Jacob grimaced. “That’s kind of thin, boss.”
“I hate to agree with my brother, but it is.”
“Agreed. It is,” Spenser said. “But Layla is a woman who was deeply hurt and acting from a place of emotion without really thinking things all the way through. That’s something I can relate to. And even though my hunch is paper thin, it’s also the only card we have left to play. If this doesn’t work, then we really are out of cards to play, and like it or not, the game is over.”
Spenser turned to Jacob. “Pull up the map you had the other day and put Layla’s cell phone tracking data up, please.”
“Coming right up.”
A few keystrokes later, the monitor lit up with a map of the town. A moment later, the familiar orange dots that had denoted Layla’s cell phone the other day appeared. There weren’t many, which Spenser thought played into her hands. She stepped over to the map and looked closely at it, trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle she’d gathered together in her mind.
“Jacob, can you mark these in chronological order?” Spenser asked.
“I can do that.”
She listened to his fingers tapping on the keys and a couple moments later, small bubbles appeared over the dots, connected by a thin black line, each of them with a time stamp on it. Spenser’s stomach bubbled with the first stirrings of excitement as she traced Layla’s steps through the day.
“Okay, she left her house at just after seven,” Spenser said. “It looks like she stopped by the farmer’s market and then Ryker’s coffee house after that.”
Spenser stepped over to the whiteboard and grabbed a black pen. At the top, she wrote Layla’s timeline then underlined it with a heavy black line then jotted down the first movements she took from the monitor.
“After that, she ran home, presumably to drop off her groceries,” Spenser said and noted it on the board. “And she arrived at All Day Fitness at 8:10. Amanda—”
“On it,” she said.
Amanda worked her keyboard for a minute then looked up. “She had a thirty-minute spin class at eight-thirty.”
Spenser noted that down on the timeline. “Okay, so she has a class that goes from eight-thirty until nine. What time is her next class?”
“Uhhh… she taught a strength training class at eleven,” she answered.
Spenser left a space on the board between her first class and her second then referred to the map again and filled in the rest of Layla’s movements. There were two more orange dots, a stop at La Familia, a popular Mexican restaurant in town at twelve-thirty, then to home, where she apparently stayed the rest of the night. Once she’d completed writing down the timeline, Spenser stepped back and looked at the board and nodded as the final pieces of the puzzle snapped into place.
“I think we have her,” Spenser said. “And I think I’ve figured out where the needle is.”
“What aren’t we seeing, boss?”
She stepped forward and drew a big circle in between the end of Layla’s spin class at nine and her next weight training class at eleven.
“That’s an awfully big donut hole in her timeline, don’t you think?” Spenser asked.
“I guess so,” Jacob said. “But her GPS puts her at the gym the whole day.”
Spenser held a finger up. “No, her GPS puts her phone at the gym the whole day.”
“Which we can say is crap because we have her on Hamill’s security cameras at 9:38,” Amanda said as if she was catching on.
“We have who we think is Layla on those cameras,” Jacob noted. “We can’t say for sure it was actually her.”
“No, you’re right,” Spenser said. “But stick with me here as I turn my hunch into a theory.”
“Have at it, boss.”
“Layla’s spin class ended at nine. The gym is roughly, what, a mile from Hamill’s place? A mile and a half, maybe?” Spenser said.
“But like her phone, her car’s GPS pinged at the gym, too,” he countered.
“That left Layla plenty of time to leave her phone at the gym, so it appeared she was still there, while she slipped out and ran the mile or so to Hamill’s house, leaving her plenty of time to be on the cameras at 9:38, spend ten minutes inside lacing the bottle, then getting back to the gym in time for her next class,” Amanda finished.
“Bingo. She could have done all this inside that donut hole,” Spenser said, tapping on the board. “Layla is in terrific shape. She could probably make that run without breaking a sweat. And all the while, her electronics show she’s stationary at the gym.”
“We need to confirm that she slipped out,” Amanda said. “I’m friends with one of the managers over there. Let me make a call.”
“Good. Yes.”
Amanda got to her feet and slipped out of the room to make the call. Spenser turned, her eyes flicking back and forth between the electronic map and the timeline she’d written out on the board, looking for inconsistencies or hidden landmines that could blow her theory to pieces. Not seeing any, a lightness blossomed in her chest as certainty rose up within her. She might well be able to pull her butt out of the fire and salvage this case yet.
“Okay, so, where’s the needle?” Jacob asked. “I mean, it seems to me the needle is the linchpin in your whole theory. If she hasn’t destroyed it already, where did she stash it?”
“It’s possible she ditched it in a storm drain on her run from Hamill’s to the gym. And if that’s the case, a long day is about to get even longer,” Spenser said. “Alternately, she put it in the one place she didn’t think anybody would think to search. The one place outside her home that she can control—”
“The gym,” Jacob said.
“The gym.”
“You know, putting that together—that’s actually kind of brilliant,” he said.
“Albeit a little late. And this whole theory is riding on the hope that she didn’t destroy that stupid needle,” Spenser said. “But we’re sure it’s not at Hamill’s and I’m relatively certain it’s not at Layla’s place. My gut is telling me it’s there. That she was waiting to move it until some of the heat of the investigation died off since she knows we’re looking for a needle.”
