“People are coming clean left and right, it seems,” she said, aggressively moving on.
“Who else?” Decker asked.
Jessie told them about her call with Beto Estrada. It got Gaylene Parker especially excited.
“Having Detective Shore’s wife come forward could be extremely powerful,” she said, “especially since we may be able to corroborate the suspicion that he was killed. I’ve been having our vehicle expert review all the data on Shore’s car. It’s not definitive yet, but he thinks it’s possible that an explosive may have been used to sever Shore’s brake line when he was driving up the mountain.”
“That would be huge,” Jamil said.
“Yes,” Decker agreed solemnly. “He deserves justice, even if it was delayed for years. Parker is looking into who at West L.A. Division might have been involved.”
Parker nodded. The smile was gone.
“What’s wrong?” Jessie asked her.
Parker looked at Decker, who nodded for her to go ahead.
“I don’t want to ruin our celebratory mood, but it looks like not everyone is going to get justice,” she said.
“What are you saying?” Jessie asked.
“I was interviewing Elodie Peters and I mentioned the name Marla. She recognized it. She gave us the girl’s real name, hoping it would get her some leniency.”
“Who is she?” Jessie asked, using the present tense though she feared that was too optimistic.
“Her real name is Marlene Janice Cooper. Elodie said that they were recruited around the same time. They went on several overseas trips together. On one of them, when they were both seventeen and losing their cachet because they were too old, Elodie said Marlene was pumped with heroin. It was done purposefully so that a client could have his way with her while she overdosed. He wanted to reach sexual gratification while she was in her death throes.”
Jessie closed her eyes, hoping to somehow push the image Parker was describing out of her head. It didn’t work. When she opened them again, she saw that both Decker and Jamil were looking away. But Gaylene Parker was staring at her, head up and eyes clear, full of righteous anger. This was why she was a Vice cop—to stop this kind of thing.
“What happened?” Jessie finally asked.
“She died with the john on top of her,” Parker said. “Afterward, they weighed her down and dumped her in the river. Elodie named the john too.”
“Who?” Jessie asked. “Was it Otis?”
“No. But he was there. It was Sultan Omar Abdul Salah.”
Jessie sat with that for a moment before responding.
“Can anything be done?” she asked.
“Elodie seems willing to testify against Otis,” Parker said. “She told me that she was terrified they’d do the same thing to her they did to Marlene, so she made herself invaluable, even after turning eighteen. She claims to have recruited more girls in the last two years than most of the other high school recruiters combined.”
“What about Salah?” Jessie asked.
Parker shook her head.
“We’ve already put in a request for his extradition to the State Department,” she said. “But they’re not optimistic. They say that as long as he doesn’t return to the U.S. or visit a country that has an extradition treaty with us, he’s probably untouchable.”
Jessie exhaled deeply, nodded, and stood up.
“If that’s all for now, I think I’m going to take the rest of the day off,” she said.
Decker walked her to the door.
“Once you’ve had some time to decompress, I’d like to discuss how we can get you back soon. Remember, I’m shorthanded.”
“Captain,” she said, trying to sound diplomatic despite feeling exhausted to her bones, “I have a seminar to teach on Friday. I’m supposed to start a new one next week. My boyfriend is learning to walk and talk again. My sister was just used as bait in a sex-trafficking sting. You might have picked the wrong moment to broach this.”
“There’s never a right moment, Hunt.”
“Maybe not,” she conceded. “But I’m not going to think about any of that right now. We’ll talk later. I have some people at home I need to hug.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
Ryan made dinner that night.
Admittedly it was just grilled cheese sandwiches, but Nurse Patty said it was part of his physical therapy and he seemed quite proud of the accomplishment. Kat, deciding that both Jessie and Hannah needed a bit of a break, came over to assist.
When they finally sat down to eat, it felt almost like a holiday. In addition to Jessie, Ryan, Hannah, and Kat, Jessie asked Patty to stick around for dinner even though it was officially Nurse