“It seems like a huge coincidence,” Colt agreed.
Sydney glanced at the clock on the wall ticking down the seconds. “I’m afraid I really need to go. I’ll call you when I arrive on the West Coast. Maybe I’ll have a flash of insight while on the plane.”
“I appreciate that,” Colt said.
“I’ll walk you out,” I said to Sydney as she turned toward the door.
“Okay.” She glanced toward where Colt was standing one more time. “Until next time.”
Once we were outside, Sydney paused, seeming to understand that I wanted to speak to her in private.
“How exactly does someone with a cold case to solve contact Ezra Reinhold?” I asked.
Sydney raised a brow. “Do you have a cold case in need of solving?”
“Not really.” I paused. “Well, sort of.” I paused again and then continued. “It’s just that after Ben died, I found some stuff of his that I’d had no idea he’d even had in his possession while he was alive. Files. Notes. Airline tickets. That sort of thing. I’m not sure why he kept this stuff from me because we were the sort of couple to share everything. I knew he liked to poke around in cold cases and even helped him at times, so there was no reason for him to keep anything from me. But he did.”
Sydney waited for me to finish. I had to admire her restraint. I would have probably been trying to hurry me along if our roles had been reversed.
“Some things happened after Ben’s death that shed light on the fact that he had things in his life that he chose not to share,” I said, basically repeating myself. “Big things. Things that a husband probably should have shared with his wife. In the end, everything that I looked into or had Colt look into on my behalf only served to prove that Ben really was a good guy, but I guess the revelation of this other life caused me to wonder. Then, about a year ago, I received an official letter from SFPD Internal Affairs, letting me know that some of Ben’s cases had been reviewed and that the process was complete, with all questions about his conduct answered and cleared. Until that point, I had no idea IA was even reviewing Ben’s cases. I was glad he’d been cleared, but that, coupled with the little inconsistencies I’d already found, made me wonder even more.”
Sydney took my hand in hers. She looked me directly in the eye. “I won’t claim to know Ben well, but we did work together on the case of the missing teen, and based on everything I observed about him, he appeared to be a genuinely nice guy who really cared about people. It wasn’t his job to track down this teenager. He hadn’t been assigned the case, and he wasn’t being paid for the time he committed to finding his answers. He did it because he cared. He did it to find this girl if she was still alive, and if she’d been killed, as most suspected, he did it to bring closure to the family.”
“So is it your opinion that Ben probably wasn’t wrapped up in anything illegal or shady?”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s my opinion. I’m good at reading people. It’s what I do, and my ability to spot a lie is what makes me so good at my job. If Ben was the sort to have had an ulterior motive for doing what he did, I think I would have picked up on that.”
“And you didn’t?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.” She took a breath. “You were married to Ben. You knew him better than anyone. What does your gut tell you about him? Not your mind and not your heart, but your gut.”
“My gut tells me that Ben was a good guy who really cared about people and would never do anything to hurt anyone.”
She raised a brow.
“I know I should trust that. Colt has counseled me many times to trust that. And I do. To a point. But then I find something, or I find out something about Ben that I had no idea was going on, and it makes me feel less certain.”
She let go of my hand. “I get it. I really do. It would be my advice to you to let go of all the things that are causing you to question the motive of the man you loved and just accept that he loved you and would never have done anything to hurt you or anyone else. But if you stumble across something specific that you find you just can’t let go of, call me, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Frank Ribaldi.”
She frowned. “What about Frank Ribaldi?”
“He worked with Ben. Shortly after I moved to Holiday Bay, he emailed me looking for a file he thought Ben might have had at home when he died. Ben’s files were in storage in San Francisco, so I told him I didn’t have anything. Since then, I’ve collected the files, and I have to say his name has come up a lot. He was being investigated by IA at the same time that Ben was. Frank was cleared of wrongdoing as well, but I have a gut feeling that there’s a lot more going on than anyone knows at this point.”
“Unlike Ben, who I feel certain was a good guy, I don’t have the same warm fuzzy feeling about Frank. I guess you heard he was shot and killed.”
I gasped. “No, I hadn’t heard. When?”
“A few months ago. Frank was shot by one of the gang members he’d been accused of taking bribes from. It seemed that even though he was cleared by IA, the gang members who felt he’d double-crossed them weren’t
