Angela Fernandez arrived at the station early the next morning. She had salt-and-pepper hair and frown lines so deep they made it seem like her nose extended up into her forehead. After Jericho introduced himself, she gave him a long look up and down and clearly found no reason to be impressed.
“What have you got on him?” she grunted.
“Come on upstairs. Can I get you coffee or anything? You must be tired after the flight and that long drive. Have you had breakfast?” Jericho wasn’t sure why he was trying to be charming. Probably just his usual instinct to do whatever would irritate someone the most.
And based on the scowl he received as they climbed to the upper floor, his efforts were paying off. “You can get me the file on this case and somewhere to read it over. That’s all I need.”
“The file won’t tell you that much. I’ve got my notes, but they’re not typed up yet—they’re still preliminary. I’m operating mostly on instinct, here. Not a lot of evidence.”
“No evidence at all?” she asked skeptically as she trudged up the stairs.
“There’s lots of evidence pointing toward the guy we’ve got locked up for the crime. But nothing to indicate Wooderson is involved.”
“So why the hell did you call me? Why’d you drive the sergeant at the station crazy with your questions if you don’t have any damn evidence?”
“I told you. Instinct. And you flying all the way up here suggests my instinct is right, doesn’t it?”
“Instinct won’t put the bastard behind bars where he belongs.”
“Ourcase is still open.We’restill investigating.”Nice. Give up the charm offensive in favor of petty sniping.
Fernandez seemed as unimpressed by the new approach as she’d been by the old. “You must be looking really hard if you’ve got somebody else already charged with the crime.”
“Well, our innocent guy hasn’t killed himself yet, so we’re still doing better than you guys managed.”Shit. Way too far.
He wouldn’t have thought it possible for her frown lines to get deeper, but he’d have been wrong. “Cut the shit and tell me what you’ve got,” she ordered, and sank into the chair he offered in his office.
Jericho ran through it all, and Fernandez nodded at the appropriate spots—the initial assumptions, the growing evidence, the misgivings. It was a relief to be talking to someone who didn’t need to be convinced there was deception going on, and her attitude toward him seemed to improve as they spoke.
“Did he do anything like that in your case?” he asked after telling her about Tux’s fate. “Animal abuse on top of the murder?”
“No. Not that we noticed, at least. Strange for animal mutilation to be anescalation,” she mused. “Usually it would be the other way around. Start with the animals, build to the humans.”
“I think it makes sense in this case.” Jericho almost wished he was wrong, but didn’t think he was. “I don’t think this was about killing a woman. I mean, obviously it was, from our perspective. But for Wooderson? I think it was about Will. He didn’t frame Will to cover up the murder he really wanted to commit. He committed murder so he had something he could use to frame Will. And he killed the cat as another way to hurt Will. Again, no evidence for any of this, but my instinct? It says this is about hurting intellectually disabled people, and the prostitutes are getting dragged in because they’re easy victims.” He felt a bit stupid with so little reason to support his opinion, and finished lamely. “There was just something in his face when we arrested Will. He was so fucking happy. Like, fierce about it. I don’t know.”
He braced himself, but Fernandez didn’t dismiss his theory. “Have you talked to the ex-wife yet?” she asked quietly.
“Haven’t been able to get hold of her.”
“We can help you with that. She’s gone into hiding, more or less, trying to get away from him. But we’ve asked her to check in periodically, and she does.”
“So he was abusive to her?” Frustration flashed through him as he added, “And she still let him take the girls with him?”
“They’re not her kids. They’re from his first wife, and she never adopted them. He wouldn’t let her, she said. And I don’t know if you could call him ‘abusive,’ exactly, but he definitely freaked her out. Nothing she could prove, but, I guess, like you, she was trusting her instincts. He made her feel unsafe. But the point is, I talked to her quite a bit, and got some of his background out of her. Apparently his brother had a developmental delay—a pretty serious one. Died in his teens.”
Jericho had to remind himself to breathe. “Suspicious circumstances?”
“Not enough to twig anything when we hadn’t seen the pattern forming, but it’s worth looking into. I’ll go over my notes and get the details, see what I can find.”
“What about the first wife?”
“Dead. Cancer, though, nothing suspicious about that one.”
“How’d you hook onto him in your case? I mean, you never laid charges against him, so it couldn’t have been too much. What makes you so sure he’s your guy?”
“At the start, nothing. The case seemed open and closed, just like yours. Wooderson was one of the witnesses we had tying the suspect to the scene. A key witness, really. Without his testimony, we probably never would have laid charges. But he saw—hesaidhe saw—the suspect go into the victim’s apartment. Hesaidhe heard raised voices, and he said he saw the perp, Jared Scott, leave about five minutes later with blood on his shirt. We later found the shirt, complete with blood that matched the victim’s, in Scott’s outdoor trash cans.”
Jericho nodded. It would have seemed clear enough, certainly. But it also would have been easy for Wooderson to plant the shirt and make up his testimony. “It was an apartment? But nobody else heard or saw anything? How did Wooderson explain seeing so much? He was just hanging out in the hallway the whole time?”
