“Yeah, no worries. Call me when you get a chance.”
“Will do. Bye.” Amanda ended the call. She’d go to the station, tell Malone about the girls and the sex-trafficking ring, and plead with him to let her work that aspect of the case. She just hoped he’d overlook her lack of an alibi.
Thirty-Four
Amanda hit a coffee shop in Woodbridge before going into the station; it was no Hannah’s Diner, but their coffee was decent. And there was something about holding onto a to-go cup that calmed the nerves. She bought one for Trent too, and had the barista stuff a couple of creamers and sugar packets into a small paper bag. She hadn’t heard how he’d ordered his coffee the other day and they’d drunk from lidded to-go cups.
But when she reached his cubicle, he was nowhere in sight. Cud was at his desk and did a double-take in her direction, making her feel a little self-conscious about the bruising and cuts to her face. She’d done her best to cover them, but one could only expect so much from foundation and concealer.
“Good morning.”
Amanda turned to see Trent, and she smiled at him and held out her offering. “I thought you might like a Jabba.”
“Always.”
“I didn’t know how you took it, so…” She pointed to the bag.
He dropped the bag into his garbage can. “Love it black.” He went to take a sip but held it up in a toast gesture. “Thanks.”
So he liked it black—interesting. “You’re welcome.”
“I thought maybe I’d missed you and you were off talking to—”
“Detective Steele.”
“Sergeant,” she said, spinning to face Malone.
His eyes widened at her appearance, but he regained his composure quickly and pointed toward his office. She dipped her head in acknowledgment.
“As you were,” she said to Trent before following her superior.
She sucked in a deep breath as she entered Malone’s office and he closed the door behind them.
“I’m not sure I want to know about—” He circled his finger to indicate her face.
“You don’t.”
“Hmph.” He sat behind his desk, and she took the visitor chair.
He said, “From what I see, you and Trent are getting along well. Don’t worry, there will be future cases for you two to work together.”
She liked Trent, but she still wasn’t sold on having a partner. She should plow ahead about the sex-trafficking ring, but instead, she asked, “What’s Trent’s story?” The question rushed out of her so fast that it surprised her—and given Malone’s expression, him too.
“Huh?”
“Well, you must have had a talk with him, told him to take it easy on me. There’s no lighting a fire under him.”
“He doesn’t have enthusiasm for the job?”
“Not what I meant.”
“Ah, you’ve done your best to provoke him and it hasn’t worked.”
She smirked and hitched her shoulders. “Maybe.”
“Why am I not surprised?” He laughed, which somehow after yesterday’s events sounded sweeter than ever. “I think it’s a Steele family trait. Your father, as much as I like and respect the man, made me want to punch him more than once.”
“I’m pretty sure you actually did once.” She buried her smile in the lip of her coffee cup.
Malone held up an index finger.
Amanda went on. “Well, if you didn’t talk to Trent, he’s got to be the most laid-back rookie ever. Usually they’re all gung-ho and eager to go in guns blazing— Oh.”
Malone seemed to watch her as her own realization struck.
“He told me he was shot.”
He held up two fingers. “Twice. One round to his shoulder, another to his chest. He was damn lucky.”
“I’d say.” It would seem Trent had a way of downplaying his incident with a gunman too.
“That changes a person.”
She simply nodded, remembering how he’d told her that he carried that day with him.
“But enough about Trent. We need to talk about yesterday, Amanda.”
She’d figured the diversion wouldn’t last forever. She drank some coffee and tried to gather her thoughts. “It’s just… Hill got me so mad.” So much for articulation.
“I can’t have my detectives tossing their badge like that. I need to know I can count on them to do their jobs.”
“You have my word.”
Malone clasped his hands on his lap, wet his lips, and nodded. “Very well. Now, do you have your alibi for me?”
“Not quite yet. But should be very soon.”
Malone sighed. “I don’t know what you expect from me.”
“Actually,” she started, “I need to talk to you about something very important and urgent.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re going to try to sweet-talk your way back onto the case? I can’t let it happen. You know that.”
“I know, but what you don’t know is Palmer was booked with a silver bracelet when he went to prison.”
“And the big deal is…?”
“There was a data chip in the clasp that contains an inventory of girls.”
Malone’s eyes widened. “Girls? A sex-trafficking ring? No.” He shook his head. “I don’t see Chad Palmer being involved with that.”
“Neither do I, but Trent’s going to poke around, talk to a few of Palmer’s associates again and pressure them.”
“Okay, what do you want?”
“I want permission to look into the cold cases. I can’t help but wonder if there’s not something there that might be tied to the network. There’s already a detective in Sex Crimes who’s been assigned—”
“Hold up.” Malone held up his hand. “This is already moving and you’re telling me after the fact?”
“I’m sorry. It all happened so fast and…”
“That happened.” He pointed to her face.
She was hoping to eternally avoid needing to tell him about Rick Jensen, his assault, his threat, and the fact she’d just let him get away with it. As a long-time friend of the family he might understand, but she couldn’t take that risk.
“Yeah. Anyway, I’m fine, but those girls are not. They need to be helped and whatever degenerates are involved need to be brought to justice.”
