Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Fifteen minutes later, she was on the way to HQ, zipping through the Secret Service checkpoint and across town in record time.
Maybe she ought to start working overnights again to avoid the traffic.
She’d done third shift early in her career, and it’d been a bitch.
Her body’s internal clock had never fully made the adjustment, meaning she’d walked around in zombie mode for two full years before she’d been mercifully moved to days.
The other benefit of showing up to work in the middle of the night was no press staked outside the front door.
She parked in the main parking lot and walked into the building, enjoying the freedom to come to work without being stalked by reporters.
The first person she encountered inside was the last person she expected to see there at that hour.
“What’s up, Chief?”
“Vice did a big sweep on the gambling ring tonight. A lot of unhappy people in lockup, all of them claiming to be innocent bystanders, of course.”
“Of course. Did Public Affairs get the word out about the arrests?”
“They’re working on it now.”
“Good. We need all the positive publicity we can get.”
“You mean I need all the positive publicity.” Though he looked tired, he seemed measurably better than he had the last time she saw him. “Celia’s statement has helped to calm things.”
“That’s great. I’m glad to hear it.”
“I appreciate it, and I’ll tell her so when I see her. We’re having lunch the day after tomorrow.”
“It’s good of you to do that.”
“She’s my friend as much as he was.”
Because there was no one else around, Sam hugged him. “You’re the best.” She let go of him before she could lose her composure and headed for the pit.
“What’re you doing here?” he called after her.
“Pulling a thread,” she said over her shoulder.
In the pit, she found Dani Carlucci and Giselle “Gigi” Dominguez working in their side-by-side cubicles. While Dominguez was a petite, curvy Latina, Carlucci was tall, blonde and stacked. “Ladies, what’ve we got?”
“Let’s go in the conference room, and we’ll draw you a picture,” Carlucci said. With two more years on the job, she was the senior partner.
Sam clapped her hands. “Oh, I love pictures!”
In the conference room, Sam noticed the large dry-erase board that’d recently held the details of her father’s case had been wiped clean.
Case closed.
She took a deep breath and fought through the wave of grief that came over her when she hadn’t been expecting it.
That’s how grief worked, or so she’d been told.
Always there, waiting to surge to the surface to remind you that your loved one is gone forever, even when you’re in the middle of something else.
Dominguez dragged the empty dry-erase board closer to the table and wrote Bryce Massey’s name at the top. She drew a line to Tara Weber and another line to Delany Russo and then connected the two women to each other.
“We believe that Bryce paid Delany to keep tabs on Tara for him,” Carlucci said after Dominguez had completed the drawing.
“Holy bombshell, Batman,” Sam said. “Do tell.”
Dominguez produced financials for both parties with various transactions highlighted. “Note that the dates of the withdrawals from his account match the dates of deposit for the same amounts in hers.”
Sam’s spine buzzed with sensation, which is what happened when they closed in on murdering scumbags. “Tell me more.”
Dominguez placed text message records on the table in front of Sam.
“This came from Detective Green’s review of the phone data.
The first set of messages is between Tara and Bryce.
We went back to the week in early February when the baby was most likely conceived and found that Tara was in close touch with Bryce and they spent time together. ”
Sam scanned the text exchanges that showed Bryce pleading with Tara to see him so they could talk.
At first, Tara put him off, claiming she was busy and only in town for the week before traveling for work again.
After some more back-and-forth, she agreed to let him come over for a short visit on January 31.
“Do we have any way of knowing how long he stayed?”
“Until noon the next day,” Carlucci said, handing another page to Sam.
I’ve just left you and I already miss you. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to have this time with you, babe. I still think we can put things back together.
The message had been sent at 12:12 p.m.
“What was her reply?”
“She didn’t reply. As far as we can tell, she never again replied to a message from him.
We’ve gone through her emails and calls as well.
While he reached out to her repeatedly, it appears she never replied.
Shortly after that, he starts texting Delany, reminding her they have a deal.
