though. There were so many things to think about; he couldn’t afford to get stuck on anything. So he did what he always did, and put the thoughts aside, somewhere in the background, ready for later.
Hanson was still at her desk when Jonah arrived. He shook his head at her, and then came and sat in a neighboring chair.
“I’m pretty sure I told you lot to sod off. Didn’t you get the memo?”
“Sorry, sir,” Hanson said with a ghost of a smile. “Ben started it. And I felt like I should compete, and then by the time he was ready to go I’d got a little bit stuck in….”
“What are you looking at?”
“A few things,” she said. And then she added, “There’s something that is really bothering me. Actually, there are two things, but one more than the other.”
Jonah was absolutely ready to go home. He was wet and tired and feeling grumpy. But he’d been where Hanson was. Working on a first homicide case with feverish enthusiasm. Finding heart-racing excitement in discrepancies. “Let’s hear it.”
“The search started with people on foot,” she said. “None of them saw the stash, which makes sense if it was behind an offshoot of the beech tree. The most anyone would do would be duck under the tree and move on, yes?”
“Yes,” Jonah said. “I’m happy with that.”
“But at five P.M., they brought in dogs from Southampton,” she said, handing him an old report from the investigating officer at Lyndhurst. “They were primed for Aurora’s scent, and they’d all been trained on suspicious substances. So how did all of them fail to find a place that we know she had visited before, and which must have reeked of Dexedrine?”
Jonah frowned. He took the report and read over it. He had a hazy memory of the dogs arriving at the scene. But on that first day, he’d been moved to the door-to-door search with his sergeant. They’d spent the evening knocking and questioning.
“You’re right. I don’t…”
He thought of Jojo’s confession. Of how they had caved the entrance in.
“Jojo Magos is coming in tomorrow,” he said slowly. “She wants to make a statement to the effect that she and Brett Parker caved in the entrance to the stash. Caving it in would make it a lot harder for the dogs to pick up the scent, but if Aurora had been in there beforehand, there should have been a trail leading right to it.”
Hanson nodded, her cheeks gaining a slight flush of excitement. “If they covered it up, that makes sense of some of the weird statements from the following day. They were trying to cover up two of them hiding it…Yeah, look.”
She had stuck tiny fluorescent tabs to some of the pages in a stack of statements, and she pulled one open to show him. “Topaz said Brett went toward the main road to search, and Jojo stayed at the camp. But Connor said Brett had gone to wade in the river and that Jojo had gone looking toward the road. Brett agreed that he’d been wading, but the one slightly canny bit of interviewing involved him being asked why he hadn’t been at all wet when the police arrived. He’s on tape as saying he removed his trousers before going in, but they’ve indicated a pause in the transcript. Here.”
Jonah couldn’t help smiling at the thoroughness. It was a refreshing feature in a new recruit. It was usually just Lightman who went for the meticulous approach.
He glanced over the statements. Nodded. “Good work, Juliette.”
“So do we think that’s all they were hiding?” she asked. “Was it just that they’d gone to hide the drugs, or was there something else? Were some of them deliberately laying a false trail for the dogs, either to hide the drugs or because they knew she was there? And if so, how did they know how to do it? The talk we had from the guy at Vice said it’s really hard to do.”
“You’re right,” Jonah said thoughtfully. “I had that talk, too. That stuff about how they smell in the same way we see. Not just one thing at a time.”
“So whoever did it probably had a good working knowledge of narcotics,” Hanson agreed.
“Yup. Benners.”
“Or Jojo Magos, through her brother.”
Jonah nodded. He found himself thinking again of Jojo hiding the stash.
“You should definitely go home now, Juliette,” he said. “I’m heading off in the next thirty seconds. And thank you. That’s significant information.” He started to walk