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“They killed Ashville at home,” Lopez said.
“She had no life outside of work. And if your choices are the well-fortified and CCTV-monitored DA’s office or courthouse versus her remote lake house, which would you pick?”
“Point taken,” Arnett said. “But my schedule is tougher than Ashville’s. I barely work out—don’t roll your eyes—and when I do, I do it here at the HQ gym. I go shooting out at the range, also heavily secured. Laura and I have date night once a week, but we vary what we do, and there’s no way I’m bringing her into this.” He pulled out his phone. “In fact, I’m sending her to go visit her sister in Vermont immediately.”
They waited while Arnett made the phone call, but Laura’s voice mail picked up. He left a message telling her to leave for her sister’s house and call him back when she was on the way.
“That should completely freak her out,” Lopez said, eyes wide.
Jo shook her head. “She’s been married to a cop for decades. It’ll scare her, but she’ll be okay. And, our killer doesn’t seem to be interested in collateral damage, so I don’t think they’ll go after her.”
“Problem.” Arnett typed out a text. “They could go the sniper route pretty much anywhere, even as I’m walking into the building here.”
Lopez ran her hand along her ponytail. “They could’ve shot Ashville from the trees, but they didn’t. They want their victims to know what’s coming.”
“They know Arnett knows what’s coming, so that might change,” Jo said. “I say we announce you’re on administrative leave. That will force them into a box—they’ll have to hit you at home, and that’ll put us in control. Bernard needs something to print anyway, so I’ll make sure she gets the news before the others.”
Arnett scratched his chin. “I have a security camera at home—but then, so did Ashville.”
“Hers weren’t positioned to capture the road or the pier. Do yours cover your entire property?” Jo asked.
“The front entrance of the house, but there are blind spots.”
“They’ve done their research, so they know about the blind spots. We can take advantage of that,” Jo said.
“I don’t run, don’t go for walks, I don’t even do yard work. Laura gardens and we have a neighbor kid who does the mowing and the big stuff. The only thing left is the ten-yard walk from my car to the front door, and that would be captured on camera.”
“If I were the killer, I’d take the camera out,” Lopez said. “Is your camera hooked up to Wi-Fi?”
“Yep. We access them through an app, but we’ve been careful to use secure passwords.”
“Doesn’t matter. Someone with skills can hack into them and take them offline whenever they like. If they don’t have skills, a ski mask and a baseball bat’ll accomplish the same thing. In that case you’d know there was a problem, but it’d take time to repair,” Lopez said.
“Which is fine for our purposes,” Jo said, “because wewantthem to think they can get past the security. So we leave it in place, but maybe put up some feeds in the neighbors’ yards to cover the property. Then we place the team remotely, a few blocks away monitoring the cameras, so they’ll be close but not visible.”
Arnett nodded. “With me waiting inside.”
“I think that gives us the best bet at controlling the situation, unless you guys can think of anything better?” Jo asked.
“What about you, Jo? Inside or out?” Lopez asked.
Jo raked her teeth across her lower lip. “I’ll take the evening shift tonight in the van. Then when the teams change I’ll go home, get a few hours of sleep, and return for the early-morning shift with Goran and Coyne so I’m there for the pre-dawn hours our killer seems to favor.”
“I like it,” Arnett said.
Lopez nodded.
“Anything else we’re missing?” Jo glanced between them. When they both shook their heads, she pulled out her phone. “Okay, then. I’ll call Goran and Coyne in here to set everything up.”
CHAPTERFIFTY
Amid the stress of everything, I’d forgotten to eat again. I never used to forget to eat—I had an appetite the size of the Burj Khalifa. But now my stomach is a perpetual minefield of nausea. Even when I do remember to eat, I never know when it’s going to come right back up at an inopportune moment.
As I sat down with a bag of something fast and cheap, I tapped and read over the report about Bob Arnett. They weren’t calling it a suspension, but in essence, that’s what it was. I’d been hoping for something akin to that; although I arranged my plans so I’d be fine either way, every variable I could limit or control was one less worry.
I brought up my cameras. The news report about Arnett was part of a mental chess game that was going to determine the rest of my life, and as such I couldn’t afford to accept it at face value. Because the timing was strange—why would they put him on leave after Murphy’s death? Why not the day before, when the lawsuit was announced in the press? That would have been the appropriate time if they were worried he’d compromise the lawsuit and the murder investigation. Possibly that was just how long these things took, but I couldn’t afford to assume that was so.
I considered other possibilities. Had he upset his lieutenant? From what I’d experienced of Arnett, he was the sort who waited back at the edge of the shadows and let others take the attention, watching and waiting and planning his moves carefully. Upsetting his superior didn’t seem to fit.
