By Monday at noon, Jacob was ready to snap. Burns and Williams had come back with nothing. The owner of the café had told them that the group of women met without fail every Saturday at nine and that they stayed and talked for a couple of hours. He’d recognized all three girls from the pictures but hadn’t known their names. And worst of all, when they’d asked for his electronic records of all the credit cards used in his café on Saturdays, he’d gladly handed them over, only adding that most of the women in the group paid in cash only.
Jacob didn’t understand how a man had killed three women in thirty-six hours and hadn’t left a single shred of evidence. All three of the girls’ homes—or in Veronica Tally’s case, college dorm room—had come back squeaky clean with no evidence of anyone except the girls and their friends and families having been there.
None of their things were missing.
Nothing was particularly out of place.
No unusual or unknown prints were found.
Basically, Burns and Williams had returned to the station with bad news. Again. And Jacob was itching to let his own frustration out.
To make matters worse, he couldn’t even blame them because he had proven unsuccessful too. His research into the early hours of the morning on the anonymity group and HAK had proven useless, and all he’d gotten out of it was less sleep than he should have, which was not helping his current mood. If a single good thing had come out of the second attempted break-in at Lola’s apartment and his ensuing, sleep-deprived theory, it was the fact that the Captain had agreed to put twenty-four-hour protection on her. Even now in the middle of the day, a rookie was perched in the parking lot of her apartment complex in a marked police sedan and Jacob felt relieved knowing that someone was with her at all times.
Doug had disappeared, having left to go and update his chain of command on the case, but Jacob, Burns, and Williams sat together on steel and plastic chairs in the Northeast Community Police Station and stared at the board in front of them.
Occasionally, one of them would make a suggestion and the other two would volley the idea back and forth until it reached its natural conclusion, but that was never a good sign. They weren’t a thinktank. They weren’t supposed to pull hypotheticals out of thin air and slowly rationalize them away. They were police. They were supposed to follow the trail of evidence that led to the criminals, make an arrest, and let the courts decide from there. Sure, they’d occasionally take small hops and assumptions to pursue a line of reasoning, but nothing akin to the Sherlocking that they were doing now.
So, after another long, fifteen-minute silence, Jacob called it. He knew that the detectives both had to catch up with the other work that the case had been keeping them from. So, did he. But, more than that, he didn’t want the detectives around when he used his call-a-friend card. He hated that he was about to do it anyway, but he needed a fresh perspective.
Even his own captain was getting itchy over how much time he was spending on the case, away from his responsibilities at Central. He’d already been pulled off reviewing the police logs because the patrol and corroborating video logs from the Northeast Division had come back clean, which he’d expected anyway. So, as much as he hated to admit it, he needed help.
Picking up his phone, he dialed the number from the black business card. The card was a heavyweight, with a matte black background and no other text on it other than the stark, silver phone number, but Jacob knew that the number still worked despite the four years he’d had it in his wallet.
“Lieutenant Jacob Simmone,” the voice drawled when the call was answered. “I figured it wouldn’t be too long until you decided to jump ship. Did you finally quit the boys in blue so that you could come and join me?”
Jake grinned despite himself. Zac Murphy was an arrogant SOB, but they’d been best friends since their first day at the academy together, best friends through the case that had gotten Zac’s girlfriend killed nearly eight years earlier, best friends until Zac had up and quit the LAPD shortly afterward without so much as a phone call.
Jacob had walked into work to find Zac’s desk cleared out and a message from the Chief that his best friend and partner had quit to become a PI—a PI with less-than-legal methods if word on the street was any indication.
“Murph,” he said, smiling over the phone. “I would have stopped to chat on Sunday but I-”
“Had more pressing concerns?” Zac laughed. “Yeah, I could see that. Since when do you manhandle potential victims in a serial murder case?”
Jacob wondered how much he still trusted Zac. They hadn’t spoken in years, only occasionally running into each other when some wealthy, impatient patron of Zac’s got tired of the bureaucratic operations of the LAPD. The truth was that he still trusted him implicitly, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a public servant and Zac was not, that he had not been since Tara had died.
Because the memories threatened to loose themselves, he gave Zac what he wanted. “Since I’m going to convince her to marry me at some point,” he said, honestly.
“What. The. Fuck?”
Jacob grinned. “Don’t you dare say anything to Sarah Boyle. The idea only just occurred to me this morning. Speaking of which…what’s your connection to my case, Zac?”
“Nah-uh, you’re not going to slip past me this one,” he countered immediately. “How long have you two been dating?” Zac asked, his voice still incredulous. “I…I didn’t find you in her background.”
“So, Sarah’s hired you to look into it,” Jacob countered, knowing that he was right. Still, he grinned by how angry Zac sounded that something as big as an LAPD boyfriend had slipped under his radar. “Don’t beat yourself up over it, man. I’ve known her—what?—nine days and we haven’t even been on an official date yet.”
There was silence on the end of the line and Jake found himself grinning. Again. Oh, yeah. You’re in way over your head, Man. Stop smiling. You look crazy.
“Hold on one second.” Jacob could hear Zac rifling through some paperwork on his desk. “You know that my sister is a shrink for uniforms, right? I’m going to read her number to you…”
“Yeah, trust me. I’m not entirely sure I don’t need her services.”
Zac laughed and Jacob found himself enjoying the easy banter. It was almost as if there wasn’t a world of unsaid things between them. With an audible sigh, Zac took the first step. “So, you want to know what I’ve found?”
“Well, I know that the Boyle girl hired you,” he said, fishing for verbal confirmation. When Zac didn’t contest the point, he took it as true and added, “You know that I usually wouldn’t ask, given your…methods. But this time… everything is at stake.”
“I understand.” Another moment of silence ensued and they both knew that the other was thinking about Tara, about how she’d died. Eventually, Zac groaned, and Jacob could hear him wheeling his desk chair across the hardwood floor of his office. “It’s going to cost you a favor though, Jake.”
“What do you need?” He closed his eyes, prepared for what he’d have to do. He didn’t dwell on the fact that he’d do it because he already knew that he’d do anything if it meant keeping Lola safe.