Chapter Seventeen #3
“Look in my email.”
He did, and when he found the one reply, he opened it. In it, he found a message back from an attorney. She’d contacted one before he’d gotten there.
“I’m filing. I don’t cheat,” she admitted. “My marriage was over when I told Duke I didn’t want custody of the girls. I’m sure we’ll both file at the same time.”
Well, that helped.
Okay.
He didn’t feel like he’d destroyed a marriage.
Oh, he was still going to have to face Elizabeth, and he was going to have to take one hell of an ass kicking from Duke, but at least he wasn’t a cheater.
But still, this was going to go bad.
Elizabeth could get mean.
And it was going to go nuclear.
Bet on it.
* * * The Blackhawk Family * * *
The Hotel
Monday Ten P.M.
The best part of tonight was getting the hell out of the cemetery, and where they could ensure that no one was watching them.
The last thing they needed was for the killer to change his MO, and find a gun.
Been there.
Done that.
So, as soon as Chris got the coffin closed, and equipment to come remove it from the ground, they packed everything up and headed out.
Chris was at the morgue, managing the body, eyeballs, and horned skull, and she, Callen, and Gene were going to do some work.
As in research.
When she walked into the room, Callen had given her the gift that kept on giving.
A whiteboard.
Yeah, someone knew her well.
Now, after giving the dog a bath, and drying him off, they were settling down.
Security was out getting kibble, and they were locked down inside.
“Okay, so let’s go through this list,” she said, needing to see it all written down. “Gene, you can do the honors,” she admitted.
Callen protested in jest to lighten the mood.
“You let him touch your whiteboard, and that’s not fair. I call foul.”
Elizabeth shrugged.
“You touch my clit. Want to switch?” she asked, not missing a beat.
Gene laughed.
“Hey, Kitten, come purr in my lap.”
Callen pointed at him.
“Bad gay man. Bad!”
That made them all laugh.
When Gene pulled out his notes, she was curious to see who he had written down.
Gene was like the record keeper on their team, and he did a damn good job of it, too.
She trusted him, simply because they thought alike, and he’d run investigations with Ethan long before she had been in charge of this.
As he wrote the names down, she was mentally crossing them off her own list in her head.
“I’m going in order of meeting people, NOT in order of probability they are the killer,” he admitted.
She understood that.
Gene was pretty methodical in how he thought.
‘Devon Slater
Larry Springer
Jeffrey Von Gunter
Trenton Balkin
Bill Farmington
Ernie Kotile
Hector Del Rio
Alexi Redmond’
Immediately, she saw names she didn’t recognize, and the city ME. She actually believed she was having a stroke. Did she miss something?
“Uh, what’s with the names we didn’t go over?” she asked. “Where did they come from, and why does the ME have a place on our list?”
Gene sat down.
“Know how you told MATE to do a deep search on him, and then forward everything to me? Well, she did. Also, the two detectives did the same thing. They found some names. I’m the keeper of the whiteboard, apparently.”
She was curious.
“Okay, then, let’s start at the top. I know Callen is researching everyone we spoke to, and doing runs on their families…”
He stopped her.
“I was at a cemetery. I’ll be doing all that tonight. You’ll have everything as soon as I get it. We aren’t all your favorite like Gene.”
She actually laughed.
“I mean, he’s new so…”
He flipped Gene off because he’d never flip his wife off. As he did, Gene just chuckled.
“Oh, to be her favorite. Ironically, it has nothing to do with my dick, and everything to do with my personality. You should buy one.”
Callen laughed.
He loved bantering with Gene.
It was always amusing.
When she cleared her throat, they knew she wanted to rest at some point, so they needed to get moving.
“I’m recording this,” he said, pointing to his phone. “So we can just forward this to Ethan when we’re done. I know he’s up working on his profile, and getting ready for tomorrow.”
She didn’t mind.
“Love you, EJ. Miss you,” she said, so he’d randomly hear it when he listened back.
Then, Gene began.
“At the top of the list is the person we spoke to first. We’ve had confirmation from Gabe that he’s gay, and on the up and up. That, along with the fact that rich men don’t like to get their hands dirty, tells me he’s in the clear,” he said, looking at Callen to bust his ass.
He didn’t let it go.
“I’m about to get my hands real dirty when I punch you in the mouth.”
Gene winked at him.
“On top of that, we found out that last year, he inherited the place from his father. The two detectives are still working on the dig to see who owns Sundown Real Estate. They haven’t updated me about that yet.”
Elizabeth let him talk.
