Criminal

KITTY TREADWELL ” into the mix, then “ HODGE ,” “ JUICE/DWAYNE MATHISON ,” and finally, “ ANDREW TREADWELL .”
    “What are you doing?” Amanda asked.
    “Puzzle pieces.” She spread the multicolored pages out on the Falcon’s hood. “Let’s put it together.”
    Amanda took in the disparate words. The idea wasn’t so crazy after all. “We should do it chronologically.” She moved the names around as she spoke. “Hank Bennett came into the station, and then Sergeant Hodge sent us to Techwood. Make a new one for Tech.” Evelyn scribbled the word onto a new sheet. “We need to subcategorize these.” Amanda took the pen and started filling in details: dates, times, what they’d been told. The Fury’s engine clicked in the heat. The metal hood singed her skin.
    Evelyn suggested, “I’ll make a timeline.”
    Amanda handed her the pen. She pointed to the different pages as she called out the sequence. “Hank Bennett goes to Sergeant Hodge last Monday. Hodge immediately sends us out to Techwood to take a rape report.” She looked at Evelyn. “Hodge won’t tell us why he sent us in the first place. Obviously, there wasn’t a rape. Why did he send us there?”
    “I’ll ask him again this morning, but he wouldn’t tell me the last four times.”
    Amanda felt the need to tell her, “You were very brave to do that.”
    “Fat lot of good it did.” Evelyn waved away the compliment. “Juice, the pimp, doesn’t belong in here.”
    “Unless he’s the one who killed Jane.”
    “That doesn’t seem likely. Juice was probably in jail when it happened. Or having the crap beaten out of him for resisting arrest.”
    “Okay, let’s push him up here as a remote possibility.” Amanda moved Juice to the periphery. “Next: We’re at the apartment in Techwood. Jane tells us that there are three girls missing: Lucy Bennett, Kitty—who we later find out is Treadwell—and a girl named Mary, last name unknown.”
    “Right.” Evelyn wrote down the information, shooting their names off Jane Delray’s.
    “Then, a few days later, Jane is murdered.”
    “But she was misidentified as Lucy,” Evelyn corrected. “I’ll put an asterisk beside her name, but we should keep it this way just for clarity’s sake.”
    “Right. A person who is thought to be Lucy Bennett is murdered.”
    “I wonder if the brother had a big life insurance policy on her?”
    Amanda supposed being married to an insurance man put these ideas into Evelyn’s head. “Is there a way to check? A registry?”
    “I’ll ask Bill, but just talking it out, I think given Lucy’s life, why murder her when she would eventually kill herself with drugs?” Evelyn looked down at the timeline. “It’s not much of a motive.”
    “Motive.” There was something they hadn’t considered. “Why would someone want to murder Jane?”
    “Are we assuming the killer knew it was Jane whom he was murdering?”
    Amanda’s head was starting to hurt. “I think we have to assume that until we find out otherwise.”
    “Okay. Motive. Jane was very annoying.”
    “True,” Amanda agreed. “But the last person she annoyed other than us was Juice, and if there’s one thing I know about pimps, it’s that they don’t kill their girls. They want them working. They’re product.”
    “I’ll call the jail and see when Juice got out, just to make triple sure.” Evelyn tapped the pen against her chin. “Maybe the murderer was someone who saw Jane talking to us at Techwood? The whole compound lit up when we arrived. There’s no way it wasn’t broadcast to the rooftops that Jane was talking to two police officers.”
    Amanda felt unsettled by the thought that she might’ve been partly responsible for the girl’s death. “Write that down as a possibility.”
    “I hate to think we had anything to do with it. Then again, she wasn’t exactly baking cookies for the PTA.”
    “No,” Amanda agreed, but Evelyn had only seen the pictures. “Have you ever had a manicure?”
    Evelyn looked at her fingernails, which were clear-coated, just like Amanda’s. “Bill treated me to one last Christmas. I can’t say that I enjoyed having a stranger touch my hands.”
    “Jane’s fingernails were perfect. They were filed and polished. I couldn’t’ve done a better job myself.”
    “That manicure was ridiculously expensive. I can’t imagine Jane having the money.”
    “No, and if she did, she’d spend it on drugs, not getting her fingernails