CHAPTER TWELVE
Victor Ruiz was not what Kari had expected. She'd pictured someone grizzled and cynical, the kind of veteran first responder who'd seen everything and believed nothing.
He looked up as she approached, wariness flickering across his features. "You're the detective? The one Rachel Carter called about?"
"Kari Blackhorse. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me."
"I almost didn't." Ruiz gestured to the bench across from him, and Kari sat.
"The cops who responded to that call made it pretty clear they weren't interested in my observations.
Said I was overthinking it. Said I didn't understand how things work in the modeling industry.
" His jaw tightened. "Fifteen years on this job, and suddenly I don't know what an overdose looks like. "
Kari heard the frustration in his voice, the particular sting of being dismissed by people who should have listened. She knew that feeling well. "Tell me what you saw. Take your time."
Ruiz was quiet for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Behind them, the fire station hummed with quiet activity, someone washing a truck, voices drifting from inside. When he spoke, his voice was measured, precise, the voice of someone trained to observe and report.
"We got the call around seven in the morning.
Welfare check requested by a roommate who'd come home and found the door locked from inside.
Building manager let us in." He took a sip of coffee, his eyes distant, seeing something that wasn't here.
"The victim was on the bed. Young woman, early twenties.
At first glance, it looked like a standard overdose.
Empty pill bottles on the nightstand, suicide note on the desk. "
"At first glance," Kari repeated. "What changed?"
"The details. The things that didn't add up.
" Ruiz set down his coffee cup, his hands moving as he talked, unconsciously recreating the scene.
"The pill bottles were lined up perfectly on the nightstand.
Three of them, spaced evenly apart, labels facing outward.
I've responded to hundreds of overdoses.
When someone takes a bunch of pills, they don't arrange the bottles like they're setting up a display.
They grab and swallow. The bottles end up scattered, tipped over, knocked on the floor. "
Kari could picture it. Someone staging the scene, not understanding how real overdoses looked. "What else?"
"The suicide note. It was on the desk, printed out on regular paper.
Generic font, no handwriting. And the language was.
.." He searched for the right word. "Clinical.
'I have decided to end my life because I can no longer endure the pressures of my career.
' That's almost word for word what it said.
No one writes like that when they're in that kind of pain.
Real suicide notes are messy. They're emotional.
They're addressed to specific people. This read like someone had Googled 'how to write a suicide note' and followed a template. "
Kari felt a chill run through her despite the afternoon heat. "You told this to the responding officers?"
"I told them all of it. The bottles, the note, the position of the body.
" Ruiz's voice took on an edge. "She was lying perfectly straight on her back, hands folded on her stomach, like someone had posed her.
People don't die that way from pills. They curl up, or they fall off the bed, or they end up in some awkward position because the body doesn't cooperate when it's shutting down. "
"And they dismissed all of it."
"One of them laughed. Said I was watching too many crime shows." The memory clearly still stung. "The other one just wrote it up as a straightforward OD and that was that. Case closed before it was ever really opened."
Kari sat with that for a moment. A staged scene, dismissed by officers who saw what they expected to see. A young woman dead under suspicious circumstances, filed away as just another casualty of a cruel industry.
"Mr. Ruiz, have you ever seen anything like this before? In your fifteen years on the job?"
He didn't answer immediately. His hands wrapped around his coffee cup, and he stared at the table for a long moment. When he looked up, there was something troubled in his eyes.
"Once. About eight months ago. Different part of the city, different circumstances.
Young woman, also a model, also an apparent overdose.
" He spoke slowly, as if he were working something out as he said it.
"I didn't respond to that one personally, but I heard about it from a colleague.
He mentioned the same thing I noticed with Escalante.
The scene felt wrong. Too neat, too organized.
Like someone had cleaned up before we got there. "
"Did he report his concerns?"
"He tried. Same result. The cops didn't want to hear it. Another sad story about a girl who couldn't handle the pressure." Ruiz shook his head. "I remember thinking at the time that it was strange, two similar situations so close together. But I didn't connect them. Didn't have any reason to."
"Until now."
"Until now." He met her eyes directly. "You think someone's killing these girls and making it look like suicide."
It wasn't a question, and Kari didn't treat it as one. "We're talking about women connected to the same industry, dying under similar circumstances, with details that trained observers say don't add up. That's not a coincidence."
"No," Ruiz agreed quietly. "It's not."
"Do you remember the name of the other victim? The one from eight months ago?"
Ruiz thought for a moment. "Jennifer something. Jennifer Blake, maybe? Or Baker? I can try to find out from my colleague, if you want."
"Please. Anything you can tell me would help." Kari pulled out one of her cards and handed it across the table. "My cell is on the back. Call me if you remember anything else, or if you hear about any other cases that fit the pattern."
Ruiz took the card and studied it. "Navajo Nation Police. You're a long way from home."
"Everyone keeps telling me that."
"Maybe because it's true." But there was warmth in his voice now, a kind of respect that hadn't been there at the start of the conversation. "The girl who's missing. Tayen. Is she connected to Escalante?"
"They were friends. They worked for the same agency. And Tayen disappeared the same day Amanda died."
Ruiz was quiet for a moment, processing that. "You think she saw something. Or knew something."
"I think it's possible." Kari stood, sensing that she'd gotten everything she was going to get for now. "Thank you for talking to me, Mr. Ruiz. I know it wasn't easy, after the way you were treated."
"Victor." He stood as well and extended his hand. "Find out what happened to that girl, Detective. Someone should give a damn about these women, even if the system doesn't."
Kari drove back toward her hotel, her mind churning through everything Ruiz had told her. Who would have access to these women? Who would know their schedules, their vulnerabilities, their isolation from family and support systems?
The agency. The photographers. The recruiters who found them and brought them to L.A. in the first place.
Blake Montgomery had seemed genuinely upset about Amanda's death, but he'd also admitted to pushing models to emotional extremes.
Jessica Vance was cold and calculating, more worried about her reputation than her models' lives.
And Diana Shepherd, the one who seemed so caring, had been the one to lie about Amanda's death.
Any of them could be involved. Or none of them. Kari still didn't have enough information to narrow it down.
She needed to find out more about Image Management. The CEO, Vanessa Caldwell, still hadn't returned her call, and Kari was tired of waiting. She was going to track them down.
She needed to look into the death from eight months ago, see if Jennifer Blake or Baker was connected to the same network of agencies and photographers. And she needed to keep pushing on Amanda's death, see if she could get the official investigation reopened.
Most of all, she needed to find Tayen before whoever was behind this decided she was a liability that needed to be eliminated.
She wondered, not for the first time, if she was in over her head. She was a tribal police detective operating far outside her jurisdiction, chasing shadows in a city she didn't know, trying to find a girl who might already be dead.
But Tayen Chee was family. And Kari had made a promise.
She got out of the car and headed inside to make more calls, dig through more records, pull on more threads.
Somewhere in this maze of agencies and photographers and dead young women was an answer. She just had to find it.