The Night Detectives (David Mapstone Mystery 7)

I wondered how much he really knew her, but shut up and let him continue.

The money she earned was awesome. The Great Recession didn’t hurt her profits. This sure beat taking on more student debt. She set up small accounts at banks around town, depositing cash as if it were her tips as a waitress. Over time, she consolidated them into a smaller number of bigger accounts. She took out loans from her father and paid them back, telling him that she had a job helping a woman stage condos and houses for sale. Her father’s checks were clean to deposit. It was a crude way to launder money, but it was good enough.

The only thing Grace Hunter hadn’t assessed for her business plan was the competition. And one night she was kidnapped, beaten, and raped by America’s Finest Pimp. He told her that he ran the hotel girls in America’s Finest City. He would control her liaisons and take seventy percent of her gross earnings. If she held out on him, he promised, he would beat her to death and take her body out on his boat, feeding her remains to the sharks. For the next three months, she lived in constant fear.

Then she saw Tim again.

He took off the icepack and shook his head. “We thought we’d be safe in O.B. She had money saved. Then she got pregnant and the baby came along. We were happy. She just got a job at Qualcomm and I was going to be a stay-at-home dad when I graduated. I guess she decided to leave me. But I can’t understand how she could leave our baby.”

Lindsey’s face again, whose eyes were such a deep blue that in certain light and certain mood they appeared violet. I thought about the new life I had held in my hands, minutes after gripping the potential death of the Colt Python in the same hands. It was a corny thought, to be sure. But Lindsey’s voice

burned like acid on my face: You did this!

Focus, Mapstone. “Why didn’t AFP get her addicted? That’s the usual M.O. for a pimp.”

“She convinced him she’d be worth more clean. She was good at convincing people. AFP sees himself as a businessman. She paid him straight, every week, until she disappeared and came to be with me.”

“Did it bother you that she’d fucked all those men?”

I phrased it as crudely as I could and he stared at the carpet. He was a natural suspect. Jealousy was always a prime motive, wronged spouses and boyfriends always prime suspects.

“All those men, their dicks inside her.” I spoke tawdry fluently. “It would sure bother me. It would bother me to find that my wife had been fucking even one man other than me.”

Trust me. Only every second, splinters under my skin. But the splinters didn’t want to make me kill her.

I said, “I know you’re a nice guy, Tim. But didn’t it get to you? Did you ever think about killing her when you thought about all those men…”

“No!” His face flushed apple-red.

I took my time, studying his expression and body language, and letting the silence work for me, having watched Peralta interrogate many suspects.

Finally, Tim drew up his wiry frame. “That was in the past. She regretted it. I loved her. I’d rather die than hurt her.”

I believed him. He didn’t have murder in him.

“Did she ever talk about a man named Larry Zisman? He used to be a pro football player. Owned a condo downtown.”

“Was that one of her clients?”

I didn’t answer.

“The name doesn’t sound familiar,” he said. “And she didn’t talk about those men. I didn’t want to know and she didn’t tell me.”

“So you guys lived alone here. What about friends?”

“We’d say hi to neighbors. It’s that kind of place. Grace stayed in touch with Addison…”

“Who the hell is that? A man or a woman?”

“A woman. She was her best friend.”

“Did she visit?”

Tim said that Addison had visited several times, but they never left O.B.

“Addison didn’t know anything about Grace’s, you know, business.”

“I need her contact information.” Then I asked when he had seen Grace last.