Furlong checked his notes, glanced at the pass-through serving hatch into the kitchen, and realized that a serene older Vietnamese chef from his last visit was missing. In his place, a young, roly-poly white guy who was studying his phone between orders. Furlong made his way to the restroom, always another point of information for Powers’s reviews, and peeked in the kitchen.
“Where’s Mai Pham?” he said.
The kid looked up. “Made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” And laughed. On the counter stood a giant glass jar of pickled vegetables. The jar’s label screamed its mass-produced provenance.
Furlong drove his Mini Cooper to Enterprise — his shared office space in the uber-hip RiNo neighborhood near downtown. The middling banh mi and the impostor ingredients had planted a seed.
Enterprise gave him a veneer of official status. Furlong was treated like a father figure by the start-up whiz-bang tattooed gang that came and went at all hours of the day and night. For this bunch, it was working on your future IPOs by day and guzzling IPAs by night. Furlong’s age made him a quaint anachronism. His restaurant tips, however, were golden. He had suggestions for all taste buds and expense levels. He’d developed a few relationships with the tech-savvy youth, which had come in handy on more than one occasion.
“Gather is just like Zoom, right?” said Furlong.
“With a few differences — including the fact that the dashboard is a snap. Any grandma can figure it out. Zoom got complicated.”
Brie Chambers was part of a team that was developing an app that had something to do with bitcoin. Furlong’s head hurt just trying to understand the basic concept. Chambers had short blond hair streaked with bright tangerine. She had a generous sunbeam smile and a tall, athletic presence. Her graceful body was right at home in tight black jeans and a loose purple turtleneck. She sat next to Furlong on a bright-red couch in one of the many mini living rooms around Enterprise that were designed to encourage collaboration or relaxation or both. She sipped on steaming tea that smelled like already-smoked pipe tobacco and which she had explained was called Roy Boss, “but spelled r-o-o-i-b-o-s and is really good for bone health and digestion and comes from a South African bush.” Furlong wondered about the power of marketing and storytelling to entice perfectly beautiful young people to ingest such odd products. Like grapefruit beer. Or marshmallow popcorn. And all such trends seemed to happen from coast to coast. Regionalism was dead. It was very possible Timothy Powers was working up a rant. Furlong squelched it — for now.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I’ve been asked to take another look at that case involving Billy Duncan—”
“What? Oh my god. Seriously? For real? My roommate is obsessed.”
“Really?”
“She likes all those true crime podcasts, murder docs. Those network shows where they drag out a murder case for an hour. And — right — Gather was a thing in the Billy Duncan deal. What was his name?”
“Tyler Hyde.”
“Yep,” said Chambers. “Tyler Hyde. Always thought it sounded like trying to hide, but there he was, right in plain sight.”
Furlong opened his vintage laptop. He pulled up the recording from Gather — seventeen men and women in a two-hour online meeting. He hit play.
“I remember I had just moved here from Bushwick and I thought, where the hell is Glendale, what the hell is Glendale?” said Chambers. “Also, where’s the glen and where’s the dale? Duncan’s body — well, most of it — was found the day after I got here, so it was sort of a welcome-to-Colorado thing you don’t easily forget.”
“Some greeting,” said Furlong.
“Creepy. So Tyler Hyde?”
“Was in this meeting when the murder happened,” said Furlong, pointing to him. There were three rows of boxes — six frames in the top row, five in the middle, and another row of six. Hyde, head and shoulders only, sat in the middle of the group of five in the middle row. Dead center. He wore a plain green pullover and round brown horn-rimmed glasses. “The meeting started thirty minutes before the camera got whacked by the man in the hoodie when he stepped off the elevator.”
“My roommate would probably say, Are you sure it was a man?”
“Agreed,” said Furlong. “But the cases involving dismemberment by women are rare.” He paused the recording.
“A proud talking point for your gender.”
“So proud,” said Furlong. “Anyway—”
“Tyler Hyde never left the meeting, right?”
“Right.”
“He lived close enough, if I remember, but it was like he had the perfect alibi.”
“Right.”
“Remind me why Tyler Hyde was even a suspect, then?”
“Billy Duncan had brought Hyde’s name to the DA. Duncan had spotted financial irregularities.”
“Embezzlement?” said Chambers.
“It’s unclear.”
“And?”
“And Duncan’s suspicions were never proven.”
“Because Duncan was killed,” said Chambers. “But Hyde could have been ticked off about the allegations.”
“Sure.”
Furlong hit play on the Gather recording again. A copy of the two-hour meeting had been sent to the DA’s office the day after the murder. By email. Anonymously. It was as if the email provided instant inoculation for Hyde: Don’t bother coming after me. Hyde was questioned by police. His entire demeanor was polite and cooperative, though he shunned any public statements. The recording of the snooze-a-thon meeting found its way onto YouTube for anyone to see.
“What was the meeting about again?”
“A nonprofit. Schools in Africa. He’s on the board.”
“Thief by day, do-gooder by night?” said Chambers.
“People are complicated,” said Furlong.
“You watched the whole meeting?”
“Me? Yes. Had to. He’s there for the duration. It was well-reported at the time.”
“Well-reported?” said Chambers. “What exactly does that mean?”
“These days? I’m not so sure. Is there any way, you know, from a technical perspective, to rig this?”
“What do you mean, rig?”
“I’m looking for the simplest answer,” said Furlong. “Maybe he’s not really there?”
“He’s participating,” said Chambers. “I can see him.”
“Yes, at the beginning he’s in charge of the fundraising committee and he makes a big report.”
“And it seems like real time?”
“I mean, he’s taking questions. Yes.”
“And then?”
“And then the meeting moves on to other business and he’s—” He’s what? Just sitting there? “Would it be possible to switch your Gather feed to a recorded video?”
Chambers thought about it. Shook her head like dawning realization. Said, “My roommate is gonna go nuts.”
For three days, Furlong followed Tyler Hyde back and forth to work. It was a mere four blocks from his eight-story apartment building to the city offices, but Hyde drove his tiny Kia to work because at lunch he ran swift, efficient errands and grabbed a cheap bite. To go. He was usually back in his office within forty-five minutes. If anything, Hyde appeared to be upstanding. Purposeful. He walked with his shoulders up. He held doors for women. He drove with care. He kept to himself.
On the fourth morning, as Furlong began to think Hyde might not give him anything to work with, the man emerged from his office at ten thirty a.m. and drove to a bank just over the Glendale border in Denver. Hyde hustled from his car, stepping around puddles in the melting snow. At the bank entrance, he sprayed a glance around like a lawn sprinkler on crack. He rested his gaze for a second longer than necessary on Furlong’s car. Furlong saw how Hyde’s face might have looked during the crime. Sheer darkness. Furlong shuddered.