by Blake Pierce
He led them down the hall in silence for several seconds, then looked back.
“I was so sorry to hear about Ms. Estrada,” he said.
“Did you know her well?” Karen asked.
“No. Only passing in the halls,” he admitted. “But I hoped to make her team one day. She was a real trailblazer. Did you know that no entertainment industry client of hers ever served a single day in prison?”
“I think I heard that somewhere,” Jessie said.
They reached the conference room, which was indeed large. The table alone had to be a good forty feet long. A burly man in a navy suit stood at the far end of the room.
“That’s Ajax,” Simon said. “He’s here to…ensure everything runs smoothly for you.”
“That’s okay, Simon,” Karen said. “We know why he’s here. You can dispense with the euphemisms.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Simon said, his face turning red. “There’s water in the mini-fridge behind the cabinet on the back wall. If you need anything else, just have Ajax buzz me and I’ll bring it in.”
After he left, Jessie and Karen moved over to the pile of paper in the middle of the conference table. Ajax joined them, standing just off to the side. Up close, Jessie saw that he was even more massive than she originally thought. Easily six foot six and two hundred fifty pounds, he looked like he might have just come from playing in the football game Karen’s husband had been watching. His head was shaved and his hands, the size of oven mitts, had red, angry scars on the knuckles.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” he said. “I’m sure this will just be a formality, but I need to go over the ground rules with you. First, what you have on the table is a list of Ms. Estrada’s clients who have had cases they’ve had before the court, along with abstracts describing the cases. If you need actual court documents, Simon can try to provide those, as long as they were in the public record. All other materials are off-limits, I’m afraid.”
“What about clients who didn’t have any cases?” Jessie asked. “Maybe folks who just kept her on retainer?”
Ajax shook his head.
“Unless specifically authorized, that material is unavailable. We’re providing data on people who Ms. Estrada represented in matters before the court. If you have a particular request beyond that, you’ll need to make it formally.”
Though Jessie didn’t like having the parameters of her search limited, she wasn’t in a position to be too demanding. After all, without a warrant, the firm was under no obligation to allow the access she currently had. She decided not to rock the boat for now.
“Okay,” she said, turning to Karen. “I think we should be looking specifically for two things. Tell me if you disagree.”
“Shoot.”
“First, were any of Estrada’s clients investigated for crimes resembling what happened to her—violence towards women, assault, that kind of thing?”
“Makes sense,” Karen agreed.
“Second, were any of her clients unhappy with the outcome of their case? That information won’t necessarily be in the files. We’ll have to cross-reference with news reports to check on that.”
“Bonus for you,” Karen pointed out, “as a detective who has had an unusual number of law enforcement interactions with celebrities, I may remember some of them.”
“You’ve got that over me. As you may have learned from the last case we worked on, I’m not exactly a pop culture expert.”
“I’ve got you covered,” Karen said. “I didn’t want to say it earlier because it sounds like they made your life hell, but I’m a regular reader of Blabber.”
“I won’t hold it against you,” Jessie promised.
They split up the cases alphabetically and dived in. The first thing Jessie checked was to see if Jasper Otis had been honest about Milly Estrada not personally representing him. At least based on the documents that she had available, he had been. Then she started to go through everything again, looking for the name “Marla,” on the off chance she was mentioned, but it was a needle in a haystack.
“Do you have a digitized version of this stuff?” she asked Ajax.
“Not one that we can share,” he answered. “Separating out the confidential data from the public facing material is much harder on the computer. That’s why we gave you hard copies instead.”
Jessie looked at her watch. She’d already spent fifteen minutes on this wild goose chase. She reminded herself of what Decker had said. He would follow up on the Marla interview with Detective Parker. In the meantime, she needed to stay focused on the case in front of her, on solving Milly Estrada’s murder.
She began working her way methodically through the files. It quickly became clear that, while none of Milly’s clients actually served prison time, a number of them were held in jail for long stretches before and during trials. One guy—a well-known rock star named Percy Avalon—was held in custody for nine months on charges that he held a model from one of his music videos against her will in a hotel bathroom.
When the case finally came to trial, a member of his entourage claimed that he had confined the woman without Percy’s knowledge. That guy was sentenced to fourteen months in prison. Percy, who was convicted of an accessory charge, got time served. Jessie marked him down as someone she’d like to chat with, especially if she could confirm he was at the party.
In another instance, an actor named Rance Jensen got himself in some real trouble. The former star of a TV series called Batts’ Badge about a hard-driving sheriff in a corrupt small town, Jensen was charged with assault after he beat up a reporter who asked him about allegations that he was verbally abusive on the set.
Interestingly, Milly Estrada handed off his case to another firm just before trial, claiming an unspecified conflict of interest. Jensen was convicted and spent four months in prison. His comments after his release suggested he thought Estrada had bailed on him rather than risk ruining her perfect “no prison” record. He sounded particularly salty about it. Jessie wrote him down as a person to look at more. She noticed that his wasn’t an isolated incident.
