“That’s a nice area,” Genie remarked. “Not where I’d expect prostitutes to live.”
“Jocelyn had met Ivy, the woman who ran the group of call girls, a year ago. She didn’t talk about her much, but they had an understanding, I suppose. Jocelyn claimed Ivy wasn’t like other
“Ivy?” Lucy asked. “Do you have a last name?”
Cathy shook her head. “I never met her. I told Jocelyn I wanted to, to assess her sincerity, but Ivy wanted no help whatsoever.”
Lucy started to see what the problem was. “And that’s why you and Jocelyn started having problems.”
“No,” Cathy said, without conviction. She shredded the tissue clasped in her hands. “I told her to go to the authorities. The girl, Amy, was fourteen; if we knew where she was, we had a responsibility.” She bit her lip. “I should have done it myself. Jocelyn convinced me to do it her way.”
“What happened to Amy?” Lucy asked, fearing the worst.
“Jocelyn reunited Amy with her mother. A happy ending. I’ve talked to Amy’s mom-she’s doing great. She’s going back to school in the fall, getting her life back. Because Jocelyn didn’t give up.
“Jocelyn had it in her head that she had to save all the girls in Ivy’s house, but some of these girls-like Nicole-had been on the streets for years,” Cathy said. “They were nineteen, twenty, maybe older. There’s a point where you have to focus on your best hope for success. Jocelyn wanted to help those whom no one else would. The hardest cases.”
That’s why Senator Paxton was involved. He was helping those hard cases, the lost causes. Because that’s what he did.
Lucy’s stomach twisted with her conflicted feelings about her former mentor.
“We had an argument about Ivy,” Cathy said. “Jocelyn stopped talking to me, spent more time with that girl, and then on Tuesday morning she called me on my cell phone, early-five A.M. Said Ivy’s house had burned down and she was helping the girls find a place to stay. Nothing else. I came into the office yesterday, and she’d cleaned out her desk. I’ve been trying to call her-” Her voice caught. “How long? How long has she been dead?”
“She was killed late last night.”
“Why didn’t she call me back? She knows I would have done anything for her! I loved her like a daughter.”
Lucy didn’t have the answer to that question. This situation was far more complex than she’d originally thought. But finally, they had a solid direction. It should be easy to find the house on Hawthorne Street that had burned down in the early hours of Friday morning.
“Was Maddie one of the girls in Ivy’s house?” she asked Cathy.
The director nodded. “I don’t know the others, or how many-six, eight, ten.” She put her hands up, then they fell limply to her desk. “Jocelyn was very protective of them. She was driven. And now she’s dead!”
Lucy suspected she knew how many girls had been in the house.
Cathy unlocked her bottom drawer. She hesitated a moment, then pulled out a file and handed it to Lucy. “I shouldn’t be giving you this. It’s all I have on Ivy. I’m sure Jocelyn has more; I don’t know where, if it’s not at her house.”
The file was thin. Lucy opened it. Inside were two pages of handwritten notes apparently taken by Cathy Hummel. Time Jocelyn was spending with Ivy, observations. The third page was a photograph. It wasn’t a sharp picture, but it showed a young brunette with an aristocratic bone structure and attractive face.
It was the same girl who had taken Jocelyn’s car from the hotel the night the Taylors had been murdered. The same girl who’d returned, presumably found the bodies, but ran instead of calling the police.
“This is Ivy?”
“Jocelyn gave me that a few months back, wanting to know if she’d been reported missing. I ran her picture through our database; she didn’t come up.”
Cathy continued, “Trust me when I tell you this: Ivy is bad news. Why else would Jocelyn keep things from me?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“It looks like these murders are connected to Jocelyn’s work,” Genie said as she drove across town to Hawthorne Street. “I want to talk to the neighbors, check the house.” She got on the phone with her team to get the details about the fire.
Lucy sent Noah an e-mail through her phone about what they had learned, growing increasingly frustrated with the small keyboard. She wanted to talk to him about Wendy James and the message left on her body, along with the idea to show both Wendy and Maddie’s pictures to Cora Fox, but she didn’t want to do it over messaging.
And she especially wanted to talk to him about Senator Paxton. She wanted to talk to Jonathon one-on-one, but she wouldn’t do it behind Noah’s back. He wasn’t involved in killing Chris and Jocelyn Taylor, but she had no doubt that if he knew who had killed them, he would seek his own vengeance.
He’d done it before.
But she could put none of that in e-mail. And she couldn’t tell Noah that, because he would ask her why she hadn’t come forward with the information she had on the senator. And she would have to say she didn’t have proof, she had no evidence, she just had her intuition and a theory and her masters degree in criminal psychology.
Plus the fact that she understood Jonathon Paxton better than anyone else.
She closed her note with a request to talk to him as soon as possible about a theory. She hoped he’d call her immediately, and waited for her phone to vibrate the entire drive over to Hawthorne. It didn’t.
Genie pulled up in front of the burned remains of what appeared to have been a large, Craftsman-style home-though it was hard to tell as every wall was black from soot and smoke.
Caution tape surrounded the crumbling structure.
What was left of the house was on a quiet, tree-lined street with well-maintained, stately, older homes. It was only blocks from a main thoroughfare, but the blocks surrounding it were equally attractive. It wasn’t what most people think of when they think “Washington, DC,” but Lucy had lived here long enough to know there were many pockets like this in the city.
“I talked to the lead fire investigator,” Genie said. “They believe it started in the basement. The house was on an old furnace system, but the owners”-she looked at her notes-“George and Karen Schwartz, currently of Satellite Beach, Florida, said they have maintenance records that the furnace had a clean bill of health as of March.”
“Any fatalities?”
“No, though two firefighters were injured fighting the blaze. The renters haven’t come forward.”
“And the house was rented to Ivy? Do we have a last name yet?”
“The owners don’t know-they use a property management company.”
“And?”
“And no one has talked to them yet. The fire started before dawn Tuesday morning, the owners were contacted later that day. By this morning, it got buried under eight more investigations. They’re sending me a copy of the file.”
They walked around the property, but found nothing of interest. Everything inside the house had been destroyed by fire or water from the fire suppression. There seemed to be little left. Lucy wasn’t an expert on fires, but this one must have burned hot and fast.
“Was there any accelerant?” she asked.
“That’s inconclusive as well-they’re awaiting lab results.”
“It’s highly suspicious that the house where two of our victims lived was burned down this week,” Lucy said.
“You’re thinking that the killer tried to take care of all of them at once.”
