On top of an AWOL Brody, the DMV database search they’d been running for white Buick Lucernes in San Francisco had some sort of program failure, so they had to start it again. The office told Jamie they’d hope to have something by Thursday. Three days away, Thursday was forever.
Jamie had identified one of the unlisted numbers on Z’s phone as belonging to Gavin Borden, so Z was communicating with Charlotte. Two short calls, each under two minutes. She’d also learned that over the ten days prior to Charlotte’s attack, Z was in touch with someone on a burner phone and a phone number that traced back to Michael Delman. The calls were all initiated from Michael Delman to Z and most were under a minute long.
One had lasted for almost fifteen minutes.
Long enough to make a plan to get Charlotte to come to Delman’s house?
Of course, but that didn’t make sense. What about the lingerie? Was she dressing up for Z? The calls between Z and the burner phone had gone both ways, including the day of the attack. Some as long as twenty minutes.
She tried to imagine that beautiful sixteen-year-old dressing up in that lingerie for her son. Couldn’t. The image of her son in her mind was of a young boy. An undersized ten- and eleven-year-old. How could he have become a man that would make a woman want to wear underwear like she’d seen on Charlotte?
Z was suddenly two different people, and she didn’t know either of them.
Tonight would be the night that she and Z talked. She had the phone records. It wasn’t his mitt. Fine. But it was his phone. He’d made those calls. He’d spoken to Charlotte. He knew her. He knew something. Tony was gone, so there were no excuses. It was all closing in. She pictured the garbage pit from Star Wars.
Her life was only missing the monster lurking beneath to come up and grab her ankle and pull her down.
Or maybe the monster was there, too.
Jamie was at her desk, gathering case files and waiting for Vich who had run down to the lab on something related to Schwartzman’s unwanted floral arrangement. The department was empty. It had been a rough weekend. The Saturday night rapes, plus a handful of other assault cases, and every inspector was juggling a new case as well as at least a dozen open ones. She and Vich had been split up on a few of the cases to handle the load.
This morning, they were meeting the private investigator who was linked to the tracking device. After that, Vich would head to talk to one of his victims and Jamie would figure out where to go on her own cases. The department door opened as she was dropping her notes into her computer bag.
“Jamie.”
Hal stood in the doorway.
“No one here but me,” she said.
Hal didn’t move.
She barely glanced at him as she said, “What’s up?”
As he moved toward her, she sensed something was wrong. She knew it as she focused on packing up her things. He held a folded paper in both hands, running his fingertips along the creases nervously.
“What is that?” she asked.
“It’s a subpoena.”
Jamie shrugged. “Okay. You want Vich and me to deliver it?”
The door swung open again and Hailey thundered in. “Hal, it’s almost done.”
Hailey froze as Jamie looked up.
“What’s almost done?” Jamie asked.
“The subpoena, it’s for DNA.”
Jamie pressed her lips closed and took the sheet from Hal’s fingers. A subpoena for DNA.
“Hal,” Hailey said again.
“Jamie, we all want the same thing,” Hal said. “This is the best way to clear him.”
As though working on their own, her fingers reached up to unfold the document. But then she stopped. No. She would not read this. She did not need to read it. She already knew exactly what it was.
“Clear him of what?” Jamie could hardly believe the words had come out. She didn’t want to know the answer.
“She doesn’t know about the blood, Hal,” Hailey said. “I told you that I was coming to talk to her.”
“I can do this,” Hal said.
“Stop it!” Jamie shouted. Her hand trembled as she shoved the paper down into her bag and pulled it closed.
The department door opened and the admin, Marcia, poked her head in. “You okay in here, Inspector?”
“Thanks, Marcia,” Jamie said.
“We’re fine, thanks,” Hal said.
Marcia gave Hailey and Hal her evil eye, an expression that was at odds with the kind-old-lady look of her old-style big hair and full skirts. “Inspector?” Marcia asked.
