CHAPTER 31 JERRY
JERRY
Jerry Knight—who now went by Jezebel—barked out a laugh, which was quickly followed by a curse as a blob of jam from the donut she was holding fell on her shirt.
“What’s so funny?” Ari asked.
“Some podcaster, influencer, vlogger, whatever just showed up at Justin’s place, and they’re broadcasting live from his front yard.”
“I guess we can thank Saige Carlson for that. Can’t Alexa jam the signal?”
“Possibly, if she weren’t lying down in the back seat as Chase speeds along the highway.”
Now Ari chuckled too. “Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be in Saige’s shoes when Alexa fucks with her.”
“It couldn’t happen to a more deserving person. Alexa already cancelled her BuzzHub account.”
The two of them were sitting in the back of a surveillance van that Priest—who was technically their boss, but not really—had borrowed from a friend.
They’d started out on foot, but being exposed gave Jez a prickly feeling.
She’d spent long enough learning to heed her gut that she’d come up with an alternate plan.
Now, a covert camera was trained on the two bikers loitering in the Justice Project’s parking lot a hundred yards away, their faces partially obscured by smoke as they puffed on cigarettes.
The shorter one had started off with a vape, but clearly that wasn’t going well for him.
“Only BuzzHub?”
“She’s juggling projects. The corporate gig, keeping Nolan on track at the vineyard, a side hustle involving national security stuff, and now this dumpster fire. Give her time—she’ll nuke Saige from orbit.” Jez nodded at the screen. “Don’t you know a dude from the Diamondback Devils?”
“From the Vegas chapter.”
“Aren’t they basically the same club?”
“Yes and no. It was started by two brothers, only they had a falling-out and one moved to Fredericksburg. There was a tug-of-war over the name, and the upshot is that they’re both using it.
The question is how Raelene and Serafina got mixed up with them.
Some of the members are friendly on an individual basis, and if they owe you a favour, they pay up, but they’re not good people. ”
“If they’re not good people, I wonder how many of them are incarcerated in Redding’s Hill?”
“Huh. We should ask Alexa to check. Or…wait a second…” Ari pulled out her phone and tapped away.
“Or just ask Google. The answer is that at least three of them have been sent to Redding’s over the past several years, but I can’t say how many of them are still there.
Or whether they’ve moved between the various levels. ”
The Redding’s complex was a sprawling correctional facility in southwest Virginia, consisting of three separate prisons.
The level six supermax was Redding’s Gap, and Levi had started off in there, confined to his very own seven-by-twelve box for twenty-three hours a day.
Each cell contained only a steel slab with a thin mattress for a bed, a steel desk and shelf, and a steel toilet/basin combo.
Meals were served through a slot in the door, and the layout meant inmates couldn’t see any of their fellow guests.
Levi had deserved it. After what he’d done to Ruby, he should have been in a fucking casket.
But over the years, it seemed he’d earned his way through level five at Redding’s Grove by good behaviour, and now he was languishing in level four at Redding’s Hill, where he had access to the cartoon channel and the chow hall. If he was lucky, maybe he got to do laundry for five cents an hour.
“You think he worked out a deal on the inside? Arranged for the Diamondback Devils to do his dirty work?” Jez eyeballed the office building. “Are the lawyers working under duress?”
“From what I’ve learned about Raelene Holtz, she’d chew off their balls if they tried threatening her. She might have lost her faith in the system and joined the carpool Mafia, but she was always a shark in the courtroom. And Serafina brought the pair of them coffee this morning.”
“I’m usually good at working this shit out, but I have no idea what’s going on here.”
“Well, there’s one obvious answer. They think Levi is innocent.”
Jez snorted. “Yeah, right. One look through the evidence, and they’d know he did it.”
“I mean, that’s what they’ve requested.”
“But they only need to read a couple of news articles to get the gist. The Sykes family had a team of PIs and high-priced lawyers working for years, and those knuckleheads couldn’t find a loophole—shouldn’t that tell them something?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yeah, I know. But the only other person with the opportunity to murder Ruby was Justin, who firstly, has the personality of a Care Bear, and secondly, spent the middle of the murder window on the phone to his fiancée, who was a neurotic mess of a woman, and even she stuck by him.”
“To start with.”
“They only broke up because reporters kept hassling her, not because she thought he was guilty.”
“Also, you realise there are a whole bunch of Care Bears, and they each have a different personality?”
“Too much information.”
