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“She’s no longer under arrest, but the police want her to stick around until they can verify the information and ask her more questions,” Aiden said.
“I’m not a legal expert, but unless she’s under arrest, couldn’t she have left the police station?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s right. She could’ve left yesterday night, but then, she would’ve had to come back again today, so she decided to stay,” Aiden said.
“Is she nuts?” I yelled. “Why didn’t she leave, or at least, why didn’t she check into a hotel if she didn’t want to come down to Monterey again?”
“I think it had something to do with the fact that Officer Shin was working the night shift.” I heard the amusement in his voice.
Julia looked stunned and exclaimed, “Unbelievable! She purposely chose to stay inside the jail just so she could talk to Officer Shin?”
“I can’t say for certain, but she didn’t press to leave when I asked her if she wanted to go,” Aiden said drily.
Annisa’s decision made me shake my head in exasperation, but her absence gave us an unexpected opportunity. For the first time, Annisa’s attention-seeking behavior might work out to our advantage and let Julia and me go through her apartment without being disturbed.
“Hey, Aiden, I woke up not too long ago, but Julia and I were planning to drive down to Monterey. We don’t have a plan yet, but it sounds like we need to check Annisa’s apartment first.”
I looked at Julia. “Don’t you have a key to her apartment?”
She nodded. “Yes, I have a spare key. We can let ourselves in, but what are we supposed to be looking for?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
“Listen, I drove home to Mountain View after the police interviewed Annisa, but I’m going back down again. I’ll call you when I know if you can meet with Annisa. In the meantime, if you can take some photos of anything you see that doesn’t belong there and send them to me, I can ask Annisa about it when I meet with her.”
“That sounds good,” I said and ended the call still puzzled by Annisa’s decision to stay the night in jail.
“It doesn’t seem like Annisa to voluntarily stay the night at the police station. Unless…” I drifted off.
“Unless, she was afraid that someone was after her,” Julia said, finishing off my thought.
Chapter Seventeen
While I got ready to go, Julia gave Grumpy a short walk. By the time I walked out of the bedroom wearing black leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, he was already curled up in his favorite spot on the couch.
Pointing to her own sweatshirt, Julia grinned broadly and said, “We’re twins!”
“Great minds think alike.” It was uncanny how often we wore similar clothing, although Julia liked to dress up more frequently than I did.
“Are we ready?” I asked and pointed toward the front door. Julia nodded and got up from the couch. Grumpy opened one eye when he felt the cold air replace Julia’s body next to his, but he didn’t budge. He closed his eye again and went back to sleep.
“You’re definitely living your best life, little dude,” I said, but he didn’t even twitch an ear in acknowledgment.
Julia’s BMW was parked out in front, and I climbed into the passenger side when she unlocked the car. It was clean, but her gym bag and her backpack that she used for work was on the back seat.
“We didn’t get a chance to talk about what I saw in Annisa’s car.”
“Yeah…I was surprised to hear that she had the stuff in the trunk,” Julia said, scrunching her face.
“Some of them still had tags, so they were brand new. She had them strewn in a pile with the scuba gear as though she didn’t care if they got damaged or stolen. If I had spent that much money on the purses, I would’ve at least covered them up.”
Julia shrugged. Neither one of us had a good answer, so I turned on the radio to pass the time. Scanning the stations, I flew through the channels until I got to the local news.
“The crime rate in the city is getting worse. You can’t go downtown because you might get mugged,” a female caller said in a distressed tone. The radio announcer was making sympathetic noises in agreement.
“Gosh, I didn’t realize things had gotten so bad in the Bay Area.” When I visited Julia in San Francisco three years ago, it didn’t feel like everyone was talking about the crime.
“COVID changed a lot of things. Along with petty crime, some Asians are worried about being targeted. Tristan bought me a can of pepper spray to carry in my purse.”
