“Not a problem,” Gaynor said before hesitantly adding, “is this in relation to the recent murders of immigrant women that I’m seeing all over the news?”
“I’m afraid I can’t get into it,” Jessie said. “But please, if she contacts you first, ask her to get in touch right away.”
“I will.”
Once Jessie hung up, Devery was the first to say anything.
“This is good, isn’t it?” he suggested hopefully. “If she’s on a plane to Sacramento, she’s not here. That makes her less vulnerable than the others, right?”
“In theory,” Sam said. “As long as our killer isn’t following her there. While we wait, I suggest we keep looking at other potential victims. We don’t want to make any assumptions.”
Jessie agreed. There was no guarantee that Priya Kapoor’s political aspirations made her the next target. But it certainly raised some red flags.
In fact, now that Jessie thought about it, she wondered why it hadn’t done so for Claire Vallejo too. She should have been aware of the new candidate’s campaign goals, especially since they aligned with her own. She seemed pretty plugged in and this was a major oversight.
As she sat at her desk, turning that over in her head, a familiar tingling sensation washed over her. It was the same one she often got when she was on the verge of making some kind of breakthrough in a case. But other times, it hinted that something was off. That’s how it felt now.
“Hey Jamil,” she said to HSS’s senior researcher. “Can you pull up everything you can find on Claire Vallejo?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It didn’t take long.
Within a few minutes, Jessie was reviewing everything that Research could locate on Claire. Sam was clearly thrown by the request but chose not to ask why the sudden interest. Instead, he silently looked over the same information that Jessie was reading.
The first thing that jumped out to Jessie was that, while Claire hadn’t lied to them when they went to her office the first time, what shedidsay left out a lot. Claire had said that her parents died when she was young and that the Vallejos adopted her. That was technically accurate, but woefully misleading.
“Are you seeing this?” she asked Sam, whose face had gone ashen, indicating that he had.
“What?” asked Devery, who didn’t have a copy of the documents.
"Claire Vallejo was born Claire Sanderson," she said. "Her mom died in a fall at home when Claire was five. A couple of years later, her father, Gavin Sanderson, got remarried to a Hungarian woman named Svetlana whom he met on a business trip. A few years after that the new wife killed him."
“What?” Devery asked, dumbfounded. “That seems like a big deal. How is this only coming up now?”
“We never had any reason to look into Claire’s background before,” Sam said quietly. “What made you want to look now?”
“Priya Kapoor’s name should have jumped out at her immediately when we showed her the list,” Jessie said. “There’s no way she’d be unaware of a wealthy, prominent immigrant woman who was running for office on a campaign to help immigrants. So why didn’t she say anything?”
“You’re assuming she knew about her campaign,” Sam objected weakly. “Maybe she just missed it somehow.”
“Maybe,” Jessie said. While she wasn’t buying it, that was possible. And she didn’t want to pile on with Sam if she could avoid it.
Beth waved her hand wildly, apparently excited to share what she’d just discovered.
“Go for it,” Jessie told her.
“One thing Clairedidknow was where each of these women lived,” she said. “Looking back over the last eighteen months, I see that she was on the invite list for events supporting immigrant women at each of the victims homes, as well as one at Kapoor’s. I haven’t yet confirmed that she attended any or all of them, but if she did, she’d have familiarity with the layouts and maybe even tricks to get in.”
“There’s more,” Jamil said. “I’m reviewing the records involving her stepmother’s murder trial. She claimed self-defense, saying that she suffered years of physical abuse at Gavin’s hands and that at one point he threatened her, saying that if she didn’t get her act together, she’d have an ‘accident,’ just like his first wife. Claire testified at the trial, saying she’d never seen her father hurt Svetlana. But apparently that wasn’t convincing to the jury because Svetlana was acquitted. Not long after that, she left the U.S. along with most of Sanderson’s fortune. She returned to Hungary, basically abandoning Claire. The girl didn’t have any close relatives who would take her in and ended up in the system, ultimately getting adopted by the Vallejos.”
Jessie allowed the new information to settle as she tried to make sense of it all. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but the more she thought about it, the more suspicious she became.
“I know we like her, Sam” she said, “but this looks bad. Claire was familiar with all three victims. Yes, she’s an immigrantrights activist, but her priority is a certain type of immigrant. Remember how she said she was less concerned about wealthy women who had the money and husbands to deal with issues than those who didn’t have those resources.”
“That’s an eminently reasonable position,” he countered.
“At first glance, it absolutely is,” she agreed. “But what if her ambivalence toward those women turned to outright hostility? What if she viewed these wealthy immigrant women as unworthy? What if she considered them gold-diggers like the stepmom who killed her dad and took her inheritance?”
