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“Are you thinking that there might be some discrepancy between the list she’ll give us and the one we’ll get from Kirby?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” he conceded, “but I just want to cover all our bases.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd that the forceful but pleasant woman we spoke to earlier was such an unrelenting bulldog here last night?” Jessie wondered. “It almost sounds like a different person.”
“Maybe she was just being on her best behavior for the police when we talked to her,” Ryan mused.
“That’s certainly possible,” Jessie agreed. “But her attitude here seemed more alienating than productive. I can’t help but wonder why she’d risk it.”
Just then, both their phones rang. It was Jamil. Ryan answered his and put the call on speaker.
“Hey Jamil, you’re on speaker,” he said. “What’s up?”
“We had a few updates for you,” Jamil said. “First of all. Ava Martell’s phone was destroyed beyond repair. Since it had an eSIM card rather than a physical one, we have to get into her cloud account to access her data. That’s proving to be a longer process than we’d like.
“How long?” Jessie asked.
“Everyone is short-staffed because of the impending holiday,” Jamil explained. “With all the bureaucratic hurdles we’re trying to overcome, I doubt we’ll make any progress before tomorrow.”
Jessie tried not to let her frustration get the better of her. This wasn’t Jamil’s fault. And yet, she felt sure that if they could access Ava’s data, a whole new crop leads might open up.
“You said you had a few updates,” she reminded him. “What else is going on?”
“Right,” the head researcher said. “I wanted to let you know that Nina Kirby got in touch with us. She gave us the names of the people who sat at her table at the legal event. She also authorized us to check her phone and car GPS data, though not the content of the phone. She said that if we wanted that, it would require a separate approval, since there might be client confidentiality issues.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “We’ll be sending you the list of event attendees from the venue momentarily. Please let us know if you notice any substantial differences between the two.”
“Will do,” Jamil promised. “By the way, we did a deeper background dive on Ava Martell’s husband, Harrison Buhner, and we found some interesting stuff.”
Like what?” Jessie asked.
“First of all, while he is a senior executive at the Deluxe Resorts and Hotels chain, he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of actual responsibility there. We found several articles that indicate that he was in middle management for much of his career, and that it was only after he married Martell that things changed. One article even suggested that he was elevated in the hopes that his wife’s modest celebrity and film contacts might mean the hotels could be used in upcoming film productions. I don’t know if that’s even relevant to your investigation, but it seemed notable.”
“Could prove interesting,” Ryan mused. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” Jamil replied, “according to some information that Beth uncovered, it appears that Buhner isn’t actually out of town.”
“What?” Ryan demanded. “Maybe you should have led with that, Jamil!”
Jessie shook her head in frustration, unable to disagree. Jamil was a genius, but he occasionally got so interested in particular trees that he forgot about the forest.
“I’m sorry,” Jamil said. “Now that I say it out loud, it seems obvious.”
“What did Beth find?” Jessie asked, hoping to move away from any conflict and get to the important stuff.
Beth, while not a human supercomputer like Jamil, had an incredibly sharp mind, which people tended to underestimate because she was an attractive, six-foot-plus former college volleyball star.
“I’ll let her explain,” Jamil said.
“Hey guys,” Beth said over speaker, “so we only just learned this. Buhner did attend the Deluxe Resorts biannual executive conference, which was held the last few days in Las Vegas. The overall meeting didn’t end until after a brunch event today, but it looks like Buhner flew out yesterday evening.”
“So he’s been here in L.A. since last night?” Jessie reconfirmed.
“From everything we can tell, yes,” Beth said. “We have details if you want.”
Just then, Mary Portnoy returned to the ballroom with a sheath of papers in her hand.
“We do,” Jessie said to the researchers, speaking more quietly into the phone now. “We’re just wrapping up here at the hotel. We’ll call you back from the car and you can fill us in on the rest.”
