Find Millicent Estrada’s killer. Let me worry about the recording. If they end up connecting, we’ll deal with that too. But right now, your job is to solve this murder. Got it?”
She nodded reluctantly.
“Where are you headed now?” he asked.
“To her law firm to see if any cases she handled suggest motive.”
“Good,” he said, getting out of the car. “Take Detective Bray with you. You need someone to help keep you grounded right now.”
“Yes, Captain.”
He started to close the door, then stopped himself.
“And Hunt, don’t mention any of this to her. Until we know more, this is strictly ‘need to know’ and she doesn’t.”
At least they agreed on that.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Karen Bray was already waiting when Jessie got there.
The offices of Halsey, Burt, Tyler & Estrada were located in a massive tower in Century City, just a long red carpet’s walk away from the building that served as Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard. This skyscraper wasn’t as celebrated but it was equally impressive, forty stories high and housing at least a dozen of the most prominent firms in the city.
“You ready for this?” Jessie asked when she met Karen at the main entrance to the office on the thirty-seventh floor.
“It was this or noshing on chips and bean dip while watching three-hundred-pound men wearing pads slam into each other for a few hours. I think I made the right choice.”
“How did the soccer game go?” Jessie asked, not wanting to directly probe her new partner about the state of her marriage.
Karen smiled, obviously not fooled.
“I didn’t know you were such a fan, Jessie,” she said, before adding, “The Hornets—that’s Ryan’s team—won five to three. They celebrated with pizza and ice cream and then more pizza.”
“Your son’s name is Ryan?”
Karen nodded.
“I didn’t want to say anything, for obvious reasons.”
“I appreciate that, but it’s okay,” Jessie told her. “It’s not like I don’t think about my Ryan five hundred times a day anyway. You mentioning your son isn’t going to send me on a misery bender, at least not one worse than I’m already on.”
“Then you’re made of stronger stuff than me,” Karen said. “If anything like that happened to my husband, Cal, my already brittle hair would be completely gone.”
Jessie nodded, not saying anything about the conversation she overheard. Karen smiled again.
“Surprised to hear that? Don’t be. We have our moments, my hubby and I, but he’s a good guy and a good man. He just tends to forget that when his team is playing, so I remind him.”
“Not my business,” Jessie said.
“You’ll get there too one day,” Karen said.
Jessie couldn’t help but laugh.
“I don’t know about that. The last guy I married is the main reason that my life’s in the toilet right now.”
“Yeah, but your Ryan’s not like that, right? It’ll be different this time.”
Something about the comment threw Jessie. The idea that she might one day marry Ryan Hernandez wasn’t new to her. But ever since his injury, she’d put thoughts like that on the back burner. The fact that someone else seemed to think it ought not to be made her wonder why she wasn’t so sure.
“So Estrada just volunteered to let us come here?” Karen asked, snapping her out of her personal crises.
“No, I asked him. But I think he was anxious to do anything that would prove he was helping.”
She proceeded to fill the detective in on the particulars of the interview.
“Do you like him for this?” Karen asked when she finished.
“He has no real alibi and the ex should always be near the top of the suspect list, as I can attest to. But he was pretty straightforward with me and seemed to genuinely want this solved. If he’s lying, he’s very good at it. Plus, it’s clear that he still loved her. The question is whether that got twisted somehow.”
“Your people are doing facial recognition from the party, right?” Karen asked. “To see if he showed up?”
“Absolutely,” Jessie assured her. “I don’t trust his phone GPS. He could have left it at the house. That’s why I called our top researcher, Jamil Winslow, on the way here. He’s going to do a deep dive on Estrada’s tech tomorrow. Maybe the guy ordered food last night. Maybe he was posting online. Maybe a security camera caught him leaving the house. Anything he finds will be more than we have now.”
“You don’t want Ernie Purcell to honcho that stuff?” Karen asked jokingly.
“I think that the less we involve Purcell in this case,” Jessie replied, “the more