He was on the phone, so he passed a stack of mail to Josie as she walked by and mouthed a silent hello. When she got to the office she found Marta working on a case report at her desk.
Josie opened a pull-top can of fruit cocktail and poured it into a bowl. She drank the juice and ate the fruit for her dinner as she filled Marta in on the latest from Holder.
“Sorry to hear that,” Marta said. “Why don’t you go home and give your brain a rest. Get a good night’s sleep and start fresh tomorrow.”
“I can’t. I’m too pissed.”
Josie finished off a package of cheese and peanut butter crackers and spread the phone documents out across the conference table, on top of the phone diagram, and stared at the numbers and the timeline of phone calls for a long time.
She went back to the night of the murder and examined Josh’s calls. He had not placed a call to Lilith that night. And Lilith had not called anyone after three that afternoon. She hadn’t talked to any of the other suspects that day, or since then.
Josh had placed several local calls the day of the murder, and received several from Macey earlier in the day. The last call he received that day had been at 6:37 p.m., from a local number Josie didn’t recognize. Josie typed the number into a search engine but got nothing in return.
Next, she pulled out Big Ben’s phone records and studied them again. He had placed and received hundreds of calls on his cell phone over the past month, most of them with the area code for Albuquerque, New Mexico. Josie ran her finger down the list of area codes and stopped at 432, a West Texas number. She checked the number against Josh’s, Macey’s, Ryan’s, and Caroline’s numbers, but it didn’t match up. That meant Ben had been called by another person in West Texas.
Josie compared that number to the number that had called Josh Mooney at 6:37 p.m. the evening of the murder. The numbers matched.
“Damn. Marta. Come here.”
Josie ran through what she had just discovered and Marta clamped a hand on Josie’s shoulder. “How do we trace that number down?” she asked.
On a whim, Josie pulled her cell phone out and typed the number in to see if it registered as one of her contacts. The contact Mayor Moss appeared.
“Son of a bitch,” she whispered, and held her phone up for Marta to see.
*
Marta sat down heavily in the chair beside Josie. Her forehead was bunched into worry lines. “The mayor called Big Ben one day before Renata was killed.”
“And that was several days before I went to his office to tell him about Caroline being involved. So he obviously knew about this before I showed up. It’s probably why he took my gun and badge away. He wanted to block the investigation.”
“I just can’t believe this,” Marta said.
Josie went to her daily notes logbook on her desk and flipped through it. “Did I mention to you that Mayor Moss stopped by here before all this broke loose to say the mayor’s office had received a weird voice message?”
Marta frowned and shook her head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“It wasn’t a big deal at the time. He said the message was about something bad going on in town. He said Helen accidentally deleted it.” Josie found the note in her logbook and looked up at Marta. “He stopped by the office the morning of the day we found the body in the pasture.”
“Why would he say that to you, knowing Caroline was mixed up in this?” Marta said.
“Maybe Moss has been a part of the organization all along. Maybe he was trying to deflect attention.”
She and Marta sat down at the table and stared at the phone records from Big Ben until the numbers blurred. Examining the calls over the past year, they weren’t able to find any other from Mayor Moss, nor did they find any additional calls from Big Ben to the 432 area code.
“Mayor Moss?” Marta said. Her voice was breathy, unbelieving. “Caroline was shock enough.”
“It’s not that he has a high regard for women; he obviously doesn’t. But he defends the law. That’s the part of his personality that always felt genuine to me,” Josie said. “It was the part of his personality that I respected. This is the kind of news that makes you question everyone.”
“What do we do now?” Marta said.
Josie looked at her watch. It was almost eight p.m. She wanted to call Otto, but refrained. “Holder told me to stand down while he turns the investigation over to the FBI. I want to go home and think on this tonight. I’ll wait until morning to turn Holder’s world upside down.”
TWENTY-ONE