Page 60 of Dead & Breakfast
“Drama king?” Salvatore raised one perfectly arched eyebrow. “I’ll expect a crown delivery shortly. Anyway, looks like he had a bit of a tiff with his friends a few weeks ago.”
“What did they fight about?” Arthur asked against his better judgment. It didn’t seem particularly relevant to the case, but Arthur knew better than to dismiss teenage squabbles outright. There might be something important embedded deep in their threads of selfies and acronyms Arthur would never understand.
“Well, a few weeks ago two of his friends got a crush on the same person—but it looks like they resolved that by simply all dating each other. Very modern of them. I like their style.”
“Anything actually important?”
“I’m getting there, darling.” Salvatore clicked a different text thread and scrolled up. “A couple days ago, someone named Shelly confronted Brody about his new friends.”
“She must be the girl we met. I definitely got the sense she wasn’t pleased about them.” Arthur recalled the girl’s body language as she’d discussed Brody’s buddies. He’d thought perhaps she’d developed feelings for her friend and was simply grumpy he’d ditched her for a group of seniors, but perhaps it was something more sinister.
“Yes, see, here she calls them a bigot brigade—very inflammatory language—and he says it’s not like that.”
“It very muchislike that,” Arthur grumbled. “But I don’t see how any of that is related to the mayor’s death. If Brody was running about with those kids now, why would he kill the mayor? Roth was the leader of the bigot brigade, so to speak.”
“You tell me—you’re the detective here.”
“We need something more concrete,” Arthur muttered, shaking his head.
“Well, the best I can do is that Shelly texted him a skull emoji. Perhaps it’s a death threat of some kind.”
“Unlikely, considering how popular those little pictures are among kids these days.”
“There’s more.” Sal sat on the unmade bed, moving the laptop over so they could both see the screen. He navigated over to another text thread. “His friend’s emojis might not have been a threat, but this certainly looks like one.”
I know what you did. This isn’t over.
Arthur nearly dropped the box he was holding as he shuffled on his knees to close the distance between them. “What did he do?”
“No idea!” Sal pointed to the screen, which showed the solitary text on an otherwise blank page. “This is all they said. But it seems our friend Brody was up tosomethingthat caused someone’s displeasure.”
“What about you? Find anything good in thePlayboys?” Sal asked.
“They’re letters,” Arthur said, pushing the box onto the bed beside Sal before getting to his feet. “From Brody’s mother.”
Salvatore perked up. “Oh? Now, that’s interesting.”
“She seemed to want to reach out to him, but there’s no indication he wrote back. If he did, his father didn’t seem aware of it.” None of this was painting any sort of compelling picture of a would-be murderer, though Arthur supposed in real life, murderers didn’t usually leave a clean trail of evidence or obvious death threats. It would be more complicated than it ever was on TV.
“I’ll check his email. Maybe he sent her a message that way? I mean, honestly, who writes on paper anymore?”
“Some people like old-fashioned correspondence.”
Arthur shrugged and flipped open his notebook to jot down the threatening texter’s phone number from Brody’s computer. Perhaps they could look it up later. Phone books might have been passé, but Arthur felt sure Sal could work some Internet magic.
“What are you doing? I can just put the contact directly into my phone and google to find out who it is.” Sal waved his cell phone in Arthur’s face. “Oh! We could prank call them!”
“Don’t you dare!” Arthur snatched the phone from Sal’s grip and pocketed it. “They could be a killer!”
“I don’t see what difference that makes. Prank calls are always funny.”
“For now, let’s finish examining the potential clues here.”
Sal grunted, but he got up to help Arthur search all the same.
Brody’s room didn’t exactly scream criminal the way he’d expected. Arthur hadn’t known Brody as more than his dentist’s son for the few months they’d lived in Trident Falls, but since finding George Roth’s body in the garden, he’d built an opinion of the boy that was now being complicated by hard evidence. Arthur had thought of him as a misbehaving teen, then perhaps a murderer driven by hate, but now Arthur couldn’t help but see Brody as the child of an estranged mother and a boy whose zest for art was being ignored by everyone except the vandals his friends so despised. Arthur couldn’t help but empathize. It had to be lonely to be so unseen by everyone around him.
“Well, this is odd.” Salvatore leaned over to stare into the little wastebasket by the desk. “There’s crumpled-up notebook paper in here.”
