Also hanging on the wall was a photo of a younger Jake Tuohy in some wooded section of Northern California. He was standing beside a deer that had been strung up in a tree by a hind leg. Tuohy was grinning. He had a knife in his hand and was about to gut his kill.
That photo of the dead animal and the pleasure on young Tuohy’s face gave me a very bad feeling.
His phone vibrated.
He read a text, tapped the phone, read another text, then put the phone down.
“All right,” he said. “The dead woman checked in on Tuesday night with cash.”
“Tuesday,” I said. “Not Monday night? You’re sure.”
“It’s in the book. Tuesday. She didn’t say anything to me, just pushed the money across the counter. Two tens and a twenty.”
Conklin leaned forward and asked the motel manager, “She was alone?”
“That’s right.”
“At what time?”
“Around the same time as usual. After ten, something like that. And like always, she put a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on her door. We honor that around here. Up to a point. Due to a laundry strike yesterday, that point was an hour ago.”
Conklin pressed on. “How’d she look?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
Conklin said, “Did she seem normal? Or was she stressed?”
“Fuck if I know,” Tuohy said. “I was on the phone. She pushed the cash at me. I gave her the key card to 212.”
I said, “You said ‘as usual.’ You’ve seen her before.”
“Sure. Like, every few weeks. Cinnamon was some kind of working girl.”
“Cinnamon? No, I think you’re talking about someone else. I’m asking about Carly Myers.”
“Look, I don’t know and I don’t care what her real name was. You showed me her picture, and I’m telling you now. The only way I know that girl is as Cinnamon. And from what I can tell, her customers liked some spice.”
My mind spun. Carly Myers was a working girl? A prostitute?
No way. How could that possibly be true?
CHAPTER 23
Tuohy said that Carly Myers had checked into the motel on Tuesday night and that her name was in the register.
I checked it myself.
As Tuohy had said, her name was right there, wedged in between other guests who’d checked in on Tuesday night. So where had Carly been for twenty-four hours after leaving the Bridge on Monday?
This didn’t make sense.
I pulled up Carly’s picture on my phone, walked it across the room, and showed it to Tuohy.
“This is the dead woman?”
“Yeah. That’s her. She went by the name of Cinnamon. Usually, her pimp drops her off in the parking lot, but I didn’t see him when she checked in the other night.”
Conklin asked, “What’s the pimp’s name?”
I expected Tuohy to say again, “Fuck if I know.” But he said, “Denny or Danny. I’ve heard her say, like, ‘Later, Denny.’ And don’t ask me if I know anything else about him, because I don’t. Never saw him close up. Couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, don’t know what kind of car he drives, or if he has any ’stinguishing marks.”
There was a knock on the door.
Tuohy groaned, leaned heavily on his desk, and got up. He went to the door and opened it.
Officer Nardone came in and gave me a report; he’d taken guest names and photographed their IDs. A few of the guests were feisty. One had told him he was out on bail and an arrest would sink him. Another had thrown up on Nardone’s shoes.
“I told you. It’s nothing but wild animals out there.”
He shook his head, then said, “None of them saw anything or anybody, including the deceased. Also, Inspectors McNeil and Chi just got here. They’re taking over the interviews.”
This was good. The ball would be moving now.
I went into our holding room and talked with McNeil and Chi, and together we set up a phone relay between them and Nardone. Nardone would run the guests’ names on the car’s computer, while Chi and McNeil stayed with the guests. Nardone would let them know who had a rap sheet.
Einhorn was manning the door. I told him to go out to the street and take pictures of the crowd. The doer might come back to the crime. It happens.
I looked at my watch as I went back to Tuohy’s office. It was 6:00 p.m. We’d been here for three hours. A big twenty-four-hour gap had opened in our timeline. Carly had been somewhere before she was brought here. Where were her two missing friends?
I told Tuohy that I’d need the housekeeper’s contact info.
He tapped on his phone, scribbled a number on the back of a card, and handed it over. “That’s all I’ve got. Anything else I can do for you?”
His growl was heavy with sarcasm.
“Do you have a record, Mr. Tuohy?”
“I’ve been pristine for twenty years.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about. We’re going to need you to come with us down to the station. You spoke with the dead woman. Your fingerprints are on the doors. This makes you a material witness to a homicide. Let’s get your statement on the record.”
“Son of a bitch.”
Tuohy glowered at us. My gut tensed up. I could see him killing a prostitute, easy.
It might have been a murder of opportunity, then he’d staged a cover-up. Or maybe it was personal and he thought he could get away with it.
I watched Tuohy think through his options. Guys in jobs like this were streetwise. He knew he didn’t need to come to the station, but if he didn’t, we would double down. Get a search warrant for his home and car while we were at it. We could take his life apart.
Tuohy texted his boss.
Then he put on his hat and jacket, and we walked him out to our car.
CHAPTER 24
Conklin took the wheel, and as we crawled through rush hour to the Hall, I checked Tuohy’s arrest record on the MDC.
Jacob “Jake” Tuohy had spent time at Folsom for possession, holding up an all-night convenience store armed with his finger in his pocket, and around that time his ex-wife had gotten a restraining order against him.
I expected more and worse, but as he’d said, his sheet had been clean for twenty years. “Pristine.”
While I liked Tuohy for Carly Myers’s murder, I didn’t see him as organized, a master planner, or a serial killer. But Jake Tuohy was all we had.
We left the squad car parked on Bryant in front of the Hall and escorted Tuohy upstairs to Homicide. The squad room was nearly empty, all hands on the street, talking to their informants, trying to locate the missing and possibly dead schoolteachers.
Conklin made Tuohy comfortable in Interview 1, while I went out to the observation room behind the glass and watched with Jacobi as Conklin questioned our person of interest.
He started off with softball questions, then mixed in the harder ones—pitching them right across the plate.
Tuohy stuck to his story; he had not killed Carly Myers and didn’t know who had. He hadn’t seen anyone go into her room. Furthermore, he’d never heard of Susan Jones or Adele Saran. He scrutinized their photos and said he didn’t recognize either of them.