Free Devil Smoke by C. J. Lyons

door so Sarah couldn’t hear her.
    “Lucy? We have a problem.”

     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 12
     
     
    WHILE WASH BEGAN his work of combing through Sarah Brown’s digital footprints, Lucy retreated to the back of the house to what Valencia called the “nanny’s room.” It was long and narrow with only one small window at the far end and was empty except for a few cartons of stray office supplies. Perfect for Lucy’s needs.
    At the FBI, she’d gotten used to surrounding herself with smart boards to visually represent a case, covering them with data as well as potential avenues of investigation. Here, she went low tech, but it still worked. She covered the walls with brown craft paper, grabbed a bunch of marking pens and sticky notes in various colors, and began deconstructing Charlotte Worth’s last days.
    On one wall, she created a timeline with documented facts: where Charlotte was, who saw her or was with her. On the other wall she organized hypotheticals—unverified sightings before or after the day she vanished, the various “possible” leads that law enforcement, the private investigators hired by Tommy and Charlotte’s family, and Valencia had stumbled across—along with unanswered questions raised by the evidence: motives for her leaving voluntarily, reasons to question her mental health, motives for anyone to want to harm her, the stalled money trail she’d left in her wake, possible attempts to cover her tracks… There were so many questions that Lucy almost ran out of space.
    When she was done, she stood back. No wonder both the police and private investigators had been so frustrated. Tommy was right. Despite the fact that they’d been able to discover a multitude of “facts” about Charlotte’s disappearance, you could twist them into any story you wanted.
    For instance, following the money—a time-honored law enforcement tradition, mainly because it usually did lead to answers—told a story of a woman who bought disposable cell phones, who had multiple accounts separate from her husband, and who, on the day she vanished, maxed out those accounts’ ATM withdrawals. Cash in hand, she bought herself time by parking her car in a secluded scenic overlook, where it sat undiscovered for three days. Presumably she either met an accomplice or had another car waiting, then walked away from her life.
    This was the story that seemed to please law enforcement the most. Lucy could understand why: it not only solved the case, but it had the most concrete, objective evidence to support the theory, and it meant that they hadn’t allowed a murderer to walk around free to kill again.
    Only problem: no one had been able to document any motive or even a hint of unhappiness that might cause Charlotte Worth to abandon her life, including her husband and child.
    The press had taken a different, more salacious view, following their own time-honored tradition of “if it bleeds, it leads.” They speculated at first about possible motives for killing Charlotte—despite the fact that Tommy had an ironclad alibi for the day of her disappearance—setting their “investigative teams” to search for possible “thugs for hire” and tracking down would-be assassins he could have reached out to via Craigslist and other anonymous internet sites.
    Lucy had to give them credit. For a story with almost no facts, they’d managed to create the illusion of a much wider conspiracy, as if husbands and wives throughout Pittsburgh were busy searching for nefarious partners to help eliminate their spouses, leading one paper to do a series on “how to get away with murder,” while another online tabloid website tried to create a sting operation to snare potential hit men for hire. All of which no doubt brought much-needed eyeballs to their publications, but were of no help in finding Charlotte.
    The last theory—suicide—was the least popular. And the one with the least concrete basis. But both Charlotte’s family and