“Jack,” she said.
Nothing else. No What are you doing here? No You can’t just show up here anytime you feel like it. No You need to make an appointment before coming here.
“Rachel,” I said.
I stepped up to her desk.
“Got a minute?” I asked.
“Of course. Sit down. How are you, Jack?”
I wanted to go around behind the desk and pull her up out of her chair into an embrace. She still had that power. I got the urge every time I saw her. It didn’t matter how long it had been.
“I’m good,” I said as I sat down. “You know, same old same old. What about you? How’s business?”
“It’s good,” she said. “Real good. Nobody trusts anybody anymore. That means business for me. We’ve got more than we can handle.”
“We?”
“Thomas and me. I made him a partner. He deserved it.”
I nodded when I couldn’t find my voice. Ten years ago we shared a dream of working side by side as private investigators. We put it off because Rachel wanted to wait until she was fully vested in her FBI pension. So she stayed with the bureau and I worked for the Velvet Coffin. Then the Rodney Fletcher case came up and I put the story ahead of what we had and what we planned. Rachel was two years shy of full vesting when they fired her. And our relationship fell apart. Now she did background searches and private investigations without me. And I did tough watchdog reporting for the consumer.
This was not the way it was supposed to be.
I finally found my voice.
“You going to put his name on the door?”
“I don’t think so. We’ve already done the branding with RAW Data and it works. So... what brings you here?”
“Well, I was hoping maybe I could pick your brain and get some advice on a story I’m working on.”
“Let’s move over here.”
She gestured toward the seating area and we shifted there, me sitting on the couch and Rachel taking the armchair across a coffee table from me. The wall behind her was hung with photos from her time with the bureau. I knew it was a selling tool.
“So,” she said when we were seated.
“I have a story,” I said. “I mean, I think. I wanted to run it by you, see if anything pops for you.”
As quickly as I could I told the story of Tina Portrero’s murder, the connection to three other deaths of women across the country, and the rabbit hole it had led me down. I pulled the printouts from my back pocket and read her passages from the GT23 informed-consent pages and some of the quotes from Bolender and Tina’s mother.
“It feels like there’s something there,” I concluded. “But I don’t know what the next steps would be.”
“First question,” Rachel said. “Is there any indication that the LAPD is going the same way with this? Do they know what you know?”
“I don’t know but I doubt they’ve come up with the three other cases.”
“How did you find out about this in the first place? It doesn’t feel like the new you. The consumer reporter.”
I had conveniently left out the part about the LAPD coming to me because I had spent a night with Tina Portrero the previous year. Now there was no way around it.
“Well, I sort of knew Tina Portrero — briefly — so they came to me.”
“You mean you’re a suspect, Jack?”
“No, more of a person of interest, but that will get cleared up soon. I gave them my DNA and it will clear me.”
“But then you have a big conflict of interest here. Your editor is letting you run with this?”
“Same thing. Once the DNA clears me there is no conflict. Yes, I knew Tina, but that doesn’t preclude me from writing about the case. It’s been done before. I wrote about my brother and before that I knew an assistant city manager who got murdered. I wrote about the case.”
“Yeah, but did you fuck her too?”
That was harsh and it led me to realize that Rachel had a conflict of interest herself when it came to me. Though our decision to part three years before was mutual, I don’t think either of us had gotten over the other and possibly never would.
“No, I didn’t fuck the assistant city manager,” I said. “She was just a source.”
I realized as soon as I said the last line that it had been a mistake. Rachel and I had had a secret relationship that blew up publicly when she revealed that she was my source on the series of stories exposing Rodney Fletcher’s misdeeds.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay, Jack,” Rachel said. “Water under the bridge. I think you’re right about this DNA stuff. There is something there and I would pursue it.”
“Yeah, but how?”
“You said it’s a self-regulating industry. Remember when it came out that Boeing was essentially self-regulating and self-reporting when they had those airliner crashes? You could be onto something just as big here. I don’t care what it is — a government, a bureaucracy, a business. When there are no rules then corruption sets in like rust. That’s your angle. You have to find out if GT23 or any of them has ever been breached. If it has, then game over.”
“Easier said than done.”
“You need to ask yourself where the vulnerability is. That part you read to me: We cannot guarantee that a breach will never happen. That’s important. If they can’t guarantee that, then they know something. Find the vulnerabilities. Don’t expect the media flack to just give them to you.”
I understood what she was saying but I was on the outside looking in. The weaknesses of any system are always hidden from the outside.
“I know that,” I said. “But GT23 is like a fortress.”
“Weren’t you the one who told me once that no place is a fortress to a good reporter? There is always a way in. Former employees, current employees with grievances. Who have they fired? Who have they mistreated? Competitors, jealous colleagues — there’s always a way in.”
“Okay, I’ll check all of that—”
“The collaborators. That’s another vulnerability. Look at what GT23 is doing, Jack. They are handing off data — they’re selling it. That is the point where they lose control of it. They don’t control it physically anymore and they don’t control what’s done with it. They do their due diligence on the research application and then trust that that is the research that is actually conducted. But do they ever double back and check that it is? That’s the direction you have to take this. What did the mother say?”
“What?”
“The mother of the victim. You read me her quotes. She said Tina was never married, never wanted to be tied down to one man, was boy crazy from the start. What is all of that? It’s a nice way of saying she was promiscuous. In current society, that is considered a behavioral problem in females. Right?”
I was seeing all of her profiling instincts come into play. I might have had ulterior motives in coming to see Rachel Walling again, but now she was using her skills to give direction to my reporting and it was beautiful.
“Uh, right, I guess.”
“It’s the classic profile. A man pursues sex with multiple partners, no big deal. A woman? She’s loose. She’s a whore. Well, is it genetic?”
I nodded, remembering.
“Sex addiction. At least one of the GT23 collaborators is studying risky behaviors and their genetic origin. I saw that in a story. There might be others.”