Page 62 of Den of Iniquity

Which was a lie, of course. In case no one has mentioned this previously, dogs do tell lies. The reason I knew for sure that Sarah was lying was due to the note Mel had left on the counter saying that she had fed Sarah before leaving the house.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I told Sarah. “Don’t you go giving me that old song and dance. I’m not falling for it.”

I doubt she understood my spoken words, but the negative shake of my head that accompanied them got my point across. She tucked her tail between her legs and headed for the other room.

I’d kept my nose so close to the grindstone for so many days that I figured I deserved some time off, so without even opening my email box, which now had 163 messages in it, I went straight to my crosswords. I hadn’t made a dent in the backlog of those before falling asleep at the Westin, and I was determined to catch up.

My phone rang half an hour later with Marisa Young’s name in caller ID. Remember the old days when you had no idea who was calling untilafteryou said hello?

“Good morning, Marisa,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Serena called,” she said excitedly. “Or Caroline. I still don’t know what I should call her.”

“That’s something the two of you will need to sort out in the future,” I said. “What did she have to say?”

“We talked for a long time. She said she’d like to meet me, so I’m flying into Portland tomorrow, and she’ll drive up from Ashland. I’ve booked a pair of rooms at River Place.”

“Does Jeremy know about any of this?” I wanted to know.

“I doubt it,” Marisa replied. “She told him that I’m an old school chum of hers who’s coming to town briefly and that Saturday is the only day the two of us can get together.”

That statement caused a small lurch in the pit of my stomach. Both knowingly and unknowingly, the woman we knew as Caroline Richards had been living a lie for years, and she’d had enough practice to be good at it. Now, even though the jig was up and people were onto her, she hadn’t stopped lying. That told me that Caroline Richards was a scammer at heart. That didn’t bode well for Jeremy Cartwright and not for Marisa Young, either. She had a tremendous amount of emotion invested in finding her long-lost niece, and I worried that she was going to be disappointed.

“I’m so excited,” Marisa went on. “I can’t wait to see her and have her back in my life.”

“What you lost all those years ago was an innocent child,” I cautioned. “What you’re getting back is a grown woman who has spent the past ten years surviving on the streets on little more than her wits. Don’t get your hopes too high.”

“Oh, I won’t,” Marisa assured me. “We’ll be fine. I wanted to thank you. I still can’t believe you found her.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Glad to be of service.”

But as I hung up, I couldn’t help but worry that the wheels I had set in motion might not turn out well for anybody.

By then, my crossword mood had totally evaporated. After the phone call, I went to the kitchen where I made myself another cup of coffee and a piece of toast. Then I returned to the living room. Settled into my recliner, I opened my email account and prepared to face the music. I now had 186 new messages. To my dismay only a small number of those were spam. The rest were all for me. Most of the emails were from Yolanda’s intern, but three were from Yolandaherself. I suspected those might have something to do with the case files I had flagged earlier.

The sheer magnitude of the problem was disheartening. That’s when I remembered Benjamin Weston and Sandra Sechrest. Ben had skin in the game because of his relationship to Matilda Jackson. And Sandra had been willing to give me the case numbers that had made my Evidence unit experience infinitely easier. Maybe Seattle PD itself wasn’t ready to reopen any of my overdose cases, but there was no rule that said cops couldn’t look into something on their own time, especially if they knew the kind of progress I’d already managed to make on my own. And if I had some help with scanning through those lengthy interviews, maybe we could speed up the process.

So that was the next thing I did—I began assembling my very own multicase task force. Picking up my phone, I located Ben Weston’s number in my contacts list, and pressed send.

“Hey, Beau,” Ben said when he answered. “How’s it going?”

“How many homeless people do you know who go around wearing Apple Watches?” I asked.

“That would be zero.”

“Correct,” I replied. “So what would you say if I told you that, in viewing the footage of Darius Jackson leaving the food bank, I noticed that the woman he was accompanying, the supposedly homeless one pushing that overloaded grocery cart, was actually wearing an Apple Watch?”

“How the hell did you find that out?” he demanded.

“By going to the Evidence unit, putting my butt in a chair, and viewing hours of surveillance footage one frame at a time,” I told him. “While I was doing so, I saw a flash of light on her left wrist that I believe came from an Apple Watch.”

“What makes you think that?” Ben asked.

“Because in looking into a number of those overdose fatalities, I found another one that’s most likely related to Darius’s. That victim actually died in eastern Washington, but shortly before his death, a homeless woman was spotted in that vicinity. During the subsequent investigation, a witness mentioned having seen a homeless woman wearing an Apple Watch. When I went back and studied the Darius surveillance video, that’s when I spotted that suspicious glow on her arm.”

“Whoa,” Ben said. “That sounds like more than a coincidence.”

“Way more,” I agreed. “Not only that, I’m convinced she might be involved in more than just those two cases. I’m worried I’m only scratching the surface.”

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