“It’s okay, Marcia,” Jamie said. “Thanks.”
Hailey took Hal’s arm. “Can you let us talk?”
“I’m sorry if this is hard for you, Jamie,” Hal said.
Jamie yanked the paper out of her bag. Saw Zephenaya’s name. Jabbed her finger at the air in front of Hal. “Why should it be hard for me, Hal? You come in here, asking for a DNA sample from my son? Without explaining yourself? What do you know about hard? You have a son who attends a fancy prep school on the charity of a bunch of rich people? Then, that kid’s deadbeat dad is linked to a rich girl’s assault and, a few days later, he’s murdered at the school where your son goes?” The rage simmered across her shoulders and back. “You don’t know shit about that.” Jamie turned to Hailey. “But you do. You know something about having a child you want to protect, don’t you, Hailey?”
Hailey held Jamie’s gaze, but Jamie could tell it wasn’t easy. Hailey was proud, and she had worked hard to put her past behind her. It was low to bring it up again, but Jamie was desperate. Every tool, every weapon was drawn, and she would fight.
“The blood where Charlotte was attacked isn’t Delman’s,” Hailey said. She took a step toward Jamie.
Jamie tensed. She knew what it meant.
The blood wasn’t Delman’s.
“It’s not a match,” Hailey clarified. “But the two are related.”
“They have markers in common,” Hal added.
Markers in common. Jamie set her palm on her desk, fighting off the desire to sink down onto the ground. Related. That didn’t mean it was Z. Delman had a sister, Tanya. Maybe Tanya had a fight with Charlotte. Jamie leaned against the desk. Damn DNA.
“We need to be able to rule Z out,” Hailey said. “He doesn’t need to know that we’re collecting DNA.”
Jamie seized on another opportunity to fire at them. “You want me to lie to him? To my son?” She considered the evidence she’d concealed, the lies she’d told to Roger in the lab and to Tony and to Hailey and Hal, for that matter. All of it made her sick.
“I want you to know we’re on your side,” Hailey said slowly, motioning between her and Hal. “Both of us.”
Hal said nothing.
“Leave,” Jamie said.
Neither moved.
“Get the hell out of here!” she shouted again.
The department door burst open again, but it was Vich, not Marcia, who came through the door. He crossed to Jamie.
Jamie took her time folding the subpoena back up and putting it in her bag.
“We’ve got the last of Charlotte’s friends in Interview One,” Vich said. “And I pushed our meeting with Ronald Ikerd back to 10:30.”
Jamie turned her back on Hailey and Hal. The air in the room shifted as they left.
Vich put his hand on her shoulder. “I heard about it in the lab. Tell me what you want me to do.”
“Let’s go do this interview. What’s the girl’s name?”
Vich glanced at his notebook. “Claire Delger.”
“I’ll meet you there in five.”
*
Jamie took the five minutes to pace the bathroom. The bathroom was empty. She considered going in the handicapped stall but locked the main door instead. She needed the whole space to think it through. They wanted Z’s DNA. Of course they did. She had known it would come to this eventually.
What were the laws about subpoenaing a minor’s DNA? Surely the judge who s
igned it knew he was a minor. Worth a check.
She imagined a judge would sign it. After all, Z was a kid who would have DNA similar to Michael Delman’s and Michael Delman had no other children. They had found DNA with familiar markers to Delman’s. Familiar markers. That didn’t necessarily mean his child. She tried to think of all the people who might have familiar markers. How close a relationship did that have to be? Schwartzman would probably know.
Michael had one sister Jamie knew about, Tanya. She had come to several of the adoption hearings when Michael Delman was in prison. She was an obese woman, her upper arms tattooed with the names of her husbands and boyfriends. There had been two or three on each arm.
