“Admit it,” Sean said, “you like the cat.”
“I never said I didn’t.”
Lucy laughed. “You told me you didn’t want a pet.”
“Cats are easy.”
The cat suddenly meowed loudly and jumped off Sean’s lap.
“See, he doesn’t like you,” Kate said, picking the cat up. “Good kitty. I knew you wanted to stay with me.” She stuck her tongue out at Sean, an odd and hilarious gesture for a woman who was nearly forty.
“There’s a bump on his neck that’s probably sore, that’s why he jumped down. You should take him to the vet.”
“If I’m taking him to the vet, I’m keeping him while Lucy’s gone,” Kate said.
“I guess that’s final.” Sean winked at Lucy and she suspected the conversation wasn’t over on the cat.
Lucy finished going over the Wendy James reports while Sean worked on his laptop.
Next, she picked up the arson report on the Hawthorne Street house and reviewed it again.
“What I don’t understand,” Lucy said, “is how Ivy Harris was able to rent that house on Hawthorne when she was using a false name. Did she have a complete fake identity? Social Security number and everything?”
“Where’s the rental agreement?” Kate asked.
“I haven’t seen it.”
Sean said, “Maybe someone cosigned the agreement, or she took an ID. Often, the companies do only a cursory background check. Or, if someone has a good record as a tenant, a reference from a previous landlord is sufficient.”
“It’s not here,” Lucy said. “At least, it’s not in the arson reports. I don’t know that we requested it.”
“Tell Noah to request it tomorrow,” Kate said.
Lucy didn’t want to wait that long. “The agreement may give us an emergency contact, someone who knows Ivy-maybe even knew she was using a fake name.”
Kate pulled out a paper. “Here’s the contact information for the owner. Give them a call.”
The doorbell rang as Lucy was on the phone with the owners. Kate jumped up to answer it.
By the time Kate came back to the family room with Noah, Lucy had the answers she needed. “The owner is going to fax me a copy of the rental agreement.”
“For what?” Noah asked.
“The Hawthorne Street house. Check if Ivy Harris has any references or a previous address. Someone knows where she is.”
“Good plan.” He sat down. “I can’t stay long, but I need to follow up on your accident.”
“I sent you a report. That’s everything I remember.”
“And it was detailed. I went back to talk to Patricia Neel, the neighbor, and she identified a church that Hannah Edmonds had attended.”
“You mean Ivy?” Kate asked.
“Ivy Harris is a false identity,” Noah explained. “We have confirmation that the girl known as Ivy is in fact Hannah Edmonds, who’s bipolar and suicidal.”
Lucy shook her head. “She wasn’t acting suicidal. She was definitely in preservation mode, believing that she’s the only one who can protect her sister.”
“Which is asinine,” Noah said. “She must not be thinking straight if she thinks she can protect a fourteen- year-old better than the authorities.”
“She may have some reason for distrusting law enforcement. She got in the car because she was terrified of the guy chasing her-she said she didn’t know him, and that may be true, but she’d seen him before, I’m certain of it. If we can get her to work with a forensic artist, we can get a good rendering.”
“That’s a big if, because she ran from the crash site.”
“You’re treating her like a criminal, not a victim,” Lucy said.
“You don’t know that she’s a victim. She is accused of kidnapping her sister, a fourteen-year-old minor. She is using a fake identity after making her family believe she committed suicide. She’s a known prostitute who fled a murder scene. Yes, she is most certainly a person of interest.”
Lucy felt chastised, and Noah wasn’t wrong about the situation, but at the same time they didn’t have all the facts. Pieces were missing that would make the picture clear.
“I understand,” she said, “but she’s a classic victim, particularly if someone in authority let her down. Distrustful of the police-”
“So are criminals,” Noah interrupted.
Lucy continued, “Protective of her family, scared, hiding.”
“I know a lot of bad guys who fit that bill, too,” Noah said. “You know nothing about her. She’s considered dangerous.”
“Her house was burned down in the middle of the night. She went to someone she trusted-Jocelyn Taylor- who wasn’t under duress. We know that Chris Taylor contacted Senator Paxton for advice, but was killed before he could meet with him.”
“Maybe Ms. Edmonds didn’t want him talking to anyone.”
“You think she’s party to the murders of her friends?”
Noah hedged. “No, but I think she knows more than we do about who is responsible.”
“Have you talked to the runaway that Jocelyn relocated?” Kate asked, trying to break the tension in the room. “She might have some insight.”
“An agent from the Richmond office had an interview this afternoon with the girl and her mother.” He looked at his watch. “She said she’d have the report to me this evening.”
He said to Lucy, “We’re going off the theory that the three crime scenes are interconnected, but we have no suspects and the one witness who can help ran. We need her in custody.”
“I agree, to protect her. Her house is gone, her friends are dead, she’s terrified, and she’s trying to protect her sister.” Lucy didn’t like how Noah was putting Ivy in the role of suspect.
“All signs of desperation-and that’s what I’m worried about. She’s going to do something desperate and get someone killed. Genie Reid is damn lucky that bullet didn’t kill her. If it was a higher caliber, or she was turned only a few degrees, it would have hit her chest, not her arm.” Lucy had rarely seen Noah angry until this week. Now, every time they talked about the case, he seemed to be angry.
But Lucy was confident Ivy was as much a victim-and target-as those who had already been murdered. “I agree, we need to get her into protective custody, but someone is targeting all the girls in the Hawthorne house. There were at least six, and we know about five of them. Maddie and Nicole were murdered; Ivy, Mina, and Ivy’s sister are in hiding.”
“The pastor of His Grace Church near their house knows more, and I have a team outside the church watching for any sign of Hannah Edmonds or her sister. I also have a lead on the virtual phone number you ID’d on Nicole Bellows’s body.”
Noah glanced at Sean, who had been oddly silent during the entire conversation. “You were right, Rogan. Someone bought a prepaid credit card to use for the virtual phone service. We have a vague description of a forty- year-old white male of Italian or Spanish descent who last reloaded the card. Now that we have that number, we’re going back to the virtual phone company to run a reverse program, to trace that credit card to any other virtual numbers it purchased, under any name.”
Sean nodded and said with mock surprise, “Smart.”
Noah snapped back, “The FBI has a good cyber crimes team.”
“They’re adequate,” Sean said.
“Hey,” Kate said, “I’ll take you on head-to-head with a computer anytime, Rogan.”
“You’re not on cyber crimes, you teach them,” Sean grinned. “You’re head and shoulders above anyone else there.”
Noah sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t have time for this, Rogan.”
Noah was showing signs of strain and fatigue, and Lucy realized there was a lot of pressure on him from all angles-Congress, Matt Slater, AD Stockton, DC Metro, Reverend Edmonds.
She forced herself to stay calm and not take his anger personally. “Let’s put the Ivy-Harris-as-suspect theory aside for a moment. Consider her as a target. Wendy was killed the day before the fire. Ivy and the others at
