“You don’t know what you’re talkingabout,” Franks scoffed. “I’m not a fucking Nazi.”
“All right,” Smith said, holding up ahand of caution to stop Franks from going any further.
“No, this bitch thinks I’m a racistasshole,” Franks said. “I’m not going to just sit here and take it!”
Zoe almost thought Shelley had gone toofar. They weren’t going to get any cooperation out of Franks, not with himtaking this attitude. They were more likely to meet resistance at every step ofthe way. If he was the killer, and now that was starting to look like it couldreally be an “if,” he wasn’t going to admit to it easily.
“All right,” Shelley said, mirroring thelawyer, one hand up in deference. “Let’s say that you’re telling the truth.That you aren’t connected to the murders in any way. Where were you last night?”
Franks blinked at the change of pace,cast around himself for the facts. “I finished my last client about half pastsix. Then I went home.”
“Straight home? No stop-offs ordiversions?”
Franks nodded. “Straight home. I stayedin all night. I was tired from the day’s work.”
“And someone can corroborate this?”Shelley asked. She had a pen in her hand, hovering in midair over a piece ofpaper, her eyebrow raised as if waiting for him to give her the names to writedown.
Franks hesitated. “… I live on my own,”he said.
Shelley put the pen down, her shouldersangling backward, facing him head on, the intention to write disappearing. “Soyou’re telling me that no one can confirm you went straight home and stayedthere.”
“Maybe the neighbors saw me,” Franksoffered.
Shelley shook her head. “I’ll needsomething much stronger than that, Jasper. Even if someone saw you get home,who’s to say you didn’t go back out again later?”
He struggled, shaking his head. “I didn’tgo anywhere. Is that when the murder happened?”
“What about two days ago, midday?”Shelley pressed on, ignoring his question.
“Two days ago…?” Franks tracked it backin his head, his eyes racing side to side as he figured it out internally. “Itwas my day off. We’re open weekends, so we tend to take a day off in the week.”
“And what did you do?”
Franks spluttered, his composure shakenin a different way now. Shelley had deftly diffused his rage by taking him on atangent that shot away from his previous contentions, and now he was rattled,unsure of himself. It was masterfully done. Zoe couldn’t help but sit in awe.Franks was losing it, his posture sinking, the lines of his body smoothingdownwards into dejection. “I stayed at home all day. On my own.”
“Let’s stop beating around the bushhere, Jasper,” Shelley said. She pulled three photographs out from the insideof her file and splayed them out in front of him. Three portraits, all faced sothat they looked out at him from the print. One for each of the three victims. “Youknow these people, don’t you?”
Jasper looked at the photographs,confusion and disorientation clouding his features. He blinked a couple of times,then looked at his lawyer.
After some form of silent communicationhad passed between them, something that Zoe couldn’t interpret, Jasper noddedhis head slowly.
“Him, and her,” he said, pointing atJohn Dowling and Callie Everard. “I know them. I gave them tattoos. I don’tknow the other one.”
Zoe exchanged a glance with Shelley.Curiouser and curiouser. If her budding theory was right, and Naomi Karling hadbeen a random attack in which the killer had no intention at all of setting heralight, then it would fit.
Jasper Franks could be the man who setCallie and John on fire after cutting their throats, for all his skillfuldenial and anger.
There was a knock on the door, and allfour parties in the room looked up to see one of the local LAPD officers pokinghis head through the newly opened gap. “Agent Rose?” he said. He had chosen thewrong agent, of course, since Zoe was the one in charge of the investigation;still, it wasn’t as though she minded. It was a common mistake. “There’ssomething you need to see.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Zoe joined Shelley in looking over thebox of items that had been pulled out of Franks’s apartment, a search conductedat the same time as their interview. They had paused the tape, left Frankssweating alone with his lawyer, to examine what had been found.
The LAPD search had been thorough. Theyfound some things that Franks probably never thought anyone was going to find.
Captain Warburton had personallyoverseen the sweep, and had stayed with the boxes to brief them. “These wereall in a cupboard, hidden away behind a false back. It was a fairly poor job.The wood colors didn’t even match, and it was bowing out from the weight ofeverything stacked behind it.”
Zoe lifted a few items out of the box inher gloved hands, examining them. A World War Two–era pistol, the metal dulland scuffed from use in combat. Several medals, each with faded ribbons andtarnished metal, but clearly from the same timeframe.
More disturbing was the fact that one ofthem, a dull bronze cross with a red, white, and black striped ribbon, bore aswastika imprinted in the center.
A Nazi medal.
“This proves his connection to the whitesupremacists,” Zoe said, holding it up for Shelley to see. “He may not be amember of the group, but he clearly sympathizes with their outlook.”
“There’s more where that came from,”Warburton said grimly. “The front of the cabinet was more innocuous stuff, old postcardsand rations tins, stuff from allied countries. We found fifteen different Nazimedals, and some old uniform pieces and armbands.”
Zoe sifted through the box, gingerlylifting up one of the infamous red swatches of fabric, made to be the rightsize to fit around an adult male bicep. “Why hide it, if it was an innocentthing to own?” she asked.
“We can use this,” Shelley said. She grabbedan evidence bag and put the armband inside, doing the same with a couple of themedals. “Watch his face, Z. He’ll be sweating once he sees these.”
Zoe nodded mechanically; she did notfeel the need to explain to Shelley that she was not the best person to watchfor facial expressions, and that