What Jamie remembered most was how cold it had been those days—bitter outside and the heat in the old courthouse wimpy and ineffective against the chill. But there was Tanya in her sleeveless shirts, her brightly scripted boyfriends and husbands on either side. Delman didn’t have a large family. The court always looked to family first in a case like Z’s. His older sister, Shawna, had been his guardian before her death, but now there was no one else besides Tanya.
At the time, Tanya was recently divorced and on probation for her second drug charge—possession of methamphetamine with intent to sell. She had a handful of young children of her own and they, too, would become wards of the state if Tanya couldn’t straighten herself out. Which is how Jamie had been awarded Z. Did they issue a subpoena for Tanya’s blood, too?
*
Jamie arrived in the interview room angry. She was angry that this whole thing wasn’t over. That she suspected Z was involved with Charlotte, that he’d been with her that night. That she didn’t know what happened that night. That Z wasn’t being honest. Irrationally, she was angry with Hailey and Hal and with everyone at City Academy for making her feel like Z was being judged and, mostly, angry at herself for not knowing how to deal with it. But as she settled down across from the young friend of Charlotte’s, sitting politely at the table with her hands in her lap, it was impossible to stay angry. This was just another kid. She didn’t control that she’d been born with money any more than Z controlled that he’d been born without it.
In her job, Jamie had interviewed her share of teenagers—boys and girls. As a group, they hadn’t changed all that much in her seventeen years on the force. Fewer of them smelled like smoke, which was nice, and there was an increased predilection for piercings that were no longer limited to the ears. They had more tattoos than they used to.
But like the one sitting across from her, most teenagers exuded discomfort in their own skin like a cloying floral scent and, like Z, they alternated radically between being apologetic and furious. They were also consistently bad liars.
Even the good ones were unsure and unpracticed in their craft and gave themselves away. Claire Delger was neither good nor practiced, so it only took about five minutes to suss out two important facts: first, she—along with her friends—knew that Charlotte had a boyfriend who didn’t go to City Academy and, second, she had neither met him nor knew his name. Claire thought Charlotte’s mystery man might have been older or much older. Other than that, she knew precious little.
“Assuming he wasn’t a student at CA, when would Charlotte have met him?” Jamie asked.
“A couple people thought maybe it was the school service day we did about two months ago,” Claire said. “We went to serve lunch and dinner at a homeless shelter.”
“Do you remember Charlotte meeting anyone there?”
“No,” Claire said. “Not at all, and we stood together the whole time. I was on green beans and she did potatoes. Mostly, we talked to the people who came through the line. They were so grateful to have us there.” Claire stared at her lap, and Jamie thought of a term she’d heard recently about kids who grew up with a lot of money. The article had referred to these kids as suffering from “affluenza.” Jamie assumed that was true of most of the kids at Z’s school, but she had to admit, this one was pretty levelheaded.
“Can you think of anything else that might help us find out who Charlotte’s boyfriend was?” Vich asked.
Claire checked over her shoulder as though to see if anyone was there, then began to play with the bottom of the ponytail that hung over her shoulder. Using both hands, she twirled the locks around her fingers.
“Claire?” Vich pressed.
“Lotti wouldn’t talk about him. She said she had to keep him a secret because her parents would go batshit.” Pink flushed across Claire’s cheeks. “That was what she said.”
“But she never said why they’d go batshit?” Jamie asked.
“But there was something…” Claire said.
They waited.
“She mentioned quitting her art lessons—she took from a guy—”
“Heath Brody,” Jamie supplied.
“She said something happened, and she couldn’t take lessons from him anymore.”
“And that made you think he might be the boyfriend?” Jamie asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe… There was something about how she talked about him. Like she was embarrassed.”
“But you didn’t ask her if it was Heath Brody?”
“No,” Claire said. “We all wanted to know who he was; she seemed so into him.”
“I thought girls shared their secrets,” Jamie said. “Why didn’t anyone push Charlotte to tell you who he was?”
