out the truth for me, vanished, and there’s never been an answer for me.”
There was total silence after he’d finished speaking. Hanson’s gaze burned into him, and he lowered his eyes to his hands, which were shaking badly.
“Jesus,” Hanson said. “Do you have any idea how many men have tried to use that excuse? The ‘I don’t remember’ trope? And this is all aside from the stuff with Jojo. I assume you were at her house late last night because you were sleeping with her? With a suspect?”
“No, I wasn’t,” Jonah said, his voice firm this time. “I’ve never been involved with a suspect. I’m trying to solve a case, Juliette. Everything else is secondary. Everything. I gave you Zofia’s name because I’m determined to solve it, even when that meant letting you find out about something I’ve been ashamed of for most of my life.”
Hanson shook her head, and said in a slightly unsteady voice, “You’re supposed to be—” And then she turned round without finishing the thought, and left.
She didn’t need to finish what she’d started saying. He knew what she meant.
He felt, profoundly, that he had failed her. Her next step must be to report him. And there wasn’t anything he could do to stop her.
* * *
—
FEAR ENDED UP taking over Jonah’s afternoon. Every time Hanson moved or said anything outside, he found himself moving to watch her, wondering what she was telling the other two. The combination of anxiety and lack of sleep was deadly and his focus was anywhere but on the case. Where it needed to be. It bloody needed to be.
O’Malley tapped on his door at quarter to one, and Jonah found his pulse picking up again at the thought that his sergeant was about to weigh in about Zofia. But O’Malley’s expression was neutral.
“You’ll probably be interested to know that the first phone records are just through,” the sergeant said. “I’ve got Topaz, Brett, and Daniel for this year. Looks like Connor and Coralie are with O2, so that’s going to be a manual permission.”
Jonah nodded. He’d been through this process a lot of times. Aside from the online portals used by many of the major phone companies, there were still those who only gave out records when permission had been sought and given manually. Requests would go to staff members, who would make a decision and then send the information back. Those could be handled quickly or could take several days to process, and there was no way of knowing which it would be.
He found a flicker of interest breaking through his tiredness and fear. There could be some interesting interactions among the three they already had. A lot of calls back and forth could be indicative.
It was frustrating that they didn’t have the messages themselves at this point. Unless there was an overwhelming reason to ask for the content of messages, and approval had been given by a secretary of state, what the police had access to was simply who had called or messaged whom, at what time. Location information could also be gathered, but accuracy was in no way guaranteed, as recent cases had proved. Calls were routed through the nearest available cell tower, which might not be close to where the call had actually been placed. For more precise information you needed a smartphone with GPS, and permission to access it.
The other problem faced in investigating older cases was records being deleted. The good news was that, thanks to various antiterrorism laws, carriers now had to store records for a full year. But it was up to them whether they kept the information for longer, and it was hit or miss whether they would have data going back further. In terms of actual message content, only a few providers stored this at all, so even with the full weight of the law behind them, investigators often came up with nothing.
“OK,” he said to O’Malley, telling himself it was time to pull himself together. “Can you start with the last few days? Look at which of those three messaged each other, or any of the rest of the group?”
“Yup, will do.”
* * *
—
JONAH WAS REREADING the reports on the two fires when Jojo’s tousled blond head appeared through the door to CID. He hadn’t come to many conclusions. His gut instinct told him that the first fire had been to warn Aleksy off. But it could have been more than that. Aleksy had been in the