Page 40 of 25 Alive

She signaled to Lorraine, who held up the flat of her palm. Meaning,I’ll get to you when I can.

“I can’t stay long,” I told the others. “Joe’s suddenly catching a 5 a.m. flight tomorrow, and we have to shift some plans—”

The girls protested.

“Lindsay, at least give me fifteen minutes,” Cindy said.

Lorraine came over with a pitcher of beer, but Yuki said, “We’re not drinking tonight. Please bring bread and butter, okay?”

Lorraine said, “Okey dokey,” and disappeared into the shifting crowd before Claire could put in an order.

Claire sighed and said, “Okay, Cin. So, what happened?”

“I heard from my contact in Verne …”

I was sitting directly across from Cindy and could barely hear her. I said, “Say again?”

Yuki whipped her head around to the left and shouted at three people laughing and talking at the next table, “Will you keep it down, please?”

“Hey,” said the man sitting at that table. “Mind your manners.”

Yuki turned back to our meeting. “Cindy, you were saying?”

As if cued, Rikki’s band launched into a Calypso jazz version of “Down to the Market,” making it difficult to form or follow a simple thought.

But Cindy was still on track.

“My cop source in Nevada …”

“Wilson,” Claire and I said in unison.

“Uh-huh. He called me today. He heard about a cold case in Portland, Oregon—an ‘I said. You dead’ crime that happened about a year and a half ago.”

While twisting her ring, pulling at her curls, and focusing on each of us in turn with her big blue eyes, Cindy told us what she knew about this unsolved case.

“This woman was a divorcée in her mid-thirties. She was found dead. Hanged. But that’s not the weird part. The kicker is that when she was found, the words ‘I said’ were written on the sole of one of her shoes and ‘You dead’ on the other.”

Claire asked, “Her death was a homicide?”

“Undetermined,” said Cindy.

“You’re saying that the ME called it ‘undetermined’?” Claire asked. “This woman’s death wasn’t ruled a suicide, a homicide, or an accident?”

Cindy said, “Not officially, no. Butsomeoneknows. So, I’ll be digging for leads.”

I felt a pang of guilt. Agent Jim Walsh had told me about this same suspicious death in Portland. Now my three best friends were in on this story. Cindy Thomas, a stellar reporter and bestselling true-crime author, was determined to unlock the puzzle and get it out to the world in big black headline news. She was about to turn this cold case nuclear.

I’d promised Walsh that I would be his silent partner. I hadn’t broken my promise, but Cindy wanted help. She asked us each in turn: Could Claire speak to her counterpart in Portland? Did Yuki have any strings she could pull with the Portland DA? And did I know any cops who worked in Oregon?

I tried to stop the unstoppable Cindy Thomas.

“Cindy, can you sit on this story until Portland’s ME calls it a homicide.”

Yuki said, “I agree with Lindsay. I can see a lawsuit if you get it wrong. You really don’t want—”

Someone said, “Excusez-moi.”

Lorraine was standing at the head of our table, order pad in hand.

---