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Matt closed the door and came back to the table.
“Wow,” Michael said. “You really know how to make friends and influence people, Kara.”
“She’s taking direction from Thornton,” Kara said.
“Maybe,” Matt said, “but we don’t know for certain. I’ll go over there tomorrow and demand some answers. She already doesn’t like me.”
“Join the club,” Elena mumbled. “That was a fucking waste of time. What is her game? I sent her everything we had. But we didn’t give the feds the case. My boss said play nice, share information, don’t budge on jurisdiction.” She frowned. “Why did Craig want to meet with the federal lawyer?” The abrupt change of subject had Kara’s instincts twitching.
“Maybe there was a federal component to his grand jury investigation,” Michael offered.
“Or maybe he wanted advice,” Kara said. “Like when you go to a colleague and bounce ideas around as you work through things. I think the question is, why didn’t he tell you, Elena? Is there another bad cop in LAPD?”
Elena stared at her, but Kara didn’t back down. Elena must have thought the same thing. Why was Craig keeping information from the already small investigative team?
“I gotta go,” Elena said. “Let me know if there is any fallout from this, and if they want to talk again, don’t do it without your department rep or a lawyer. I don’t like the look of this. It’s as if Chavez wants you to be guilty.”
“I’m sure she does, but I’m not, so I’m not worried.”
Elena left, and Kara stared at the door when she was gone. Something was bugging her about Elena, had been all day, and Kara would damn well figure out what it was.
26
Kara was exhausted but couldn’t sleep.
When she went to bed after dinner, telling Matt and Michael that she was tired and had a headache, she hadn’t been lying. But she’d sat at her laptop and started researching. She read more about Will Lattimer and First Contact. Will was quoted criticizing some of the government programs that were supposed to help the homeless. He called sixty thousand homeless in Los Angeles a “humanitarian crisis” and claimed he had a nine-point plan that would virtually end homelessness in less than three years for a fraction of the money that the city had already spent but, “The homeless industrial complex will never initiate my program because they would lose billions of dollars. They care more about the money than they do about the people they are supposed to help.”
He was also quoted as being critical of harm reduction programs that didn’t provide rehab options. “Most homeless outreach programs funded by the city aren’t even allowed to offer treatment.”
Kara didn’t know if that was true, but she’d seen enough city employees giving away the “tools of the trade”—pipes, clean needles, foil, Narcan—that she wouldn’t be surprised.
She searched Violet Halliday and found a bio on a website for a computer company that she helped start up ten years ago at the age of nineteen. The bio indicated that she was attending community college while working for the company, which streamlined some sort of online form system. The description went way over Kara’s head, but apparently it was a good program because the company sold to a bigger company, and Violet was one of four people credited with the technology breakthrough.
Impressive. Probably. Kara still didn’t know what the program did, but other people seemed to appreciate it.
There wasn’t much online about Violet, and everything she found about Will she already knew. She was about to shut down and try to sleep when she saw an obituary that mentioned Violet. It ran three weeks ago.
Halliday, Jane Elizabeth, 54. Died in Venice Beach on August 20 of hypoxia. She is survived by her daughter, Violet Halliday, 29, of Burbank. In lieu of flowers, donations should be sent to First Contact, an organization that seeks to empower the homeless so they can become self-sufficient.
Kara frowned. Hypoxia was almost always caused by a drug overdose.
Was there a more personal reason for Violet’s involvement in Craig’s investigation?
She closed her computer and lay back on the bed. She fell into a deep, heavy sleep and dreamed about a woman overdosing on fentanyl, then it morphed into Colton being shot over and over and over...
Kara woke up suddenly. She looked at her clock. It was just after midnight; she’d slept for two hours. But something had been bugging her about her meeting with Lex on Monday, then yesterday with Elena. After reading the obituary, she realized what it was—she had never been informed about Colton’s will.
She was in it. She knew because Colton had joked about it.
“‘And to my partner, Kara Quinn, I leave my Harley, which is far superior to her wimpy bike.’”
“My bike is not wimpy.”
“It’s for girls.”
“I am a girl.”
“The Harley is better, and it’s one of the lighter, faster models.”