Malone’s lips twitched and there was a sparkle in his eyes—one she hadn’t seen for her in a long time. He was proud of her and it made her sit up straighter.
“So? Can I work the cold cases?”
“You really don’t think there’s any true connection to Palmer?”
She got comfortable and laid out what she was thinking. “It could be a leap, and I have no way of knowing until I dig into it, but do you remember the stripper who was murdered in Georgia five and a half years ago?”
“Yeah. What about her?”
“Well, we haven’t been able to figure out a connection between the girl and Webb—not that we’ve had a lot of time to focus on that. But we know enough that Casey-Anne Ritter seems to be an assumed identity and living off the grid. That tells me she either had something to hide or she was hiding. So was her connection to Webb an involvement in the ring or was she a victim?”
Malone chewed on his thumbnail. “Huh. Just assure me again that if any of this starts leading to Palmer’s killer, you’ll back off and turn whatever you have over to Trent?”
“Does that mean that you’re letting me—”
“Hold up. There’s still the matter of your alibi. I’d feel a lot better if I had that. What seems to be the issue anyway?”
It would be easier if she could convince herself to come clean about the one-night stand, but she wasn’t ready to go there unless she had no choice. “I should have it in a couple of hours.” She glanced at his clock on the wall. “Less than,” she added with a smile.
“Hmph. Fine. Get it, then get to work.”
“What am I supposed to do until then?”
“Not my problem, Detective.” He swe
pt his hand in a brushing motion. “Shoo.”
She returned to her cubicle, but Trent wasn’t in his and his coat and coffee were gone. Atta boy, he’s following a lead, she thought.
She sat at her desk and downed the rest of her drink and stared at the partition. What a waste of time just sitting around waiting. Surely there was something she could do that wouldn’t give Malone a fit. She recalled Detective Patricia Glover’s voicemail. One phone call couldn’t hurt anything. She called but got voicemail, and it sure felt like the universe might be conspiring against her too. She didn’t leave a message.
Next, she tried Detective Banks from Georgia. He answered on the second ring.
“This is Detective Steele,” she said. There was a pause on his end, so she reminded him. “I called about a case you worked over five years ago. Casey-Anne Ritter.”
“Oh right. Yes. How can I help? You said you thought you might have a related case? You referring to Jackson Webb—the guy killed with the same gun a few days later? Has new evidence surfaced?”
“Yes, and no, I guess.” She filled him in on the data chip and the sex-trafficking ring. “I think it’s possible that Casey-Anne was either involved or a victim.”
A huge sigh traveled over the line. “I wish I could say that surprises me.”
The hairs rose on the back of Amanda’s neck. “Which—victim or perpetrator?”
“Definitely the former, and I’d say she lived in fear. It was just the starkness of the girl’s apartment, you see. She had a beanbag chair in the living room and couple of hardcover books. Her bedroom was a used mattress and second-hand dresser. Ask me, she was ready to run whenever she needed to. She paid for her rent in cash. She worked at a strip club, dancing.” He paused there as if he wasn’t sure if Amanda was aware of that.
“I read that in the file.” Casey-Anne was more likely sex-trafficking victim than perpetrator.
“Well, when she showed up to rent her place, she’d banged on the building manager’s door, saying she was responding to the paper in the window advertising the studio apartment. She had a wad of bills in hand, enough to cover first and last month’s rent.”
Pawning the bracelet on its own wouldn’t net “wads of bills.” Assuming they weren’t completely off base with their theories about Casey-Anne, it would seem she’d exchanged other items for cash too.
“Did she provide references?” A stretch, no doubt.
“She didn’t have any, but she had cash. That was something the manager repeated often.”
A ball of rage knotted in Amanda’s chest. All it took was a wad of cash and some members of society could overlook a young girl who was obviously running from some sort of trouble.
“How did the manager describe Casey-Anne?”
“Said she was jittery, but she was clean—another thing of importance to the man. He wanted a building free of druggies.”
“At least he had some standards,” Amanda lamented. “My part— another detective in my unit happened to search for Casey-Anne Ritter and came up empty. He was under the impression it was a fake name.”
“I found the same, but she had ID that pegged her as Casey-Anne Ritter, twenty-one.”
“And that’s what you ran with?”
“Yes and no.”
“It’s the no part I’m interested in.”
“I did consult the missing persons database for Atlanta to see if anyone had reported her missing. To me, she barely looked eighteen.”
Amanda glanced at her monitor, her mind on the files waiting for her on the mainframe, all those young girls. Would she find Casey-Anne Ritter among them? “I’m taking it nothing hit for you?” she said to Banks.
“No. You think she might have had ties to your city—”
Dumfries wasn’t exactly a city, but… “Was thinking Prince William County as a whole, maybe farther out.” Once Amanda started digging in, she’d check the local missing persons database and see what she could find, but the more specifics she could gather on Casey-Anne first the better. “Did she have any distinguishing markers?”
“Besides the gunshot wound?”
Banks paused there and she wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or had a warped sense of humor. He cleared this throat and continued.
