Everything sticks like a broken record
Everything sticks until it goes away
and the truth is we don’t know anything
Sosa and Beth sat in Peet’s on Mission Street, facing the sidewalk. She pulled out a notebook and showed Sosa all of her work from last night, when she was sitting interminably at the bus stop. Her cell phone started to beep with SMS’s and she got a chance to read them as Sosa looked at her notes. Mac wanted to know if they could talk. He told her it was in the past. He wondered what she was up to. He had some tickets to a show. There were about twenty messages. She wrote him back quickly: “In meeting, will call you soon.” Hopefully that would staunch the flow.
“OK bear with me,” Sosa said. “Let me go over all of this in my words.”
Beth sipped her coffee slowly so she wouldn’t interrupt.
“The first victim, Jelly, was pushed from the top of Fort Point. Here, you say that in the Moleskine she should have been at Fort Mason at 9pm with a Tim. But her estimated time of death was between 10pm and midnight, at another location. She was last seen at 4pm in a meeting at work, in the outer Mission.”
“Some other details on Jelly: she was autistically dyslexic, she didn’t have a cell phone, and she purportedly, from a dream, has a camera that is missing.”
Sosa paused. Beth wondered if she could jump in.
“Can I…”
“I’m not done.” Sosa said.
Beth sipped her coffee.
“Jelly and Diane shared a boyfriend, name of Jeremy.” Sosa quickly dialed his cell phone. “Mikey, can you get on a Jeremy, ex- intimate of deceased Jelly. Thanks.”
He traced her notes with his finger. “Ok and lastly, … oh no, that’s, yep, I think that’s it.”
“Can I?”
“Sure.”
“We have to see if Jelly uploaded any photos recently. That will show her camera make and model. On flickr you can see recent uploads, though we’ll have to figure out her password. She probably used it at work, and so Mac can find cookie passwords on her computer…”
“I didn’t understand about half of what you said.”
“OK, I know someone who can find out what her password was to this online uploading site that will show her recent photos.”
“Great.”
“It’s my boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
“It’s OK, I think he’d love to do it. Him and Jelly were… close. He actually just told me, last night, that they were a little too close.”
Sosa drew his hand through his dark curly hair, “This is Jelly’s boss? Oh man. This is getting sticky.”