“I have a daughter, remember? I need to know this stuff.”
“Okay, fine. Justin’s whatever the boring one is.”
“Grumpy Bear?”
“That’ll do.”
“The articles I’ve read said there was camera footage from the house, and it proved nobody came or went during the murder, but what exactly did it show?”
“There was a three-hour window on Saturday night, and that’s when Ruby was killed. Nobody apart from us arrived or left before or after.”
“How did you determine the window?”
“Alexa spoke with her at three minutes past seven. Nothing exciting—just a conversation about groceries. I knocked on her door around ten to see if she wanted a glass of wine. The door was locked, and we now know she didn’t leave, but I assumed she’d gone out because I wasn’t her fucking keeper and she often went out.
So between that and the autopsy results, we were able to work out the time she died.
If I’d just gone upstairs an hour earlier, if the idiot next door hadn’t been playing his damn bass so loud… ”
“It was loud enough to drown out her screams?”
“It was loud enough that I took a sleeping pill when I needed a nap. Now I just live with the insomnia.”
Many times, Jez had wished she’d never moved to Virginia.
Ruby’s broken body wasn’t the first she’d seen—when she was nine, a man had jumped from a building and splattered himself across the sidewalk in front of her—and it wouldn’t be the last. But it was the one that kept her up at night.
Yes, her time in Blackstone Bluff had left her with two major regrets—she hadn’t been able to save her friend, and she’d never found her dad.
Which was the whole reason she’d moved to Fairfax County in the first place.
Sure, she’d found traces of his presence, ephemeral, like vapour trails on an icy morning, but Jeremy Pope himself was a ghost. His mom had passed away when he was seven.
His father was a mystery. A handful of foster parents remembered the boy who’d passed through their home, and the few CIA veterans willing to talk recalled him being the best undercover officer the agency had ever seen.
Perhaps that was how he’d vanished into the ether so easily?
Jez was the only concrete evidence that the man codenamed Jericho had ever existed.
Much like Ruby. Her mom’s alcohol-ravaged liver had given up years ago, and Ruby’s sole legacy was a headstone in Eastlawn Cemetery. Although when Jez visited her grave, she sometimes found a fresh bouquet resting on the cold stone.
“No one else in the house heard anything?”
“Levi claimed he was wearing noise-cancelling headphones, and Justin said Eliza was ‘emotional,’ which is diplo-speak for ‘she was shrieking through the phone.’ Speaking of Justin’s shitty taste in women, what do you think of his latest infatuation?”
Alexa had sent Jez a photo of the woman, along with the message Another fucking redhead. How long do you think this one will last?
“Jessalyn? She’s a definite improvement on her predecessor. I only met Melanie once, but my fingers were itching to slap duct tape over her mouth.”
“I never had the pleasure. I did meet the one before her, though. Rebecca.”
“By chance or on purpose?”
“On purpose. There’s very little in life that happens by chance. Although we were never formally introduced, and I doubt she remembers my face.”
“I heard she cheated.”
“Who do you think sent Justin the photos of her doing the nasty with a man who wasn’t him?”
When Alexa found a bunch of messages between Rebecca and a colleague, Jez had been dispatched to see if they’d followed through on their flirting. Even though she hadn’t seen Justin for years at that point, she still didn’t want him to make yet another dumbass mistake with a woman.
“Damn. Does he know it was you?”
“Of course he doesn’t. Tell me Jessalyn isn’t a raging narcissist or a philanderer or two steps away from a nervous breakdown?”
“She isn’t. I mean, I don’t think so. Can a woman be a philanderer?”
“Why not? We’re all about smashing the patriarchy here.”
Sometimes literally. As a member of Point Team Golf, more commonly known as the Choir, an all-female special forces team that fixed the problems others couldn’t and didn’t officially exist, she’d eliminated a number of problematic jackasses.
A few women too, because she was an equal-opportunities assassin, but statistically, more men wound up in positions where they could do great harm.
Alexa, who’d been pretty antiestablishment since her uncle—a police officer—abused her as a child, had analysed the numbers a while back, and the pattern was clear. Men were bad news.
Alexa also freelanced for the Choir, albeit somewhat grudgingly. She used the codename Echo now, and perhaps one of the strangest parts of this whole fiasco was hearing their old names again, relics of a past they’d both tried to forget.
“But Jessalyn does have one thing you don’t,” Ari said.
“Dubious taste in men?”