“Since Ethan thinks that this person has been prepping for this game for a while, Devon doesn’t fit. He can’t get the building taken care of, and we’ve heard he’s tried. Agents Bartlett and Price had that run-in with the head of city council and confirmed that Devon didn’t lie to us.”
That made Elizabeth curious.
“Refresh my memory as to what they found. It’s been a night,” she admitted.
He did by reading their reports that Corbin had filed a few hours ago.
“I put the head of the council on the list, not because he’s cockblocking Devon Slater, but because he was hyper fixated on talking to you. In Corbin’s report, he said the man desperately wanted your number to meet with you.”
Honestly, she wasn’t shocked. Just like the local law wanted to see her, she wouldn’t be shocked some overzealous city council member would too.
Callen spoke up.
“He’s on the list I’m running to see if he’s got any skeletons in his closet.”
She was good with that.
“You don’t have to give me anything on Jeffrey, unless it’s more about his family.”
Callen shook his head.
“Again, still not done, and I put him lower on the list because you told me he wasn’t likely the killer. Do you want me to reorganize that search?”
She shook her head.
Elizabeth’s gut was rarely wrong.
“No, keep your search the way it is. I don’t feel Jeffrey as the killer. I don’t know why, but I don’t.”
That worked for him.
Callen had hoped to be able to remove one name from the search, but he didn’t want to risk it. It appeared they were going to all be researching tonight.
LATE.
Gene continued.
“Larry Springer is on the list because of how worked up he was that Devon was speaking to us without him there. That worried me.”
Callen shared what he did know.
“He’s done. He’s got nothing bad in his past,” he admitted to his wife.
Gene confirmed.
“That matches up with what the two detectives worked on. They said he has no police arrests, or issues. He looks pretty clean.”
She glanced over at Callen.
“Dig deeper. Use MATE’S software. I want to go so deep, he feels violated across town. He didn’t sit well with me, and Ethan said this person is crazy smart. He’d be able to mask his intentions.”
He understood.
“I’ll start that as soon as we’re done,” he offered.
Gene continued.
“We have Jeffrey on the list, and I think that’s self-explanatory,” Gene said. “Unless I can remove him one hundred percent, I’m not comfortable with removing him.”
Callen chimed in.
“At the rate the deep search is going, you’ll have confirmation and his family history by morning.”
She was good with that, too. She wasn’t expecting much on that one.
“Who’s next?” she asked.
He pointed at the list.
“They ran Bill Farmington,” Gene said, meaning the two detectives. “They found he’s clean, but that brings us to his one employee, who coincidentally is the same person who called the body in at the scene.”
She lifted a brow.
“What’s that mean?”
Callen shared.
“Ernie Kotile did two decades in prison for killing his friend who was messing with his woman.”
Oh, well, that meant she needed to talk to him. He was a killer, so that pointed her right at him.
“So you think maybe he liked killing and was killing before he went in?” Callen asked. “When did he get out of prison?”
Gene shared.
“Around the time frame that this started getting wonky. He doesn’t fit timeline-wise, but maybe he had help?”
Elizabeth gasped.
“Gene! Two killers? Don’t put that out there!” she admonished, and that amused him.
He was to the point.
“If I don’t, and it happens, you’ll be cranky that I didn’t bring it up. I’m avoiding the melee for later.”
She snorted.
“Point made,” she admitted. “I would bust your balls about that.”
Oh, he was aware.
“Anyway, Ernie Kotile found the body, and the rule is if you found it, you might have left it, so I put him on the list. We’ll likely have to talk to him unless we can find something to eliminate him by morning.”
She knew he was right.
“Again, point made. We’ll be doing the bulk of our interviews, along with a morgue check-in tomorrow. Who is Hector?” she asked, pointing.
Gene clued her in.
“MATE sent the name of the funeral homeowner over,” he said. “Like you requested.”
She was curious.
“I asked for all the funeral homes,” she admitted, “not just one.”
MATE must have been listening because she popped in, and was sitting on the coffee table in front of them.
How?
They had no clue.
She wasn’t able to sit on things, but with her, she was learning. Honestly, it was best not to ask too many questions. No one wanted to have nightmares about AI taking over the world.
“I ran all of their obituaries, and cross-referenced it against the names on the release paperwork at the morgue. There’s only one funeral home. They all went to the same one.”
She lifted a brow.
“So one funeral home for the last ten people who went into that cemetery, and the others?”
MATE nodded.
“Yes, Mother.”
She sat back and considered it. That opened up a whole new avenue of possibilities. It might lead her down another path—one that actually made sense.