DEAD AIR: PLAYBOOK

9. Live

## Chapter 12 — Bait

The plan was simple, which meant it was dangerous. Simple plans had nowhere to hide.

Friday, 8 PM, live: Dead Air Season 3, Episode 1 — "The Playbook Murders." Adian would play the memos, walk the audience through the siphon, and name Paula Reyes on air — full name, on the record, in front of two million people. The only court Paula was afraid of.

"She'll move," Marcus said, laying out the countersurveillance map on the studio table. "People like her — administrators, planners — they don't run. They adjust. She'll call Vane. She'll try to get to Priya, to the laptop, to Kwan. And we'll be watching all three."

Calloway had a tac team on standby, unmarked, two blocks out. June would run the board. Elena would run the tip line and the monitors. And Adian — Adian would wear a hot mic under his shirt, live to Calloway's van, the way he'd worn his guilt for two books: close to the skin, always on.

June prepped the board like a woman going to war — backup feeds, kill switches, a second recorder running to a drive in her bag. "If they hijack us again," she said, taping down a cable with more force than it required, "I want three copies of everything before they can blink."

Elena took the monitors and the tip line, her investigator's face on. Marcus's voice came through the earpiece, calm as still water: "Perimeter's quiet. Tac team's two blocks out, dark. Priya's lake house is being watched — if Paula moves, we'll see it."

"And Vane?" Adian asked.

A beat. "Vane's the one thing I can't see, Adian. That's what makes him Vane."

Kristel found him at 6 PM, packing his bag in the bedroom — the good shirt, the dark blue one, the armor.

"Don't," she said.

"Kristel—"

"Don't perform this." She stood in the doorway the way she'd stood in doorways all their marriage — watching, deciding. "Every time you go on air for one of these, you come back less mine. The lake took forty-eight hours. The memos took a season. This —" Her voice cracked. "Maya took her first steps for the nanny, Adian."

The guilt landed precisely, like a paper cut. "After this one," he said, "I step back. I swear. After this one—"

"Don't swear." She crossed the room and straightened his collar with hands that shook, slightly, once. "Swearing is what you do instead of staying."

She kissed him — brief, fierce, the kiss of a woman sending a man into a burning building — and went to check on Maya, and didn't look back.

In the hallway he passed the nursery door, cracked open, the moon night-light spilling its soft blue across the carpet. He stopped — just for a second — and looked in at his daughter asleep in her crib, one fist curled against her cheek, the monitor's red eye blinking steady above her. I'm doing this for you, he thought. So nobody ever gets to use you the way they used everyone else.

It was true. It was also what he'd told himself at the lake, in Book 1, driving forty miles in the dark toward a text about his sister. True things had led him into deep water before.

He touched the doorframe lightly — a promise, a prayer — and went to the studio to become the bait.

At 7:42 PM, eighteen minutes to air, the studio felt like the inside of a held breath. June moved around the board with the brisk efficiency of a woman defusing a bomb. Elena checked the monitors. Marcus's voice crackled in Adian's earpiece: "Perimeter's quiet. Too quiet, but that's professionals for you."

Adian sat at the mic, turning his wedding band around his finger, around and around.

"You don't have to do this," June said.

"Yes," Adian said, "I do."

At 8:00 PM the red light went on, and two million people leaned in.

"Good evening," Adian said. "I'm Adian Cross, and this is Dead Air. Tonight, I'm going to tell you about the Playbook Murders — and I'm going to name the killer."

## Chapter 13 — Live

He played the memos first — Wren, Theo, Mara, the performances — and then he played the fourth one, the real one, the unperformed one, and two million people heard the difference the way you hear the difference between a rehearsal and a wound.

"Paula Reyes," he said into the mic, and June's hand hovered over the kill switch the way it had on the night of Episode 212, and Adian shook his head once — let it run — the way he had then. "Daniel Reyes's office manager. The woman with the casserole dish and the appointment book. She's been stealing from the children of murder victims for eighteen months. And when Colin Beck found out, she hired a professional to drown him."

The studio was silent except for the red light's hum.

"Paula," Adian said, quieter now, "if you're listening — and I know you are — the police are already moving. It's over."

Then he walked them through it — the way he'd walked two million people through a hundred cases, the register settling, deepening, finding the truth the way it always did.

"The siphon," he said. "Thirty-one families. Two thousand dollars a quarter, shaved off every disbursement, for eighteen months. Three hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars — stolen from the children of murder victims, by the woman handing them the checks." He let that sit. "Colin Beck found it. He was a forensic auditor — he found money for a living. And six weeks ago, he was found in a reservoir, ruled an accident. His laptop is gone. His last unsent email said: I found the siphon. It's inside the disbursements. I have names."

He played Beck's memo — the real one, the unperformed one — and the studio filled with the sound of a man remembering the worst night of his life. Two million people heard the difference between acting and bleeding, and the tip line lit up like a switchboard — not with tips, with recognition. Listeners who'd heard the leaked memos. Listeners who could hear it too.

"Three of the memos you've heard about are performances — paid actors, scripts, noise. This one isn't. This one is signal." Adian leaned toward the mic. "And the noise was manufactured to bury it. Somebody paid three people to confess to three deaths so that nobody would hear the fourth confession — the real one. Somebody is using my show as a smokescreen — and I'm done being the smoke."

June's eyebrows went up at the ad-lib. Elena smiled — the fierce one, the sister one.

"So tonight," Adian said, "we clear the air."

Marcus's voice in the earpiece, tight: "Movement at the lake house. One vehicle, heading—"

And then the feed glitched.

A tone, low and wrong, rolled under Adian's voice like a wave under a boat. The studio monitors flickered. June lunged for the board — and the tip-line channel was already live, unmuted from inside, the paired-device trick, someone in the building, the Book 2 nightmare all over again.

But this wasn't a memo. This was a voice, live, unmodulated for the first time — calm as a metronome, close as breath:

"You named the wrong killer, Adian."

Vane.

The studio went arctic. Elena froze at the monitors. June's hands hovered over a dead channel.

"The administrator signs the checks. She doesn't pull the triggers. You want the man who drowned your auditor?" A pause, almost gentle. "Come alone. You know the address."

"Vane—" Adian started.

"Fourteen Heron Point Road. Come and see what your playbook looks like from the other side."

The line died. The studio was silent except for Adian's breathing, live, unedited.

Marcus's voice in the earpiece, urgent: "Adian, don't—"

Adian was already standing, pulling the earpiece out, looking into the mic — into two million faces.

"Show's over," he said. "Go home."

He walked out of the studio into the night, toward the lake, toward the address that had been waiting for him since Book 1 — and this time, he remembered every step.