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“I’ll tell the press we believe a previous defendant is responsible, and we’re on their trail. I want a name to go along with that by the end of the day.” She hung up.
“Okay, then.” Jo tossed the phone aside and started up the car. “In the meantime, back to Flynn.”
Arnett shook his head and stared out the window. “She’s veering close to delusional. In an ideal world, we’d have DNA and fingerprints for every case. And perpetrators would walk in off the street and handcuff themselves while unicorns flew through the air sweating winning lottery tickets. Until that day, we have to settle for getting some of the bad guys off the street for only a year or two via a plea deal.”
“Right, no, that’s true,” Jo said as she pulled out into traffic. “But what worries me is her accusation that Sandra faked a confession. I don’t like the picture that’s coming together.”
Arnett turned to her, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that sort of behavior doesn’t fit with what I thought I knew about Sandra, and it changes what we’re looking at. Now we aren’t just looking for a disgruntled defendant. We may be looking for one who hasvalidreason for believing they were treated unfairly. And when I look at the Mitch Hauptmann case through that lens, it makes me wonder what exactly happened to make him disappear overnight after tangling with her.”
Arnett’s brows knit. “Who says Flynn is even telling the truth?”
Jo nodded. “She may not be. We need to find out. And that means the Huertas file and the Hauptmanns just became my top priority.”
* * *
Half an hour later they settled into their desks, diving into the bags of Sal’s meatball subs they’d picked up for dinner on their way. “You want to take Hauptmann, or should I?” Jo asked.
“Already typing it in,” Arnett said.
“Great. I’ll call Lacey Bernard with the information I promised her ahead of the press conference, then dive into Sandra’s files, starting with Huertas.”
It took mere seconds for Jo to find what she was looking for. “Yep, here it is.” She pulled it out and handed it to Arnett. “A confession from his alleged accomplice. Nothing on it or around it indicates whether it’s genuine or not.”
Arnett’s brows shot up. “Maybe Flynn’s wrong. Maybe the kid did actually confess.”
“I’ll track him down and ask.”
He wasn’t hard to find; his information hadn’t changed in the two years since Huertas had been investigated. When she got him on the phone, he staunchly denied ever having confessed to anything.
“What did you expect?” Arnett said when she relayed the response to him. “Of course he’s not going to risk going to prison over it now.”
As Arnett turned back to his computer, Jo studied his face surreptitiously. Was it her imagination, or was he going out of his way to disbelieve everything Flynn had said? She understood the instinct to defend a colleague, but one of the reasons she valued Arnett as a partner was that he never closed his mind on possibilities, and this was veering strangely close to him doing just that.
She mentally shook her head and returned to the file in front of her. Silence fell as she searched, until Arnett announced he’d found Hauptmann a few minutes later.
“Sure enough, he was arrested for operating under the influence this past Fourth of July. But that wasn’t his first mix-up with law enforcement by a long shot.”
Jo swiveled toward him. “Do tell.”
“Started out small with some possession of marijuana back before it was legal and a bar-fight assault or two. But a couple of years back he was indicted for sexual assault. Allegedly raped a woman.”
Jo’s eyes narrowed. “Allegedly? He wasn’t prosecuted?”
“Nope. Hang on.” Arnett tapped some more. “Charges were dropped—after they got an indictment from the grand jury. Looks like Nguyen was the ADA on it. I’ll give him a call.”
The connection rang several times and went to Nguyen’s voicemail; while Arnett left a message, Jo fed in Hauptmann’s information to find his current location. “Not only did Hauptmann and his wife skip town, they skipped the entire county. They live out in the Berkshires now, not too far from the New York border.”
Arnett glanced up at the clock on the wall. “About what, an hour away? Seems to me it’d be smart to make sure they’ll be around before we head out.”
Jo called the numbers she was able to find for the Hauptmanns, two mobile lines on a shared account. She left messages on both of them identifying herself and asking for a callback, without referencing the reason for the call.
“Jo, Bob.” Christine Lopez’s voice rang out behind them.
Jo and Arnett both whipped around to find her striding toward them, her expression grim. Dressed in yoga pants, trainers, and an over-sized Walking Dead sweatshirt, her normally long, sleek black ponytail was mussed, and she had bags under her eyes. She clutched a backpack in one hand and a Rockstar in the other.
“I got here as fast as I could.” She dropped the backpack next to Jo’s desk. “No way I’m sitting out someone killing one of our ADAs on my watch.”