“You know how it is. We’re a close group. It’s impossible to keep things a secret once more than one person knows. And our parents all know each other, so if her parents found out and pressured our parents, who pressured us, it would be bad,” she explained. “I didn’t want to be the person who knew if she didn’t want people talking about it.” She opened her mouth to say something else but stopped.
“What is it?” Jamie asked.
“It’s nothing important.”
“Please tell us,” Vich urged.
“It’s not about Charlotte,” Claire said. “It’s more about secrets.”
“Okay…”
She shook her head, embarrassed. “There’s this series we all watch—like on Netflix. It’s called Pretty Little Liars.”
“Pretty Little Liars,” Jamie repeated. “Okay.”
“The theme song goes something like, ‘If I show you then I know you won’t tell what I said ’cause two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.’ Charlotte knew that once someone knew who he was, there was no keeping it quiet.”
Unless one of them was dead. God. That was one more thing that had changed about teenagers—the shows and books they watched and read were so much darker than they’d been when she was a kid.
Claire stared down at her hands.
“Did you know that Charlotte had a secret?”
She looked up, startled. “You mean, her boyfriend?”
“No,” Jamie said. “Another secret.”
Light-eyed and skinned, Claire’s red face gave away the answer.
“What do you think she was hiding?”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “She never told me. I swear.”
“But if you were to guess,” Jamie pressed.
“I can’t guess.”
“You have to,” Jamie snapped. “She’s in a coma. You have to help us so we can find out who did that to her.”
Claire blinked her wide blue eyes but, to Jamie’s surprise, she didn’t cry. Instead, her resolve shifted. The redness in her cheeks faded and she raised her hands onto the table. “I think something happened with the art teacher.”
“Heath Brody.”
“He did something to her,” she went on. “Lotti wouldn’t say what it was, but I could tell she was uncomfortable. She felt ashamed. He made her feel really awful about something.” Claire raised her chin as though angry.
“You think he assaulted her?” Vich asked.
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say what happened. I told her she should talk to someone. The school counselor is too intense—she’s like a Catholic nun
or something—so no one would go to her. I pushed Charlotte to talk to her parents. Her dad’s an attorney, so he could definitely do something.”
“What happened then?”
“She totally freaked out when I mentioned talking to her parents. It was like she was sure they’d blame her. Especially her mother,” Claire added. “That guy was, like, her mother’s favorite artist ever.”
Vich thanked Claire for her help and led her out to meet her mother. When he left, Jamie wrote HEATH BRODY in her notebook and underlined it twice. She pulled out her cell phone and called Patrol, requesting that they please send a car back out to Heath Brody’s residence.
Everything circled back to Brody. She was relieved.
Brody was the key to all of this.
The DNA sample would clear Z.
Why, then, were there still so many unanswered questions?
Chapter 34
Roger had lifted one hundred and thirteen partial prints from forty-three “clean” bar glasses. Most of those were probably the bartender’s, but there was no way to be sure until they were run. He had also lifted ninety-some prints off the bar itself, plus seventeen off the front door handle, and another five off the door that led to the bar’s small back patio and the alley. In addition, he collected eleven cigarette butts and four cans from the patio and alley. The process had taken almost five hours. His team had joined Sydney’s to work a nasty office building fire scene, so Roger had worked alone. Just him and the funky smell of cheap beer. It was better than what he smelled at most of his crime scenes.
He spent much of that time cataloguing where each glass, fingerprint, and other evidence was found. Cataloguing was one of Roger’s favorite parts. Before he married Kathy, he had a specific way of keeping the food in his pantry and the refrigerator. Not only meat in the meat drawer, but turkey on the right, salami on the left, pastrami perpendicular at the front of the drawer because it was his favorite. Mustard between the mayo and ketchup, pickles on the far side of the ketchup, and so on. Early in their marriage, Kathy had made an effort to keep things in his special order, but then they had Kimmy and all bets were off. Which was fine by Roger. He had plenty of places to exercise his OCD proclivities.
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