Page 65 of Missing White Woman

The hair. The hands. The jeans. The blood covering it all.

She pulled the car over. “This is why we went to visit Morgane, Bree. To see if there was anyone else the police should be looking at. It was your idea.”

Adore was right. I was the one who’d wanted to rush over, but now it felt too quick. Too out of the blue. “I don’t want to point fingers at someone else just so they’re no longer pointed at me and Ty.”

I couldn’t do that to anyone, not after what had happened to me.

“And I would never do that.” Adore put on her blinker, then waited for a car to pass before pulling into traffic. “Let’s go to my place. I’ll look him up. You can check out his socials. And if we find nothing, we find nothing. It can’t hurt.”

I wasn’t so sure.

TWENTY

Andrew Martin didn’t have Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat. He didn’t even have a Facebook account I could find. He was not on social media of any kind. But luckily for us, Puffy was. He had one of those Instagram accounts that pretends to be from the dog’s point of view. The type with cute pics and corny captions along the lines of “Rawr, had so much fun with my dad at the dog park today.”

It hadn’t taken off. There were just 30 followers—but one of them was Janelle Beckett. And that was the only reason I saw the account. “Puffy” had left a comment on one of Janelle’s photos of the two of them together. I had to travel fifty-four weeks back to find it.

“How’s it going?” Adore said.

We’d been quietly working side by side on her couch since we’d gotten to her house a couple hours ago.

The sofa was so white I’d been afraid to sit on it, and I definitely had turned down her offer of a glass of red. “I can’t find any other Puffy comments,” I said. “He doesn’t like any of her pics, though she liked all of his. No comments from her, though. You?”

She motioned to the MacBook on her lap. “His background check’s more boring than watching paint dry. Not even a parking ticket.”

“Well, we tried.” I put my phone down and thought about how hungry I was. “Want to order pizza?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but it was clear she wasn’t talking about food options. “It’s still giving me ‘He was such a nice neighbor, we’re so surprised he was a psychopath’ vibes. Who doesn’t have parking tickets?”

“I don’t,” I said. Just had much worse.

“There has to be something here.”

“Or maybe there isn’t, Adore. Maybe he’s just a boring white guy who always obeys the speed limit and loves his dog way too much.”

But she didn’t answer. Too busy looking something up.

She was still a fast typer. One of the million and one things she had always been good at. We used to get together to write our essays, all ten of her fingers flying across the keyboard, me going much slower with the two-finger method. I still hadn’t learned how to type properly. Yet another case of arrested development.

“You wanna order pizza?” I said again, but she still ignored me. “What are you doing, Adore?”

“Morgane Porter has a DUI.”

I reached for the laptop, but she wouldn’t let me take it. “You’re looking up Ms. Morgane?”

“I’m looking up everybody on that block. She’s just first because I know her full name.”

This was not going how I’d thought. I sure as hell wasn’t going to look up Ms. Morgane’s socials, even if she had any.

Instead, I typed “110 Little Street” and “Airbnb” into my search. The first hits were just as I’d expected. Stories about the murder. I quickly kept scrolling past link after link—all with the same photo of a happy and alive Janelle in her space buns.

I only lifted my thumb when my eye caught on another pic. This one was of the house itself. The link was to the Airbnb listing. I’d never seen it—just the screenshots Ty’d sent, as he had taken care of all the reservations—back when his secrets had been fun.

Beautiful Row House in Jersey City (Directly Across the River from NYC)

It was a surprise the listing was still up.

I clicked. The price wasn’t cheap. Ty had really gone all out. Now I wondered if he’d found it through Janelle. I shook off the thought, flinging it across the room like it was some spider. There was work to be done. It wouldn’t do to get distracted thinking of Ty and Janelle’s relationship—what it had been or what it hadn’t been. It didn’t matter right now. What mattered was finding out who had killed them both.

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