I shook my head slowly. We got off at the eighteenth floor, and I punched in the numerical code on the security door to our wing. As we headed to my office, I pondered my options. None was great.
“If I call the reporter and give him a response, I’ll make it a bigger deal. You know what they say-”
“You wrestle with a pig, you both get down in the mud, but the pig likes it,” Toni finished for me. “Kinda late for that. The mud’s flying, and some of it’s already on you.”
“But there’s more to it here. The last thing I need is attention from the press.” I explained about having to find Lilah Bayer before the press got its hands on the surveillance footage and spooked her into running.
“So you’re trying to outrun them?” Toni shook her head. “Good luck with that.”
She sat down in front of my desk and put her feet up on the table by the window. I dropped my purse into my bottom drawer and looked longingly at the bottle of Glenlivet, then quickly slammed the drawer shut and plopped down into my majestic judge’s chair-the one I’d proudly corralled after finding it abandoned in the office hallway late one night. On brighter occasions, Toni and I’d tried to picture the scenario that caused it to roll off a judge’s bench on the fifteenth floor and into a corridor in the DA’s office on the eighteenth.
I slipped off my shoes and curled my feet under me.
“You really think Vanderhorn’s going to care what an idiot like Hemet says?” I asked.
“Vanderhorn cares about what makes him look bad,” Toni replied. “Hemet’s mudslinging about you has ‘bad for Vanderhorn’ written all over it.” She paused and raised an ominous eyebrow. “Especially if anything goes wrong with the case.”
“So your advice is, what?” I asked irritably. “Don’t let anything go wrong?”
Toni shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. Just don’t lose, and everything’ll be fine.”
I rolled my eyes. “Gee, thanks, Tone,” I said sarcastically. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
It came out a lot snarkier than I’d intended.
“Gee, Rache, I don’t know,” Toni replied. “Maybe because you’re too busy jumping my shit?” She stared at me. “What’s going on? You are not yourself.”
More than her words, Toni’s expression of concern brought me to a screeching halt.
“Or, apparently, anyone better,” I admitted. “I’m sorry, Tone.”
“You want to talk about it?” she asked softly.
Her gentle tone unlocked the angry shell I’d built around the pain of losing Graden, and against my will, I felt tears leap to my eyes. But the middle of a workday was no time to lose it. Mutely, I shook my head and pressed my fingers to my temples as I willed the tears back.
“Okay,” Toni said. “You let me know when you’re ready.”
I nodded.
Her cell phone rang, and she looked down at the number and sighed. “The IO on my geezer bandit case-I’ve gotta take it.”
I waved her off. “Go. And don’t worry, we’ll talk.”
Toni smiled as she opened her phone and headed out to her office.
I tried to lose myself in the work that’d piled up on my desk, but my thoughts kept wandering back to my fight with Graden. Was my need to keep Romy a secret really all about my feelings of guilt? Not just my desire for privacy or an escape from my past? And even if it was guilt, I knew I wasn’t just imagining Graden’s control issues. So maybe we’d never have made it anyway-Romy or no. The truth was, we’d probably always been doomed. My need for privacy-obsessive as it might be-would always clash with Graden’s need to control and know all. Better to accept that it had always been hopeless than believe the lie that we’d ever stood a chance of making it.
I pushed away from that depressing conclusion and found my thoughts returning to Lilah. I pulled out my “Lilah list” and went to work.
I was on my cell, wrapping up a call with my contact in the public school system, when my office phone rang.
“DA’s office,” I said.
“We got something on the bank video,” Bailey said.
“Something-as in a view of the killer?”
“No.” Bailey sighed.
“Then we’re stuck with Lilah.”
“Yeah. We’ve hit every place within camera range.”
I was already in a lousy mood, and this news didn’t help-even if I hadn’t really expected the bank video to give us the stabber. “Why don’t you bring it over?”
“Thought you might want to come watch it here,” Bailey replied. “It’s on your way home, and we could grab a drink after…”
It was on my way home, and ordinarily I’d have been on board with the plan. But now I was suspicious. Was she purposely trying to get me into the station? This was the second time she’d suggested it today. On the other hand, both occasions made sense, so maybe I was just being paranoid? Either way, I wasn’t taking the bait.
“I need to finish up some work here,” I replied tightly. Even little lies didn’t come easy with Bailey or Toni. “Why don’t you bring it here and then we can go back to the hotel for a drink?”
I knew that over drinks, I was going to have to tell her about Graden. For all I knew, he’d already jumped back into the dating pool. I didn’t want Bailey to find out from someone else. Of course, this meant I had to come up with a decent reason for the breakup, and so far I hadn’t thought of anything that’d float. Or, to be completely accurate, anything at all.
Bailey paused a beat, but she agreed. “Be there in ten.”
40
It actually took her twenty minutes, but I didn’t mind. For some weird reason, I got more work done in those twenty minutes than I’d managed to do in the last two hours.
“What took you so long?” I asked when she appeared in my doorway.
“Ran into Graden on my way out,” she replied.
How unlucky could I get? But I didn’t think he’d talk about anything personal during work hours, so I was fairly sure he hadn’t said anything to Bailey. And I knew he’d never tell anyone about Romy-not after the way I’d reacted. As angry as I was, I still knew I could trust him not to deliberately do anything to hurt me.
I fought to keep my voice even. “Oh?”
Bailey shrugged. “He looked a little rocky, but I guess everyone’s entitled to their off days.”
She peered closely at me, then looked away. The moment of silence stretched on while I tried to decide whether to just tell her now. Ultimately she made the decision for me.
“Here,” she said, producing a disc. “Pop this in your computer.”
From the moment the image came up on my screen, I could tell this was a sharper picture than any of the other surveillance footage. It figured that a bank would have better equipment. The camera captured Simon from the front, so that meant it was behind the stabber. We watched as Simon approached Lilah and grabbed her arm, then got shoved off. I paused the disc and pointed.
“Looks like a side view of Yamaguchi, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Yep. Confirms his story,” Bailey agreed. “Push forward a little way, and you’ll see…”
I did and saw that Yamaguchi immediately stepped back, then turned and moved out of range. “Simon’s still standing,” I said.
“Right,” Bailey agreed. “Now put it in slo-mo.”
I hit a key, and the disc moved frame by frame. I watched as a hand protruding from a long-sleeved shirt or jacket stretched out toward Simon. The hand was closed; I couldn’t tell what, if anything, was in it.
One second later, the hand made a rapid, forceful thrust straight into Simon’s abdomen, then quickly withdrew. But as Bailey’d said, the camera hadn’t picked up the stabber’s face or even his body. Whoever it was immediately moved back and out of range as Simon sank to the ground.
I played it again. This time, as the hand extended, I froze the image and stared.
“So this is all we’re going to get on our stabber as far as surveillance footage goes,” I said.