CHAPTER 27
I found my Joe reclined in his big chair, papers stacked around him, his laptop open on his thighs, and deep in sleep.
It was after ten o’clock and I wanted to sleep, too, but I wanted to talk to Joe more. Maybe my own special agent would see a flaw in my reasoning or a door I hadn’t opened.
I called his name, walked over, and kissed his head, and he started awake.
“Joe, honey,” I said. “I really need to talk to you.”
He righted his chair into a sitting position and said, “I really need to talk to you, too. In fact, I may need to talk to you more.”
“You first,” I said to my man. “But I have a confession. I stink.”
“Do not.”
“Do.”
By the time I’d showered, gotten into pj’s, and made ham and mayo sandwiches with tea for two, Joe was back with Martha from their nighttime walk around the block.
I brought our dinner over to the coffee table, and Joe and I relaxed into the inviting embrace of the long leather sofa. I urged Joe to start talking. And he did.
“It’s about Anna,” he said. “Anna is the woman I met sitting on Golden Gate Avenue.”
“I know who you mean.”
“Well, here’s the thing. I didn’t open a case file on her that night. She looked like she’d been through hell, and I was right. In fact, I didn’t know a fraction of it. So I said ‘screw protocol’ and gave her a lift home.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, Joe. You can walk the protocol back, right?”
Joe picked up his sandwich, looked at it as though he’d never seen such a thing before, and put it back down on the plate.
“I should have done it before I started investigating Slobodan Petrović. I didn’t know if Anna’s story was for real or if she was having flashbacks to the nightmare of nightmares. If I’d opened a file, she would have had to meet with a duty officer and she would have been questioned. Extensively. What if he didn’t believe her? There was a good chance of that. And Bosnia isn’t exactly on our patch.
“I didn’t think it through.”
I remembered Joe’s face when he told me Anna’s story on the night he’d met her. He’d been this close to breaking down when he told me about the scorched-earth destruction of her town. The savage murders of her husband and child.
“You did the humane thing, hon. Subjecting Anna to an FBI grilling without first vetting her story could have been worse for her, and you, too.”
“That’s what I told myself. But what I’m doing now, having people in other offices do research, digging into government files on behalf of my concern for this woman … I’m acting like I’m a PI, not a federal agent. It’s inexcusable. Let me be more precise: I could get beached.”
Joe Molinari was a straight arrow. Solid. Honest. Some would say a hero. He’d taken a hell of a chance for a stranger. A woman. I tried not to let that bother me.
I asked, “What can you do to fix this?”
“Now that I’ve gone this far, I want to bring this to the supervisor as a real thing. If Petrović is living on Fell Street legally, I want to know how that happened. Why is he here? Is he in a witness protection program? Is he being managed? What’s his deal? If Anna is wrong and this is a Petrović look-alike, I’ll talk her down and save her the grief of being interrogated by the FBI. And I’ll fess up.”
“That shouldn’t take too long,” I said.
He shrugged. “I have to work this myself, not get anyone else involved. Anyway, your turn. Tell me.”
He didn’t have to convince me. I was dying to tell him about my day.
CHAPTER 28
Joe and I changed positions on the sofa. I lay down with my head in Joe’s lap, and he stroked my hair. I told him how good it felt. He smiled, but it didn’t quite take. He looked as wrung out as I felt.
I put it out there; that we’d found Carly’s dead body, that it appeared to be homicide.
“I heard something about a dead woman found in the Big Four.”
“That’s her.”
“Oh, man. Too bad, Linds.”
I filled Joe in on the details, including the shocker that she’d checked into the motel alone, and that according to the manager, she’d done it before.
“He said she was a prostitute.”
“No kidding. The schoolteacher?”
“So said the manager. Right now I have nothing to support that. But, Joe, if Carly was a party girl, anyone could have killed her.”
Joe commiserated, encouraged me to keep talking.
I said, “The manager says he may have seen her date, but only from the back. He says Carly had a pimp named Danny or Denny, he doesn’t know. Our night shift is showing Carly’s picture around, talking to their CIs about her and this possible Danny or Denny. And here’s a surprise. None of the hotel guests heard or saw anything suspicious while Carly was at the Big Four.
“These three women were having good lives by nearly any standard. What am I missing?”
Joe said, “Maybe it wasn’t them. It was him. What kind of person would have done this?” His anger was right there, just below the surface. Was he thinking about Petrović and Anna? What kind of man had committed this shocking crime?
I said, “I think her killer was careful. Organized. This wasn’t an amateur job. My guess is he’s killed before.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
I pictured the three women leaving the Bridge feeling happy, maybe a little tired, tipsy … what had happened?
“Joe, there’s no sign of a struggle in the parking lot outside the Bridge. Assuming the women were offered a lift back to the school after dinner. Say the driver saw an opportunity. Why did these women get into that car?”
“Was it raining?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe they trusted him.”
I smiled at him, squeezed his hand.
“Or one of them did.”
He said, “You’re in the early stages of the investigation. You need more information, Linds. Want to go to bed and sleep on it?”
Sounded good to me. I cleaned up while Joe stacked the dishes in the dishwasher. A few minutes later I met the man I loved in the bedroom. We got under the covers, and Martha climbed in between us.
We all slept.
CHAPTER 29
My eyes flashed open at some dark hour.
I couldn’t remember the whole of my dream, but the fragment that remained was a picture of Carly, Adele, and Susan climbing into a vehicle outside the Bridge.
Now my conscious mind kicked in.
If the three women had gotten into a car with a killer, how was it that twenty-four hours later, Carly had checked into the Big Four Motel alone?
Big question: Where had she been during that time?
If Carly had been tricking, any smart and careful psychopath could have killed her in room 212.
I was scared.
I was afraid that this case could be an endless ball of string that would be unsolved for the next twenty years. Or it could go cold forever.
Next unrelenting question: Where were Adele and Susan?