looking for the name “Marla,” on the off chance she was mentioned, but it was a needle in a haystack.
“Do you have a digitized version of this stuff?” she asked Ajax.
“Not one that we can share,” he answered. “Separating out the confidential data from the public facing material is much harder on the computer. That’s why we gave you hard copies instead.”
Jessie looked at her watch. She’d already spent fifteen minutes on this wild goose chase. She reminded herself of what Decker had said. He would follow up on the Marla interview with Detective Parker. In the meantime, she needed to stay focused on the case in front of her, on solving Milly Estrada’s murder.
She began working her way methodically through the files. It quickly became clear that, while none of Milly’s clients actually served prison time, a number of them were held in jail for long stretches before and during trials. One guy—a well-known rock star named Percy Avalon—was held in custody for nine months on charges that he held a model from one of his music videos against her will in a hotel bathroom.
When the case finally came to trial, a member of his entourage claimed that he had confined the woman without Percy’s knowledge. That guy was sentenced to fourteen months in prison. Percy, who was convicted of an accessory charge, got time served. Jessie marked him down as someone she’d like to chat with, especially if she could confirm he was at the party.
In another instance, an actor named Rance Jensen got himself in some real trouble. The former star of a TV series called Batts’ Badge about a hard-driving sheriff in a corrupt small town, Jensen was charged with assault after he beat up a reporter who asked him about allegations that he was verbally abusive on the set.
Interestingly, Milly Estrada handed off his case to another firm just before trial, claiming an unspecified conflict of interest. Jensen was convicted and spent four months in prison. His comments after his release suggested he thought Estrada had bailed on him rather than risk ruining her perfect “no prison” record. He sounded particularly salty about it. Jessie wrote him down as a person to look at more. She noticed that his wasn’t an isolated incident.
“Hey,” she said to Karen, “are you finding that Estrada dumped a lot of cases that looked like losers just before trial?”
“Now that you mention, I have seen a few,” Karen said. “At least three that I can remember.”
“Let’s keep tabs on those folks,” Jessie said. “I suspect that if she ran into anyone at the party who she jettisoned before trial, their conversations might not have been too friendly.”
*
They’d gone through the files and collected a list of eight people who either had a history of violence, were left by Estrada at the trial altar, or both. Jessie called Jamil Winslow’s work line to leave a message asking him to focus on them when he started poring over the footage from Otis Estate tomorrow.
She already had him going through Beto Estrada’s alibi, and under normal circumstances, adding this to his punch list might have been asking too much. But ever since she’d first worked with him on a murder case in the wealthy beach community of Manhattan Beach, he’d proven to be a savant.
Short and skinny, at twenty-four, Jamil was brilliant, persistent, and seemingly immune to exhaustion. He’d actually left the Manhattan Beach PD to join her station, specifically to work with her and Ryan, a source of guilt for her considering that she now only intermittently consulted for the force.
To her surprise, he picked up.
“What are you doing there, Jamil?” she demanded. “It’s Sunday afternoon.”
“I wanted to get a jump on the Beto Estrada stuff and I figured it would be easier from the office,” he said as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Don’t you have things to do?” she asked.
“This is a thing to do,” he insisted. “What’s up?”
She explained what she wanted. When she was done, the unexpected silence on the other end of the line immediately told her there was an issue.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I was going to wait until tomorrow to tell you this,” he finally replied. “But the folks in tech have some bad news. There’s a problem with the security footage from Otis Estate. There are gaps.”
“What does that mean?”
“According to the security chief at the estate, with the exception of the main entrance to South House, they don’t save the