It was almost two in the morning, Kirby struggled to keep his eyes open and was tempted to just toss self-respect into the dustbin of history and ask the big man to carry him into the room. While Kirby yawned Gustav unlocked the door and opened it for him, allowing him to keep a scintilla of dignity.

  "Kirby," said Molly, rushing to the door and giving Kirby a big hug.

  "You didn't blow up this time?" asked Mitch.

  "How did everything go?" asked Henry Hack.

  "Did they confess?" asked Bruce Haring.

  "What happened?" asked Andi.

  Kirby took a second to take in the scene. The large living room area of his suite was almost full with people. Molly was hugging him, Mitch was sitting on one of the easy chairs. Andi and Henry Hack were sitting on one of the sofas clinging to each other, and Bruce Haring was standing up by the antique Art Deco writing desk.

  "Okay," said Kirby making his way to the other sofa, guided by Molly, "one at a time."

  "I think I can speak for everyone," said Andi Hack, "when I say that we hate to bother you, but we really need to know what's going on."

  "Long story short," said Kirby, taking a seat, with Molly sliding in next to him. "We have Jim Madden and Kevin LaGuardia dead to rights on killing Armand Tanzerian in the hallway. LaGuardia recorded it with his phone, either to protect himself, or blackmail Madden, it doesn't really matter now."

  "What was going on?" asked Mitch. "When you left here with Darling you were a little lacking in the explanation department."

  Kirby took a moment and explained to them how he heard Madden talking through the air vent in Erica's bathroom, how it led to the bogus art scam, the fake Wilco and the raid on the auction.

  "But are they responsible for Erica's death?" asked Andi.

  Kirby shrugged. "I don't think so," he answered, "when I hit them with them being overheard by Erica, neither of them had a clue. If they're not lying, and they don't show any of the usual signs of lying, then my theory of them killing Erica because she overheard them talking about their scam kind of goes out the window."

  "Can you make a circumstantial case?" asked Molly.

  "I don't know," said Kirby, "they were coaching their fake Wilco at the time of Erica's death. Since he's just an actor who didn't even know he was involved in a scam, he doesn't really have much to gain from lying to protect them from a murder charge."

  "So you're back at square one?" asked Bruce, taking his seat by the writing desk.

  "I'm afraid so," said Kirby.

  "Maybe it was the stalker?" asked Bruce.

  "That's a little far-fetched," said Andi.

  "It's not the first time a stalker killed someone," said Bruce.

  "But I don't think this moony-eyed fool was dangerous," said Andi, "and I don't think Erica took it that seriously, or she would have at least mentioned him to me."

  "What about the fire?" asked Bruce.

  "What about this fire?" asked Kirby, his mind cloudy from sleep. "I need the details."

  "She told me it was caused by bad wiring in her garage?" said Andi.

  "That's what she said so you wouldn't worry," answered Bruce. "What really happened was that someone stuffed a rag in the gas tank of her lawnmower and set it on fire. The lawnmower blew up, but the fire failed to spread to the house."

  "So it was definitely arson?" asked Kirby.

  "Definitely," said Bruce. "The police thought Chaz Healey did it, but he had an alibi for that night."

  "Let me guess," said Kirby, "he was off getting wasted with some nightclub bimbos."

  Bruce nodded.

  "I just thought that Erica would have come to me if she was really frightened," said Andi, a hint of tears lingering in the back of her voice. "I could have helped her then."

  "I don't think there was anything you could have done," said Henry, holding his wife tighter. "It's not your fault, really it isn't."

  "I could have warned her that something like this could happen," said Andi. "The poor girl had the most dreadful luck with relationships. They always ended with lots of anger and yelling and all kinds of accusations. It was only a matter of time before one of them went over the edge."

  "The police are giving the stalker pictures a second going over," said Kirby, "they think they might be able to decipher some traceable data from the emails and the attached photos, but that's the sort of technical stuff I'm no good at."

