Bartoneri’s expression changed again. Surprise? Concern? Fear? The detective took the phone away from her ear, narrowing her eyes at the screen.
Then the detective’s face paled. She took a step back. And hung up.
“Something wrong?” Jane had to ask. Clearly there was. Maybe-Lewis? If Robyn had succeeded in killing him, they’d never know the real story. And poor Gracie…
Detective Bartoneri had slipped her cell phone into a pocket of her black blazer. Jane saw the gold badge clipped to her belt and the edge of a black leather holster.
“Not at all.” Bartoneri squared her shoulders, looked Jane up and down. “I’m here regarding Mrs. Wilhoite,” she said. “She’s asked for an attorney. We’ll be holding her until he arrives. As a result, there’s no reason for you to remain, since-”
Bartoneri’s phone rang. The three-tone trill came clearly though the detective’s jacket. The woman’s eyes widened. She yanked out the cell, looked at the screen. Seemed to make a decision.
“Hello?” she said.
65
“Off the record?” Jake leaned back against the pile of pillows on Jane’s leather couch, his shoes kicked off, his legs stretched the full length. Coda, as always, had curled herself on his lap, tail wrapped to her pink nose. Jake was not a cat person, but Jane’s calico aggressively refused to accept that. “Yeah. It was Angie.”
Jane plopped a wooden bowl of twisty pretzels on the coffee table, then handed him an IPA, the icy brown bottle wrapped in a napkin. She took her usual spot, leaning back at the opposite end of the couch. Her legs, in those somehow sexy black sweatpants, paralleled his, her toes against his thigh.
“Everything on the couch is off the record.” Jane kneaded her toes into his jeans. “Especially after midnight. But I can’t believe I was right there when you called Angela Bartoneri. Rats. Wish I had known what was going on.”
Jake tried to calculate how long he’d been awake. It was risky to collapse on Jane’s couch, but they were both flying on adrenaline right now. Jane already knew Robyn Wilhoite was under arrest for attempted murder. And Angie Bartoneri was in custody as a co-conspirator in the secret City Hall taping and extortion. “I’ll tell you the rest-if you keep it secret.”
“Who am I gonna tell?” Jane toasted him with her glass of red wine. “I’m unemployed, and probably without prospects, since I blew off Marsh Tyson to take care of the Gracie thing.”
He saw her face fall.
“I know, honey.” Jake shifted, pressing the weight of his leg against the length of hers. “We’ll all take care of Gracie, right? However it turns out? Lewis will be fine. We know Gracie loves him, and he loves her. She’s lucky, you know, to have Melissa and Daniel. And you.”
“And you.” Jane took a sip of her wine, closed her eyes briefly. “We can’t control the universe,” she said. “We can only do the best we can.”
They sat, silent, for a moment, Coda’s purr vibrating against Jake’s chest. As peaceful and domestic as a scene could be-for a cop and a reporter after forty straight hours of deception and murder. And two families struggling with a new reality.
“Curley Park,” Jane said.
“Just what I was thinking,” Jake admitted.
“You’re such a romantic.” Jane poked him with a toe. “But yeah, off the record. Tell me. You grabbed that Ward Dahlstrom’s phone and hit Redial-very cool. Legally iffy, right? But cool. And that’s when you reached Angela Bartoneri?”
“Former Detective Angie Bartoneri-who’s now in custody for extortion and conspiracy and a shitload of other stuff,” Jake said. “Along with her partner in crime, Ward Dahlstrom. Apparently he’s hated Catherine Siskel ever since she got named chief of staff instead of him. Decided to use her daughters to get revenge.”
Dahlstrom, the weak link, had ratted out Angie the second he’d had the option. Once Jake had heard Bartoneri answer Dahlstrom’s phone-he’d recognized her voice instantly this time-their scheme had begun to disintegrate. Angie in turn had ratted out Calvin Hewlitt, who she said used his security systems for an extortion scheme, threatening to leak embarrassing security videos unless victims paid them off. Apparently the University Inn was a prime source. Jake had already subpoenaed every bit of video from Hewlitt Security.
“They couldn’t sell the stuff to TMZ and places like that,” Jake said. “They’d be too easy to trace, you know? Instead, they demanded payoffs from rock stars and pols to keep that stuff under wraps. Private citizens, too. We found they’d taped a girlfriend of Lanna Siskel’s in a hotel room with her still-closeted lover. Seems like the University Inn’s surveillance system supported a cottage industry in undercover video.”
“Disgusting,” Jane said. She wondered if Tall and Beefy were involved. Be fun to cover their trial.
“Problem is,” Jake said, “Calvin Hewlitt-the guy you saw in the alley?-insists he had nothing to do with anything. No question his company installed the hotel surveillance systems, and his college buddy Dahlstrom hired Hewlitt Security to wire City Hall all on the up-and-up. But he says he had no idea anyone was using the videos. He insisted Dahlstrom, on his own, wired the greenroom to his personal computer. And that Dahlstrom also made the Lanna Siskel video and the phony one of Tenley on his own. Well, ‘on his own’ in cahoots with Angie. I knew she’d hooked up with some computer guy. Dahlstrom and Angie. Geez. Both bitter about their careers. Both out for revenge. I bet they were quite the happy couple.”
“Easy enough to find out about the hookup.” Jane crunched a pretzel, brushed the salty crumbs off her chest. “The computer hookup, I mean. Not Bartoneri and Dahlstrom.”
“Yeah.” Jake tipped his beer, finishing the last drop. Sleep was about to overtake him, but now his brain was revving. “Wish we could link Hewlitt to Curley Park, you know? He was in Franklin Alley, we know that. But he insists he wasn’t anywhere near the stabbing.”
“Want another?” Jane drained her wineglass. Uncurled herself from him. He could still feel the heat from her leg against his.
“Sure.” If they wound up here on the couch all night, what the hell. Even though tomorrow-it was already tomorrow-he and D still had a shitload to solve. “We can’t figure out who the dead guy with the tattoo was-but again, it’s not like we’re a TV show. It hasn’t even been forty-eight hours. We’ve got Dahlstrom and Bartoneri. We’ll crack this. I know Hewlitt’s the link. I just wish I could put him in Curley Park. He was probably all over those photos Bobby Land took. Obviously that’s why he smashed the damn camera. We just can’t prove it.”
“Poor Bobby Land,” Jane said. She saw three more IPAs in her fridge, but Jake was fading fast. She’d never seen him so tired. Scruffy face, eyes spiked red, his T-shirt sagging. He was still adorable, no question, but exhausted. She kept talking as she came back into the living room. Jake had draped one leg over the top of the couch. Coda hadn’t budged. “So Bobby Land-you think Bartoneri and Dahlstrom were in on that, too?”
“We’ll find out. Like I told each of them, first to talk is the first to walk,” he told her, taking the beer. He took a swig, then tucked the bottle between his arm and the back of the couch, settled into the pillows. Yawned. “Oh, sorry. Anyway. Yeah. They clearly thought Land had witnessed the stabbing. The kid made a big deal of it, remember? My bet’s on Angie. She knew the blind spots of the police HQ surveillance cameras. And Angie had left the hospital at the time of the attack. She’s got means, motive-and no alibi. And remember, she was alone in the ambulance with the tattoo guy. Who knows what she did to make his condition worse.”
Jane pictured it all again, Bobby Land, just a scrawny kid who longed to hit the big time with his photos. He’d clearly latched on to her because…