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“Yeah, me neither,” he admitted and grew quiet as he finished his meal. Nothing was making sense, but he felt as if they were getting closer to piecing it all together. Jardine was involved. They just had to figure out how.
Once they were on the road again, Rivers drove toward the station, and Mendoza, as ever, was on her phone, scrolling through messages and e-mail. He’d just pulled into the lot when she said, “Uh-oh . . . what’s this?”
“What?” he asked as he nosed his Jeep into a parking slot near a department cruiser.
Her eyebrows knitted as she stared at the screen. “It’s weird.” But there was an edge of excitement to her voice. “Let’s go inside. I want to bring it up on my computer. Bigger image.” She was already unbuckling her seat belt and opening the passenger door.
Rivers followed her to her cubicle, where she peeled off her coat and slung it haphazardly onto a filing cabinet; then she slid into her roller chair and pulled it close to her computer monitor. “It’s from the lab,” she explained. “DNA on the hairs found in James Cahill’s bed.” Her fingers were flying over the keyboard and working the roller ball of her mouse. “Here . . . look.” The report came onto the screen. “Three specimens,” she pointed out, “all different. One male. James Cahill and two others. One is from Megan Travers—it matches the samples we took from a brush in her apartment, and the other one . . . look here. Female as well, undetermined, but get this—related to Cahill.”
“What?”
“A cousin, probably, not a first cousin, but someone related to him on his mother’s side.”
“His mother?”
“Right, Kylie Cahill, who was Kylie Paris, but who, it seems, is really an Amhurst.” She glanced up at Rivers, who was standing behind her, bending over to see the screen. “I’ve done some research. The Amhursts are even richer than the Cahills, or were, and the two families intermarried or got sexually involved with each other over the years, and there were several children who were born to mistresses.”
“Including Kylie Paris.”
“Right.”
“So James Cahill was sleeping with someone related to him?”
“Distantly related, but yeah,” Mendoza said, disgust pulling at the edges of her lips. “The way he goes through women, this shouldn’t be a surprise.”
“To us,” Rivers thought aloud, “but I wonder if it will be to him.” He stared at the report and the label: UNKNOWN FEMALE.
Mendoza rolled her chair back to stare up at him. “The Unknown Female is a blonde,” she pointed out.
“So Sophia Russo is his cousin,” he said, the wheels in his mind whirling.
“Imagine that.” She shook her head. “Some kind of cousin. As I said, ‘distant.’”
“I wonder if he knows?”
Mendoza shook her head. “Maybe not yet, but he will soon enough.”
Rivers’s cell phone went off, and he glanced at the screen. “At last.”
“At last?” Mendoza was still looking at the DNA results on the computer monitor.
“At last—Earl Ray Dansen,” he said and answered. Dansen and he had been playing phone tag for most of the day. “Rivers,” he said into the phone.
“It’s Earl Ray, down at the Clarion. Glad I finally caught you.”
“Me too. You know about Charity Spritz.”
“Jesus, yeah, I know. Can’t believe it.” He sounded stunned. “Horrible.”
“Can you tell me what she was working on?”
“The Cahill story. But, uh . . . look, I think it would be better if we talk face-to-face. I’ve got something I need to show you.”
Rivers checked his watch. After seven. “How about now?”
“I’m stuck here with tomorrow’s edition. I was hoping you could come to the office.”
“That works. We’re on our way.”
