I left the conference room and opened my laptop and tried to type up the development for our case file. I rubbed my face and collapsed into my chair.
“Who was Judith protecting?” AJ asked.
“Senator Malone,” I said. “Because of Olivia.”
“Why because of Olivia?” she said.
“Because Judith knew about her,” I said.
“But why would that cause Malone to pay her off?” she asked.
“We don’t know for a fact that Malone paid her off,” I answered.
“Then who did?” she asked.
“That’s the final question,” I said. “If we knew that, we could solve the case.”
The question hung in the air for the better part of the afternoon. I needed Vicki to process with, and with her in Phoenix, I felt crippled. I didn’t see Vicki until I got home that night. She came back from Phoenix late, albeit with a bag of sushi takeout.
“I come bearing gifts,” she said as she walked through the door, her hands full of bags.
“Ah,” I said. “Sushi.”
“Fifth Street Bistro,” she winked.
“Missed you,” I said.
“Me or food?” she teased.
“Both,” I said.
She laughed and produced a bottle of champagne.
“Victory drink,” she declared as she held the bottle high.
“You won your case already?” I asked.
“Close,” she said as she fished around in the kitchen for a corkscrew. I eased onto a barstool and unpacked the food bags.
“Come on,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Well,” she began as she dug the corkscrew into the bottle, “the judge set a trial date for two years from now.”
“Two years?” I said. “How is that a victory?”
“Because,” she stopped and leaned forward against the counter, her eyes bright, “in the meantime, Elena gets a temporary visa.”
“So,” I said, “for the next two years, she’s legal?”
“Yep,” she said, and popped open the champagne.
“Congratulations, Vic, that’s a big deal,” I said.
“I know,” she smiled and poured us glasses.
“To winning,” I toasted.
“To winning,” she repeated.
“So,” she took a sip, sat on the stool next to me, and crossed her legs. “How did it go back here today?”
I laughed. “It was... interesting.”
“Yeah,” she said. “AJ sent me an odd text.”
“Odd was definitely the name of the game today,” I said.
“Judith?” she guessed.
I took another sip of champagne and nodded. I opened boxes of California sushi and rice and dug in.
“Piece of work,” I said.
“Between you and AJ,” she said. “This story is really starting to sound mysterious.”
We both laughed, and she opened a container of teriyaki chicken. She looked beautiful, sitting on the barstool, prim and poised, with her dark hair pinned up and slightly disheveled from a long day.
Tonight, she wore a black pantsuit with a pink blouse and high fashion boots, and when she spoke, she occasionally clicked her acrylic fingernails together, and something about the sound was soft and feminine. Even the way she ate, had a graceful manner to it, dainty and deliberate.
“What?” she raised her eyebrows at me.
I shook my head as I must have been staring.
“Nothing,” I sighed. “Yeah, so Judith came in, and we have it all on tape.”
“Did she confess again?” she asked.
“She tried,” I said. “But I busted her. She pretended she didn’t know Malone, or Olivia.”
“Really?” she chortled. “She thought she could get away with that? Is she on drugs?”
“You know, I asked her that,” I chuckled.
“You did not!” she laughed. “Seriously?”
I nodded, and we both laughed harder.
“She insisted she wasn’t,” I said. “But, then eventually, she told me that she only confessed because an unidentified man offered her half a million to take the fall.”
“What’s she going to do with half a million in prison?” she asked. “That’s a lot of commissary bucks.”
“No,” I said. “She’s got a genius son. He reads encyclopedias.”
“Sounds like my house,” she muttered. “My mom would make us read encyclopedias.”
“No, he reads them for fun,” I said.
“How old is this kid?” she asked.
“Nine,” I said. “So, the money was to send this kid to snooty private schools and universities.”
“But with a mother in prison,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “She figured he could do better with a lot of money than with her.”
“That’s a load of crock,” she said. “But then again, if that’s what she thinks, then maybe she’s that shitty of a mother, and she’s right.”
“Either way,” I said. “It’s moot. We told her to confess to the cops, and Landon will turn the tape over to them.”
“And you think she will?” Vicki raised an eyebrow.
“Doesn’t matter if she does or doesn’t, really,” I shrugged.
“So,” she began, “who is this unidentified man?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll bet he’s connected to Malone.”
“What if he’s not?” she asked. “What if he’s connected to the killer?”
I rubbed my face. “I think I’ve about had it with hypothetical questions for a while. They all end the same, with more questions.”
She laughed. “Okay, so on to other subjects-- land.”
“Land?” I repeated.
“For the house,” she said. “I think I might have found a place.”
“This quickly?” I asked.
“It’s an idea,” she said. “It’s a plot near the lake. I think you might like it.”
“Who owns it?” I asked.
“Currently Andrea McClellan,” she said. “But as soon as she bought it, she became mayor and never got a chance to develop it. Now, she and her husband are selling it for dirt cheap.”
“That sounds promising,” I said. “So you’ve seen it?”
“I drove by it on the way home,” she said. “It could really be something. But I had a long talk today with Andrea about it.”
“You talked to the mayor?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “We go to the same nail salon, and we’ve run into each other there a couple