  "You think your work on this case is done?" asked Molly.

  "I think it is," said Kirby, "my position as a 'police consultant' is tenuous at best. It's only a matter of time before someone in authority decides that having an American interfering in a Canadian homicide case is a little too much to take, and not give a crap about the endorsement of Interpol."

  "You must be exhausted," said Andi, rising from her seat. "Maybe we should stop wasting your time."

  "You're not wasting my time," said Kirby, "but I am exhausted. Let's all get some sleep, and maybe we can talk all this over in the morning."

  "That sounds like a capital idea," declared Henry, rising to join his wife. "I think we all need to get some sleep. Maybe in the morning one of the people the police have in custody will confess to being the stalker and the killer. Then maybe we might be able to put this nightmare behind us."

  "I'll miss Erica though," said Andi, squeezing her husband's arm.

  "We will all miss her," said Henry, "she was a beautiful soul."

  Everyone rose from their seats, said their goodbyes and headed for the door. Bruce was the last to leave, pausing in front of Kirby to give him a package.

  "This is Erica's iPhone," said Bruce. "Turns out she kept copies of everything to do with the stalker on a cloud server you can access with it. Perhaps if you look them over in the morning, with a clear head you can...well, figure something out. I mean you've solved over half a dozen crimes already this weekend, and everyone really needs you to solve this last one."

  Kirby took the small black phone in his hand. Physically it was featherlight, but emotionally, it felt like a lead brick.

  "I'll do what I can."

  "That's all I ask."

  The bed was soft and inviting, but once Kirby got there, the slumber party just wouldn't start. He couldn't turn off his brain and it kept jumping around in his skull, bashing against the sides like an angry lion in a cage. Bits of information – what the old time detectives in old time novels called clues – zipped around like fleas on that angry lion, irritating the hell out of it. He couldn't sleep because he was thinking too much, and he couldn't think straight because he was too damn tired.

  Kirby sat up and looked over at his bedside table. Erica's iPhone sat by the lamp, staring at him like a big black eye. He picked it up and turned it on. He scrolled through the files, found the link connecting to her stalker files and opened it. There were dozens of them, the email and social network accounts were all with different free webmail providers, but they all had variations of the same username of True-Lover. He opened the earliest ones, which were saved on screenshots of Erica's Facebook fan page. The only harm done by these messages was to the art of love poetry. They were overlong rambling attempts at capturing the beauty of her face, her figure, her heart and her soul. All those elements of Erica escaped those attempts, but it didn't stop the variations of True-Lover from keeping on trying.

  Trying at least until Facebook did one of their celebrity clients a favour and blocked anyone with any variation of the True-Lover username from having any communication with Erica Cross in any form, let alone poetic.

  As Kirby waded through the files he saw that the ban by Facebook lead to the first emails. The messages themselves didn't give any clues as to how this guy got Erica's email address. The messages also shifted from poetry to eerily detailed descriptions of Erica's day to day activities. What she had for breakfast, telling her that she didn't need to diet. To her exercise regimen, to descriptions of the people she worked with at photo shoots, and even that low budget horror film she appeared in.

  True-Lover's emails dripped with jealousy over any man who showed the slightest attention to her. Telling her that they were not worthy of her perfection, and how all they wanted was her body, while he adored her soul. Erica had made notes and attached them to each email, recording where she was while her anonymous paramour was watching her. The locations went all over the world, from Los Angeles, to London, to Paris, Milan, Beijing and Tokyo.

  Kirby thought back to what Andi told him about bitter ex-boyfriends. None of these messages had a whiff of bitterness and/or rejection directed at Erica. The messages were all kittens and unicorns, dripping with the hope of a relationship to come, not the resentment of one that ended badly.

  While it went against his better judgment, he made a mental note to get a list of ex-boyfriends from Bruce and Andi. Maybe one might turn out to be delusional and have accumulated a hell of a lot of air miles over the past two years. Kirby's eyes were feeling heavy, the iPhone slipped from his hand and the room faded to black.

