into something. He killed her. But that’s ‘what if,’ Boxer. Pure speculation. Until Washburn and Clapper weigh in, I’m not putting down any bets.”
Which meant he wasn’t going to ask the DA to get an arrest warrant, or search warrants for Tuohy’s domicile, office, and car. There was no probable cause. We were lucky to get exclusionary prints and DNA.
I nodded my agreement. Any guy walking past Carly’s door could have pushed her in and killed her. He might’ve even had a clean white shirt in his suitcase.
“You did good,” Jacobi said to me and Conklin.
It was after 9:00 p.m. when Conklin and I got into our car and headed out toward Russian Hill.
Carly Myers had been murdered. How, by whom, and why were still pieces of a mystery, and that was devastating. We weren’t quite back to square one, but we might as well have been.
Where were Susan and Adele?
No freaking clue.
Conklin and I parked on Filbert Street in front of a nice apartment building where the Myers family lived, waiting for us to bring them good or at least hopeful news.
Tragically, all we had was that Carly had been murdered in a motel frequented by prostitutes on possibly the skeeziest block in the city. We didn’t have a suspect, but to stem the grief over Carly’s death, we would promise to find her killer.
Right now that promise wouldn’t hold a drop of water.
My partner and I got out of the car and psychologically buckled up. What we had to tell Carly’s parents was going to change their lives forever.
CHAPTER 26
I’d left Joe sleeping when I headed out of our apartment before seven this morning.
Now, fifteen hours later, I was done and done in. All the lights were on in the living room when I shuffled through the front door. I dropped my keys onto the console, stowed my gun belt in the cabinet, and hugged my dog.
I called out to Joe, but he didn’t answer.
I wanted to tell him all about my day. The leads that had run us into stone walls, a killer who’d scrubbed away evidence, and maybe worst of all, parents who wanted to die rather than live without their murdered daughter.
When Jacobi gets stuck on a case, he turns it upside down, looks at it from a different person’s point of view, or from an opposite angle. I turned my case over as I unlaced my shoes.
Three women had last been seen leaving a restaurant bar after having a good time. They’d been drinking, but none of them had been stumbling drunk.
One of them had been found three days later, a day and a half postmortem, hanged from a shower head in a motel that she’d frequented in her part-time night job as a prostitute.
That was a mindblower from any angle, but I turned it over in my brain. Was Carly broke?
A drug addict?
Under someone’s thumb?
Her sometimes date, Tom Barry, had told us that Carly had a dark side. Jake Tuohy had said she was turning tricks—not what I’d thought Barry meant by “dark side.”
Was this possible? Schoolteacher by day, whore by night?
Karin Slaughter, the assistant dean, was Carly’s friend. She would have rung the bell if Carly were using drugs. Carly’s parents weren’t wealthy but surely could have helped her out if she couldn’t make do on her $70K annual salary. As far as I could tell, she had a safety net. So—why turn to prostitution?
In fact, we had only Jake Tuohy’s word for that.
Similarly, Adele and Susan had friends, jobs, parents. They, too, seemed to have safety nets. But you never knew what was going on beneath the surface. Had their support systems failed?
Were they alive, in mortal danger? Or were they in similar creepy motel rooms, hanged by their necks, as yet undiscovered?
The search warrants for all three of the women’s apartments had been executed, and no additional phones, laptops, or tablets had been found.
I had interviewed Adele’s roommate, Patricia Sanders, who was torn up by fear. She had no idea what could have happened to her friend. According to Patricia, Adele had left for work on Monday morning, running late. She’d said she was going out for dinner and thrown a kiss as she raced out the door.
The roommate confirmed that Adele carried her phone and a laptop in a shoulder bag.
CSI had the electronics, and so far nothing had jumped out of them, making it more certain that the women had been nabbed by a person or persons they