I reached across the table and grabbed Niki’s hands and squeezed them. “No!” I said. My interjection punched the air with a sharpness that brought our conversation to a halt. Then quietly, I whispered, “No. I don’t want you stepping into Briggs’s trap. He wants you to be insubordinate. He needs you to be insubordinate. It’s one of his favorite weapons. You have to promise me: if he confronts you—you tell him that you didn’t know.” I squeezed her hands a little harder. “Please, promise me.”
She hesitated, looking into my eyes as if searching for a crack in my resolve. She found none. I wasn’t about to let her skip merrily along at my side as I charged down the dark path unfurling before me. She didn’t know about the wolves. She didn’t know the lengths that I would go to hunt them down. She had no idea how deep my rage and hatred ran. There would be carnage at the end of this; I felt it in my bones. I would protect her from that at all costs.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I promise.”
“You’re looking into things because I asked you to. Understand? I told you that it was part of the Jane Doe cold case. That’s all.”
“I got it, Max.”
“Good.” I loosened my grip on her hands.
“But this is about the Jane Doe case. That’s not a lie.”
“What do you mean?”
She reached into a briefcase beside her and withdrew a file. From the file, she pulled out two photographs, laying them on the table in front of me. One, I recognized as the autopsy photo of Jane Doe. The second picture was of the same girl, only she was alive, badly beaten and bruised, but alive. My confusion could not have been more obvious.
“Meet Zoya, the girl they brought into HCMC the day your wife died.”
“Where did you get this?”
“It bothered me that Cappers had a folder for the pictures but no pictures. Why would the officer take the time to create the folder and not transfer the photos? So I went down to the Tech Unit this morning. There’s a lady there that I knew from back when I worked Vice. She’s a wiz at metadata and computer forensics. She used to track IP addresses for our child-solicitation cases. This morning, she ran a forensic examination using the metadata for the picture folder and found the deleted photos still in the system. They were deleted the same day they were uploaded.”
“Deleted? Why? How?”
“Could have been an accident, or it could have been intentional. The data doesn’t say. All we know is that the photos were there and then gone.”
I looked at the pictures again. There’s no mistake. These girls were one and the same.
“I also did some research on the tattoo. Vice keeps records of tats that are linked to prostitution. I looked in the database, but no ruble.”
“Is every known pimp brand in the database?”
“There’s always scuttlebutt in Vice, tats that we believed were brands but couldn’t prove.”
“So someone in Vice . . . say, the guy who runs the unit—”
“Don’t even go there.”
“He might have some information. We should at least call.”
“Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about?”
“Whitton likes you. He’ll talk to you if you call.”
“That man is a pig, and I’m not talking to him.”
“I’m not so sure he’ll speak to me,” I said. “He hasn’t said a word to me since I stole you away from him three years ago.”
“You didn’t steal me away. I wanted the transfer. I couldn’t stand to be around that bastard.”
“It’s good to let it out. You should call him. It’ll be therapeutic.”
“Did I ever tell you that he once told me to take my top off during a sting? We were doing hotel busts and a couple of the tricks wouldn’t talk money unless I showed them my tits. Commander Whitton told me to go ahead and strip down. ‘Take one for the team,’ he said. ‘Women walk around topless all the time in Europe.’ I think he just wanted to get my breasts on surveillance footage for his private collection.”
“Well, he was plenty pissed when I convinced Chief Murphy that you should be in Homicide. Called me all kinds of names. Like it or not, he may be able to help.”
“We may never know,” she said. “If you want to call him, more power to you. But I haven’t spoken a word to that jackass for three years and I’m not about to break that streak.”
“Fine, I’ll call him about the ruble tattoo—and by fine, I mean you win again.”
“Do send him my love, would you, darling?”
“I’ll do that. You have a number?”
“In my desk, I’m sure. I’ll text it to you when I get back to the office. Then I’m heading over to the Government Center.”
“Warrant?”
“No, doing you a favor,” she said. “I have an idea where we might get a copy of Kroll’s voice.”
“The Government Center?”
“I checked the court records. He made his first appearance without an attorney. Most courts use electronic court reporters—basically it’s a fancy digital recorder. Kroll would have had to answer a couple questions at that first appearance: name, address, does he understand the charges, that kind of stuff. They may still have that recording somewhere in the courthouse.”
I grinned, then chuckled. “You’re brilliant, you know that? You were made for this job.”
She gave a humble shrug of her shoulders. “I don’t know if a recording exists,” she said. “But keep your fingers crossed. We might get lucky yet.”
CHAPTER 21
Arriving early for my meeting with Farrah McKinney, I bought a cup of coffee and found a table in the back of the cafeteria where someone had left a newspaper. I might have paid no mind to the news of the day had a headline not jumped up and caught my eye:
BODY FOUND IN BURNED VEHICLE
“Aw, shit,” I muttered.
I read the story, which gave very little insight beyond the basic facts of the fire and the presence of a body. I assumed that the source for the story had been one of the patrol officers, or maybe a firefighter. I held that thought until I read the second paragraph. There, the story referenced what the reporter called “suspicions” of the investigators. The story quoted an anonymous source as saying authorities believed the incident to be “gang-related.”
“What the . . .” That’s no firefighter saying that.
I leaned back in my seat, pressed a thumb and finger against opposite temples and rubbed. I had hoped to put Fireball aside for my meeting with Farrah. I didn’t need that blight of a human being stealing brain cells as I listened to Jenni’s last recorded words.
I had just started whittling away at possible sources for the story, a short list with an ending that I was pretty sure I already knew, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out to see a text from Niki: the name Whitton and a phone number. I called the number.
“Whitton here.”
“Commander Whitton, this is Detective Max Rupert. You have a minute? I’d like to get your help on a case.”
Silence met my request, and in that silence, the memory of our last exchange came flooding back to me, a confrontation we had after Whitton lost his argument to keep Niki in Vice. Niki knew about most of that fight, but there was one part she didn’t know.