. I follow the drag line to a set of shelves bolted into the wall. Except… the bolts aren’t screwed all the way in. Someone loosened them.

  No ordinary detective, indeed!

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” says Cindy behind me.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You said something about being no ordinary detective.”

  “Oops. That was supposed to be internal.”

  “You meant to think that.”

  “Exactly. Internal monologue fail. But also, I am.”

  “I know, Jim. Let’s focus. What sparked that internal/external confusion?”

  I show her the bolts.

  “Nice catch.”

  I say nothing, though I stand a little taller.

  “You want to say, ‘I know,’ don’t you?”

  “I do, yes. But don’t want to seem cocky.”

  “I think that rooster flew out the window long ago, Jim. So, cock-a-doodle away.”

  “Never mind. The moment is gone, but yeah, I know.”

  Pretty sure Cindy rolled her eyes, but I can’t see them in the dark. I’ll just assume she did. History’s on my side. Meanwhile, Cindy and I shove. The shelf groans, then pivots outward just enough to reveal a crack of darkness. A hidden gap in the wall.

  My stomach knots.

  We squeeze inside. A narrow space, more crawlway than hallway, just wide enough for a normal person to slip through. I’ve got to turn sideways and duck. Six-foot-four-inches with linebacker (or fullback) shoulders doesn’t exactly scream “built for crawlspaces.” The air is close, stale. A single light bulb dangles unlit. And there, shoved against the back wall, is the pink, child-sized backpack.

  The same one the girl had been clutching in the surveillance footage.

  Cindy gasps, hands flying to her mouth.

  I crouch and unzip it. Inside: a half-empty juice box, a crumpled drawing of a mermaid, a little plastic hairbrush with strands of brown hair caught in the bristles.

  Cindy’s whisper trembles. “She was here. Jim… she is here.”

  I zip the backpack back shut, jaw tight. The pipes hiss again, almost like laughter.

  Someone is about to get their ass kicked.

  Spoiler alert: it’s not going to be mine.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I’m still holding the pink backpack when the floor above us groans. Cindy’s eyes dart up. Then heavy steps thud down the stairs, one at a time, slow and deliberate.

  Eddie fills the doorway, his frame broader than I remembered, his limp gone like it was a costume he shrugged off. In his hands: a wrench the size of a Louisville Slugger.

  “Well,” he growls, voice thick as oil, “someone’s trespassing.”

  I straighten, set the backpack aside, and step between him and Cindy. “Nice wrench,” I say. “Overcompensating much?”

  His lip curls. “Have you seen the size of you? You’re lucky I didn’t bring my shotgun down.”

  He barely finishes before swinging for my head. The wrench whistles past my ear, close enough to stir my hair. I duck, drive my shoulder into his gut, and shove him back a step. He grunts but doesn’t go down. Big man, solid core. Too bad mine’s bigger, and I’m trained to tackle.

  We crash to the cement. As we do his elbow slams my neck, pain flaring down my spine. Lucky shot.

  I spin and smash a fist into his ribs. He gasps, swings the wrench again. It clips my elbow, then detonates against the cinderblock wall, showering us with dust.

  “Jim!” Cindy cries.

  “I’m fine,” I grunt, just as Eddie’s fist cracks against my temple. Damn it, got distracted. Not again. The dude’s got a knack for landing lucky shots.

  I plant my feet and drive a hammer-fist into his head. He answers with a knee to my groin, shoving me up on my toes. The wrench comes down again.

  Enough with that damn thing.

  I raise my arm, blocking his, bone on bone. A twist, and the wrench is mine. I fling it across the floor... and might’ve taken a fingernail with it. His, not mine.

  And that’s when Cindy does the unexpected.

  She grabs an empty metal pail off the shelf, cocks her arm like a softball pitcher, and swings. The clang echoes like a church bell as it smashes into Eddie’s forehead.