Page 25 of Not Quite Dead Yet

‘Then you can take it and do whatever cop things you want to do with it, I promise,’ Jet said. ‘I just need to see.’ She glanced down at his wrist. A gold expensive-looking thing. ‘Looks like you don’t own one. I’m Gen-Z – n-no offense. But I know my way around an Apple Watch pretty well. I’ll find you the good stuff. Let me help you. Please.’

The detective checked with the other two cops.

Chief Lou shrugged. ‘Can’t see the harm in it. We’d tell her anything we find anyway.’

The detective sighed. He circled around and popped the trunk, coming back a few moments later with a small black device in his hands. Jet’s watch. He handed it to her, drawing close to look over her shoulder.

‘Don’t delete anything,’ he breathed in her ear.

‘I won’t,’ Jet replied. The device asked for her passcode and she typed it in:0709.

‘So,’ she said, ‘I was thinking, you have an estimated twenty-minute range for the time of the attack from those witnesses.’

The detective looked over at Jack. Oops, might have gotten him in trouble there.

‘But if we’re going to be asking for alibis, shouldn’t we know the exact time it happened, the very minute? This thing tracks my heart rate when I wear it. Won’t it show us the exact moment I …’

Jet trailed off, swiping a notification away: Yep, she wasaware she hadn’t closed her activity rings the past couple of days, give her a break. She thumbed onto the small gray square with a red outline of a heart.

It brought up today’s data: no heartbeats,Resting Rateat 0 beats per minute. Only because she hadn’t worn the watch, but it felt pointed somehow, mocking.

Jet swiped to yesterday’s data, starting the day at midnight. Nothing. No beats. Was that because they’d taken the watch off her when she arrived at the ER? Or was some of it true: Had she been in cardiac arrest as Friday turned into Saturday? She’d almost died, right here, somewhere in this blank data.

Jet swiped again, back to Friday, to Halloween, and the graph filled with white lines, the daily dance of her heart.

‘The doorbell camera shows you getting home at 10:39 p.m.,’ the detective said, leaning closer. ‘So it’s after th–’

‘– It’s here,’ Jet said, cutting him off. Tracing the white line with her finger. A peak out of nowhere, a white tower rising above the rest of the day, 158 beats per minute. And then a drop. Sharp. All the way down that tower, to 56 bpm. ‘My heart rate rose, maybe when I heard the footsteps. The first blow. The second, when I realized what was happening. Then I must have lost consciousness here.’ Jet thumbed the line to bring up the exact time.

‘10:46,’ Ecker read it over her shoulder.

Jack removed his notebook, scribbled something down.

‘10:46,’ Jet repeated. ‘That’s when it happened.’

‘Any messages?’ Jack piped up now, his pen ready and waiting. ‘That thing shows your texts, doesn’t it?’

Jet didn’t wait for permission from Ecker, searching for the green message app. ‘I think it would’ve only picked up any messages I got while I was still here, on the WiFi. Anything after that, the watch would have been out of range from my iPhone, wouldn’t receive. Yep, just two texts. Onefrom my mom at 10:48 p.m.’ Jet sniffed, eyes running ahead of her. ‘You wanna do the honors, Detective?’

He cleared his throat, read aloud: ‘We will be back later now. Have to take the chairs back to the hotel because you wouldn’t do it.’

Jet looked up at the cops. ‘I don’t think that’s a strong enough motive for murder, do you? The chair thing?’

None of them smiled. Come on, she was the one dying; they could at least pity-laugh.

‘The other text?’ Ecker asked as Jet backed out into the menu of messages.

A blue dot next to the contact name.

Ecker stiffened beside her, leaning closer still. ‘Who’s that? Who’sDon’t Pick Up?’

Jet bit down on her lip. ‘That’s … my ex-boyfriend. JJ. I changed his name in my contacts after we broke up.’ They were all looking at her, eyes narrowed, Jack’s going farther than that, more like troubled. ‘Look, it’s a thing, OK? People do it. Young people. Never mind, not a big deal.’

Jet pressed the notification and their message thread jumped up.

Weeks of silence. Then, on Halloween, just one word from JJ:

Sorry.

---