by Blake Pierce
“Whoa,” Hannah said. “Slow down there, slugger. I think you’ve earned the right to go in an hour late. When did you finally crash?”
“I think around three,” Jessie said, not certain herself.
Her eyes darted over to the dresser, where she could see the edge of the manila envelope under the jacket she’d sloppily draped across it. Then she quickly returned her attention to her half-sister, who was already dressed and had her backpack slung over her shoulder.
“You were going to tell me where you were going,” Hannah reminded her. “That is, assuming you won’t have to kill me afterward.”
“Yeah,” Jessie said, motioning for the girl to follow her into the bathroom, where she grabbed a brush and began dragging it through the bird’s nest that was her hair. “I went to Mick’s apartment, looking for a journal or something similar. I didn’t find one but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea. I did find some other potential leads that I missed the first time around. So thanks for the suggestion.”
“Sure,” Hannah said, trying to hide the slight smile forming at the corners of her mouth.
“Give me ten minutes and I’ll be ready to take you to school,” Jessie promised before swigging some mouthwash and gargling.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hannah told her. “I was going to take a Lyft anyway. Not to be rude, but it looks like you could use a few minutes to regroup a little. That’ll be easier without me up in your business.”
“Are you sure?” Jessie asked after spitting out the mouthwash, wondering who this thoughtful, understanding young woman was but keeping that question to herself.
“No problem. Just keep in touch to let me know how the day shakes out for you.”
Jessie stared at her, unable to hide her amazement.
“Do we have some kind of Freaky Friday situation going on here? I feel like you’ve suddenly become the guardian around here.”
Hannah offered something close to a genuine smile.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” she warned as she walked out of the bedroom. “All I’m saying is that a person who goes to bed at three ought to be able to sleep until at least eight. Hopefully you’ll return the favor.”
“Are you planning to be up until three sometime soon?” Jessie asked.
“Gotta go,” Hannah replied chipperly as she headed toward the front door.
Before Jessie could follow up, the door slammed shut.
*
After a quick shower and text to Ryan saying she’d be in a bit late, Jessie sat down on her bed and studied the manila envelope. She’d wanted to look at it last night but she was so bleary-eyed, she worried that she’d inadvertently miss something important.
She snapped on a pair of gloves and looked inside the envelope again. Then she took out one wad of bills and counted them. There were a hundred of them, most of which were twenties, though there were a few fifties and hundreds sprinkled in. They totaled $3,250.
She dumped out all the other bundles out on the bed and realized she’d vastly underestimated how many there were last night. She’d thought there were a dozen but all told, there were twenty-eight. Assuming all of them were in the $3,000 range, that meant that Michaela had collected in the neighborhood of $85,000.
That was quite a chunk of change to have amassed in less than six months, especially considering that the films she’d done were mostly low budget, bottom of the barrel stuff. More suspicious, despite the sketchy nature of the business Michaela was in, even Lenny Lander wouldn’t pay his staff, porn actors or not, in cash. He might want to, but after meeting his mother, Jessie was sure payment was made via check or direct deposit.
In that case, why did Michaela have nearly $100,000 in cash hidden in an envelope behind a painting in her apartment? Even in her shady world, something about the decision felt off. It didn’t take a massive deductive leap to guess the reason.
Clearly the girl didn’t want to answer questions about where the money came from. And while the bank might not ask, it could still conceivably come to the attention of some other law enforcement or regulatory agency.
Jessie remembered what Hannah had said last night about girls from her school doing private dates in addition to the actual films. The likelihood that Michaela had done the same thing seemed high. Also plausible: the chance that a date had gone badly, ending in her death.
But if all her dating transactions were done in cash, how could her clients possibly be traced? The tech team could eventually get the GPS data for her phone from the wireless company and look at her credit card statements. But that might not prove anything.
If she was seeing these people at her place, when her roommate was off at school, there wouldn’t be any credit card records and her location data would be useless. She muddled through the challenge in her head as she started to put the bundles back in the envelope. There was another problem: what to do with all this money.
She couldn’t keep it at her place. And she definitely couldn’t turn it in to Valley Bureau. If she did that, she was sure it would disappear, whether by graft or simply to prevent it being used as evidence in the case. Even Central Station was a concern, considering the tentacles that Sergeant Costabile and his superiors seemed to have throughout the department.
That left only one realistic option, someone she hadn’t spoken to in months and wasn’t sure would accept her call. She was about to look up the phone number when she noticed something attached to one of the currency straps. It was a Post-it.
She pulled it off and looked at it. At first she thought a grocery checklist had inadvertently gotten stuck to a wad of bills. But when she peered more closely she discovered that the letters on the note, written in light, hard-to-read pencil, were what appeared to be initials. The first said “D.K.” The next was “M.B.” That was followed by “A.R.” The last row had two sets: “M.Z. + H.Z.” That set had a line through them, as if they had been crossed off.
