“Wait, what?” Pip stared at him, openmouthed. “That’s Sal’s? How do you have it?”
“The police released it to us a few months after they closed Andie’s investigation.”
A cautious electricity sparked up the back of Pip’s neck. “Can I…,” she said, “can I look at it?”
“Of course,” he laughed. “That’s why I brought it.”
Excitement charged through her.
“Holy moly,” she said, flustered and hurrying to unlock the door. “Let’s go and look at it in my workstation—uh, bedroom.”
She and Barney bolted over the threshold, but Ravi didn’t follow. She spun back around.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Come on.”
“Sorry, you’re just very entertaining when you’re this intense.”
“Come on,” she repeated, beckoning him through the hallway and to the stairs. “Don’t drop it.”
“I’m not going to drop it.”
Pip jogged up to her room, Ravi following far too slowly behind. She did a hasty scan of her bedroom for potential embarrassments. Cursing, she dived for a pile of just-laundered bras by her chair, shoving them into a drawer and slamming it shut just as Ravi walked in. She pointed him into her desk chair, too flustered to sit herself.
“Here you go, then. I charged it last night.” He placed the phone into her cupped palms. “Passcode is four fours. He used that for everything.”
“Have you ever looked through it?” she asked, sliding to unlock it more carefully than she’d ever unlocked her own phone, even at its newest.
“Yeah, obsessively. But go ahead, Sergeant. Where would you look first?”
“Call log,” she said, tapping the green phone icon.
She looked through the missed call list first. There were dozens from the April 22, the Tuesday he had died. Calls from “Dad,” “Mom,” “Ravi,” “Naomi,” “Jake,” and unsaved numbers that must have been the police trying to locate him.
Pip scrolled back further, to the date of Andie’s disappearance. Sal had two missed calls that day. One was from “Max-y Boy” at 7:19 p.m., probably to ask when he was coming over. The other one, she read with a skipped heartbeat, was from “Andie<3” at 8:54 p.m.
“Andie rang him that night,” Pip said to herself and Ravi. “Just before nine.”
Ravi nodded. “Sal didn’t pick up, though.”
“Pippa!” Her dad’s voice sailed up the stairs. “No boys in bedrooms.”
Pip’s cheeks flooded with heat. She turned so Ravi couldn’t see and yelled back, “We’re working on my project! My door is open.”
“OK, that will do!” came the reply.
She glanced back at Ravi and saw he was chuckling at her again.
“Stop finding my life amusing,” she said, looking back at the phone.
She went through Sal’s outgoing calls next. Andie’s name repeated over and over again. It was broken up in places with the odd call to “home,” or “Dad,” and one to “Naomi” on Saturday, but from 10:33 a.m. on the Saturday until 7:21 a.m. on the Tuesday, Sal called her 112 times. Each call lasted two or three seconds; straight to voicemail.
“He called her over a hundred times,” Ravi said, reading her face.
“Why would he call so many times if he’d supposedly killed her and had her phone hidden somewhere?” said Pip.
“I asked the police that very question years ago,” Ravi said. “The officer told me it was clear that Sal was making a conscious effort to look innocent by calling the victim’s phone so many times.”
“But,” Pip countered, “if they thought he was making an effort to act innocent and avoid getting caught, why didn’t he get rid of Andie’s phone? He could have put it in the same place as her body, and it never would have connected him to her death. If he was trying not to get caught, why would he keep the one biggest bit of evidence? And then feel desperate enough to end his life with this vital evidence still on him?”
Ravi snapped and pointed at her. “The officer couldn’t answer that either.”
“Did you look at the last texts Andie and Sal sent each other?” she asked.
“Yeah, take a look. Don’t worry, they aren’t sexty or anything.”
Pip opened up the messages app and clicked on Andie’s name, feeling like a trespasser.
Sal had sent two texts to Andie after she disappeared. The first on the Sunday morning: andie just come home everyones worried. And on Monday afternoon: please just ring someone so we know youre safe.
The message preceding them was sent on the Friday she went missing. At 9:01 p.m., Sal texted her: im not talking to you till youve stopped.
Pip showed Ravi. “He said that just after ignoring her call that night. Do you know what they could have been fighting about? What did Sal want Andie to stop?”
“No idea.”
“Can I just type this up really fast?” she said, reaching over him for her laptop. She parked herself on her bed and transcribed the texts, grammar mistakes and all.
“Now you need to look at the last text he sent my dad,” Ravi said. “The one they said is his confession.”
