Turn up the Heat

to us. He was being so uncharacteristically deceptive about the truck and the accounts that I had to wonder whether he was also lying about other things. I already knew that he had asked Adrianna to tell the police that he had been with her the night Leandra died. Why had Owen asked her to lie for him? Convenience? Maybe he’d simply wanted the police to stop pestering him. Or could Owen really have something to hide? Could he possibly have killed Leandra? No. There was no way. I knew Owen.
    I thought back to the morning when I’d discovered Leandra’s body in the back of his truck. Owen had wanted to show me the truck himself; it had been strictly my idea to explore it on my own. Maybe he’d had no intention of showing me the inside. He could have planned to drive the body away and dispose of it! Still, why would he have murdered Leandra? An unwelcome answer came to me. Months ago, Adrianna had had a minor fling with Snacker. She hadn’t outright cheated on Owen, but she had betrayed him. What if Owen had had his revenge with Leandra? Owen had been to Simmer’s New Year’s Eve opening, and he’d been there many times since then. He now made daily deliveries to Simmer. It would’ve been easy for him to run into Leandra and flirt with her. Owen was still furious with Snacker, but I thought that he had forgiven Adrianna for her indiscretion. Maybe not. Maybe he had stupidly, foolishly hooked up with Leandra as payback. And then Leandra had threatened to tell Adrianna. If Leandra was as coldhearted as people had been telling me, she wouldn’t have thought twice about breaking Gavin’s heart. Or Ade’s. In fact, Leandra had enjoyed needling people and taunting them.
    A much more tolerable alternative was that Owen had been set up. Someone else had killed Leandra and tossed her body into Owen’s truck. Almost everyone liked Owen. The only person I could think of who didn’t was Snacker. But Snacker didn’t hate Owen; he was just sick of having Owen shoot him dirty looks and throw obnoxious comments his way. In response, Snacker stood up for himself. The rest of the time, I thought, Owen never crossed Snacker’s mind. It didn’t make sense that Snacker would have killed Leandra, placed her body in the fish truck, and waited for Owen to suffer the consequences. Snacker loved women and loved fooling around with them; the notion that he’d killed a woman, especially one he found “hot,” was ridiculous. But I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d deliberately have framed Owen.
    My thoughts returned to the day we’d found the waitress’s body. Owen’s behavior had been strange: he’d tried to convince me to move Leandra’s body out of his truck, and he’d seemed far more worried about himself than about the dead woman, as if his selling fish were more important to him than staying alive had been to her. It was, however, possible that Owen had had some sort of affair with Leandra. The other night at Simmer, Leandra had said something that hadn’t sat right with me: “So, when am I going to get a ride in that new truck of yours? I hear the fish business is booming." Did getting “a ride” have a double meaning? Ick! Or did she know that he had bought his truck and was she taunting him with what she knew? Leandra’s words bothered me.
    I looked up Owen’s name in the online baby-name database. Owen meant “warrior.” I abruptly shut down the computer and walked away.

SIXTEEN

    MY sleep that Monday night was dreamless, and I awoke on Tuesday morning feeling healthy and energetic. After a day of hungover grogginess, my system was finally free of beer, and I was back to normal. I showered, dressed, and ran my second term paper over to school. Back at home, I was forcing myself to review my notes on the DSM and pathological behavior in general when Adrianna called.
    “Chloe, I need your help!” Worried that my best friend had discovered Owen’s lies, I braced myself for an onslaught of screaming and wailing. “The movers left a little while ago, and I can’t deal with this disaster! Can you help me get started with unpacking? I think I have that nesting thing going on, and I feel like I have to get everything settled as fast as possible.”
    The last thing I felt like doing right now was unpacking boxes, but it would be better to help Adrianna move in than it would have been to console her about Owen’s deceit. “Sure. Give me your new address again?”
    Adrianna and Owen’s new apartment