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me and Daisy went downstairs to the cafeteria to find a TV but there wasn’t one. I pulled an Almond Joy from the vending machine and we sat at a table in the cafeteria listening to the lights overhead hum, Daisy drawing her name in spilt salt with her fingers.
    Back in Phoenix, we were anxious to get our tape. We dialed Elliot and Hunter’s number, but their number was disconnected. We hadn’t heard from Rick in forever so we called him to find out what was going on but his phone number was disconnected, too. Daisy turned on the televisionwhile I checked the number with information and Daisy said, Look, it’s them. And sure enough over the shoulder of the anchorwoman was a picture of Elliot and Hunter with the caption SENATOR’S SON SLAIN.
    Turn it up, I said.
    Daisy hit the remote and the anchorwoman’s voice rose in the living room. The details of the murder were scarce. As far as the police were able to determine, Hunter and Elliot were shot to death in their home somewhere around midnight. Daisy noted that it was the day after we recorded with them. Holy shit, Daisy said, look at that. A picture of Elliot at the White House with his father, Senator Hawkins, flashed in a succession of pictures, mostly of the senator and his wife at various parties. The anchorwoman came back on and over her shoulder appeared crude sketches of people the police wanted to talk to. A neighbor woman told the police they were the last people she saw at the house. We couldn’t see it at first—Daisy was the one who really saw it—but sure enough the sketches were of me and Daisy and Rick.
    Daisy said, Try Rick’s number again. Her hand shook as she beamed the remote control at the TV, switching it off. I dialed Rick’s number and the disconnection recording played in my ear but Daisy started to freak out, pacing the room, looking out the window like she was in the government witness relocation program.
    I hung up the phone. Look, I said, we didn’t do anything, we don’t know anything. Daisy looked out the window again. We should call the police, I said.
    But they’re gonna ask about Rick and now Rick’sdisappeared and they’re gonna want to know why, Daisy reasoned.
    I said we didn’t know why and that if we didn’t go to the police it would make us look guilty of something. We agreed to wait until the morning to call the police because we secretly hoped the police would figure it all out overnight or we’d hear from Rick. Once that shite was straightened out, we hoped to get our tape back. (We
did
feel sympathy for Elliot and Hunter, who were, as far as we knew, nice guys, and they certainly didn’t deserve to be murdered—if we could, there’d be a ton of things me and Daisy would like to undo.)
    We called Stella and asked her advice. When we told her, the first thing Stella said was that now she could add us to her Murder Book. She laughed and you could almost hear the ocean in the background. We wished we were there instead of in Phoenix. We wished we were kicking through the waves and laying out in the sun.
    Before we could ask Stella for her advice she launched into the latest target of her celebrity death obsession: Jon-Erik Hexum, the actor who starred in the early ’80s TV shows
Voyagers
and
Cover Up
. Me and Daisy remembered watching the shows when we were kids but we didn’t know right away who she was talking about. The really good-looking guy, Stella said, the one that looked like a model. We said we remembered even though we weren’t sure and Stella told us how in 1984 on Stage 17 at the 20th Century Fox lot, the set of
Cover Up
, there was a half hour break between takes of a scene involving Jon-Erik Hexum’s character, a weapons expert, and another actor. (Stella had a copy of the script.)Hexum was supposed to be trying to infiltrate an enemy group as a spy and in order to win over the enemy’s confidence he was to load his