CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jessie tried to stay positive but it was hard.
The afternoon was starting to bleed away. And despite the assistance of every available member of the HSS team, they weren’t any closer to having a solid suspect.
They’d gone through every member of Thomas Bradford’s Traditional Citizenry group, reviewing criminal records and checking protest videos to identify them. They even briefly got help from Detectives Susannah Valentine, Jim Nettles, and Officer Harper Devery, who all took several names on the list.
By the time Valentine and Nettles had to leave to conduct an interview for their own case, they had cleared ten Traditional Citizenry members based on their presence at the protest that occurred when Yuki Tanaka was murdered.
Devery was able to stick around a little longer than that before he had to go back out on patrol, and cleared another half dozen members.
That left Jessie, Sam, Jamil, and Beth to follow up on the other 17 members of the anti-immigration group.
Jessie supposed she should have been happy that the group had fewer than 35 members.
She’d assumed it would be in the hundreds.
Still, that was a lot of folks who hated another group of people enough to pay membership dues and get arrested.
It was actually Jamil who made the connection that gave Jessie hope for the first time in nearly an hour. While the rest of them were reviewing hate group members, he paused to follow up on some database searches he’d done looking for other links between the two victims. One had just popped up.
“They had the same lawyer,” he said.
“Who did?” Sam asked.
“According to my data, Maria Cain and Yuki Tanaka had the same immigration attorney,” Jamil said. “His name is Richard Paulson.”
“That’s promising,” Sam said. “Maybe he’s aware of threats that the couples might have received but not passed on to the authorities.”
“Why wouldn’t they pass any threats on?” Beth asked.
“Based on the kind of vitriol we’re seeing from groups like Traditional Citizenry,” Sam said, “they might have wanted to handle things more quietly than by pursuing charges against such volatile people.”
Jessie wasn’t sure that she agreed with Sam’s analysis.
She was skeptical that the couples would refer threats to their immigration attorney rather than the cops.
That felt like an extremely passive reaction, especially from wealthy, ambitious men who were proactive in other parts of their lives.
But she still thought it was worth talking to Paulson.
“Even if that theory doesn’t pan out,” she added diplomatically, “he might be aware of folks within the system with grudges. What if there was an immigration official who seemed to have it in for them? What if some technocrat at a particular agency was making it hard for them to get applications approved? It might open up whole new avenues of investigation.”
“Wouldn’t an applicant have already filed a complaint about someone like that?” Beth pressed.
“Maybe they did,” Jessie told her, “but we just haven’t had any reason to look at that kind of data until now.
In fact, up until this point, we’ve assumed the killer is some kind of extremist outside the system.
What if they’re an extremist inside the system?
They’d have all kinds of intimate details about these couples, and especially the women pursuing residency.
They’d know home addresses. Hell, maybe they even went to these houses to conduct interviews. ”
Jessie’s and Sam’s phones pinged simultaneously.
“That was me sending you the address for Paulson’s home,” Jamil said. “Apparently he runs his law practice from there.”
“Great,” Jessie replied, standing up. “While we talk to him, please stay on the Traditional Citizenry beat. Let us know if any other members pop with criminal records or lack of an alibi for the night of the protest.”
“Will do,” Jamil said.
Jessie turned to Sam.
“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m excited to talk to a lawyer. We should move quick, before any other shoes drop.”
Sam smiled as he stood up.
“The way I plan to drive, that won’t be a problem.”