that number other than through direct contact with Jamie.'
'So what happened after Landry came forward with this name and phone
number?' I asked.
'Like I said, Edwards does the reverse trace and figures out it's
Jamie's mother's number. My recollection is that Forbes contacted MCT
at that point to let them know what he and Edwards had and to see
whether Margaret could've gotten the number from the paper somehow. The
case was getting cold, so MCT had cut the investigation down to one
team Johnson and Walker and they weren't working it very actively. In
any event, they decided the Landry lead was worth following up on, so
they went out and interviewed Taylor and confronted him with the Jamie
Z matchbook.
'Now, you got to understand, Jesse Taylor is an absolute freak. Tell
you the truth, I don't know how a guy like that even lives to be
thirty-five. Unless his whole presence is an act, the guy doesn't know
which end is up. Never knows what's going on. Talks in circles, non
sequiturs. Drinks himself into a blackout about every day. Basically
a gigantic human id.'
'But a court found him competent for trial?'
'Don't they always?' O'Donnell's smirk was irritating, but I tolerated
it for the sake of the briefing. 'So, when Walker and Johnson do the
interview, they assume Taylor's playing dumb, because they can't
imagine that someone's actually as stupid as this guy really is. Taylor
denies anything having to do with the murder. But then Walker and
Johnson confront him with the matchbook. He says that for all he
knows, he might've met Jamie Zimmerman and gotten her number. He can't
really say because he can't remember anything that happens from one day
to the next.'
'Sounds like a real winner.'
'Hey, who the hell else would be shacked up with some
sixty-five-year-old cow? Old Margaret's not exactly a looker.' He
could tell from my stare that I didn't have time for this right now, so
he resumed his summary. 'Based on Margaret's info and Taylor's
wishy-washy statement, we got a warrant for his house and his car.'
'I thought you said he shared a house with Landry. She wouldn't just
consent to the search?'
I should've known not to let my guard down and ask a question of
O'Donnell. Predictably, he used it as a chance to belittle me and make
himself look knowledgeable. 'You know how it goes,' he said, even
though I obviously didn't. 'Court says a roommate can only consent to
a search of the parts of the house they actually share. You and I know
that a couple living together and banging each other shares every part
of the house. But come trial, wives and girlfriends who consent to
searches have a tendency to say, 'Oh, by the way, Judge, that cupboard
where they found the murder weapon? That's his cupboard; I'm not
allowed to go in there.' Result? Weapon is gone. Maybe in the dope
unit, you guys don't give a shit about that stuff, but we don't risk it
on major cases. We go for the warrant.'
I ignored the comment. As long as O'Donnell was giving me helpful
information, I didn't care about the insults. 'Did they find anything
useful?'
'Depends on what you call useful. For a second, they thought they'd
hit the jackpot. See, as far as the police could tell, Jamie was
wearing these gold hoop earrings that her friends said she always wore.
Dead girl turns up without her earrings, you don't really know what
that means. Could've fallen out; she might've taken them out, who
knows? But it was definitely something the police were keeping their
eyes out for during the search. So what do they find in Jesse Taylor's
toolbox but a pair of gold hoop earrings, about two and a half inches
in diameter, just like the ones Jamie was always wearing.
'Problem was, Jamie's mom sees them and says there's no way they're the
same ones. Seems Jamie got the earrings from her dirtbag father a
couple years earlier one of his only visits to her, according to the
mom. Anyway, he told Jamie the earrings were fourteen-karat gold,
trying to push himself off as a big spender. So Mom, to prove a point
and bust any hope Jamie had that her dad was a mensch, dragged her into
one of the jewelry stores at the mall one day to prove the earrings
were fake. Turned out they actually were solid gold. The mom figured
Jamie's dad must've ripped 'em off from somewhere. The earrings the
cops pulled out of Taylor's toolbox were fake.'
I was thinking out loud. 'So Landry read about the earrings in the
paper, bought some like them, and planted them in Taylor's toolbox?'
'No way. We never released the information on the earrings, just in
case the perp took them as a souvenir. Johnson went back and read
every article and watched every newsreel on the case, and there was
nothing about the earrings. So, yeah, the theory was that Landry was
planting evidence, but she was planting it on a guilty person. Happens,
you know look at Mark Fuhrman and O.J.'s bloody glove. We figured
Taylor had to be involved at that point, because how else could Landry
know about the earrings?'
'What did Landry say about the earrings?' I asked.
'That was one thing about Margaret. All the way up until she was
