“Right,” Jessie confirmed. “He was transferred from the Men’s Central Jail last year. You’re not about to tell me they’re releasing him, are you? Because he’s got something like sixty-five years left on his sentence, even with good behavior.”
“No—nothing like that,” Dolan assured her. “In fact, he may have more time added to his sentence. It seems that after a stretch in which he was a model prisoner, he’s now fallen in with an unsavory crowd.”
“What does that mean?” Jessie asked, her fingers getting prickly and cold.
Dolan looked hesitant to go on but realized that he didn’t have a choice at this point.
“He seems to have gotten friendly with a gang associated with one of the cartels. At first, the thought was that it was a desperate move in order to get protection from other potential threats inside. But apparently he reached out to them to initiate the relationship.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The Bureau has a confidential informant in the gang who periodically passes us info. I wouldn’t mention it except that in his last report, he noted that Kyle mentioned you. That’s why it was in the file.”
“What did he say?” Jessie asked, trying to sound calm.
“Typical stuff you expect from a disgruntled ex-husband who was in prison after being outsmarted by the wife he’d tried to kill.”
“Typical stuff like what, Dolan?” she pressed.
“Oh, stuff like that you shouldn’t be living it up with money he earned, that you’re a fraud who gets credit for crimes you were lucky to solve, that you deserve to be knocked out of your ivory tower, that kind of thing.”
“That’s all?” Jessie asked skeptically. “Those don’t sound like the kind of comments that would make it into an FBI report. And they seem tame for Kyle. After all, the last time I saw him, he told me, what was the exact quote? I think it was that he wanted to take a tire iron and beat me until I was a pulpy mess of shattered bones, shredded skin, and oozing blood.”
“Yeah,” Dolan said, reluctantly going on. “It sounds like he hasn’t exactly mellowed since then. He might have also mentioned to his new friends that he’d like to gut you like a pig and bathe in your warm blood.”
Neither spoke for a moment. Jessie gulped hard before responding.
“Okay. Well, that’s not ideal.”
“No,” Dolan agreed. “But let’s keep it in context. He’s in prison. You put him there. He’s a murderer trying to get in tight with some scary guys. It’s not a stunner that he’d say something like that.”
Jessie nodded. That was all true.
“Any evidence that he’s done anything other than talk about fantasies of my death?” she asked.
“None,” Dolan said definitively. “And as soon as I saw the report, I passed the word to our C.I.’s handler for him to alert us the second that changes. I almost didn’t mention it. But I figured you deserved to know. Besides, if anyone can handle something like that, it’s you.”
She wasn’t sure she could but she didn’t want Dolan to feel bad about telling her so she forced a smile to her lips.
“You did the right thing,” she assured him. “Frankly, that’s about fifth on my list of concerns these days.”
She said it with such confidence that she thought he almost believed her.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
“I think we’re about to get shut down.”
Those were Ryan’s first words to Jessie the second she walked into the bullpen ten minutes later.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, forgoing any pleasantries of her own.
“Valley Bureau has officially charged Vasquez,” he said. “They’re pushing hard to close the case. I told Captain Decker that we’re not on board with that. He wants to meet with us at nine thirty to make our pitch for keeping it open. Other than Valley’s sloppy, stunningly suspicious rush to judgment, I don’t have anything hard to offer. Without something definitive, I think he’s going to defer to them.”
“In that case,” she said, pulling out her phone and scrolling to her note with the initials from the Post-it, “it’s a good thing I found these.”
“What’s that?” he asked, squinting at the letters.
“For your own professional deniability, I can’t tell you where I got it,” she warned. “But this is a list of initials that I think represent people Michaela had private dates with.”
“She did that?”
“I can’t prove it. But there is good reason to think she did and this list was an informal way to track her clients. I’m hoping we can use it to come up with some names.”
Ryan looked at her doubtfully.
“We can go through her data,” he said, patting the file on her desk. “But the chances of narrowing down something credible based solely on a bunch of initials from a source you won’t even share with me are…not great.”
“Which is why we need to get started,” Jessie countered. “We’ve got less than a half hour until nine thirty. Let’s make the most of it.”
Jessie quickly went through most of Michaela’s banking and credit card records and was planning to look at her phone logs next. Across from her, Ryan reviewed the GPS data from her phone. She had come across a few names that matched initials but so far, they’d all turned out to be dead ends.
“Hernandez and Hunt—in my office!” Decker shouted across the bullpen, making Jessie jump out of her seat.
She looked up at the wall clock and saw that thirty minutes had passed in the blink of an eye. As she followed Ryan to Decker’s office, she mentally scrambled, trying to come up with any credible reason for the captain to let them stay on the case. There were several she found compelling but she doubted he’d agree.
“Close the door,” he ordered as she entered.
She did so, and then took a seat beside Ryan.
“So I gave you the day, Hunt,” Decker said, settling into his worn swivel chair. “And it looks like you didn’t catch any murderers in that time. Am I mistaken?”
“Not yet, sir,” she conceded.
“Well, our friends in Valley Bureau believe they have.”
“They’re wrong, sir,” Jessie said forcefully. “I was the one who apprehended Pete Vasquez. I questioned him before anyone else arrived on the scene. He’s not our man.”
“Are you sure about that, Hunt?” he asked pointedly.
“That is my belief, sir.”
“Well, those aren’t exactly the same thing, are they? Unfortunately, the folks at Valley Bureau are confident enough in Vasquez’s guilt that they’re formally charged him with Michaela Penn’s death. He’s being arraigned this afternoon. Unless you have another suspect for me, I’m not sure what can be done.”
“Captain,” Jessie pleaded, “Vasquez is a small-time thief. He has no history of violence and his claim about finding the laptop in an alley dumpster is as credible as any assertion that he got it at her apartment. I looked at the CSU report this morning. None of his DNA or fingerprints was found at her place. Everything about his arrest looks like a cover-up.”