Pip moved over to the conversation. At 10:17 a.m., on his final Tuesday morning, Sal said to his father: it was me. i did it. i’m so sorry. Pip’s eyes ran over it several times, at the pixels of each letter, thinking.
“You see it, too, don’t you?” Ravi was watching her.
“The grammar?” Pip asked, looking for the agreement in Ravi’s eyes.
“Sal was the cleverest person I knew,” he said, “but he texted like an illiterate. Always in a rush—no punctuation, no capital letters.”
“He must have had autocorrect turned off,” Pip said. “And yet, in this last text, we have three periods and an apostrophe. Even though it’s all in lowercase.”
“And what does that make you think?” asked Ravi.
“That maybe someone else wrote that text,” she said. “Someone who added the punctuation themselves because that’s how they were used to writing in texts. Maybe they checked quickly and thought it looked enough like Sal’s other messages because it was all lowercase.”
“That’s what I thought, too, when we first got it back. The police just sent me away. My parents didn’t want to hear it either.” He sighed. “I think they’re terrified of false hope. I am, too, if I’m being honest.”
Pip scoured the rest of the phone. Sal hadn’t taken any photos on the night in question, and none since Andie disappeared. She checked the deleted folder to be sure. The reminders were all about essays he had to hand in, and one to buy his mom a birthday present.
“There’s something interesting in the notes,” Ravi said, rolling over on the chair and opening the app for her.
The notes were all old: Sal’s home Wi-Fi password, an abs workout, a page of internships he could apply to. But there was one later note, written on Wednesday, April 16, 2014. Pip tapped into it. There was one thing typed on the page: 009 KKJ.
“License plate number, right?” Ravi said.
“Looks like it. He wrote that down in his notes two days before Andie went missing. Do you recognize it?”
Ravi shook his head. “I tried to Google it, see if I could find the owner, but no luck.”
Pip typed it up in her log anyway, and the exact time the note was last edited.
“That’s everything,” Ravi said. “That’s all I could find.”
Pip gave the phone one last wistful look before handing it back.
“You seem disappointed,” he said.
“I just hoped there’d be something more substantial we could use. Inconsistent grammar and lots of phone calls to Andie sure make him look innocent, but they don’t actually open any leads to pursue.”
“Not yet,” he said, “but I wanted you to see it. Have you gotten anywhere with your interviews?”
Pip paused. Yes, she had, but part of that was Naomi’s possible involvement. Her protective instinct flared up, grabbing hold of her tongue. But she knew if they were going to be partners, they had to be all in. She opened her capstone project document, scrolled to the top, and handed the laptop to Ravi. “This is everything so far.”
He read through it all quietly and then handed the computer back, a thoughtful look on his face.
“OK, so the Sal alibi route is a dead end,” he said. “After he left Max’s at ten-thirty, I think he was alone because it explains why he panicked and asked his friends to lie for him. He could have just stopped on a bench on his walk home and played Angry Birds or something.”
“I agree,” said Pip. “He was most likely alone, and therefore has no alibi; it’s the only thing that makes sense. So that line of inquiry is lost. I think the next step should be to find out as much as we can about Andie’s life and, in the process, identify anyone who might have had motive to kill her.”
“Read my mind, Sarge,” he said. “Maybe you should start with Andie’s best friends, Emma Hutton and Chloe Burch. They might actually speak to you.”
“I’ve messaged them both. Haven’t heard back yet, though.”
“OK, good,” he said, nodding to himself and then to the laptop. “In that interview with the journalist, you talked about gaps in the case. What inconsistencies do you see?”
“Well, if you’d killed someone,” she said, “you’d scrub yourself down multiple times, fingernails included, right? Especially if you were lying about alibis and making fake calls to look innocent, wouldn’t you think to wash the frickin’ blood off your hands so you don’t get caught red-handed, literally?”
“Yeah, Sal definitely wasn’t that stupid.”
“And of course his fingerprints would be found in her car; he was her boyfriend,” said Pip. “Fingerprints can’t be accurately dated.”
“And hiding the body?” Ravi leaned forward. “I’ve always thought that was a stretch. If she’s buried in the woods somewhere, how did Sal have time to dig a hole well enough that she’s never been found? OK, so he had time, but was it enough for that?”
“Or any other way of disposing of a body,” Pip added.
“And yet this is the path of least resistance, the story everyone believes.”
“It is, supposedly,” she said. “Until you start asking the right questions.”