Page 48 of 2 Sisters Murder Investigations

“Su Lim Marshall! She’s head of — of land acquisitions or some shit!”

“Put a shirt on. You’re gonna sit here and tell me everything she asked you to do. We’re gonna get it on camera.”

“Fuck that shit! I ain’t coppin’ to no murder rap!”

Marshall lifted her eyes from the phone to Baby. One of her thin brows rose slowly. “Whatwasthat?” the small woman asked with a tight smile. “A clip from a movie?”

“That was one of your Enorme employees, Chris Tutti, admitting you paid him to murder Carol and Arthur Laurier,” Baby said. “Took about thirty seconds for him to give you up. And I didn’t even have a gun on him. All I had was a dog on a leash. Imagine what police detectives in an interrogation room would do.”

“I don’t know who — ” Marshall went for the iPad.

Baby held a hand up. “Don’t go through the motions of pretending you don’t know who Tutti is. He worked security in the staff parking lot here for a year, then got bumped up to corporate valet. I assume that’s when you met him. I bet you saw the tattoos on his knuckles, ordered a background check, and decided he might be useful in solving a little problem you were having over at Waterway Street. You saw him as the kind of lifelong bottom dweller who could use the extra cash.”

Marshall’s hand was still on the iPad.

“If you want to read the brief on me that your receptionist just sent you, go ahead,” Baby said. “You’ll find all it says is that I work for a private detective agency based in Koreatown.”

“Wow.” Marshall took a minute, shook her head. “Wow.”

Another minute passed. Baby waited. Su Lim Marshall looked through the huge windows out at the LA skyline. At the brown smudge of afternoon heat haze.

Baby had been expecting more denials, for which she had responses prepared. She’d tell Marshall that hiring an idiot like Tutti to rub out Arthur had been a grave mistake. That a solid connection between Marshall and Tutti existed somewhere, whether it was in an internal email, a message between burner phones, a handwritten address on a napkin, a slice of the two of them conversing on security camera footage. So if Baby’s security cam footage of Tutti vandalizing Arthur’s house wasn’t enough, and Tutti having been employed by Enorme wasn’t enough, and Tutti admitting that Marshall had hired him for the murders wasn’t enough —somethingwould be enough. And Baby would find that thing, whatever it was. That witness. That bank deposit. That overheard clue.

She would find it.

She would connect Marshall to Tutti.

But none of her responses were needed. Marshall simply looked at Baby and smiled.

“Okay, Ms. Bird,” she said brightly. “You wanna play? Let’s play.”

CHAPTER54

BY THE TIME Ifinished telling Dave Summerly about the trophy box — how I’d come to acquire it and what I knew about its contents — he was standing before the collection of ten sad little zip-lock bags, each with the newspaper article pressed against its surface, spread out on my dining-room table.

Summerly stood there emotionlessly, his hair still wet from the shower we’d taken together, his mouth clamped shut and his jaw muscles twitching. Jarrod Maloof’s greasy backpack and a printout of Alex Brindle and Daisy Hansen’s messages over the months of their affair were also on the table. I’d come clean on everything. It had taken me half an hour to get it all out. Summerly licked his teeth and looked at me in a way he never had before.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said, though I was terrified to hear it.

“I don’t even know where to start.” He shook his head. “I can’t ... I can’t fix on anything. It’s all swirling around. The ... the utter disappointment I feel that you didn’t trust me with all this. The fuckingblinding rageI feel that you would jeopardize a chain of custody this way.”

“I kept the box back until now because I wanted to know how it connected to the case,” I said carefully. “And I knew it would blind the police team to the possibility of Troy’s innocence. Make their tunnel vision even narrower. The chain of custody isn’t any more corrupted than it would have been if a suspect handed evidence to his lawyer. No one has touched the box except me. It’s been with me the whole time.”

Summerly’s fists were clenched and shaking. He picked up each bag by its corner and placed it as carefully as he could into the box. But even though he was being as gentle as possible, the anger was fighting to get out of him. He fumbled Dorothy Andrews-Smith’s bag. I went for it. He snatched it away.

“Dorothy Andrews-Smith was killed by a fucking gang, Rhonda.”

“How do you — ”

“Iknow,” he said. “I know she was. And you will too when you examine the facts. How closely have you looked at these cases?”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’ve been a little busy,” I said. “When I started, I went for Jarrod Maloof. He went missing most recently. His uncle is — ”

“I don’t care.” Dave rubbed his brow. “I don’t care what happened to him.”

“Yes, you do.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. “Baby and I are wondering if Daisy’s affair with Alex Brindle might have sparked this. The therapist was pulling away. She felt the relationship was too intense, too risky. It could be that Daisy wanted to connect with her on a shared interest, and she went looking for — ”

“Rhonda, you gotta stop talking.” Summerly slapped the message printout on the top of the box.

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