She didn’t feel sorry for him—he’d made the choice to beat his kid’s teacher to a pulp—but she understood him. Empathize. Even respect.
“The system is fucked,” she said, “but it also works most of the time. Innocent people need lawyers more than the guilty.” She was pretty sure most lawyers would disagree with her, but she didn’t care. Innocent people believed in the system, and didn’t think they needed to protect their rights because they didn’t believe they’d done anything wrong. “Tell me what happened after I went upstairs last night. Everything.”
He assessed her. Isaac was formidable with broad shoulders and tension that bulged his muscles. She’d never seen him relax, not completely. Scarlet could see him beating a child predator to death. She couldn’t see him shooting an arrogant college prick in cold blood. She didn’t know why that made her feel better, but it did.
“I told Detective Bishop the truth, and I’ll tell you. None of those college kids came back after we ran out the red shirt. The last customer left at one-thirty. I had already cleaned up, and I set the alarm at about one-forty. I walked Heather to her car, which was near the church, then I came back here and hopped on my bike.” Isaac rode a motorcycle. There was no parking at the bar or pretty much anywhere on the peninsula unless you were lucky enough to have a tiny garage or could find street parking. A bike was a lot easier to park than even Scarlet’s Jeep.
“That means I drove away sometime around two a.m. I didn’t check my watch, I wasn’t really thinking about much of anything, just getting home to crash before I had to open up. I didn’t see anyone hanging around the area, and I didn’t hear a gun shot.”
“The gun shot woke me up at ten after,” she said. “You swear to me, none of those kids returned after I left. Right?”
He practically growled at her. “That’s what I said. You don’t believe me?”
“I do,” she said. “Just making sure.” Her old interviewing techniques. Ask the same question a half-dozen different ways and see if the answer changed. “When did you get home?”
“It only takes ten minutes to get to my place in Costa Mesa in the middle of the night. But I can’t prove when I got there. I live in an apartment on Harbor. Most of my neighbors wouldn’t talk to the cops even if they did see me. And it was after two in the morning.”
“So he has no proof. Unless he can tie you to the murders with physical evidence or a witness, he can’t prove you killed anyone.”
“Which he won’t find because I didn’t do it.” He hesitated, and Scarlet pushed.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He didn’t say anything.
Scarlet held out her hand. “Give me a dollar. From your wallet.”
“I don’t want you getting in the middle of this.”
“I already am.”
Isaac reached into his pocket and took out four quarters. Dropped them into her outstretched palm.
She closed her fist. “As far as Moreno is concerned, you’ve hired me.”
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as PI-client privilege.”
“Just work with me here. What did you forget to tell Moreno?”
He glanced around and made sure no one was listening. “I ran the kid’s name off his credit card. The one who confronted me. Richard Sanders.”
Her stomach sank. “And?”
“Well, I got his address. Before he was shot.”
“Aw, shit, Isaac.” The cold pizza in her stomach became a hard, painful lump.
“I didn’t go over there. I was going to talk to bartenders at the pier, see if he’s been a problem. But it won’t look good, and how I got the information wasn’t strictly legal.”
Damn straight it didn’t look good. If Moreno found out, he would certainly have probable cause to get a warrant. But he’d have to know to look.
She asked, “You used your phone to get the information?”
“Yeah.”
Bishop would need a warrant for Isaac’s phone records, and he’d need probable cause. He might be able to get it with some of the judges, just based on the confrontation with the kids earlier in the evening. But Scarlet guessed that unless he had at least one piece of physical evidence, or a witness, he wouldn’t be able to get it.
“This is why you need a lawyer,” she mumbled.
“I’m not calling a damn lawyer unless they arrest me. Last time, my lawyer screwed me during my plea agreement.” By his tone, Scarlet wondered if even an arrest would prompt him to call for help.
She frowned and realized she needed to talk to Isaac more. She only knew the basics—she thought serving four years in an eight-year sentence for attempted murder was pretty damn good. But based on what Bishop had dug up in less than twelve hours, there was more to his story than she knew.
“Don’t talk to Bishop,” she repeated.
“What are you going to do?”
“Talk to the other kids.” First, she needed names and addresses. She only had one lead on that, the girl Valerie who’d called 911 from Richie Sanders house. “Someone knows what happened after they left the bar, and my guess is that one of them knows—or suspects—who the killer is.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her old friend Lieutenant Hank Riley walk into the bar. She lowered her voice and said to Isaac, “We’re going to clear your name, no doubts, okay? Is there anything else—anything—that could get you in trouble? Like, did you drive by his house? Walk by?”
“No.” He didn’t break eye contact. “Scarlet, I didn’t kill anyone. But—we need to talk later.” He glanced at Hank as he sat down next to her. “Lieutenant.”
“Dunn.”
“Your usual?”
Hank nodded. Isaac pulled a Sierra Nevada draft from the tap and put it in front of Hank.
Hank Riley was fifty, a twenty-five year veteran of Newport PD. He was born and raised here, married and divorced here, raised his two sons here. And as he often said, he’d die here.
