CHAPTER 49 JERRY
JERRY
Forget Occam’s razor. This was Occam’s spiderweb.
Jez hadn’t come to Greenway Park to bring passwords.
Well, she had, but that was just an excuse.
She needed to speak with Justin and find out how the fuck his DNA had gotten inside Amie Carlson.
She also needed to bleach her eyeballs after catching Saige Carlson in bed with Tucker Levins, but that would have to wait.
While Jessalyn, Violet, and Jessalyn’s ride-or-die bestie carried on planning recipe videos and a cremation—chestnuts roasted on a flaming corpse, anyone?—Jez beckoned Justin into the living room.
“I’m going to ask a question, and I need a straight answer. Did you fuck Amie Carlson?”
“No, I did not.”
“Not even a quickie at the office?”
“Which part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”
“The part where the autopsy report said the semen found inside her belonged to you.” At least the baby wasn’t his. Amie had been telling the truth when she said Brett was the daddy.
His eyes saucered. “What?”
“Now you understand why we reacquired the body?”
Justin had been pissed about that, kept saying that Amie deserved a proper funeral and her parents needed closure.
Which was valid. But Sin, the resident conspiracy theorist, had bet Jez five bucks that they’d find Justin’s cum inside Amie, so they’d picked her up from the morgue, and Jez lost the bet because she’d believed him when he said he hadn’t slept with the woman.
And at that point, she hadn’t realised how big a clusterfuck they were dealing with.
But once Jez got into the mindset of this being a professional op rather than a collab between a lawyer and a motorcycle club, she’d considered how the Choir would manipulate the evidence.
If they really wanted to make Justin appear guilty, they’d pile on another layer of seemingly irrefutable proof.
It was DNA that had sent Levi to prison.
They’d tried to do the same with Justin.
“Are you serious? Wait, how did you get my DNA?”
“From your coffee mug.” A triviality. “The bigger concern is how Amie got it.”
“I…I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t the only genetic profile present.
The team went over her entire body and all her clothing with specialised swabs, and they also found touch DNA that matched the motherfucker Jessalyn shot in the woods.
But they had to look hard for that. A second-rate ME like the one assigned to Amie’s autopsy would have homed in on the semen leaking out of her and assumed he’d found his man. ”
“And I would’ve been sharing a cell with Levi.”
“I doubt it. He had to earn his way to Level Four. Newbies start by talking to walls in Level Six for a year first,” Jez said, and Justin blanched. “I need a list of every woman you’ve slept with in the past year.”
“Melanie and Jessie. And there was a blonde from a bar, but only once.”
“Did you use a condom with all of them?”
His cheeks reddened. “Not Jessie. Do we have to go into the details?”
“Yes. Is now really a good time to add a kid into the mix?”
“How do you know Jessie isn’t on some other form of birth control?”
“Because Alexa’s a nosy bitch.”
Justin took a calming breath. “Not that it’s any of your business, or hers, but Jessie has fertility problems.”
“No, her idiot of a husband had fertility problems.”
His eyes widened. “What? No, she said it was her.”
“I can believe the asshole made her think it was her fault rather than his.”
“What kind of douche would make his wife go through unnecessary medical procedures?” Justin answered his own question. “Fuck. She said the doctor was one of his golf buddies.”
“Well, there you go. Let me know when the baby shower is so I can make sure I’m busy that day. Tell me more about the blonde.”
If the Choir needed to collect that type of DNA sample, they generally sent Barbie or Tulsa. When you wanted to win at all costs, nothing was off-limits. The problem? A new team had entered the game, and they played with the same attitude.
“She was a nobody. Brax insisted I should expand my horizons, Ava said she was into me, and Grey gave me a condom. We ended up in a hotel room, and the rest is hazy. You really think Jessie could be pregnant?”
Basic biology said yes, but that wasn’t Jez’s problem. “Hazy how? Were you drinking?”
“I’d just broken up with another fiancée; of course I was drinking.”
“And…?”
“And I fucked her. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was gone.”
“What happened to the condom?”
“How the hell should I know? I didn’t even think about it.”
“Well, presumably it was no longer on your dick. Where did you put it?”
He screwed his eyes shut, thinking. “In the trash can.”
Mental note: what did Levi do with his used accessories?
He’d always claimed the sex with Ruby was consensual, and given the presence of new information, that seemed like a reasonable possibility.
Ruby and Levi? Jez could see it. Yes, Levi was weird—usually quiet, often intense, occasionally spaced out—but also hot in a nerdy way, and he’d always been a nice guy until… until he was framed for murder. Shit.
“I’m going to need a description of the blonde. Which bar?”
“I didn’t look at the name.” A shrug. “Grey will know. It was his idea.”
Huh. Grey’s idea. Grey had conveniently been the only housemate missing on the day of the murder, plus he’d known they’d be searching the area near Burr Hill.
