The Competition - [21]
Bailey and I had managed to nail Erling, but when Lilah found out that he was in custody, she hired an inmate to kill him. He’d always been loyal to her, but she couldn’t be sure that loyalty would last when he was facing a sentence of life without parole. A Nazi Low Rider serving a lifetime sentence shanked Erling.
Certain that Erling would soon be sleeping with the fishes, Lilah hopped a private jet to parts unknown. But right before takeoff, she’d texted me with information about my sister. Reports that might prove Romy, who’d been abducted more than twenty-five years ago, was still alive. The text was Lilah’s way of saying that if I left her alone, she might get me more information on Romy’s whereabouts. But if I kept after her…well, whatever form her retribution took, it was almost guaranteed to be lethal for Bailey and me.
But I one-upped Lilah: Erling had survived the attack, barely. He was in a coma. I answered her text with a photo of him in the hospital. I left out the part about him being in a coma, the better to make her sweat.
Graden had checked out the reports she’d sent me about Romy and found they were legit. But they were more than twenty-five years old and so far there’s been no further trace of my sister. Nor has there been any trace of Lilah, though both Graden and the district attorney investigators have been actively hunting for her.
If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have had any concerns about my personal safety, though I certainly would’ve been pissed off that a criminal had escaped justice. But Lilah was a whole different story. Bailey says she’s got a bizarre obsession with me. I can’t argue. At one point, Lilah followed Graden to a downtown bar and hit on him-and said just enough to make sure he’d tell me about it. To make matters worse, Lilah had the resources to disappear-or reappear-almost anywhere, at will. I try not to dwell on the fact that she’s still out there, but since she’s unlikely to get therapy for her obsession, let alone her sociopathy, I keep one eye on the rearview-and a loaded gun in my purse.
I lingered over coffee, thinking about our next move. We needed to push forward harder and faster on Otis Barney. I’d hoped we could track him through his cell phone, but his parents told us he’d lost it recently. It seemed to be true. There had been no activity on his number for the past five days. The unis had checked out his calls and texts for the past month and found nothing of interest. The calls were mainly to and from his mom and dad, with a few to video game companies and electronics stores. So he really did seem to be the loner Marnie and his parents had described.
That was bad news for us, because it made it that much harder to get information on where he might be. Worse, it meant that identifying his buddy, the second shooter, would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. We’d have to talk to everyone in his classes-and maybe the whole school-and hope someone could give us a lead. It would be a major time suck, and it might not even pay off. The only other option-and one that would give us much faster results-was to get into Otis’s computer, if he had one. But for that, we’d need a search warrant. I looked at my clock radio. It was a little after seven. J.D. would be in his chambers soon. If I headed for the office right now, I could bang out the warrant in time to catch him before he got swamped with his daily calendar.
But there was one thing Bailey could do in the meantime. I called her on the way to the courthouse. And caught her in one foul mood.
“I said I’d meet you at the station,” Bailey said. “What couldn’t wait another half hour?”
“We’ve got to get that photo of the shooter’s wrist enhanced so we can show it to-”
“Already done, Knight. It should be on my desk by the time I get to the station. I’d ask if there’s anything else, but I don’t want to know.”
“Actually, you might.” I told her I was going to put together a warrant for Otis’s computer.
“Shouldn’t take you long,” she said. “We’ve got diddly-squat. Who’re you going to take it to?”
“J.D.”
Bailey snorted. “Way to work the friend angle, girl. Guess it’s worth a try. You need me there?”
“Nah, I can sign this one. I’ll meet you at the station.” I like to do my begging in private.
Bailey was right, it didn’t take me long to write the warrant. I pumped up the probable cause as best I could, even waxed a little poetic about the shooter’s crazy laugh, and got down to J.D.’s courtroom by eight o’clock. I was in luck. The hoards hadn’t descended yet. The clerk let me straight into chambers. I kept my pitch short and handed J.D. the warrant with a silent prayer.
I watched his face as he scanned the probable cause affidavit; I squeezed the arms of my chair to keep from fidgeting. I guess it was true that I was banking on his friendship to make him a little more sympathetic to the cause, but I was also counting on J.D.’s experience as a former detective in Robbery-Homicide to know how badly we needed to speed up the investigation. He finished reading and dropped the pages on his desk.