Jessie stared at the letters, as if looking at them long enough would suddenly unlock some secret code within. But after several minutes, she came to the conclusion that these were almost certainly exactly what they seemed to be, the initials of people Michaela had either “dated” or planned to.
Considering the fact that she had nothing else to go on, she couldn’t dismiss this lead entirely. But it felt borderline worthless. Even for the crossed-out dual initials, “M.Z. + H.Z.,” the odds of narrowing them down to something useful were minute. Still, it was more than she had five minutes ago. So she copied the initials into her phone, tossed everything back in the envelope, threw on some clothes, and headed out the door to follow any path that might get justice for Michaela Penn.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Jessie felt more like a drug dealer than a law enforcement officer.
She waited on a bench in Pershing Square, a few blocks away from Central Station, for her contact to arrive. It didn’t take long. Within three minutes of her arrival, he showed up and sat down beside her.
“How’s it going, Jessie?” he asked.
“As you know better than most, I’ve been much worse. How about you, Agent Dolan?”
“Getting by,” he said, shrugging.
FBI Agent Jack Dolan seemed to be telling the truth. The last time she’d seen him was several months ago, when they’d worked together on a case that ended in the death of her own serial killer father. By the end of their time together, their mutual animosity had turned into grudging respect.
In the intervening time, Agent Dolan seemed to have turned a corner. She remembered him as a surprisingly paunchy, long-haired, worn-down, hard-drinking cynic who invariably had food stains on his ill-fitting suit.
He still had the bureau-violating long silver hair. But there were no visible stains and he seemed to have lost a considerable amount of weight. He appeared healthy.
“You look good,” she told him. “Still surfing?”
“Most mornings,” he said conspiratorially. “You can probably smell the salt wa
ter on me. I cut out the drinking too.”
“Completely?” she asked, stunned as she recalled how he’d downed hard liquor like water.
“I didn’t trust myself to do it any other way,” he admitted.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Well, I’m a forty-two-year-old man who drank pretty much every day since I was seventeen, so it’s been challenging. But at least I sleep better. What about you? When I got your call, I did a little catch-up on your status. All your serial killer stalkers are dead so you don’t have twenty-four-hour protection. You’ve assumed guardianship of a frickin’ teenager. You’re dating a detective. It’s almost like you’re domesticated now.”
“How did you know about the dating thing?” Jessie demanded, ignoring her flushing cheeks and all the other stuff he managed to somehow uncover.
“I’m an FBI agent and I’m good at it,” he said. “Did you expect any less?”
Jessie smiled despite herself.
“It’s just a little disconcerting to hear my personal business thrown back at me so casually. We’re trying to keep that last bit quiet, so if you could keep it to yourself?”
Dolan pretended to lock his mouth and throw away the key.
“So why are we here?” he finally asked. “You sounded more anxious than usual on the phone.”
Jessie pulled out the envelope and dropped it in his lap. He looked down at it, then back up at her expectantly.
“Long story short,” Jessie began, “I’m investigating the murder of an underage porn actress who may have been an escort on the side. She was stabbed nine times but the folks on the case all seem to want to wrap it up fast and tidy. I’m worried that they have an ulterior motive. So when I found about eighty-five grand in cash hidden in her apartment, I wasn’t entirely confident that I could turn it over and expect it be handled properly. So instead, I’m giving it to you until I know what’s going on.”
“You want the Bureau to take custody of the cash?” he asked.
“No, I want you to hold it. I don’t know who these cops have under their thumbs but it’s clear they have serious reach. If you put this in the system, even at the federal level, I worry it will get back to them. I don’t trust the bureaucracy right now. I trust you.”
Dolan stared at her for a moment, clearly doing some mental calculations involving risk and reward. Finally he cracked a grin.
“I know just where to keep it safe,” he assured her. “You see, there’s this yacht I’ve been looking at…”
“I will kill you, Dolan,” she growled.
“Just kidding,” he said, chuckling. “I have a safe in my office. No one else has the combination. It’ll be good there. But I can only hold it for a little while. If this thing is as messy as you suggest, there could be blowback for me too. So I can give you until the end of business tomorrow. After that, it’s your hot potato again, okay?”
“That’s fair,” she said, standing up. “I better get to the office. I’m already almost an hour late and I am, you know, investigating a murder.”
“Sure,” Dolan said. “Just one more thing before you go. When I was doing my background review on you earlier, the one that told me you’re dating Hernandez, something else popped.”
Jessie noticed that for the first time since he arrived, Dolan looked uncomfortable.
“Go ahead,” she said, apprehensive.
“Your ex-husband, Kyle Voss, is doing his time at the Theo Lacy Facility in Orange County.”
“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.
