Page 43 of Dying to Meet You
“Did you share them with Tim?” she asks.
“No! I mean, Ishowedthem to him. He asked about my find, because he saw it in the news. But I didn’tgivehim the photos. They aren’t really mine to share.”
“Then how did he get them?” she asks coolly.
“I don’t know.” My voice rises with stress. “Maybe I set my phone down and walked out of the room. Or maybe he figured out my passcode. It wouldn’t have been that hard.”
“Can you guess why he wanted them?” she presses.
“No,” I say sharply.
“Let’s do this,” Fry says. “You give us permission to clone your cell phone data, and we’ll look into it on our end.”
“What do you mean?” My voice sounds high and thin and panicky. “A clone?”
He pulls a piece of paper from his legal pad. “If you sign this, we can ask your mobile carrier to share all your data with us. You’ll still have your phone. We’ll just be able to see the data on it.”
To say that I’m alarmed would be an understatement. “What kind of data?”
He shrugs. “Whatever’s there. Photos and texts. Calls you made. Apps you use. Stuff like that.”
Holy shit. “I don’t see how that helps you figure out why Tim took those photos. And I’m not handing over my entire life to strangers for no good reason.”
“Think about it,” Riley says, her face placid. “Can I show you a couple of unrelated photos from the scene?” My face must go pale because she says, “They’re not of the victim, Rowan. Just items found in his car.”
I exhale. “Okay. Sure.”
She takes the iPad back, taps the screen a few times, and passes it to me. “Are these Tim’s?”
The photo shows a pair of wireless earbuds in a sporty steel charging case. I point to the screen. “He had his initials engraved on it. Yes, they’re his.”
She flips to another photo. “This?”
It’s the basket where he kept his Moleskine journals. “That sat on the back seat, and he kept his notebooks in there.”
“Hmm,” she said. “But there were no notebooks in the car. So this thief liked notebooks, and not earbuds?”
She seems to be waiting for me to weigh in, but all I can do is shrug. My mind is churning through scenarios where the cops look at my phone and find out I was basically stalking Tim for the last few days of his life.
“How about these? Are they familiar?” Riley flips to a new photo—two paper receipts side by side. “From the glove box.”
I have to enlarge the screen to read them. One is from Portland Grounds. “That’s the coffee shop where we met. It’s a few blocks away from here.” I point in a northerly direction. “We went there a lot.”
“Did you go there on June fifth?”
“Is that the date on it?” I squint at the receipt again and find the date, which is, in fact, June fifth. “Maybe? I go there almost every day. It’s my usual spot. But we were broken up by then. And if Tim went there, he didn’t tell me.”
“Do you find that weird?” she asks. “That he went to your coffee shop?”
“No? Maybe?” I rub my forehead, and the barista’s strange story echoes in my brain. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Tim and I went there together, and then we stopped. But I don’t own the place. He clearly did whatever he wanted to.”
“How about the other one,” she prods.
I zoom in on the other receipt, and I probably don’t do a very good job of hiding my flinch. “Docksiders. We never went there together. I don’t go there anymore.”
“Why not?”
“That’s where I...”Met the man who derailed my entire life. “That’s where I worked in college. I met my daughter’s father there. I smelled like fried clams for an entire summer, and it’s not somewhere I like to go anymore.”
