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CHAPTER THIRTY
They didn’t have much time.
Between the Zellers interview, the Aaron Rose interrogation, and all their sneaking around, it was bound to get back to someone that they weren’t spending all their time on the Ristore tennis murder.
Once word got out, there were likely two outcomes. Decker shut them down and took their badges. Or worse, Commander Butters and his minions came after them. But they were committed now. The only way out of this, both professionally and personally, was to find out who killed Michaela Penn.
“Do you still have the GPS data from Michaela’s calls?” Jessie asked Ryan as they drove back from Culver City to the station in his car. They’d left hers in the parking structure.
“Yeah,” he said, handing it over. “What are you thinking?”
“Now that we know three of Michaela’s clients, I was hoping we could find some connection among them that might lead us to the other one listed on her Post-it list. We still don’t know who D.K. is.”
Ryan shook his head.
“Normally I’d suggest we give the data to the tech team,” he said. “But I’m sure Butters has tagged his name in the system. If we include him on any list, he’ll know and we’ll have shown our hand.”
“So we’ll have to do it old school,” Jessie said, looking over Michaela’s location data. “It actually shouldn’t be that hard. The girl led a pretty provincial life, all things considered. In the last month, she rarely went more than ten miles from her apartment; lots of trips to work, the grocery store, the mall, the movies. She almost never left her little corner of the Valley.”
“That makes sense,” Ryan said. “It’s the area she knew best and probably where she felt safest.”
Jessie was only half-listening. One of her own comments had given her an idea. She began flipping back among different days, making notations on the sheet as she went along.
“What is it?” Ryan asked, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he drove.
“It just occurred to me how regular her habits were. I mean, she truly almost never left her neck of the woods. I count only eleven total trips over the hills into L.A. proper in the last four weeks.”
“For an independent teenage girl who was making serious money, that is surprising,” Ryan agreed.
Jessie started tallying up the visits.
“Yeah, I’m starting to think she may have only left the Valley to meet clients. Two of the trips appear to be to Aaron Rose’s Culver City office, both on Thursdays, just like he said. Two more trips are to the Zellers’s house. Those stop about a week ago, right around the time they broke things off. There are also two trips to a Travelodge motel in the Adams district.”
“That would probably be her meeting Butters,” Ryan said. “The department has a deal with the chain for reduced, sometimes even waived rates. And the location you’re looking at is about halfway between LAPD headquarters and where Butters lives in Hancock Park. I can’t prove it, but it fits.”
“Okay,” Jessie said, making a note on the paper. “That leaves five more times she left the valley in the last month. If we could determine where she was going, maybe we could identify other clients.”
Ryan sighed from the driver’s seat.
“What?” she said. Something was obviously bothering him.
“Nothing,” he said, though it clearly wasn’t. “Tell me what you found.”
She decided not to push him and returned to the list.
“Of the five other times she came to the city, one was to Hollywood and one was to Santa Monica. Both stops were in large shopping districts. They might be dead ends. But the three other visits were all to an address in Beverly Hills, on Wilshire just off Rodeo Drive. It looks like it’s a medical office tower. Three times in a month? That sounds like a regular client to me. We should check it out.”
“An entire medical building?” Ryan asked, sounding exasperated. “Come on. It’s one thing if it’s a home but there are likely dozens of offices in that tower. How do you propose we narrow it down?”
“The same way we would have done if we had gone to Aaron Rose’s building without knowing he was the client. We’d look at the tenants and see if any names match the initials on the Post-it.”
“But Rose wasn’t listed in the building directory,” he reminded her. “Only the name of the firm was. Without knowing his name ahead of time from that photo, we would never have found him.”
Jessie felt his frustration seeping into her.
“Well, what do you suggest?” she asked snippily.
He looked over at her, reluctant to answer.
