It took roughly an hour, but JJ finally got some information that might help them, although it wasn’t at all what she’d expected.
“This phone was purchased in Lakeway by Nancy Wright,” JJ announced as she started to stand.
She instantly squealed when she turned to find Baz and Reese both standing there, obviously waiting for her to finish.
“Announce yourselves, would you?” she grumbled, pressing her hand to her heart. “You could give a girl a heart attack.”
“Nitroglycerin,” Reese muttered, pulling out his phone as he walked away.
“What?” JJ shook her head. “I’m not havin’ a heart attack, dummy. I said Icould.”
“What’d you find?” Baz asked, his tone soft and apologetic.
She held up the phone. “This isn’t our vic’s phone. It was purchased by Nancy Wright. I was able to trace the number back to where it was purchased, and with that, I did a search of local cameras around the time of the sale. Mrs. Wright bought the phone a month ago.”
“Before Jacobs and Wright met their untimely fate,” Baz noted.
“Exactly.”
“Has it been used to make any calls?”
“Just one. To another burner phone on the very first day she purchased it.”
“Who bought that phone?”
JJ shook her head. “No idea. If I had to guess, that phone’s been destroyed.”
Okay, so maybe the information wasn’t as helpful as she’d hoped.
*
Baz spent the next couple of hoursdigging deep into Nancy and Brian Wright’s life while the rest of the team divided and conquered the other couples.
While their main priority was locating Cedric Hawkins, the theory Reese and Brantley were now going off of—the wives had conspired to off each other’s husbands—required that they do a deeper dive on everyone in hopes of pinpointing where he was. If he was being kept somewhere, it wouldn’t be in a public place, which meant they needed to drill down on possible locations. Property owned by one of them seemed the likely answer.
He found it interesting that they’d come to this conclusion so quickly, but Baz figured that had something to do with so many people looking at the same puzzle. A diverse group was going to have the best outcome because they each saw things that the others didn’t. In this case, it had been the reactions of Annie Hawkins and Mallory Jacobs that had thrown up the red flags.
Well, that and the fact that Nancy Wright was nowhere to be found despite the fact Detective Mathis assured them she had agreed to come into the station.
“Who talked to her?” Baz wondered aloud, thinking back to the police report that stated Jacobs’s body had been found in the locker room.
“What?” Evan asked from his desk across the way.
“Mathis said Nancy Wright was comin’ into the station. Do we know who talked to her to confirm that?”
Evan glanced down at the notes on his desk. “I don’t see anything, no.”
“Hey, JJ,” he called up to the loft and repeated the same question.
“Mathis didn’t say,” she answered.
“What’re you thinking?” Evan asked, turning in his chair and stretching back. “Maybe they’ve got help on the inside?”
Baz gave it some thought. “The original detective on the cases is no longer working them…”
“That definitely raises questions.
“And if the police report was altered … the one about Jacobs’s body being found at the country club…”
