and One Ninetieth, to Patrick Christiansen.” She waited, but whatever she was getting at escaped him. “Collins and One Ninetieth is three blocks away from Parker’s home address.”
He studied her. “You think Parker placed the call.”
“Twelve minutes later Tull received a call from a public phone located inside Joe’s Tavern.” She hitched her hip on the corner of his desk to stab the page emphatically. “Everyone uses informants, yeah, I get that, although mine all seemed to have cells even before I did. But this isn’t coincidence. It can’t be. I don’t know what it means, but it’s a link.”
He flipped the pages again to look at the numbers, dates, and times she’d highlighted. The calls had only occurred once in the last thirty days, as she’d noted. “I need to go back further,” he muttered. “See if this is a onetime thing or if it occurs regularly. If it shows up in other months . . .” Looking up, he gave her grin. “Good catch, Chandler.”
The smile she graced him with hit him like a fast left jab to the solar plexus. Jesus, her smile should be outlawed. With effort, he hauled a bit more oxygen into his lungs and cleared his throat. The slim hip and thigh perched perilously close to his arm were encased in navy today. There was nothing remotely sexy about the no-nonsense suit she wore, although he couldn’t say the same about the red top beneath it. It hinted at cleavage and the curves that might lurk beneath the tailoring.
He jerked his gaze back to stare blindly at the pages in front of him.
“What’s with the map?”
Welcoming the change of subject, he unrolled it again. “Got a blow-up of the area around the convenience store where we think Christiansen was snatched. This line”—he traced the yellow highlighting—“is one possible route that would have skirted any traffic cameras on the way to the Wakeshead Park. The pink highlighting shows another path. The only other routes take him miles and miles out of his way, which would have slowed him down considerably.”
“Not to mention upping his risk.”
“Exactly. With the estimated time of death, we can be reasonably certain one of these two routes were chosen. I have Hoy and Mendall going door-to-door on both routes, checking for any businesses along the way that might have security cameras pointing toward the street. ATMs. Anything that may have caught the vehicle as it went by.”
“And the phone books?”
“Shroot caught that assignment.” Something inside him lightened at the memory. “He . . . uh . . . expressed his undying gratitude in advance.”
“I’ll bet.”
To his relief she gathered up her binder and removed her shapely ass from his work space. He made a mental note to have that corner of the desk bronzed. “I swung by Nora Parker’s house, Roland’s widow, on the way to work. She ID’d him as the man in the still IT got us from that old video segment.”
She turned and gave him a sharp look. “And the other?”
Somehow he’d known that question had been coming. “She didn’t recognize the other one in the video. The one they called Johnny. I also ran the names by her that Bonnie Christiansen recalled as being part of her husband’s card club. Struck out there, too.”
“Roland didn’t happen to belong to a card club, did he?”
“She said no. She also said he didn’t have a second job.” He hesitated, feeling a stab of guilt for what he was about to say. “I think she’s lying.”
Risa reached for her coffee again. In college he’d faced all-American linebackers intent on mowing him down on the field, but she appeared to be made of far stronger stuff than he was. One swallow had been more than enough for him.
“About . . .”
“The extra job.” He watched her sip, felt slightly better about himself when she winced a little as she swallowed. “She didn’t want to talk about it. But the tells were there. I’m having the captain make a case to the brass for a warrant on the three victims’ financials. With Christiansen’s widow acknowledging that he worked somewhere, although she was vague with the details, we should be able to present an argument that the intersection for the three victims might lie in something they were working off the job, rather than on it.” He didn’t envy Morales his task of selling it to the administration, but with the bars came the responsibility.