“She had a cherry birthmark the size of a quarter on her lower back. Beyond that she was a natural brunette, though she was a platinum blond at the time of death. She had brown eyes and a small dimple in her chin. She was five-seven.”
Amanda scribbled all this down for quick reference when she got off the call. “What about any leads in the case?”
“Didn’t get far. I mean, obviously, given that the case went cold.”
She didn’t respect how easily it seemed Detective Banks had relieved himself of any obligation in that regard. He clearly wasn’t the see-it-through type.
“What about friends, coworkers at the club where she stripped?”
“Georgia’s Peaches. Yeah, we spoke with all of them. Oh— There was one dancer who went by Ginger, who saw Ritter just before she left what was her last shift. She said that Ritter was in a hurry to get out of the club.”
“Did she know why?”
“She said she seemed spooked but pressing that didn’t get me anywhere.”
Probably because Ginger had her own secrets that she didn’t want being probed, and getting too involved in a police investigation had a way of making that happen. But the fact that Ritter was “spooked” made Amanda wonder if Casey-Anne had spotted someone from her past and that’s why she’d been high-tailing it out of the club that night.
“There’s also something else that might help, though it hasn’t so far.” Spoken as if Banks had continued working the case. “A neighbor in Ritter’s building said she saw a man in the hall outside her door.”
Amanda sat up. “Was this around the time of the murder?”
“No,” Banks said. “That’s why it was dismissed as irrelevant—or should I say, my sergeant told me that it probably wouldn’t get me anywhere.”
Amanda strongly disagreed. Every lead in a homicide investigation had to be seen through until it either produced the next step or hit a dead end. “When was it?”
“During the day.”
“The day she was murdered?”
Banks didn’t say anything, but Amanda heard him sigh.
“That day? And you didn’t pursue the lead?”
Banks remained silent, probably tired of defending his boss, and hopefully feeling shame for so easily backing down himself.
“Did this neighbor talk to the man?”
“She said ‘hi’ to him and asked if she could help him. He told her that he was Casey-Anne’s uncle, in town visiting. The neighbor lady accepted that and went back into her apartment, but she said the man gave her the creeps.”
Amanda bit her tongue so as not to jump down the detective’s throat—an eyewitness saw a man outside the vic’s apartment who gave her the creeps on the day of the murder, no less, and that still wasn’t a lead worth pursuing?
She wanted to throttle something. “I think we both know—”
“It wasn’t her uncle? Yeah.”
“Uncle” was probably there for the bracelet—assuming Amanda’s earlier speculation held merit. The more she could gather about this guy the better. “Did this neighbor have anything else to offer about this ‘uncle’ guy? What he looked or sounded like?”
“She said that he had a bit of a lisp and a very slight limp.”
The gunman in the Happy Time surveillance video favored the left knee—a coincidence or had “Uncle” returned to kill Palmer?
“What about hair color, eyes, height?”
“Strong and lean, black hair, and he was short for a guy. If I remember only about five ten.”
That height would also fit with the perp who’d assaulted Palmer. “What was he wearing?”
“Jeans and a black sweater.”
“A hoodie?” She just thought she’d ask.
&nbs
p; “She didn’t say that.”
“Okay, you’ve given me a lot. Thanks for all your help.”
“I hope you find her justice, and if there’s anything else I can help you with on this end, I’m just a call away.”
“Actually… Back closer to when this happened and after the murder of Jackson Webb, did you speak with anyone from Prince William County PD?”
“I did. Can’t remember the detective I spoke to now, but it was a man.”
“Detective Dennis Bishop sound familiar?”
“Yeah, I think that’s it.”
“Did you tell him about this “uncle” guy?”
“I did, but he didn’t seem too interested. Told me he had no eyewitnesses for his case, and unless I got somewhere with “Uncle,” he didn’t think it was related to the murders.”
She looked over her partition and could see the top of Cud’s head. She’d be asking him about this. “Okay, thanks,” she said to Banks.
He ended the call, and she cupped her phone in her hands and got up, fully intent on questioning Cud about what he was thinking back then.
The sound of someone snapping their fingers had her looking over a shoulder. She groaned internally at the sight of Malone.
“You have that alibi?”
She opened her mouth and—
“No? I didn’t think so.” He looked at her sternly, and she consulted the clock—11:30 AM.
“Going to get it right now!” She ran out the door. She had thirty minutes to get back to the construction site in Dumfries.
Thirty-Five
Amanda pulled into the construction lot at five to noon. Three food trucks were there now, no doubt eager to satisfy the appetites of the hungry workers. Logan’s pickup was in the same place as it had been earlier, and now there was an available spot two down from it. She parked and would wait there. It was convenient if Logan was going to leave the premises for lunch and it afforded her a good view of the gate.
She pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror. The bruises weren’t that noticeable, but they weren’t exactly invisible either. She didn’t have a powder compact in her car, but she had some lipstick in a pocket, so she smeared some of that on and finished primping by fluffing and sweeping her hair over her shoulders. She examined the final product and clued in. What the hell was she doing? She flipped the visor back up.
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