‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and meant it. It wasn’t Deacon’s fault she was out of sorts. She laid that firmly at her own feet. Being around Marcus O’Bannion never failed to leave her unsettled and . . . anxious. Scarlett hated being anxious. She drew a breath, found her center. None of this was about her anyway. This was about a seventeen-year-old girl on her way to the morgue. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well lately. It’s left me a bit tight.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Deacon’s expression said that she was fooling no one. ‘So why did he lie about his gun?’
She replayed Marcus’s words in her mind. ‘He didn’t lie. He said, “I drew my weapon.” He never said he drew the baby gun. But if he recorded the whole thing . . .’
‘His gun would be caught on his cap-cam.’ Deacon shook his head. ‘Although I doubt he’d have been so free with offering us the video if it had anything incriminating on it. That he didn’t tell us about the other gun has me wondering why.’
She reached for the ball cap that Deacon had dropped into an evidence bag, inspecting it from all angles. Clever little thing. ‘Does this store the video in the camera or does it feed to a drive somewhere else?’ she asked, all too familiar with Deacon’s penchant for gadgets.
‘If the camera has storage, it’s probably not big enough for more than a minute or two of video. I’d bet he sent the feed to an external drive, wirelessly.’
‘What’s the range?’
‘Depends on how much Marcus spent on the camera. With his bucks, I’m sure it’s top of the line, so maybe a few hundred feet. But he lives a couple miles away and . . .’ He let the thought trail, then rolled his eyes. ‘Sneaky sonofabitch had the hard drive in his car. He could have handed the whole thing over to us before he walked away, but he didn’t.’
Sneaky sonofabitch indeed. Any residual warmth from Marcus’s earlier trust dissipated like mist. ‘He’ll delete the gun part before he sends over the video, won’t he?’
‘Most likely. Unless he stopped recording when the bullets started flying.’
She lifted the cap so that it was level with her line of sight, squinting at the camera in the edge of the bill. ‘How would he have turned this thing on and off?’
‘Through his phone. But not the one he showed us. That was a throwaway.’
‘I figured that one out for myself.’ She sighed. ‘What’s your take on Marcus?’
‘I don’t think he shot the girl either, if that’s what you’re asking. I think we’ll find the footage from this camera supports every word of his story about Tala. But he wasn’t telling the whole truth about the enemies who’d want him dead. He was startled when I asked him if he could be the target.’
Yes, she thought, Marcus had looked startled. And dismayed. And maybe even guilty at the notion that he’d inadvertently caused the girl’s death. ‘That was good intuition on your part.’
Deacon shrugged. ‘Reporters tend to make a lot of enemies. I know I don’t like them.’
Scarlett’s lips curved. Deacon had very good reasons not to like the press. His snow-white hair and the wraparound shades he wore during the daylight hours made him easy fodder for the media. The heat of the summer meant he wasn’t wearing his signature black leather overcoat, but every reporter in town had captured him on film wearing the thing during the winter, so the damage was long done. Deacon Novak was larger than life, which meant the cameras were trained on him.
Better you than me. She’d been quoted by reporters in her role as a cop plenty of times. That was part of the job. But she’d once been personally involved in a news story and didn’t care to repeat the experience. The very memory was enough to tie her stomach into knots.
‘He’s listed as the paper’s publisher,’ she said. ‘The Ledger used to be second in town, after the Enquirer, but he’s built up the readership substantially since he took over five years ago, when he came back from Iraq. Yet I’ve never seen his name as a byline. He’s not one of the reporters going out and pestering people for a story.’
Deacon tilted his head. ‘So you’ve checked him out pretty thoroughly, huh?’
Scarlett felt her cheeks heat. ‘Yes, last year when we were looking at the O’Bannions as suspects.’ Nine months ago, when they’d been trying to catch a killer. Marcus had saved a girl’s life and Scarlett had desperately wanted to believe him to be the good guy he appeared. ‘I wanted to know what kind of man he was.’
‘And?’
‘I think he’s basically good, but the media do disrupt lives while they’re getting the story. And rarely do they care.’
Deacon was watching her too closely, with that look in his eye that meant he was seeing far more than she wanted him to see. ‘That sounds like the voice of experience talking.’
‘It is.’ And it would be a shame Scarlett would carry for the rest of her life. ‘I had a friend back in college who died because a reporter broke a story that should have been dealt with privately. He got the big byline and my friend got a pretty angel to stand over her grave.’
‘You blame the reporter for her death?’
‘Partially, yes.’ And partially Scarlett blamed herself. ‘But ultimately I blame the sick, sadistic sonofabitch who murdered her.’
‘Oh. I thought you meant she’d committed suicide.’
‘No. She was killed by her ex-boyfriend, but she might have survived had that damned reporter kept his mouth shut.’ And you too, Scarlett. She’d trusted that damned reporter, told him things far better left unsaid. Because I was a million kinds of stupid. ‘I’ve wanted to see her killer pay for more than ten years, but I have to admit there were times I wanted to make the reporter pay too. His callous disregard for the consequences of his actions led to the death of an innocent woman.’
‘You don’t want to believe that Marcus is that kind of journalist.’
No, she didn’t want to, but she wouldn’t trust so blindly. Never again. Of course the proof would be in the article he printed about Tala’s murder. He had the power to withhold the facts the police wouldn’t have told the public. She knew his paper had cooperated in the past, but she’d never interacted with Marcus directly. ‘Like I said before, Marcus isn’t credited as a reporter with his paper. He owns the paper and is listed as the publisher. That opens the field to anyone impacted by any story he allowed to be printed. He is responsible for the actions of the reporters on his staff who break stories that make people unhappy.’
‘So our suspect list could be anyone who blames any reporter Marcus has ever employed. That could be a big list. Luckily he keeps track of the specific threats.’
‘True, but I don’t think he wanted to admit that the threats to his life were credible – to us or to himself. Yet his mother made him promise to wear Kevlar, so they must have been credible to her. Which means his family – or at least his mother – knows about them too.’
‘I agree. So if the killer was someone Marcus pissed off through his paper, then Marcus was the target and Tala was simply collateral damage.’
Scarlett turned, her gaze dropping to the asphalt where Tala had bled out. ‘But my gut tells me this is more about Tala than Marcus. She asked him to meet her here. She was shot first. And the killer doubled back to make sure she was dead. It’s more probable that Tala was the target and Marcus was collateral damage. Or a loose end. In which case, all we have to go on is her body, her first name, her last words, a shell casing, the general vicinity of where she lived, and the name of a poodle with a diamond-studded collar.’
‘And the fact that a man and his wife “owned” her,’ Deacon said grimly.
Scarlett considered it. ‘We’ve closed cases starting with far less. If we’re dealing with human trafficking, we’ll need your Bureau contacts.’ Deacon was officially on loan from the FBI to Cincinnati PD’s Major Case Enforcement Squad, but he’d integrated into the group so completely that most days she forgot he was still a federal agent.
He nodded. ‘I’ll check with my SAC and find out who’s trafficking people in this area.’