Jennifer frowned but dutifully reached out to accept the files. She was wearing her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, her all-business look. I knew her frown belied the fact that she’d willingly accept any part of a murder case. I also knew I could count on her very best work.
“What am I looking for in all of this?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. I just want another set of eyes on those files. I want you to familiarize yourself with the cases and Gloria Dayton. I want you to know everything there is to know about her. Cisco’s working on her profile in the years since those cases.”
“Okay.”
“At the same time, I want you on something else.”
She slid her notebook in front of her.
“Okay.”
“Somewhere in the most recent file there, you’ll find some notes from my former investigator, Raul Levin. They regard a drug dealer and his location in a hotel. His name is Hector Arrande Moya. He was Sinaloa cartel and the feds wanted him. I want you to pull everything you can on him. My memory is that he went away for life. Find out where he is and what’s going on with him.”
Jennifer nodded but then said she wasn’t following the logic of the assignment.
“Why are we chasing this drug dealer down?”
“Gloria gave him up to get a deal. The guy went down hard and we might be looking at alternate theories at some point.”
“Right. Straw man defense.”
“Just see what you can find.”
“Is Raul Levin still around? Maybe I’ll start with him, see what he remembers about Hector.”
“Good idea, but he’s not around. He’s dead.”
I saw Jennifer glance at Lorna and Lorna’s eyes warn her off the subject.
“It’s a long story and we’ll talk about it someday,” I said.
A somber moment passed.
“Okay, then I’ll just see what I can find out on my own,” Jennifer said.
I turned my attention to Cisco.
“Cisco, what have you got for us?”
“I’ve got a few things so far. First of all, you asked me to run down Gloria since the last time you had a case with her. I did that and went through all the usual channels, digital and human, and she pretty much dropped off the grid after that last case. You said she moved to Hawaii, but if she did, she never got a driver’s license or paid utilities or set up cable TV or purchased a property on any of the islands.”
“She said she was going to live with a friend,” I said. “Somebody who was going to take care of her.”
Cisco shrugged.
“That could be but most people leave at least a shadow of a trail. I couldn’t find anything. I think what’s more likely is that’s the point where she started reinventing herself. You know, new name, ID, all of that.”
“Giselle Dallinger.”
“Maybe, or that could have been later. People who do this usually don’t stick with one ID. It’s a cycle. Whenever they think somebody might be getting close or it’s time to change, they go through the process again.”
“Yeah, but she wasn’t in Witness Protection. She just wanted a new start. This seems kind of extreme.”
Jennifer cut in on the back-and-forth then.
“I don’t know, if I had this record on my name and I wanted to start over somewhere, I’d lose the name. Nowadays everything’s digital and a lot of it is public information. Probably the last thing she wanted was somebody in Hawaii digging up all of this stuff.”
She patted the stack of files in front of her. She made a good point.
“Okay,” I said, “what about Giselle Dallinger? When did she show up?”
“Not so sure,” Cisco said. “Her current driver’s license was issued in Nevada two years ago. She never changed it when she moved over here. She rented the apartment on Franklin sixteen months ago, providing a four-year rental history in Las Vegas. I haven’t had time to go back into it over there but I’ll get to it soon.”
I pulled a pad out of my briefcase and wrote a few questions I needed to ask Andre La Cosse the next time we spoke.
“Okay, what else?” I asked. “Did you get to the Beverly Wilshire yesterday?”
“I did. But before I get to that, let’s talk about the apartment on Franklin.”
I nodded. It was his report. He could deliver it the way he wanted.
“Let’s start with the fire. It was first reported at twelve fifty-one Monday morning when smoke alarms in the hallway outside the apartment went off and residents entered the hallway and saw smoke coming from our victim’s door. The fire gutted the living room—where the body was located—and heavily damaged the kitchen and the two bedrooms. The smoke detectors inside the apartment evidently did not go off and the reason for that is under investigation.”
“What about a sprinkler system?”
“No sprinkler system. It’s an old building and it was grandfathered in without it. Now, from what I was able to pick up over at the fire station, there were two investigations of this death.”
“Two?” I asked.
This was sounding like something I could use.
“That’s right. Both police and fire investigators signed off on it at first as accidental, with the victim falling asleep on the couch while smoking. The accelerant was the blouse she was wearing, which was made of polyurethane. What changed their minds about that was the coroner’s initial survey. The remains were bagged and tagged at the scene and taken to the ME’s Office.”
Cisco looked at his own notes, which had been scratched on a pocket notebook that looked tiny in his big left hand.
“A deputy medical examiner named Celeste Frazier did a preliminary examination of the body and determined that the hyoid bone was fractured in two places. That changed things pretty quick.”
I looked at Lorna and knew she did not know what the hyoid bone was.
“It’s a small bone shaped like a horseshoe that protects the windpipe.”
I touched the front of my neck in illustration.
“If it’s broken, it means force trauma to the front of the neck. She was choked, strangled.”
She nodded her thanks and I told Cisco to keep going.
“So they went back out, with arson and homicide investigators, and now we have a full-on murder investigation. They knocked on doors and I talked to a lot of the people they talked to. Several of them heard an argument coming from her apartment about eleven Sunday night. Raised voices. A man and a woman going at it about money.”
He referred to his notebook again to get a name.
“A Mrs. Annabeth Stephens lives directly across the hall from the victim’s apartment and she was watching out her peephole when a man left following the argument. She said the time was between eleven thirty and midnight because the news was over and she went to bed at midnight. She later identified Andre La Cosse when the cops showed her a six-pack.”
“She told you this?”
“She did.”
“Did she know you were working for the guy she identified?”
“I told her I was investigating the death across the hall and she spoke willingly to me. I didn’t identify myself further than that because she never asked for anything further.”