“Hey,” she said to Karen, “are you finding that Estrada dumped a lot of cases that looked like losers just before trial?”
“Now that you mention, I have seen a few,” Karen said. “At least three that I can remember.”
“Let’s keep tabs on those folks,” Jessie said. “I suspect that if she ran into anyone at the party who she jettisoned before trial, their conversations might not have been too friendly.”
*
They’d gone through the files and collected a list of eight people who either had a history of violence, were left by Estrada at the trial altar, or both. Jessie called Jamil Winslow’s work line to leave a message asking him to focus on them when he started poring over the footage from Otis Estate tomorrow.
She already had him going through Beto Estrada’s alibi, and under normal circumstances, adding this to his punch list might have been asking too much. But ever since she’d first worked with him on a murder case in the wealthy beach community of Manhattan Beach, he’d proven to be a savant.
Short and skinny, at twenty-four, Jamil was brilliant, persistent, and seemingly immune to exhaustion. He’d actually left the Manhattan Beach PD to join her station, specifically to work with her and Ryan, a source of guilt for her considering that she now only intermittently consulted for the force.
To her surprise, he picked up.
“What are you doing there, Jamil?” she demanded. “It’s Sunday afternoon.”
“I wanted to get a jump on the Beto Estrada stuff and I figured it would be easier from the office,” he said as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Don’t you have things to do?” she asked.
“This is a thing to do,” he insisted. “What’s up?”
She explained what she wanted. When she was done, the unexpected silence on the other end of the line immediately told her there was an issue.
“What’s wrong?” she
asked.
“I was going to wait until tomorrow to tell you this,” he finally replied. “But the folks in tech have some bad news. There’s a problem with the security footage from Otis Estate. There are gaps.”
“What does that mean?”
“According to the security chief at the estate, with the exception of the main entrance to South House, they don’t save the recordings unless there is something notable. There are six security officers in a dedicated facility on the estate monitoring the footage in real time. If there’s nothing suspicious, they delete the files every hour. As a result, there are huge sections of time in multiple areas on the estate that have no coverage.”
Jessie tried to keep her voice even, not wanting to take her frustration out on him.
“Do you buy that?” she asked.
She could almost hear him shrug.
“It’s not inconceivable,” he admitted. “With the sheer volume of raw footage that place accumulates, it would become unwieldy pretty fast. But you’d think they’d want to hold onto the stuff a little longer after a party, if only for liability issues. As it turns out, the material we do have is mostly still there because of money.”
“Money?” she repeated.
“Yeah, Tech says the best stuff we have is from the camera across from the entrance to the main house. Apparently they kept that active and recording all the time to tally the total number of attendees in order to better track catering needs.”
“So the only workable footage we have exists because they want to make sure they had enough food?” Jessie confirmed.
Before Jamil could reply, her phone alarm went off. It was the reminder to give Ryan his meds.
“I have to go,” she said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
After hanging up, she noticed a text from earlier she must have missed. It was from Nurse Patty: Leaving for the day. Reviewed Ryan’s status with Hannah. See you tomorrow.
A wave of shame washed over her. She’d been so immersed in the research that she’d been gone all afternoon and never thought about it. She’d insisted that this case wouldn’t interfere with her personal life and yet she was getting sucked in again.
And there was more. Despite the relaxed nature of the text, a burst of apprehension shot through Jessie. The idea of leaving Ryan alone in her sister’s care made her uneasy.
“Excuse me,” she said to Karen as she dashed from the room. “I have to make a call.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“So you don’t trust me.”
Hannah couldn’t decide if she felt more offended or put upon.
“I didn’t say that,” Jessie told her. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have let Nurse Patty leave. I just wanted to review the medications with you since it’s the first time you’re giving them to him.”
“You didn’t let Patty leave,” Hannah reminded her. “She was going no matter what and now you’re trying to make it sound like it was all part of your grand plan to entrust me with responsibility. But I already told you that Patty walked me through the meds, so this feels a lot like you’re checking up on me.”
She could feel the resentment building in her.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Jessie insisted. “I’d be hypervigilant no matter who was giving him the meds, myself included. It just happens to be you doing it right now.”
Hannah knew that she should have some sympathy for her sister’s situation, and yet she couldn’t help going in for the kill. Jessie had been taking her for granted all day and she deserved to be put in her place.
“And why is it that I’m doing it right now?’ she asked rhetorically before answering her own question. “Could it be because on the very day that your invalid boyfriend is released to your care from the hospital, you’re running around the city on a Sunday afternoon, chasing down a case that can’t possibly be as important as what’s going on here?”
The silence on the other end of the line told her that she’d hit pay dirt with that. She felt a satisfaction only slightly moderated by the sense that maybe she’d gone too far. She continued before her sister could try to reprimand her.
