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He shrugged stiffly. “This isn’t the first bullshit lawsuit filed against the unit and it won’t be the last.”
Except, as far as Jo knew, it was the first one that had ever named him. She wasn’t buying his reaction—but now, with Hayes looming, wasn’t the time to push it. “And Steve Murphy? He was your partner for the case?”
“Yep.” His eyes swept across the road.
Jo called up what she knew about Steve Murphy. He’d retired about five years before, when he turned sixty-five. He was a good enough guy, but as old-school as they came. His father had been a detective, and his grandfather before that. He was the sort who believed in baptism by fire for trainees, and if you didn’t live up to his expectations, he had no problem letting you know. He held the standard for everyone; as long as you got the job done, he didn’t care what you looked like or what you did with your private time. But if he did decide you weren’t of the right caliber, his mind was made up. Jo had frankly been surprised when he retired—she’d assumed he’d have to be pried out with the jaws of life.
She winced as she added him into her understanding of the Ossokov case. Sandra Ashville’s willingness to bend the rules. Steve Murphy’s single-minded doggedness. Bob’s strange reactions about the case. Whatever it all added up to, it wasn’t good.
As she tried to coalesce it, the half-formed thought she’d had in bed that morning came back to her. Something about the cross-contamination of the blood samples was tugging at her. Why?
She shook her head in frustration and continued to the allegations, spitting out her translation for Arnett as she went. Wrongful conviction due to misconduct at both levels. Specifically, that the blood sample was not accidentally contaminated by the lab analyses, but had been purposefully tampered with. There was no reason for any other sample of Zara Richards’ bodily fluids to be present at the time the target blood sample was analyzed since a comparison profile was already available. Law enforcement had been harassing him for years, the suit argued, and when all else failed, Sandra Ashville had directed the detectives to manufacture evidence.
Jo’s head spun. She flipped back through the timeline she’d put together in her notes. Zara Richards’ car and her cup had been found first. That evidence would have been collected before her body was found a week later. Any of the DNA collected from the body would then have been gathered with other evidence from the body. Ossokov and his car hadn’t been brought in until at least a day later than that. But when exactly the samples were sent would have depended on how backed up the CSIs were—the tests might have been sent out at the same time, or they might have been sent out on different days. The only way to know how any of it had gone down for sure was to pull the evidence logs.
With shaking thumbs, she shot off a text to Marzillo and Lopez:
In the Zara Richards case, was Zara Richards’ DNA evidence sent out at the same time as the blood sample from Cooper Ossokov’s car? Wouldn’t they have been sent out and tested at different times?
Three dancing dots indicated Lopez was replying.
We’re looking into it.
“Everything okay?” Arnett asked.
“Yeah, just trying to make sense of the timings involved in everything.”
She pretended to return to skimming the documents, fingers gripping her necklace as she read. What the hell was going on? One possibility, the one she hoped was true, was that Ossokov was flat-out fabricating the accusations, likely because his whole I’m-not-holding-a grudge schtick had been a ploy for him to buy time while his attorney figured out what to do to help sell his book.
But she herself had been picking up strange vibes from Arnett, and she wasn’t comfortable with what they’d learned about Sandra Ashville’s methods. So it wasn’t a stretch that Ossokov really did believe there had been malfeasance, and he or one of his attorneys had noticed the same oddities in the timeline Jo had.
And maybe he was right: maybe Ashville and the detectives, including Arnett,hadfabricated evidence somehow.
Every cell in her body screamed out against the very thought. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Arnett wouldneverbe involved with something like that. His unfailing integrity and unfailing loyalty to the justice system was the biggest reason she’d come to trust him the way she did.
But what if those two things came into conflict—his integrity, and flaws in the legal system? Which would win out?
No—she squeezed her eyes shut against the thought. That would never happen because Arnett believed deeply inthe integrityof the justice system. He believed the rules were there for a reason, and exemplified the principle that there was nothing a good cop hated more than a bad cop. No way on earth would heevermanufacture evidence.
Which left her with one last, desperate option: that Ashville and Murphy had cooked something up between them that Arnett knew nothing about.
She wanted to believe that more than she’d wanted anything in her life. But Arnett wasn’t stupid. Yes, she was the one of their pair who picked up on the subtlest signals people sent out, but he was no fool. Was it really possible something like that could have gone down without him realizing it?
She shook her head to clear it and swiped back to the beginning of the document. As she did, her eyes landed again on the specific parties named in the suit—Sandra Ashville, Steve Murphy, and Robert Arnett.
“Why didn’t he name Winnie Sakurai?” she blurted out.
Arnett looked up at her. “Why would he? Any misconduct he’s alleging would have happened long before the evidence went before a grand jury, let alone before a judge was assigned.”
“Right. But with regard to the current killings, if our theory is Ossokov is killing people he’s angry with because of his incarceration—if he didn’t blame Sakurai enough to name her in the lawsuit, why kill her?”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-THREE
Arnett’s brow creased as he pulled into the parking lot of HQ, and some of the color came back into his face. “You’re looking for rationality in irrational behavior. He doesn’t give a shit about the suit, the suit is a distraction.”
Jo snapped off her seat belt and hurried out of the car. “So why not throw everything at the wall?”
“I’m sure the lawyer thinks the lawsuit is real, and told him naming Sakurai wouldn’t fly. A jury found him guilty, not the judge.” He pushed through the building’s door.
