He was right.
Jules took a deep breath, and exhaled it slowly.
Sam was obviously amused, but trying hard to hide it. “Is it possible that in all these years, I’ve never seen you ripshit angry before this? I mean, it kinda makes sense you would go allFucking hell, Starrett, since you’ve studied at the feet of the great Max Bhagat.” Jules’s beloved former boss at the FBI was known for his ability to be impossibly, inhumanly cool—until he full-on blew a gasket.
“Gavin’s death really threw me,” Jules admitted. “I keep thinking, what did I miss? And who killed him?”
Sam made aprobably notnoise and face as he continued to look at his phone.
“And yeah, I know, he was old, and old people die ofnatural causes like heart attacks, and on top of that, this is not that kind of case, and... God, I’m not happy about any of this. Of course, I’m not happy about much right now, and I’mreallynot happy when shit like this happens, reminding me—I mean, grinding my face in the fact that I’m not where I want to be,” Jules continued. “Knocking on doors without a badge, not getting full background material when—Jesus Christ. This is on us. We should’ve at least googled them. Tell me this wasn’t a major news story—producer Milton Devonshire’s teenage son killing a woman after stealing his father’s car?”
“Oh, it was.” Sam was still scrolling through no doubt countless accounts of the death and the arrest and the trial and the conviction. “Let’s see...”
Jules took out his own phone and did the same and... God, really all he’d had to do was google Milt Devonshire Junior and the stories about the manslaughter conviction came right up.
“Wig-Milt was... seventeen at the time.” Sam gave an overview of what he’d found—what Jules was finding, too.
One of the top links was to a YouTube video with the headlineLeaked Video Evidence Prompts Guilty Plea.It was a local news report—channel five—and Jules clicked on it as Sam expounded.
“He stole Daddy’s car, a Jaguar XJ220, got shitfaced—drugsandalcohol—and a woman was killed when she was out for an early morning run. It happened in Van Nuys—not too far from here. It didn’t go to trial. Son pled a deal, went to juvie, got out when he was twenty-one.” He looked up at Jules. “Rich-white-boy justice in action.”
Theskipmessage for the pre-video commercial finally popped up, so Jules hit it and turned up the volume on his phone as Sam came to look over his shoulder.
“Leaked video footage,” the news anchor reported in a chirpy, upbeat voice that didn’t quite match the seriousness of the story, “from the hit-and-run case that’s rocked Hollywood. Evidence has surfaced that clearly shows the son of television producer Milton Devonshire behind the wheel of his father’s car in the early hours on the morning that a thirty-five year old woman was killed in a deadly hit-and-run.”
Sure enough, playing on the screen to the anchor’s voice-over was grainy footage from what had to be an outside security camera of this estate’s driveway, right in front of the four-bay garage.
“Huh,” Jules said. Something was... off. The angle was a little odd—the frame of the shot wasn’t centered on the full driveway, but maybe there was more than one camera out there.
The video showed the car, haphazardly parked in the middle of the driveway, a blurry figure slumped behind the steering wheel as the timecode essentially sped around the clock—in super fast-forward mode. Then the timestamp slowed to normal speed as a woman wearing an apron came out onto the driveway.
Was that Helen the housekeeper? Had to be.
She was clearly agitated by what she saw, and ran back toward the house, whereupon an elderly man, dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas, slippers on his feet, came back out with her, with some urgency. Together they opened the car door and reached for what appeared to be a teenaged boy who was behind the wheel. The video skipped or maybe glitched a little, and then the kid was down on the driveway, unresponsive. The man crouched beside him—conveniently on the non-camera side so there was as clear as possible a shot of the boy’s face—as the woman ran back into the house, no doubt to call for help.
“Seventeen year old Milton Devonshire Junior has pled guilty to vehicular manslaughter and DUI charges,” the anchor spoke over the footage. “He’ll be arraigned in court this afternoon. The family of the victim, Marina Santana, has released a statement asking for privacy at this time... When we come back, local dad mistaken for homeless man fights city hall...” Jules closed the clip.
“Marina Santana, huh?” Sam said, no doubt googling her name, because yeah, this was the last time they were going to makethatmistake.
“With any luck she had a wife named Emily Johnson,” Jules said, going back to his own scrolling and searching.
“No wife so far,” Sam said. “A sister—Carlotta, and a father Frank, both Santanas and... Okay, I just googledhit and run victim Marina Santana daughterand got an Elizabeth Santana. ”
“Everyone’s named Santana.” Jules saw that on his phone, too.
“I guess the daughter’s biological father wasn’t in the picture.”
“It’s Elizabeth, not Emily?”
“Yeah.” Sam looked up, contrite. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to do this yesterday.”
“I didn’t either, so...” Jules shook his head in disgust. Yes, they’d been busy, and yes, he’d had too much to do and too little time to do it. This morning, Robin had wanted to talk to him about something, too—please gods, let it be that he’d found the perfect house and not that he wanted to try again to have a baby because Jesus, Jules just could not. Bring a new life into this dumpster fire of a messed up world? Please, no.
But God, the idea of finding the time it was going to take to have an in-depth, heartfelt, honest conversation that was going to end with Robin bitterly disappointed wasoverwhelming. Especially right now in this moment of intense failure.
Hit and run.
Hit and freaking run.
