you showed me yesterday.” He found the bullet-pointed steps she had taken to assess Rebecca Caterino’s body. A passage had been added explaining in detail how she had checked both the carotid and wrist twice. “Are you willing to put your hand on a Bible in front of a judge and swear this is the truth?”
Lena’s throat worked. “Yes, Chief.”
“Jesus.” He flipped through the copies. Every detail looked so uniform that it could’ve come out of a typewriter. He turned the page.
PRELIMINARY INTERVIEW WITH LESLIE TRUONG
—Man with black knit cap
—No idea how old/hair color/eye color
—Can’t remember what he was wearing
—Did not speak to each other
—Nothing suspicious
Jeffrey felt a sharp pain in his jaw. He’d read her official report. Nothing about a man with a black knit cap was anywhere to be found. “What the fuck is this?”
“Uh,” Lena craned her neck to see. “What she said. Leslie. I wrote down—”
“Leslie Truong, the woman who found Rebecca Caterino, saw a man in a knit cap and you didn’t think that was important enough to tell me?”
Lena’s face told him she knew exactly how much she had fucked up. “It didn’t seem important, Chief.”
“Jesus Christ. I told you everything was important. What else did she say?”
“Nothing,” Lena said. “I mean, something—what I wrote down. That’s all she said. I swear to God. I asked her if she’d seen anybody in the area and she said about four different people. Three women she didn’t know but she thought they were students, and one guy, and that’s the guy she described, but it’s not really a description, is it? I swear that’s all she said. It was nothing. We all thought Caterino was an accident.”
“Not all of us, Lena.” He was gripping the pages hard enough to crumple them in his hand. “Leslie Truong was mutilated. Do you know what was done to her? The witness you let walk away?”
Jeffrey threw Sara’s summary in her direction. She struggled to catch it. Then she read the words. He watched the horror spread across her face.
“That.” Jeffrey stabbed his finger into the paper. “That’s what happened to the woman who saw the attacker’s face. You let her go. She had a god damn target on her back, and you sent her into the woods on her own, and this is what happened to her.”
Lena looked sick.
Jeffrey was glad.
“Chief, I—”
“You need to get your ass over to that construction site right now before I take your badge and frogmarch you out of my squad room.”
She jumped out of the chair.
He wasn’t going to let her off that easy. “You come directly back here when you’re finished, you hear me? Don’t dawdle around, don’t wander off chasing your tail. Right back here. I mean it.”
“Yes, Chief.”
He watched her run past Frank, through the saloon doors.
Jeffrey turned toward the window. Lena was in the parking lot. She was trying to unlock the door to her Celica.
“Chief?” Frank was at the door expecting an explanation.
“Not now.” Jeffrey had to get out of this building before he ripped it apart with his bare hands. “I’ll be back for the briefing. I’m on my phone if something comes up.”
Frank stepped aside to let him pass.
Jeffrey ignored the looks in the squad room, Marla’s pursed lips behind the reception desk. He resisted the temptation to kick open the saloon doors. He kept his shit together until he was outside on the sidewalk.
“Fucking god damn fucking shit,” he hissed, fisting his hands inside of his pockets.
A cold breeze pushed back against him as he walked the length of Main Street. Still, he was sweating by the time he took a left toward the lake. The wind turned into a knife as it sliced across the water. The grass was still wet with dew. He watched the cuffs of his gray pants slowly turn black from the moisture.
Jeffrey forced his hands to unclench. He tried to rationalize away his anger. Lena had fucked up, but she worked for him, which meant that every mistake she made fell squarely on his shoulders. He tried to see her side of things. He’d told her to clean up her notes. She had cleaned up her notes. When she had talked to Leslie Truong, she had believed that Rebecca Caterino had suffered from an unfortunate accident. Could Jeffrey honestly say that he would’ve found an escort to take the young woman back to campus? He sure as fucking hell would’ve mentioned to his boss that there was a man