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Chapter 30
Julia sat straight in her chair, excitement at her idea overwhelming the heavy cloud of grief and sorrow. “Has anyone tried to contact Carole recently?”
Gorowski shook her head slowly. “Not that I know of.”
“Maybe when she tried to leave, she saw Dawson’s car. Maybe she turned around and went back inside. Hid somewhere in the building. Didn’t leave until Dawson’s car was gone. Or maybe she never left the building at all.”
Julia leaned closer to Gorowski. “Carole’d get her cell phone back when she left, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes, if she had it when she was arrested.”
Julia whipped her cell out of her pocket and tapped on Carole’s contact. Stabbed the call icon.
The phone rang once, then went straight to voicemail. “Please leave a message,” said the pleasant, vacuous voice.
Sighing, Julia tapped the phone back into her pocket. “So much for that idea.” She stared into the distance as she thought, her forehead scrunched up.
“Where would she hide?” Gorowski asked with a frown. “It’s not like there are any unused areas. Or even unused rooms. We’re crammed into too few offices, doubled up in tiny spaces.”
Julia stared at the wall, thinking. “What if she never left her cell?” she said, thinking aloud.
“A deputy would have fetched her from her cell after her bail was paid. Escorted her to the lobby, where she’d get her belongings back,” Gorowski pointed out. “Watched her leave.”
“Carole’s a smart woman,” Julia said slowly, thinking her theory through. “Dawson was the one who hacked my computers and installed the spyware, and Carole knew about it. Dawson told me Carole let him into the restaurant.
“She’d probably suspect that Dawson would be waiting for her. And she also probably realized she was a loose end. Something to be snipped off and discarded. Could she have traded places with another woman?”
Carole narrowed her eyes at Julia. “Not as easy as it sounds, Ms. Stewart.”
“It could be,” Julia said, thinking furiously. “She’d pick another woman who wouldn’t have anyone posting bail for her. Offer to switch places with her. After lunch, or exercise, or whatever, Carole would go back to the other woman’s cell, and that woman would go to Carole’s cell. When the deputy came to release Carole, it would be the other woman who walked out of the building. Which was why Dawson didn’t see Carole, even though he watched everyone leave.”
Gorowski leaned back in her chair. “Interesting theory, Ms. Stewart. And I suppose it’s possible, if the other woman superficially resembled Carole Hastings.”
“Blond hair, about her height and age,” Julia said. “What deputy would suspect that someone getting bail would switch places with another inmate?”
“It’s a crazy theory,” Gorowski said slowly. “But we don’t have a huge number of women inmates right now. I’ll take a look and see if Carole Hastings is one of them. Stay put. I’ll be right back.”
After Gorowski left the room, Nico reached for her hand. “Nice out-of-the-box thinking, Jules. I hope you’re right. It’s better than thinking Carole’s rotting in an unmarked grave somewhere.”
Fifteen minutes later, Gorowski stepped into the conference room, then guided a blonde woman in a blue jumpsuit in after her. It took a moment for Julia to realize the woman with no makeup, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail, was Carole Hastings.
“You were right, Ms. Stewart,” Gorowski said with a sour look at Carole. “If Ms. Hastings here had applied her clever mind to her job instead of stealing money from you, she wouldn’t have been a guest of the Seattle PD for the past several days.”
Gorowski nodded at an empty chair. “Sit down, Ms. Hastings, and tell us exactly what you did.”
Carole’s story was pretty close to Julia’s hypothesis. Carole had approached the other woman in the library. They’d sat together one day at dinner, and Carole had learned that Josie didn’t have anyone to bail her out. Josie’d been arrested for shoplifting, and was too ashamed to call her family for bail money.
Gorowski sighed. “We’ll have to pick her up and bring her back. Her bail wasn’t paid.”
“I’ll pay her bail,” Nico said, studying Carole. “She might have saved Ms. Hastings’ life.”
Julia leaned toward Carole. “Why didn’t you want to go with Dawson?” she asked. “Since you were working together, you should have been happy to jump in the car with him.”
Carole’s gaze slid away from Julia. She thought she saw shame in Carole’s expression. But instead of pushing her former hostess, she waited.
Finally, staring down at her hands in her lap, Carole said, “The last couple of weeks, I was kind of scared of Kent. He was… he was impatient with me. When we had sex, he was rough. Hurried, almost, like it was a chore. And every once in a while, when I looked at him unexpectedly, I saw contempt in his expression. Disgust.”
Carole wrapped her arms around herself. “I’d complained a few times about not making enough money.” She shot an apologetic glance at Julia. “You were paying me a fair wage,” she said. “But teen-aged girls are money pits. Harper was whining for expensive shoes and expensive clothes. She wanted a designer handbag, for God’s sake. And I felt bad I couldn’t give them to her. So when Kent suggested that I take some of the cash people paid for their meals and then delete the meal from the system, it sounded simple. Easy. And foolproof.”