Hank nodded toward her water bottle, his eyebrows raised.
“I’m working today,” she said.
Hank lifted his mug. “Not me.” He took a long drink.
“Rub it in,” she muttered. “What brings you down to the bar on a beautiful Saturday afternoon?”
“You don’t bluff well.”
“Bluff?”
He motioned toward the wide-screen television mounted on the wall behind the bar. “The Dodgers are playing.”
She rolled her eyes. She was an Angels fan. Didn’t earn her a lot of friends in this bar because Diego bled blue.
“You didn’t come down to watch the Dodgers game.”
“Not only,” he admitted. “It’s my day off, but I got an earful about you this morning.”
“I’ll bet,” she said.
“Bishop is a good cop. And so were you. Give him room to do his job.”
“He doesn’t like me. I’m not going to stomp all over his case, but Isaac didn’t shoot anyone last night.”
“I warned Diego about Isaac.”
“Then what are you doing drinking in this bar?”
“Keeping my eye on the situation.” He looked pointedly at her. “I don’t want you to get into trouble, Scarlet.”
Scarlet glanced at Isaac. He kept a stoic expression, but he was watching the situation even as he tried to be discreet. “Isaac wanted to help the girls, not kill the jerks who drugged them. He got them out, that’s all he cared about.” Except for the fact that red shirt was with Valerie when he was shot. Had he raped her? Maybe she should’ve been nicer to Bishop earlier and he might have told her something.
“The answer to your unspoken question is I can’t tell you anything about the case.”
“I’m not asking.”
“You don’t need to use words.”
“I’m going to help Isaac.”
“The best help he can get is to hire a good lawyer.”
“Or a good P.I.”
“Don’t get involved.”
She didn’t resp
ond. Hank knew her better than that. “I can vouch for you with Bishop, but I’m not going to tell him to keep you in the loop.”
“Don’t bother. Someone has already gotten to him.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he thinks he knows everything about me.”
“You have friends here, Scarlet. You know that. He didn’t hear anything from my people.”
“Maybe I don’t have as many friends as I thought,” she mumbled. She thought back to the responding officers last night. It had to be one of them. Maddox? She doubted it. But she didn’t know some of the others, like the cop named Pete. She’d burned bridges when she left L.A., and it wouldn’t surprise her if one of the NBPD cops was friends with someone who hated her guts. They might be in separate police departments in two different counties, but they weren’t all that far apart.
“I’ll talk to him.”
She shook her head. “I’ll handle it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing to damage the police investigation—but I need to prove Isaac couldn’t have shot two college kids in cold blood.”
“Two?”
She blinked, not realizing that she’d voiced a theory that wasn’t fully formed. “There was another gunshot victim on the beach. Young guy, I didn’t see his face. And then Sanders a couple blocks over? My mind connected them. I can’t shake off the feeling that it’s the same killer.”
Hank nodded. Took another sip. “Bishop came to the same conclusion.”
Both of them knew he shouldn’t have told her, but she was grateful he had. It helped her focus on how to prove Isaac was innocent. She needed to find a witness who saw him during the window of at least one of the crimes. Even though it was late at night, he was pretty recognizable at six feet, two-hundred-ten pounds with tats on his arms driving a Harley at two in the morning.
Hank smiled up at the television. “Finally, the Dodgers are playing like they used to. This is our year. I can feel it.”
“It won’t last,” she said optimistically, and Hank glared at her. “Later.”
She walked to the opposite end of the bar where Isaac was pouring his killer margaritas for a group of young women in bikinis. The word had gone out about Isaac’s talents, and Diego was going to have to hire a second cocktail waitress because Heather only worked three nights a week. Isaac glanced at Hank, then said to Scarlet, “You’re going to find someone who was out at two in the morning and remembers seeing me?”
“Eventually,” she said. “I have a couple other ideas first.”
“Don’t jeopardize your relationship with Riley over this.”
“Over keeping you out of prison? Really? You want to go back?”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“What did you want to tell me before?”
“Do you know what caliber gun was used?”
“No.”
“Can you find out?”
That lead ball in her stomach came back. “Isaac—spit it out.”
“I own a .357 revolver.”
“Shit.”
“It’s not legal. I can’t pass—”
“Don’t tell me anything else yet. Just—” Just what? Turn it over? Get rid of it? Lie?
“Promise me you won’t talk to Bishop without a lawyer.”
“I won’t.”
Scarlet hated feeling that she was on the wrong side of the law.
She’d better be able to prove that Isaac was innocent, or she was going to have to question every instinct she thought she had, and she feared she’d come up short.
Chapter Seven
It took Scarlet an hour to learn Valerie had been discharged from the hospital that morning and where she lived—a large, sprawling apartment complex near the campus that catered predominately to college students.
The police would have already taken Valerie’s statement, and there was no reason Scarlet couldn’t talk to her about the events last night.
She knocked on Valerie’s door. At first, there was no answer, but her car was in the carport, so Scarlet knocked again. And waited. She heard movement inside.
