“It’s been a week; why didn’t they call her in as an MP?” Jacob asked. A Missing Person report would have helped them out immensely a week ago when her body had first been found, but instead, her employer had only mentioned that she’d been gone when Burns and Williams had stumbled into the restaurant on their radius search.
Burns shrugged. “The manager said that the service industry is notorious for patchy employees. Apparently, it’s quite common for staff to take off every now and then and just never answer the restaurant’s calls. It’s transient work in LA. A way to pay the rent until something better comes along.”
He nodded but frowned at the board. “Did the manager say anything specific about her work performance?”
“Yeah,” Williams chimed in. “She said that Deborah was a good, reliable employee. She showed up on time and was good with patrons. They only ever had one incident with her in the five years that she worked there.”
Burns and Williams glanced at each other.
“Spit it out.” Doug frowned at them, clearly used to the duo’s in-sync way of communicating.
“A few years back, a guy who had been drinking heavily for a couple of hours cornered her on her way back from the restroom.”
Jacob’s head whipped up.
“He tried to lay some moves on her, and she flipped out, started screaming and clawing at the guy’s face. It took two of the waiters to eventually pull her off and, at least according to the manager, about thirty minutes to calm her down.”
“Did she know the guy?” Jacob asked.
“No. He was a regular at the bar, a known drinker who usually kept to himself and in his cups.”
Williams picked up where Burns had left off. “The manager said it had shaken her at the time because Deborah was so even-tempered, so calm and professional. Marla, the manager, said that when the cops came, she could tell that Deborah was in shock so she’d backed her when she said that the guy had tried to assault her.”
“We have a report on that?”
The detectives nodded, their heads moving at the exact same time. “It’s standard. The guy got taken to an overnight holding cell and once he’d sobered up, he called and apologized. Said that he’d never meant to scare her.”
“She didn’t press charges?”
He shook his head no.
“And the guy?”
Williams looked down at his notebook at Jacob’s question. “A construction worker, David Porto, with no priors. He moved to San Francisco to find better work in the development boom about six months after his run-in with Deborah Duran. We tracked him down. He’s married now, lives a quiet life as a junior contractor. Has a six-month-old.”
“I’m assuming that he hasn’t left town in months.”
“Nope, his whereabouts have been confirmed for the past six weeks. His boss says that he can personally vouch for the fact that David has been tied down because they’re behind on a project at San Francisco International Airport and neither of them has had breathing room in months.”
Williams added, “David Porto remembered the incident because it had scared the crap out of him. Said he’d honestly just been drunk and trying to hit on her. Hadn’t expected to scare her.”
“Did the restaurant manager say why Deborah might have reacted so viscerally to a handsy patron?” Doug asked.
“She said that it was obvious that there was more than Deborah was letting on, but that she didn’t ask at the time.”
“And then there’s this.” Jacob picked up the second police report that had been on record under Deborah Duran’s name, flipped it open to a color photograph of a younger Duran.
In the picture, she was barely an adult, maybe nineteen. Her hair was pulled back, exposing wide, sharp cheekbones and sad, green eyes, one of which was half-shut with a red and purple bruise that spread from her right temple down to her jawline. He knew that there were other pictures; pictures of her bruised ribs where three had been broken by the steel-toed boots belonging to her boyfriend at the time; pictures of the blood-spattered room where she had been found unconscious by the cops when her neighbors had called in the domestic dispute.
“So, she has a history of domestic abuse?” Doug concluded. “She’s cornered by a patron who happens to be harmless, but she doesn’t know that, and she flips out.”
Burns and Williams nodded.
“And the first victim, Veronica Tally, volunteered with an anonymity group for victims of domestic abuse,” Jacob added.
“Coincidence?”
Jacob looked at Doug, considered his question. “I’ll look more into the second’s history tomorrow. The chances of all three of them being victims of domestic violence would significantly narrow the probability of this being coincidence.”
“How are we going to do that?” Burns asked. “We tried to track down Selma Holt’s next of kin. Her parents are dead, and the kid’s father isn’t listed on the birth certificate.”
“I’m going to stop in and visit the kid. Children are weirdly perceptive,” Jacob said warily. There was no point in trying to hide the fact that he was dreading the task.
“Speak to Social about getting a sample of his DNA for the case?” Doug asked, his eyes half-closed with stress. “Take the Michaels girl with you when you go.”
Jacob frowned. “What?” He looked at Burns and Williams, but they just shrugged and kept quiet.
“Jordan is ten, Jake. But the kid is tiny, and his whole demeanor is…wary. I had to take Laura with me when we dropped him at Social Services. Just trust me, you won’t get him to say a word if you don’t have a female that he can trust masking the smell of cop on you. Take your mom if you don’t want to go with your girl.”
“You took your wife with you?” Jacob asked, solidly ignoring the deliberate reference to Lola as ‘his girl’.
Doug shrugged. “Like I said when I put you on Lola Michaels, some things aren’t written in the book. No rules can account for what that kid’s just been through.”
Jacob shifted. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with taking Lola to visit a child in the system. He knew from having done it once or twice before that it killed a small part of you every time. No child should have to live without parents, no child should be bustled from stranger to stranger without someone who loved them unconditionally. A selfish part of him wanted to protect her from that slice of reality. He didn’t want her to feel the helplessness, the hopelessness that came, untempered, from visiting a child in the county’s custody. He wanted to protect her from shit like that. He’d call his mom first. She at least had been a trauma nurse in LA her entire career, had been married to an LAPD chief; she would be much better equipped to help with Jordan Holt.
“Selma Holt’s employers couldn’t tell you anything?” Doug’s question pulled him from his train of thought.
He shook his head, no. “She kept to herself, worked hard, but didn’t mingle.”
“Seems a lot like Deborah Duran,” Burns said, pointing to her picture.
“So, we have three dead women, two who have a history of domestic violence. One directly. One indirectly. The third victim may have too. TBD. Next steps.” The captain looked at Jacob.