“We’re going to put a whole bunch of them there. Go get a seat, get coffee. I just need a minute to organize my thoughts.”
When she’d had her minute, she walked in. Cops milled, drank coffee, studied the board.
So many places to start, she thought, but she looked at the board. She knew where, who, and why.
“Take a seat,” she ordered. “This is going to be long. Ariel Byrd. This didn’t start with her, but her murder is the turning point. We’re going to get justice for her, and when we do, we’re going to take down not just her killer, but the culture that fostered it.”
She took them through the murder, Gwen Huffman, the Natural Order connection. From there she wound her way to the block in Tribeca, the missing brother, before asking the feds to brief on the missing agent.
Baxter’s comm signaled at the end of that portion.
“Sorry, LT, we caught one.”
Whitney signaled for Baxter to hand him the communicator. “I’ll transfer it, and any others for the duration of the briefing.”
Rising, he stepped out to handle it.
Eve stepped back up, continued with the interviews and observations in Connecticut, and onto Ella Alice Foxx.
She had Feeney brief on the EDD input in that area.
“They wiped her out.” Carmichael studied Ella—Yancy’s sketch, the ID shot—on the board. “Just disappeared her. Her caseworker, the admin from the halfway house, didn’t file reports? Doesn’t pass the stink test.”
“No, it doesn’t. Which is why Officers Carmichael and Shelby are watching Jane Po at this time. We have more evidence she’s complicit in this, which I’ll get to.”
“Pick her up now,” Jenkinson commented, “her first tag’s to whoever she’s working with.”
“Correct. We have good reason to believe she, in coordination with the halfway house, is funneling young women, potentially young males as well, to Natural Order. She may be a true believer, it may be for money. It could be both.”
“It’s certainly for the money.”
She glanced at Roarke when he spoke.
“You have something.”
“I had a bit of time during the transfer of electronics and so on, so I had a look at Po’s finances. It would be unusual, I’d think, for a social worker—without family money behind her—to own a vacation home on the South Carolina shoreline, and have a bit over ten million in a pair of tucked-away accounts. Then there’s the jewelry she has insured—she’s fond of canary diamonds—in the amount of six million or so.”
“Yeah, that’s unusual.”
“It was a cursory search,” he added, “but with a little more time I could find when she had influxes of money. Which you could, very likely, tie to those disappearances.”
“I just bet. Good work. You can add the staff at the halfway house there and we’ll pin who she’s working with.
“Shortly before zero four hundred this morning—” She broke off when her ’link signaled. A glance showed her Nadine on the display.
“Sorry, this could be relevant. Roarke, take over with this area, as you were there. Peabody, if necessary, brief on the subsequent interviews.”
She stepped out. “I’m in the middle of a briefing,” she told Nadine.
“And I assume that briefing is on Natural Order. I think you’re going to want to include what I’ve got.”
19
“Spill, but make it fast. Things are moving here. Wait, where are you? Are you on a shuttle?”
“I’m shuttling back from a source, a hot one, Dallas. I pushed on an angle, and it paid off. Rachel Wilkey—Stanton Wilkey’s wife. Things weren’t adding up. Number of pregnancies, timing of them, number of children.”
“Yeah, I hit on that.”
“Pursuing that, I found she went incommunicado for long periods of time, and, pursuing that, I tracked a source that led to a source, and while her medical records are buried in Natural Order and not documented anywhere else I can find, there are ways and means to persuade people to cough up information.”
“Cut to it,” Eve demanded. “I’m pressed here.”
“Rachel Wilkey had three difficult pregnancies that resulted in live births, five miscarriages, and, the big one, a hysterectomy in 2037—which is three years before Wilkey’s youngest son, Aaron, was born.”
“She’s not the bio mother.”
“Medically impossible, and, pursuing that, I hit the very, very hot.”
“Is Paula Huffman her OB?”
“Oh yeah, and Huffman had an OB nurse-slash-midwife who not only attended Rachel Wilkey, but spent a couple years in the compound medical facilities. My information is Rachel nearly didn’t survive the birth of her daughter, was emotionally unstable, but became pregnant within the year, miscarried, and shortly after that, underwent an emergency hysterectomy.
“Following this,