Tia winked. “High praise coming from you, Crawford.”
The nurse walked back. “Take the conversation elsewhere, please. Now.”
“No one goes in that room except for your nurses and her doctor,” Tia said. “An officer will be on the door at all times. If she needs to be moved, the officer goes with her. If she goes for a scan or x-rays, the officer will be outside her door.”
“Is she a prisoner or under protection?”
“Both.”
“If she’s a prisoner, you need to cuff her.”
Tia glanced at Barry. “We haven’t placed her under arrest yet,” she said to the nurse.
“Then I’ll consider the officer her protection. But if she’s dangerous—”
“Call us if you have any concerns.” Tia handed the nurse her card. She excused herself to talk to the officer at the door.
Barry and Lucy walked to the end of the corridor, to the side of the nurse’s station where they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way as well as have some privacy. Barry said, “Do you think she took photos of James Everett as well?”
That was exactly what Lucy had been thinking, though Elise hadn’t explicitly said it. “I can get her to talk,” Lucy said. She didn’t like browbeating the girl. Elise wasn’t cooperating, but she was scared and Lucy understood what these girls had to do to survive. Survival often made them hard and prickly, and often the only way to crack them was to be just as hard.
“There’s no doubt,” Barry said. “But in the meantime, maybe we should take another run at Mona Hill.”
“She’s not going to give us anything unless we have something on her—something to trade, like her freedom.”
“The solicitation charges won’t stick, and she knows it,” Barry said.
“Any way you can get a warrant to search her apartment?”
“All we have is her sending a prostitute to a john—if that. She said, she said.”
“Elise is underage.”
“She’s over fourteen. There’s a different line.”
Lucy hated that line. Girls fourteen and under were special victims. Over fourteen and while prostitution was still illegal, the penalties weren’t as extensive. There were fewer resources to get the older girls out of the life. One cop had told Lucy that by the time the girls were fourteen, they were lost causes.
And sometimes they’re lost at a much earlier age.
Lucy didn’t believe that. Most of the girls in prostitution as teenagers had been abused by their families or manipulated by much older boyfriends into a life in the sex trade. Some had made one bad decision and felt they couldn’t come back from that. They often felt they didn’t deserve to go back to their families, or that their families wouldn’t want them back after they knew what they’d done. And some families were like that. But many welcomed their daughters back with open hearts. She didn’t know where Elise fell on that spectrum, but it was clear from her street smarts and her attitude that she’d been on her own a long, long time. Was there even anyone for her to go home to?
“What if,” Lucy said, “we work Mona to give us the name of the person who vouched for Elise? Give her a pass on everything if she gives that up.”
“We have to find something on her first.”
“Between us and Tia, we could pull together enough for a search warrant. Specifically to look for the photos Elise claims she took and the drug used to kill Worthington.”
“Do you believe her? That she didn’t know that she’d killed him?”
Lucy considered the conversation. “Yes and no. She’s a habitual liar, so everything she said we need to verify. There was a lot of truth there, but some misdirection. I believe she went in thinking she was going to take compromising pictures. But I think she knew he was dead when she left the room. But based on her reaction—I don’t think she knew the drugs would kill him. Someone gave her the syringe. Mona admitted that she sent her out on the Everett job, and while Elise didn’t explicitly say Mona sent her to Worthington, I think we can make the case that Mona was involved. With the right judge, we can get a warrant to search Mona’s place for drugs, syringes, photographs, and computers.”
“Computers?”
“If they were digital photos, she would have downloaded them. So we’ll need any camera or recording equipment, phones—maybe we’ll get lucky and find out who arranged the meeting with Worthington. Because I’ll bet money that he wasn’t expecting a prostitute.”
“Slow down, Kincaid,” Barry said. “Elise didn’t say that Mona sent her to Worthington. She said she was here in San Antonio because of Worthington, but called Mona for more work. We might be able to tie Mona to James Everett, but we can’t tie her to Worthington.”