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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
At times like this, Jessie wished she had a siren for her car.
Instead she had to rely on that old standby: speeding recklessly and hoping she didn’t get pulled over. She was pulling onto the 110 freeway when she tried Ryan again. He picked up on the first ring.
“Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you,” he said before she could speak. “My phone died. I was testifying all day. I was meeting with prosecutors until just a few minutes ago.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jessie said. “Can you meet me in the Valley? There have been a few developments.”
She explained the situation as she transferred onto the 101 freeway which cut through the Hollywood Hills along the Cahuenga Pass. She did her best to ignore the potholes on the decrepit stretch of road.
It was a lot for Ryan to take in but he seemed to process it all. When she was done, he offered what he admitted was limited insight.
“I don’t know Detective Strode, never heard of him actually. That’s not a great sign,” he said. “Normally a murder like this gets assigned to the most experienced detectives in the Bureau. It’s weird.”
“It’s more than just weird, Ryan,” Jessie insisted. “It stinks. A police sergeant overtly threatens me. A murder victim is cremated before she can be autopsied. A rookie detective gets assigned to the case. Frankly, the question isn’t if someone is being protected but how high up is that person? This can’t all be Costabile, can it? He doesn’t have that much pull.”
“You’re right, it does stink,” Ryan agreed. “And this does seem to go higher than Costabile. But suspecting that doesn’t change how we approach the case. We still have to grind out the work if we’re going to unpeel what’s really going on here. But there is one upside to having a rookie detective assigned to the case. Because I’m representing HSS on this, I may be able to bigfoot him once I get there. Until then, you’ll have to hold down the fort. How far out are you?”
“I’m probably still ten minutes away,” she said.
“Okay. I’m about five behind you. Try not to get yourself shot before I catch up.”
“Aw, so romantic,” she replied before hanging up and immediately calling Garland Moses.
The elder profiler didn’t pick up until the fourth ring and he sounded drowsy when he did.
“Ms. Hunt, have you ever heard the term ‘elder abuse’? It’s after ten p.m.”
“I’m sorry, Garland. You know I wouldn’t call at this hour unless it was pressing. Besides, I never heard back from you. I was a little worried.”
“That’s a lie,” he said flatly, his drowsiness slipping away fast. “I’ll let it go this time. But please, don’t try to play me. I had every intention of getting back to you tomorrow. What is so pressing that it couldn’t wait?”
Jessie decided not to linger on his accurate assertion that she was a liar and moved on to the issue at hand.
“I may be about to enter a hornet’s nest in a few minutes and I really need your guidance. What can you tell me about Detective Wiley Strode and Sergeant Hank Costabile?”
She heard a bed creak and papers being shuffled and imagined him sitting up and putting on his glasses.
“I don’t have much on Strode,” he said, now sounding fully alert. “He was based out of Thousand Oaks until recently. He only just passed the detective exam last year and was reassigned to Valley Bureau. Until now, he’s mostly been a robbery guy, a few home invasion cases. This is his first murder.”
“That seems odd,” Jessie said. “Wouldn’t he normally get paired with someone more experienced, especially for a murder?”
“Normally? Yes. Of course, if there was a backload or major cases in the division, he might not.”
“Do you know if there’s a backload?” Jessie asked.
“I checked their case board earlier this evening. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, there are two homicide detectives not currently assigned to any priority cases. And yet, Strode was put on this.”
“What does that mean to you?” Jessie pressed.
Garland paused briefly before responding and she knew he was entering sensitive territory.
“There could be completely innocuous reasons for it that we’re just not aware of,” he began. “Or it could be an indication that someone with the power to influence case assignments wanted a less experienced detective on it or at least one with less pull in the Bureau. I tried to go through the paperwork to see who that might be. But the chain of command on this thing has been cleverly disguised. Your good friend Costabile’s fingerprints are all over the place. But he couldn’t authorize this kind of assignment shifting on his own. He’d have to be doing it on someone else’s authority. And I can’t discern who that might be.”
“So this isn’t all on Costabile?” Jessie asked.
“No. The guy’s been around forever and amassed a lot of power among the rank and file. He also holds sway with the higher-ups in the Bureau and beyond. But the kind of things you’re describing—assigning a rookie detective to a murder case, rushing a crime scene investigation, having a body ‘accidentally’ cremated—he can’t make them happen on his own. He’s getting help.”
“Great,” Jessie said, frustrated, as she pulled off the freeway onto Victory Boulevard. “So it could be anybody.”
“That’s not true,” Garland said with a professorial tone. “It actually limits the number of candidates significantly. There are only so many people with both the authority to make those things happen and the ability to hide their involvement. You just have to find out who they are. But that leads me to one last thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You need to be very careful, Ms. Hunt. Whoever he’s working for, Costabile is dangerous in his own right. The guy has a hair-trigger temper. He’s been involved in multiple questionable shootings and never lost a day of pay. He has friends and lackeys everywhere. Don’t underestimate him.”
“Okay. Thanks for scaring the crap out of me, Garland.”
“Better to be overprepared than taken by surprise. I know you’ve dealt with the worst the world has to offer—brutal serial killers. But a cop with power and ill intent is a different kind of dangerous. Just stay alert.”
