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“You know it’s not as cut and dried as that,” he protested.
“Shut up, or I’ll shut you up.”
That wasn’t Jessie. It was Mark’s large cellmate, Oscar, growling at him sleepily from the bottom bunk. Mark closed his mouth immediately. He didn’t need to lose another tooth like the last time he woke Oscar up in the middle of the night.
It was okay. He didn’t buy the accusation anyway. His mind was interesting. And he knew that eventually Jessie would return to him, that they’d be chatting across the thick, plastic visiting room barrier via the corded phone on the wall. He knew because he still had his backup contingencies, the ones he’d cryptically warned her about on her sole visit.
And those contingencies were about to be activated. Before he was captured, out of an abundance of caution and foresight, he’d set everything up so that his manifesto would go live online on Thanksgiving day. Since it was now after midnight on Wednesday, that meant the world would see it in under twenty-four hours.
And when that happened, all the fanboys and fangirls who had been sending him mail in the last two months would find it. They would read it, and at least one of them would take action. When that happened, Jessie would come running to him. The thought of her rushing to see him, desperate for him to speak with her, made him giggle.
“Stop!” Jessie hissed in his ear, “unless you want Oscar to drag you out of this bunk and work you over. If you piss him off too much, you’ll be too dead to take advantage of any backup contingencies.”
Mark shut his mouth, though he couldn’t prevent it from curling into a smile. Jessie was difficult to live with, often cruel and belittling. But in moments like this, when she protected him from himself and others, he knew that deep down, she really cared.
She was his secret weapon, and he planned to use her.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was incredibly late or incredibly early, depending on one’s perspective.
For Jessie, 4:18 a.m. was late, especially considering that she’d only gotten about a half hour of unsatisfying sleep. The Central Station main conference room was an okay place for a nap, but not when people kept rushing by every five minutes. And there had been a lot of rushing around overnight.
Unfortunately, it hadn't gotten them as far as she might have hoped. Harrison Buhner was told he was free to go hours ago and hadn't wasted a moment rushing out. Now, as Jessie sat in the HSS Research department with Ryan, Jamil, and Beth, she tried to put together the jigsaw puzzle pieces that comprised Gabriella Silva's last hours as well as the life she led up until then.
Because of when the teenagers left the parkette last night and when the dog-walker found her body, they knew one thing for sure: she had arrived at the parkette sometime between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. They were working on getting access to the GPS data from her car and phone, as well as her call and text logs, to nail it down more specifically, but that process was proving to be slow going overnight. In the meantime, they'd been reviewing her personal life.
Gabriella Silva, or Gabby as she apparently preferred being called, was recently divorced. It seemed to have been an amicable proceeding, probably because her ex, Nolan Silva, didn’t fight hard over alimony or the enormous house in Brentwood. From everything they could glean, it looked like he’d happily bought her off and they’d gone their separate ways.
Still, they looked into Nolan’s history. The man was a fund manager who’d made it big a decade ago and had been living off the spoils ever since. He lived in Florida now, though according to his business assistant, he was currently in Gstaad, Switzerland on holiday. They were confirming that.
They also knew that before going to the parkette, Gabby had gone to a fundraising party for underprivileged children. Sturgil’s people had found a card for the event in her car and checked security camera footage from the Miramar, the Santa Monica hotel where the event was held. It showed her arriving at the valet station at 9:24 and leaving at 9:58, which struck Jessie as a surprisingly short visit.
Her suspicion was confirmed by the valet, who was still on duty when Beth called him an hour ago and described Gabby as seeming “annoyed at having to leave” when he brought the car and generally pissed, though not with him. He said she still tipped him well.
“We’ve got the GPS data on the car,” Jamil said, breaking the silence of the room.
“What does it show?” Ryan asked, rubbing his eyes as he stood up and walked over to one of the researcher’s four monitors. Jessie was too exhausted to stand and waited on the couch to hear what they’d found.
“It shows her vehicle leaving the hotel and stopping on the street with the parkette at 10:14 p.m.,” Jamil said. “And it looks like she was at another private home before going to the fundraiser. Her car arrived there at 8:58 p.m. and left for the hotel at 9:16.”
"That's a pretty short visit, too," Jessie noted. "Less than half as long as her time at the fundraiser."
“Maybe she was party-hopping?” Beth offered.
“Maybe,” Ryan conceded, “but it seems like a lot more hopping than party to me.”
“Where was that first stop?” Jessie asked Jamil.
“It was at a private residence, two blocks from her own home. It belongs to some Norwegian industrialist named Gunnar Fassenweil.”
“Never heard of him,” Ryan said before turning to Jessie. “Does the name ring a bell for you?”
She shook her head.
“Hold on,” Jamil added. “It looks like Gunnar has been out of the country for eighteen months. His place is currently being rented to married couple with familiar names: Rhett and Nina Kirby.”
Jessie’s head spun in Ryan’s direction.