  Molly turned over, again, then rolled the other way, again. She just couldn't sleep. It wasn't the strangeness of sleeping wrapped in sheets with a thread count similar to the population density of Bombay, nor was it the fact that the room was so quiet. Molly couldn't hear pipes rattling in the walls or her roommate, Dora, snoring in the next room, or any of the other familiar noises that surrounded her apartment at night.

  What was keeping Molly awake was that she felt like a total and complete idiot.

  Kirby Baxter was just across the living room, alone. That condescending cow Zoë was long gone, in what was probably the worst case of break-up timing ever known, and Kirby looked like he really needed someone. He looked like he needed someone in particular, someone who might be named Molly Prudence Garrett, though she thought it best that she leave her middle name out of the equation for now.

  Molly thought back to the first time she met Kirby Baxter. It was at a convention in her native Philadelphia, and she was already a huge fan of his work. They had conversed a few times via social media, but it was their first face to face meeting. He was actually pleased to meet her, and they spent that afternoon talking over their favourite characters and stories. He even introduced her to Nick Pappas, then Smiling Sam Ash's right-hand, which helped land Molly her first job in the industry as an assistant to Simone Galen the editor and head writer of The Vengeance Sisters book.

  That first meeting gave her a career. It also put her in regular face to face contact with Kirby and the more she got to know him, the more she found out she loved him. At first she wrote it off as a childish infatuation, and tried to suppress it and act solely as a friend and professional colleague. It was a mask but, thanks to Kirby, she was in the business of people who wore masks.

  The mask almost slipped three years ago at the Atlantic Comics Halloween party. That was the night Kirby debuted his relationship with Zoë, AKA 'The Condescending Cow.' Zoë was kind of pretty in an 'I hate my daddy that's why my hair is purple' kind of way, but her beauty really was just skin deep. She worked at a used bookstore Kirby frequented while living in a Tribeca condo that her hedge fund managing daddy bought for her. Zoë was on her fifth year working on her doctoral thesis about the social and political implications of the work of Sylvia Plath, knew nothing about comics and wanted to know even less than nothing about comics. She latched onto Kirby when she found out that he was an 'artist' who owned a seaside farm on Long Island. Molly could tell Zoë was disappointed when she found out that Kirby was just a comic book doodler who only barely held on to that seaside farm by renting the grazing rights to his land to the rich hobby farmers who lived on either side of him. When Kirby lost his job he lost the one thing that set him apart from the pseudo-academics and trust fund brats that Zoë normally hung out with, a respected position in a creative industry.

  Of course Molly knew how it all turned out in the end. Zoë dumped Kirby, and then Kirby got really rich really fast. Then Kirby Baxter disappeared, leaving Molly to spend two years reading about his adventures in Europe on the roughly translated websites of European tabloids. He hadn't called her, in fact, he hadn't called anyone during that time. Kirby's silent absence left Molly sort of emotionally paralyzed, however Mitch finally tracked down Kirby to share the rumour that Dick Wilco might be coming to OmniCon. Although Kirby did eventually expose that rumour as part of a massive fraud, the thought of reuniting with his childhood mentor was the perfect way to remind Kirby that there was a place where he had friends, a career and people who still cared about him even though his life had changed rather drastically.

  She didn't think her feelings would come back so strong when she saw him again in front of the convention centre. He was still a goof, a rich goof now, but still a goof and those feelings had gone beyond what she thought was a girly little crush. However, she kicked herself for needing a belly full of tropically flavoured booze to work up the nerve to say anything about it. Only to have that anything drowned out by that damn scream.