He’d gone to Georgetown, the same as Ruby, and he’d hung out with her and her friend Tina on occasion.
Tina, who’d since disappeared. Her moonlight flit hadn’t rung alarm bells at the time because for Celtina Ulrich, taking off in the middle of the night was normal.
She camped in her car to watch a meteor shower in Voyageurs National Park.
She drove to the beach and slept on the sand dunes.
She headed to a music festival, talked her way through security, and partied backstage with the bands.
In some ways, she’d been like Ruby—both were pretty, outgoing, and easy to get along with.
But Ruby hadn’t shared Tina’s reckless streak.
“Yeah, I need to have a chat with Grey.”
“Tell me we’re going to get to the bottom of this?”
“We are. And speaking of the bottom of things, we found Amie’s car.”
“Where?”
“In a lake near Burr Hill, alongside a sunken boat, a rusty lawn chair, and a fifty-gallon drum that may or may not contain a body.”
Thank fuck for underwater drones. Even with a drysuit, diving in near-freezing water wasn’t one of Jez’s favourite activities.
The car had rolled down a slope, dropped over an underwater shelf, and come to rest twenty feet beneath the surface.
For now, that was where it would stay. The state police didn’t have a state-of-the-art drone, or an unlimited budget, or more than a dozen brain cells between them.
Rimer had been keeping a low profile since the episode in the forest. She’d released a statement saying Justin was no longer a person of interest with regard to Amie’s murder, but beyond that? Zip.
Which was also what they had on the blond guy.
He still hadn’t been identified. His prints weren’t in the system, ditto for his DNA, and he had no obvious identifying marks.
No tattoos, no scars, no surgical implants.
Dental records might confirm ID if they found a name, but those were held by individual dentists—there was no searchable national database.
The team’s next path would be genetic genealogy, and Priest knew a guy who knew a gal who might be able to help, but that would take time.
“A body?” Justin asked. “Are you joking?”
“Anything’s possible.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Are the cops going to winch the car out?”
“So they can find your underwear in the glove compartment? I hope not.”
“But I wasn’t in— Oh.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you think Jessie and I are still in danger?”
“They won’t come at you again, not right now. If they do try, it’ll be in a year or two when your guard is down, but we’ll find them before that.”
Justin stared out the window, watching the crew of specialists installing the new security cameras.
Echo had designed the system, and once the team was done here, they’d move on to Norquist Construction’s office.
After learning of Amie’s fate, the staff there had begun coming and going in pairs when they weren’t speaking with the grief therapist Justin had hired.
“How? How will we find them when we have nothing to go on?”
Wait for them to come at Serafina.
“We have leads—your blonde hookup and the dead guy in the morgue,” Jez said. “It would’ve helped if Jessalyn hadn’t shot him in the face. Doesn’t she know she should aim for centre mass?”
Justin just stared at her.
“Okay, we’ll add firearms training to the to-do list.”
Along with working out how a third party could have gotten into Blackstone House to kill Ruby, and what the hell had motivated her murder.
And they needed to do all that before the next national-security-related crisis sent the Choir off on another job.
A regular murder wasn’t a point team priority.
The Bugs—more officially known as Point Team Alpha—were already bitching about blood in their helicopter after Jez scrambled them to provide support following the shooting.
“She doesn’t want to learn to kill people better,” Justin said. “She just wants to make cooking videos and walk her dog without having to worry about being kidnapped.”
“Proper gun control will help with that.”
“So will moving to Abu Dhabi,” he muttered.
“They won’t need to kidnap her there; they’ll just wait for her to drown in her own sweat.”
The UAE was hotter than Vegas, and then there was the fucking humidity…
“What about AC?”
“Is the dog gonna take a dump in the house?” Jez’s phone vibrated, and she checked her messages. “You’d hate being stuck inside.”
Coyote
Are you busy?
Jez was grateful for how easily Zach had fallen into the role of stepdad. He treated Ari’s daughter as if she were his own, which meant he’d gone back to California while Ari—aka Coyote—stayed in Virginia.
Jez
Depends.
Coyote
How are your climbing skills?
Jez
On point. Why?
Coyote
There’s something on the video.
Jez
Be more specific.
Coyote
I can’t because I don’t know what it is. A bird? The end of a rope? A glitch in the matrix?
The end of a rope?
Jez patted Justin on the shoulder. “See you later.”
“What?”
“Places to go, people to fuck with.” A mystery to solve. A man to get out of prison. “Have fun decorating the nursery.”
As she left the property—over the fence into Marion’s yard because it was the cleanest way out—she sent a message to Serafina.
Jez
This isn’t over. We need to talk when you get back from visiting with your boyfriend. J
P.S. Watch your back.
P.P.S. You spelled assholes wrong.