“I’ll give him his meds. I’ll feed him his gruel. But maybe you can try to get back here in time to put him to bed, if that’s not too much to ask.”
She hung up without waiting for a reply, then sat on the couch, seething silently. The truth was, she’d already given Ryan his meds even before Jessie had called her. She’d also helped him reposition himself on the bed and turned on a fan because he had grunted “hot” to her. When he’d asked about his girlfriend’s whereabouts with the word “Jessie,” Hannah had soothingly assured him that she’d be back soon, not having any idea if it was true.
Now she was stuck here in this house, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, while a barely functional human wheezed in a bedroom down the hall. It wasn’t fair. She tried the deep breathing technique Dr. Lemmon had taught her in a recent therapy session, one the woman claimed was especially effective at what she called “releasing the steam.” It wasn’t working.
So she decided to call Kat. Katherine “Kat” Gentry was Jessie’s best friend. Of late, she’d also proven to be a good sounding board. Hannah had only recently started at a new high school and, considering it was her senior year and she didn’t know anyone, she didn’t have much in the way of confidantes.
But Kat was different. In addition to being a badass former Army Ranger with the scars to prove it, the woman had also run security at a penal facility holding mentally unstable killers. When that went awry, she’d become a private investigator. In other words, she wasn’t one to mess with.
More importantly, she could keep a secret. It was only a few weeks ago that Kat had taken her on a stakeout of a drug dealer, during which Hannah had confronted the guy for no reason other than to feel the rush of danger—to feel anything really.
Later that night, when Kat had threatened to tell Jessie what happened, Hannah confessed the truth: that she only seemed capable of feeling emotions when she put herself in extreme situations, and that she worried Jessie would abandon her if she found out just how damaged she was.
It had been a relief to tell Kat the truth, something she hadn’t been able to tell Jessie or even Dr. Lemmon. Kat had promised not to reveal what she’d been told, as long as Hannah promised not to put herself at risk like that again.
And in the intervening weeks, they’d both followed through. Hannah had restrained her urge to push beyond safe boundaries. And Kat had listened patiently as she tried to work out the conflicts in her head. She knew that at some point, Kat would insist that she come clean with the people responsible for her, but she hadn’t done so yet and Hannah was grateful.
“What’s up, Hanna Barbera?” Kat asked upon picking up, using a nickname that Hannah didn’t understand.
“Nothing much,” Hannah replied. “What’s up with you?”
“Just driving back from a weekend at my honey’s.”
Kat was long-distance dating a sheriff’s deputy from Lake Arrowhead, a small town in the mountains about eighty miles northeast of L.A. She sounded happy. Hannah was reluctant to ruin her mood with her own problems.
“Ryan arrives today, right?” Kat said.
“He’s actually already here, has been for a few hours now.”
“How that going?”
“Okay. Jessie had to leave for a case and the nurse left a little while ago too. So it’s just the two of us.”
“Oh,” Kat said, and Hannah could almost hear the woman processing the situation. “That must be fun for you.”
“I’ve had better afternoons,” she admitted.
“Well, I know Jessie really appreciates what you’re doing. She told me how excited she was to have Ryan coming to stay at the house. So if she’s not there, this case must be serious.”
“They’re all serious, Kat,” Hannah said bitterly.
“It’s just one day, right?” Kat said, skipping over her tone. “Tomorrow you’ll be back in schoo
l and there will be a nurse available to help.”
“Yeah, during the day,” Hannah countered irritably. “What happens at night when she’s working on a lead and I’m the only one here?”
She could sense Kat struggling for an acceptable answer. She let her squirm.
“Listen,” Kat finally said. “Your sister has got some resources available. If she has to invest in a night nurse too, she will. Frankly, I think that’s a good idea regardless, especially for the first few weeks. Maybe I can broach the idea with her. In the meantime, I should be back in the city in about an hour and a half. Do you want me to stop by?”
Hannah did but knew it was asking too much.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Ryan’s sleeping and I’m sure Jessie will be back by then. I’ll get by.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Hey, Hanna Barbera, do me a favor,” Kat said, upbeat.
“What?”
“Walk into the bathroom and look in the mirror.”
“What for?”
“Just do it,” she instructed.
Hannah complied, turning on the light and staring at herself.
“What do you see?” Kat asked.
“Myself.”
“Come on, you can do better than that.”
“I see a girl,” Hannah said, “with sandy blonde hair that probably needs to be cut, green eyes that have too much red in them, someone tall enough to borrow my sister’s clothes when she doesn’t know I’m doing it, cute enough to get a boyfriend until he realizes what a dumpster fire I am. How’s that?”
“So if I can rephrase, you’re a tall, blonde-haired, green-eyed hottie who has good fashion sense and isn’t too full of herself. Fair?”
Hannah couldn’t help but laugh.
“Remind me to have you rework my online dating profile,” she said.
“Please tell me you don’t have one of those.”