A full minute later, a hung-over Valerie came to the door. Her dark hair was stringy from being washed and then left to dry without brushing. Her face was splotchy from crying, and she wore over-sized clothes that were too warm for the ninety-plus-degree day. She had victim written all over her.
“Valerie? I’m Scarlet Moreno, a private investigator.” She held out her card. Valerie took it without looking.
“I’m really tired.”
“I won’t keep you long.”
Valerie sighed and walked away from the open door.
Scarlet entered and closed the door behind her. “Are you alone?”
“So?”
“You might want to have a friend with you today.”
Valerie collapsed on the couch as if she didn’t have any bones, resting her head on the back. The apartment was sparsely furnished, relatively tidy, with posters of the beach and baby animals all over the walls. Her lone floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was crammed with romance paperbacks and textbooks on marine biology.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
Common reaction. Scarlet pushed a stack of magazines aside—on odd mix of fashion and conservation—and sat on the unfinished oak coffee table directly across from Valerie. “I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do,” she began, “but there are a lot of people and groups who will do everything in their power to help you deal with all that has happened.”
She closed her eyes. “There was so much blood. It just spread all over the place. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Did you see what happened to Richie Sanders?”
She shook her head and finally focused on Scarlet. Her eyes were still bloodshot, but her pupils weren’t dilated or wild, and Scarlet though Valerie looked tired and hung-over, not under the influence of anything except emotional pain. “I don’t remember anything. I was upstairs. I think. Then I heard yelling and a gun went off. I came downstairs and saw him lying there, with all the blood.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
Her bottom lip quivered. “Good? What’s good about any of this?”
“I meant you’re doing good, talking about it.” Scarlet considered her options. Valerie had been traumatized, but her memory was fuzzy. She needed to be walked through what happened yesterday, because open-ended questions weren’t going to get them anywhere.
Scarlet knew the group of seven had come into the bar around six. She started there. “You and your friends came to the bar, Diego’s, about six yesterday, correct?”
She shrugged and hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “I guess.”
“Whose idea was it to go to the bar?”
She thought on that a minute. “Tessa and I went to the movies with Chase, Juan and Parker, then went to eat on the pier. Tessa and Parker are kind of going out. She really likes him, and he likes her, but they’d never been available at the same time.” She smiled, a genuine grin. “I hooked them up finally. I’ve been friends with them for so long, when they were both free, I made sure they knew it.” Then confusion replaced her expression. “Parker—” She stopped herself.
“Parker what?”
“You don’t think he could have hurt us, do you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me.”
“I don’t remember anything. Not until I saw Richie lying there on the floor bleeding. He looked at me, but couldn’t talk.”
Scarlet had to get her away from that scene or she was going to lose Valerie. People who didn’t see violence up close and personal had a multitude of different reactions, and blocking it out was one. She didn’t want Valerie to lose whatever memories she still retained.
“What did you eat at the pier?”
“We split a bunch of appetizers. It was only five or so. Had a couple drinks. Then we decided to go bar hopping before heading to a party on the beach. Chase�
�s fraternity got a permit for it.” She frowned.
“What?”
“We never went to it. I don’t think so. Odd.”
“You went to Diego’s. The five of you?”
“No—Richie caught up with us with some guy I didn’t know.”
“When?”
“At that little margarita hut near the pier.”
Scarlet knew the place.
“It was crowded and we couldn’t get a table, and Chase said Diego’s had good drinks and wasn’t too crowded. I’d been there before with Chase to watch baseball games.”
“Is Chase your boyfriend?”
She shrugged. “We’ve gone out. But it’s not serious. We’re just friends.”
She wasn’t looking at Scarlet. Was she lying or confused?
“Do you remember the bartender at Diego’s, the broad-shouldered guy with tattoos on his arms, coming over to your table?”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything.”
Scarlet needed to back track. “I was at the bar, and from my vantage point, it seemed Richie was hitting on you. How did you feel about that?”
“Richie knows I don’t like him. He’s been friends with Chase forever.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why Chase didn’t stop him from being a dick.”
Good question.
“Do you remember leaving Diego’s?”
“I don’t remember going there. Well—I do, but it’s… fuzzy.”
“Run me through it. There are no right or wrong answers.”
Valerie was trying, but she didn’t come up with much. “We’d been outside, so the place felt so dark. But it was cool and comfortable. Then Tessa said we had to go. She made Chase and Parker take us somewhere. Chase has a place nearby.” Her eyes widened. “Chase rents that house. With Richie, and a couple other guys who are never around. Where Richie was shot.”
That was new information to Scarlet. Bishop certainly hadn’t told her. Four college guys renting a house that cost upwards of five thousand a month? Where’d they get that kind of money? Family? Likely. She made a mental note to ask Mac to run financials on Richie and his friends.
“And do you remember what happened after you got to the house?”
“I don’t remember walking there. I don’t remember anything—until I heard the gunshot and ran downstairs and saw all that blood. I… I was naked. I hurt so bad, everywhere. I have no idea how I got naked or what happened. I think I screamed. I talked to someone. On my phone.” She put her hands on her head. “God, it hurts to think.”
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