So we went back to when he and Tara first broke up and found that he’d started paying Delany around that time.
We found multiple exchanges between them about Tara and a few that indicate there might be more to their ‘friendship’ than only spying. ”
Sam mulled over the information, spinning it around in her mind every which way.
“Any clue about how the building video might’ve gotten wiped? The two of them don’t seem capable of thinking it through to that extent.”
“We didn’t see anything about that,” Carlucci said.
“Let’s pick him up.”
“Now?” Carlucci asked.
“Right now.” Sam told them what she’d learned from Isabel about Bryce’s so-called alibi. “And while we’re at it, I want to bring Delany in, too.” Adrenaline rushed through her system the way it did when they were close to closing a case.
She called for backup from Patrol, asked them to pick up Delany and to keep her separate from Massey at HQ so they didn’t know the other was there. Sam drove Carlucci and Dominguez to Massey’s house near Rock Creek Park. As they drove, she talked out the case with her detectives.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. Massey broke up with Tara because she wanted to get married and he didn’t.
But he never expected her to move on from him.
He expected her to stay in close touch, to continue the dance they’d done for the previous six years while she held out hoping for more, which he never intended to give her.
Then they reunite for a night, things are like they used to be, and he believes he’s got her back where he wants her—taking the scraps he’s willing to give her, filled with hope that he might change his mind about a future together.
Except this time, she’s wise to him. Maybe she feels weak for letting him back in her bed for that one night, but she’s upset that things didn’t work out with Nelson.
After spending that time with Bryce, she’s more resolved than ever to move on without him.
Maybe she decided after being with Massey again and realizing he was never going to change that she wanted a baby more than a relationship.
She has the nights with Wilton and Finley.
And when she gave the story to Finley, she was sending a huge ‘fuck you’ to Massey, letting him know that she was done with him and had moved on to much bigger fish, and she was sending a massive ‘fuck you’ to the president, for whom she may have developed an emotional attachment until he blew her off after the affair and refused to acknowledge her child could be his. ”
“Why would someone so media savvy bring this firestorm down on herself though?” Carlucci asked.
“Because she was sick of being dicked around by men and wanted them all to suffer.”
“I like it,” Dominguez said in her usual low-key way.
“I freaking love it,” Sam said. “Well, except for the part about Tara being dead.”
“My question is still who killed Tara though,” Carlucci said. “Massey has an airtight alibi. He was at work all day.”
“I’m going to bet that he left for a time, perhaps when his airtight alibi was at lunch.
” The more she delved into this line of reasoning, the more she liked it.
“And I’m going to bet that Delany let him in, perhaps not knowing that he intended to kill Tara, but we’re going to use her to get to him.
” Sam pounded her hand on the steering wheel. “Sometimes I fucking love this job.”
The other two detectives laughed.
“You’re a weirdo, Lieutenant,” Carlucci said.
“That’s a compliment to me, as you know. The thing that makes me mad is that I should’ve looked harder at him after he tried to intimidate me on the street.”
Dominguez looked at her with surprise. “What? When did that happen?”
Sam filled them in on the incident with Massey. “I thought he was being a typical tool, trying to show me how big his dick was. After his assistant put him at work all day, I sort of wrote him off. The thing on the street should’ve been a heads-up to me, but I didn’t take it that way.”
“You needed more info before it made sense to you,” Dominguez said. “Nothing wrong with that. In the end, that and the phone data helped to lead us to him.”
As they pulled onto his street, Sam zeroed in on his townhouse, which is how she saw him coming down the stairs carrying a box.
She stopped the car in the middle of the street.
“He’s running. Let’s go.” After taking one minute to contact Patrol to tell them they were moving in, Sam got out of the car and left the door open, so as not to alert him to their presence.
Because Carlucci and Dominguez had connected the dots that led to him, Sam gestured for them to go ahead and make the arrest.
He was so focused on what he was doing, the detectives were able to walk right up behind him.
Carlucci pressed her weapon into his back. “Freeze.”