Did we have the right man?
“We still haven’t uncovered a weapon,” I said to Jill.
“We don’t need a weapon, Lindsay. We have his hair inside one of the victims!”
Suddenly, we were aware that people from other tables were looking at us. Jill huffed and sat back down. Claire put her arms around my shoulders.
I puffed a deep breath into my cheeks, slumped back against the cushion of the booth.
Finally, Cindy said, “We’ve been behind you all the way. We’re not going to abandon you now.”
Jill shook her head. “You want me to let him go, guys, while we reopen the case? If we don’t try him, Cleveland will.”
“I don’t want you to let him go,” I said. “I only want to be one hundred percent sure.”
“I am sure,” Jill replied, her eyes ablaze.
I sought out Claire, and even she had a skeptical expression fixed firmly in my direction. “There’s an awful lot of physical evidence that makes it pretty clear.”
“If this gets out,” Jill warned, “you can toss my career out with the cat litter. Bennett wants this guy’s blood on the courthouse wall.”
“Look at it this way,” Cindy said, chuckling, “if Lindsay’s right, and you send Jenks up, they’ll be studying this case as a ‘how not to’ for twenty years to come.”
Numbly, we looked around the table. It was as if we were staring at the pieces of some shattered, irreplaceable vase.
“Okay, so if it’s not him,” Claire said with a sigh, “then how do we go about proving who it is?”
It was as if we were all the way back at the beginning — all the way back at the first crime. I felt awful.
“What was the thing that nailed our suspicion on Jenks?” I asked.
“The hair,” said Claire.
“Not quite. We had to get to him
before we knew who it belonged to.”
“Merrill Shortley,” Jill said. “Jenks and Merrill? You think?”
I shook my head. “We still needed one more thing before we could take him in.”
Cindy said, “Always a Bridesmaid. His first wife.”
I nodded slowly as I left Susie’s.
Chapter 104
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I went back over everything we had on Joanna Wade.
First, I reread the domestic complaint she had filed against Jenks. I looked at pictures of Joanna taken at the station, bruised, puffy faced. I read through the officers’ account of what they found at the scene. Exchanges laced with invectives. Jenks swinging wildly, clearly enraged. He had to be subdued, resisted arrest.
The report was signed by two officers from Northern, Samuel Delgado and Anthony Fazziola.
The following day, I went back out to visit Greg Marks, Jenks’s former agent. He was even more surprised at my visit when I told him I was there on a different aspect of Jenks’s past. “Joanna?” he replied with an amused smile. “Bad judge of men, Inspector, but a worse judge of timing.”
He explained that their divorce had been finalized only six months before Crossed Wire hit the stands. He said the book sold nearly a million copies in hardcover alone. “To have to put up with Nicholas through all the lean years, then come away with barely more than cab fare…” He shook his head. “The settlement was a pittance compared to what it would’ve been if they had filed a year later.”
What he told me painted a different picture of the woman I had met in the gym. She seemed to have put it all behind her.