  Molly pulled herself up into a sitting position and turned on the bedside lamp. The light stung her eyes, and she wondered if she missed an opportunity. The moment that little bastard Mitch mentioned Kirby meeting a model, she had to choke down the urge to scream. It was her nightmare that Kirby would leave their cozy little comfort zone and become one of those rich playboys forever pursuing younger and younger bimbos who often looked more sexually fantastical than the characters Kirby used to draw for a living.

  Molly admitted to herself that she was burning with jealousy when she first heard about Erica Cross, but that blaze went down to a simmer when she saw her and Kirby in action. Kirby found her attractive; it was stupid to deny that, any man would, but Molly got the feeling that Kirby knew that a real romantic relationship between them was most likely impossible.

  She meant that it had to be impossible. Girls like Erica didn't go off and live happily ever after with geeks like Kirby Baxter. They marry them, cheat on them and clean them out in a messy, scandal plagued divorce. Molly knew that Kirby understood that, at least she hoped that Kirby understood that.

  Molly hated to admit that once the horror of Erica's murder faded she felt a wisp of relief. It was wrong, but inevitable when you're a mere mortal competing with a scarlet haired goddess for the attention of Kirby Baxter. Even though she was dead, Erica Cross had an even stronger hold on Kirby's mind now. Erica was no longer an object of fantasy to Kirby, but a victim, someone screaming from beyond death for justice. Molly knew Kirby couldn't let something like that go, he didn't have a choice, she read all about it in the European papers. Molly didn't want Kirby to know just how closely she had followed the news of his life in Europe, because she felt kind of embarrassed about it. It made her feel like a little girl caught clipping pictures of her teen dream out of back issues of a fan magazine. All of her research, coupled with her personal knowledge of Kirby Baxter as a human being told her that there was no way Kirby could let such an injustice go.

  Now he was on the opposite side of this massive suite, alone, his inability to find a solution to this mystery eating at his mind and soul. Molly wanted to go to him, to hold him, to kiss him and tell him it was going to be all right, because she loved him.

  Instead she curled up in her bed, tears streaming down her face.

  "Check it out."

  "Andi?" asked Kirby sitting up and looking around. In the dim light he could see that there was no one in the room with him. Now Kirby was confused, he could have sworn he heard Andi Hack's voice telling him to check something out. The bedside clock told him it was three forty-five in the morning. So where did the voice come from?

  Was he dreaming?

  "Check it out."

  It was Andi Hack again. This time her voice sounded more muffled. Kirby looked down and saw the faint glow of Erica Cross' iPhone lying face down on the bed. He picked it up.

  "Check it out," said Andi Hack again, and this time he saw her on the phone's monitor. It was an app, titled 'Andi's Fashion Alerts' on the top of the screen, and it showed a video of Andi Hack holding a glowing button marked PRESS.

  Kirby pressed it with his thumb, and a list of Toronto area stores cutting prices on high-end clothing appeared. Pressing on the listings for individual stores got catalogue pictures of clothing, accessories, and shoes. All the while a little digital Andi Hack offered approval from a little box in the corner.

  Kirby logged off the app, figuring he probably turned it on by accident when he rolled over, and powered down the iPhone. He placed it carefully on the bedside table, pulled up his sheets and stumbled uneasily back to sleep.

  Kirby looked up from the Tiki Bar and saw that he was at the base of the old lighthouse at Charlatan's Cove.

  Except it wasn't a lighthouse.

  It was a clock tower now.

  "What time is it?" asked Molly from her seat next to him at the Tiki Bar.

  "Check it out," said Andi Hack from his other side, her head literally buried in her now massive purse.

  Kirby looked up the clock tower. The digital clock at the very top read one thirty.

  "The clock is wrong," said Kirby, because it couldn't be one thirty in the morning, because they were in the middle of a sunny day.

  "It has to be right," said Molly.

  "Check it out," said Andi's purse, lying alone on the counter.

  "That bitch has to be right," said Max Cooperman from behind Kirby.

  "Why does it have to right?" asked Kirby.

  "Because it's my alibi," said Cooperman.

 

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