Spenser stopped pacing, planting her hands on the back of her chair, and leaned over. “Who is Aunt Yoli?”

Amanda’s face lit up with a soft, nostalgic smile.

“Yoli was our dad’s younger sister. She was… eccentric—”

“I think eccentric undersells things,” Jacob piped in. “She was batcrap crazy.”

“Eccentric,” Amanda corrected. “She was an artist.”

“Depending on your definition of the word art,” Jacob muttered.

“My brother doesn’t like Yoli because she could be… flighty.”

“Once, she forgot I was with her and left me at the zoo. By myself in the reptile house,” he argued. “Do you even understand how traumatizing that is for a six-year-old? I hate snakes and lizards to this day because of that incident.”

“You really need to let go of that,” Amanda said with a laugh. “It’s not like she left you in a cage with a snake.”

“Close enough. I was in a room, alone, surrounded by all things slithery and scaly.”

“You really need to talk to somebody about that,” Amanda said.

“I have.”

“You have some deep-seated issues, my brother.”

“Growing up in our family, it was hard to avoid them.”

“Okay, that’s probably fair,” Amanda said. “Anyway, Yoli was like that. She’d get caught up in her head with some creative vision and she’d shut the world out. That day at the zoo, she got one of those visions or whatever and that’s why she wandered away and left Jacob there. We didn’t see her for a week because she’d locked herself away to bring that vision to fruition.”

Jacob made a sour face and looked away and it was all Spenser could do to keep from laughing at his expense.

“If I remember right, what she produced was amazing,” Amanda said. “I think it turned out to be one of her biggest selling pieces. Made her a small fortune.”

“I’m so glad she was able to turn a tidy profit off my permanent emotional damage. That’s awesome,” Jacob muttered.

Spenser couldn’t stop the snort that burst from her mouth any longer. She quickly covered her mouth with her hand, but it was too late. Her guffaw filled the room. Jacob arched an eyebrow at her with a pout on his lips.

“Really, boss?”

“Sorry. I tried,” Spenser said. “I really tried.”

Amanda rolled her eyes but grinned. “Anyway, all that to say what Bo said sounds plausible. That’s just what creatives do sometimes. They shut out the world around them and go to some other plane to create their art.”

“That’s fair,” Spenser said. “But with all due respect to Aunt Yoli, we need to confirm Bo’s alibi, weak as it is, and either definitively include or exclude him from our suspect pool. We can’t simply take his word that he was in his apartment on another plane the whole time.”

“Speaking of suspects,” Amanda started. “Jacob was able to get through some of Hamill’s encrypted files. Apparently, there were more people angry with him for his steroid use than we first thought. There was a file filled with correspondence from angry clients—”

“Angry former clients,” Jacob corrected.

“Right. Angry former clients,” she agreed. “Anyway, I’ve spent most of the day running them down and talking to them.”

“Oh, speaking of the suspect pool, we can probably go ahead and knock Joel Russell off it,” Jacob mentioned. “I finished a background on him and there are no shady connections I could find. Ditto that on dark web chat rooms and his financials… nothing popped. I haven’t found anything connecting him to Hamill’s death. Like, at all. This guy really does just seem to be out there living his best life.”

“That’s great. Excellent work, guys. Really good stuff,” Spenser praised them. “Did you happen to learn anything new?”

“Of the four people I spoke with, bupkis. I didn’t get a bad hit off any of them. They were just angry about being betrayed. They were furious that they were working their butts off while their trainer was taking shortcuts. And I can’t say I blame them really,” she said.

“No, that makes sense. In their place, I’d probably be pretty pissed, too,” Spenser agreed. “How many more do you have on the list?”

“We’ve got five others that we should probably check out.”

“Okay, let’s divide up the list and have a go at them.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Amanda jotted down a few names and addresses on a piece of paper and handed it to Spenser. She looked it over then started to move for the door, hoping to talk to these people and get them either ruled in or out of the suspect pool before calling it a day. Amanda must have had the same thought because she got to her feet as well.

“Hey, wait up,” Jacob said.

They both turned. Jacob’s eyes were focused on his laptop screen and the tip of his tongue poked out the corner of his mouth as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Silence lingered in the air for a moment before he looked up at them.

“For whatever it’s worth, Bo posted some of his recording sessions on the days in question to his YouTube channel,” he said and gestured to the monitor on the wall.

The screen lit up as Jacob called up the sessions he was referring to. He hit play on the first clip, and they watched as Bo strummed out a tune, softly singing along with it. His lips twisted wryly as he stopped playing then turned to the camera.

“This is how the sausage is made, boys and girls,” he said. “You’re going to hit some wrong notes when you’re working with new material or find that some lyrics don’t quite fit with the intention of the song. That passage I just sang right there? It doesn’t quite convey what I wanted, so I’m going to have to rework the wording to improve the flow. If you want to be a working musician, this is the process you’re going to have to go through. And you’ll have to get used to the fact that no song is ever going to seem finished.

“If you’re a perfectionist, you need to abandon that mindset right now because no song is ever going to be perfect. If you’re worth your salt as an artist, you will always find ways to improve it. The trick is getting it to a point where you’re satisfied. You’ll probably never be happy over the moon, but you need to get to a place of satisfaction because, as an artist, that’s about the best you can hope for.”

Jacob hit a key to endthe clip and pointed to the screen. “The time stamp says that clip was posted right around the time Seth Hamill was dying on stage.”

Amanda pulled a face. “You know those things can be set to post at a predetermined time. That doesn’t prove anything.”

“I figured you’d be skeptical, so I dug a little deeper,” Jacob said. “These weren’t preset to drop at a specific time. These were posted when the time stamp says they were posted. And he’s got quite a few of these ‘making the sausage’ videos over that two-day time period.”

Amanda frowned. “Are we even sure the steroids were laced over that two-day time period, Sheriff? It could have been laced earlier.”

“Doubtful. There was only one bottle in his supply that had been used. If it had been tainted earlier, Hamill would have dosed himself and died earlier. It seems most likely the bottle was laced on the thirteenth or fourteenth, Hamill does himself, and dies the following day,” Spenser replied.

“Fair enough. But that still doesn’t prove Bo didn’t slip out of his apartment at some point to lace Hamill’s supply of Anadrol,” Amanda pointed out.

“No, it doesn’t,” Spenser replied evenly.

“I’ve also got activity on Bo’s debit card,” Jacob said. “He had deliveries from several food joints as well as a couple from Green Acres, the local dispensary.”

“That’s about the least surprising thing I’ve heard yet,” Spenser quipped.

“What do you think?” Amanda asked.