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Jessica wanted to scratch his eyes out. She swallowed her smart remark, and with sad eyes and a change of attitude, replied, “I don’t know how things work here. Please, can I try another phone call?” That bitch she was earlier had faded away. Now she was much more desperate.
Spielberg exhaled, and said, “Just one more.” Maybe he wasn’t a dick.
Jessica managed to smile. Now she debated on whether to call Maserati Meek again or her family. She figured it was best to call her family since Meek wasn’t answering his damn phone, probably because she was calling from an unknown number. It also wasn’t smart to be calling him from a police precinct after a bombing.
She dialed home, the phone rang several times, and she prayed that someone answered. Finally, her cousin Jalissa picked up, and Jessica was thankful. To throw the cop off guard, she started speaking in Spanish, saying to her cousin that she was in jail.
“La cárcel, lo que pasó?”
“I don’t have long to talk,” she continued in Spanish. “But I need you to call this number for me. It’s my boyfriend’s number.”
Her cousin was listening. Jessica was speaking with a sense of urgency. She gave Jalissa Maserati Meek’s number and added, “Call now; don’t wait!” Then she said, “Tell him this: ‘Everyone in red left early.’”
It was a cryptic message, but Jessica felt a sense of relief once she hung up. She could trust her cousin. Jalissa had always been responsible and on point.
Jalissa had no idea what Jessica was talking about. She had every intention of making the call immediately, but she got distracted by some infuriating texts from her ex.
Right after Jessica’s phone call, it was business as usual. Back to her nasty attitude, Jessica began cursing Spielberg out once again for arresting her. He just smirked. She was escorted back into the bullpen. Now her only option was to wait. Hopefully the judge would release her on her own recognizance or set a low bail.
***
Unbeknownst to Jessica, Officer Spielberg was fluent in Spanish. Though he appeared Caucasian, his mother was Puerto Rican and his father was Jewish. He understood everything that was said on the phone. Her saying that everyone in red left early bewildered him. What did it mean? He knew it had to mean something dealing with the explosion. The girl who’d come looking for Jessica earlier, a Stephanie Brown, had on red. Second, why was Jessica running like a track star at the police checkpoint not long after the bombing? When she was arrested, it wasn’t a run that said “I need to get home,” but “I’m guilty.” Something had happened. She was involved in something—if not the bombing, then something criminal.
Spielberg remembered the phone number she gave over the phone and he jotted it down into his notepad. His gut instinct told him to look into it. There was something there. It was too early to put his finger on it, but it was a major case, and he wanted a piece of it.
He found a computer and started his investigation. Quickly, he ran the ladies’ names, Stephanie and Jessica. Within minutes, he realized that he couldn’t find anything on Stephanie Brown’s information. Jessica had a previous arrest record with a Harlem precinct. Officer Spielberg knew that these two ladies were linked to the bombing somehow—if not directly, then indirectly.
With his newfound information, he went to speak to his sergeant with his gut suspicion. It was eating at him. He was definitely on to something.
However, Sergeant Harrison let Spielberg know that the cryptic line a young woman gave over the phone about people in red hardly made them terrorists, or linked to terrorists. He was dismissive of Spielberg because it had been a long night, and a longer day. Calls were coming in from everywhere, people were edgy, and the commissioner and the mayor were up everyone’s asses to solve the confirmed terrorist attack on New York City soil. The death toll so far was 189 dead, with 75 still missing. It was a huge and popular club.
But why a nightclub? The attack had many high-end officials baffled.
Spielberg didn’t want to give up. He knew he was on top of something big. Before he departed the sergeant’s sight, he requested one last thing.
“Could we get Jessica’s dress and have forensics swab her hands for any residue?”
The sergeant sighed, but he relented.
***
Exhaustion finally caught up to Jessica, and before she knew it, she was fast asleep on the hard bench in the bullpen. The officers knocking their batons against the iron bars suddenly woke her up from the bench, and the annoying and cruel sound echoed, waking other sleeping inmates.
“Ladies, let’s get up and go!” a cop shouted.
It was time to move. It was time for her to be transferred to Central Booking—then it was to The Tombs, as some called the place if they were unlucky in front of the judge. The Tombs was a colloquial name for the Manhattan Detention Complex—a municipal jail in lower Manhattan at 125 White Street.
Legally, Jessica had to be processed within a certain amount of time. But before she went anywhere, two female officers approached her and asked her to follow them. Jessica was taken aback. Why was she the only one singled out of the group? What was going on? In a small room, she was asked to remove her dress.
“Fuck no!” Jessica cursed at them. She wasn’t about to remove anything.
The officers anticipated this. They wore latex gloves and carried batons. The order had come in from high above and as a precaution, the sergeant had to alert federal authorities. Jessica was under suspicion, and the feds wanted to follow every lead, no matter how small or ridiculous it seemed.
“Y’all stupid bitches touch me, homes, and it’s on!” Jessica threatened them. “Fuck y’all!”
The officers, both black and both from troubled neighborhoods, were no strangers to friction. Jessica continued to curse at them and scowled and scrunched her hands into fists. They stepped closer to her and Jessica swung at them. She went pound-for-pound with one cop, before the second officer intervened and attacked Jessica from the back with her baton. The blow to her lower back made her stagger.
“Ouch!” she screamed.
