*
Max didn’t say anything for nearly the entire drive back to the hotel. She was both angry and impressed. Okay, mostly she was furious at Kincaid for holding back on her. For taking over the conversation with the detective. Max had her own questions, but they were slightly altered versions of what Lucy had already asked. Max was used to doing things her own way and while she didn’t object to anything Lucy had said or done, it was different. And Max didn’t have anything actionable to follow up on. One of her interview rules was to never leave an interview with someone who had information—like Katella—without a thread for her to follow. Giving him this assignment of reading the interviews might be productive, but left Max twiddling her fingers.
She did not twiddle well.
“You didn’t tell me about the conversation with your brother the shrink,” Max said bluntly.
“It’s not over. When I have something relevant to share, I will.”
“This isn’t a partnership,” Max said.
“I thought you didn’t want a partnership.”
“It was forced on me.”
“You planned to interview Don Katella without me.”
“As it turned out, you interviewed him without me.”
Lucy glanced at Max. Was she actually bemused at Max’s frustration?
“I’m used to being in charge, Lucy. I’m used to asking the questions.”
“Did you have questions I didn’t ask?”
“That’s not the point. I have a process, a system that works for me. You have a different process. I may have yielded different information, to give us another path to follow. Now we’re waiting on a retired cop to read hundreds of pages of interviews? And we have nothing.”
“We’re not waiting for anything,” Lucy said. “Andrew is sending me a copy of the interviews as well, of course we need to review them. But Katella was there twenty years ago. Rereading the statements may spark something in his memory.”
She was right, Max admitted, but she felt like she wasn’t in control. Max didn’t like not being in control.
“I don’t see how this is going to work,” she mumbled.
“Have you heard back from your assistant?”
Max narrowed her gaze at Lucy as she stopped at a red light. “Excuse me?”
“You mentioned last night that your assistant was following up with the Porter family.”
She’d forgotten that she’d told Lucy.
“He’ll call when he has something,” Max said. “So what now?”
“This is your case,” Lucy said. “I just got a text from Andrew—copies of all statements will be delivered to the hotel by one. We have nearly three hours.”
“My case.” Max laughed. Really. “I’d like to visit the crime scene. Get a sense of the neighborhood, the park where Justin was buried, so I can visualize the scene when we read the statements.”
Lucy didn’t say anything for a long minute. Max could be insensitive, and perhaps she had been on purpose. Justin was Lucy’s nephew. What had she said yesterday?
Justin was my best friend.
Max understood loss as much as anyone. That she and Lucy had that in common didn’t surprise her; what surprised her was that the anger she had felt earlier when Lucy took over the interview of Katella disappeared.
“Are you okay with that?” Max asked.
“Yes,” she said, and remained silent as Max typed the address into her GPS.
Chapter Seventeen
David stood when Tommy Porter’s uncle, Grant McKnight, approached him at the coffee shop near the beach in Santa Barbara. It was before the lunch hour, but the place was beginning to fill.
“Officer McKnight, thank you for meeting with me.”
Grant shook David’s hand once firmly, then sat in the booth across from David. David sat back down.
The waitress approached immediately. “Hello, Grant. The usual?”
“To go, I don’t have a lot of time,” Grant said. “Coffee now. Thanks, Ann.” He waited until she left. “This is my usual lunch spot.”
“I was surprised to get your call.”
“Jamie, Doug, and I had a long talk about your visit last night. Originally, they’d called me over to find out if they could have you arrested. I was ready to hunt you down, to be honest. Then I read the e-mail you sent last night. Bold, but to the point. I like that.”
“I don’t want to hurt your family, Grant. Let me make that clear.”
“You think Tommy’s killer is still out there.”
“I do.” Max had called him last night after Agent Kincaid left and told him that Kincaid thought the killer was a woman. She had a few other things to say—both good and bad about the federal agent—but David had a strong sense that Max liked her. Which was a feat considering how angry Max had been when she felt forced to work with Kincaid.
David wished he’d been there to see that.
Ann the waitress came over with coffee for Grant and refilled David’s mug. When she left, Grant said, “I need more. Look, I want to help, but Doug and Jamie are my family. They put Tommy’s murder behind them. They had to, or they wouldn’t have survived. They have two little girls they need to protect. But now they’re thinking … and that’s going to bring back the old memories and pain. Yet they want to help as much as they can. We felt that if I was the go-between, it would cushion the pain somewhat. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Fifteen years is a long time. Do you really—I mean, is there a chance the bastard who killed my nephew is still out there?”
“It seems like a long shot, but so far there are four murders over twenty years that are identical on the surface. The first murder was almost twenty years ago. Maxine Revere, my associate, is in San Diego working the case.”
Grant shook his head in disbelief. “Twenty years. How certain are you that this boy and Tommy were killed by the same man?”
“Max is one hundred percent certain. So is the FBI agent who is assisting on the case.”
“The feds are involved?”
“Not yet. The agent is on her own time. She’s related to the first victim, Justin Stanton. They were both children when he was killed.”
“It’s awful. There is no hell worse than losing a child.”
“I hope I never find out,” David said. His daughter was the brightest spot in his life. “I have some questions, and if you can answer them, I won’t need to talk to your sister. However, as we move forward, there may be additional questions, and Max will likely want to talk to both of them.”
“Meaning, if you get closer to finding out who did this.”
“Yes.”
“If I see that you’re making progress and my sister and brother-in-law are the only people who can answer the questions, I’ll go to them. I can convince them to help, but I refuse to get their hopes up. My sister—it was a dark time for all of us, but Tommy was her baby.”