Page 28 of Nothing Hiding

Juliette was used to the cold reception that often came from other law enforcement agencies. She knew they had to earn their trust and respect through hard work and results.

But Harris didn't seem to even want to be civil. His eyes were still steely.

"I don't know what you think you bring to the table, Agent Hart," Harris said, sounding skeptical. "We're on this case now, and we don't need outside interference. As the ambassador said, you’ve mishandled the case so far, and we are under the impression that we’re taking it over from here."

Juliette bit her tongue, not wanting to escalate the tension. Instead, she took a deep breath and tried to explain their approach. "We're still on the case, Detective Harris. We want to work together as a team, and the more of us that can be involved, the better. Our main objective is to get results, catch this killer, and get closure for the ambassador. And prevent further deaths," she added, wanting to get her fears and suspicions about this being a serial, on the table. But the British officers ignored her last comment.

"We'll see about working together," Harris said curtly. "We have our own methods and protocols for handling cases like this, and we'd appreciate it if you stayed out of our way while we take this forward."

"We should have been called out at the start," Detective Black emphasized. “We’ve already lost a lot of time.”

Now, she was insinuating that the case had been mismanaged and that the Americans had been unable to prevent a murder that had been committed before they’d even landed on British soil. This was going to make things harder. Much harder.

"Can we at least sit down and share our information?" Juliette appealed.

"No,” Harris said shortly.

Juliette’s eyes widened. “But why? Why not cooperate?”

“There's a problem with doing that," Harris said. "We haven't yet been authorized to share what we've learned with outside law enforcement officers."

She didn’t think that was the real reason. The real reason was that the two officers genuinely believed that they were now here to handle this case, and they wanted to do it on their own. She wondered briefly if there might be an old history of grudges with American law enforcement. There was an agenda here, for sure, and it was going to be destructive.

It was a pity that they weren’t coming in on a better footing. The ambassador’s emotional harangue had hammered the nails into that coffin, for sure.

"But this is an American victim, and we are FBI agents!" Wyatt protested, a thread of barely controlled anger in his voice.

Harris shook his head. "This crime took place on British soil and as such, it's our jurisdiction. You have no right to be here at all. All it's doing is complicating protocols."

There was an element of smugness in his voice.

"It's a suspected serial crime," Juliette said, needing them to hear what she was saying. "Sharing information will be very important."

Harris shook his head. "There's no evidence of that, Agent. We're here to track down the ambassador's daughter's killer, not pursue wild theories."

"Shall we go back to the office?" Black asked. "We've got some leads to follow up, and we can have a look at that timeline again."

"Let's do that," Harris said. He stood up. "If the authorization has come through by tomorrow, then here's my card, and we can meet. Until then, I consider the case to be in our hands."

Without another word, the two detectives turned and marched out.

Juliette stared after them, feeling stupefied by the blatant lack of cooperation.

She could feel the anger and frustration bubbling up inside of her, but she knew that reacting impulsively would only make things worse. Instead, she turned to Wyatt with a forced smile. "Looks like we have our work cut out for us," she said.

Wyatt grunted in agreement, his jaw clenched as he watched the detectives disappear from view. "I can't believe they're not even willing to share information with us," he said, his voice seething with anger.

"Well, we have one direction we can follow without them," Juliette said thoughtfully.

"And what's that?" Wyatt asked.

"The other missing woman. Remember, we were told about it on the way to the ambassador’s house? Let's meet up with Sierra and research that case. The Scotland Yard team are looking for Daisy's killer. But we're looking for a serial murderer. Widening the net will help us find him."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Where were the similarities Juliette needed to find?

"There's so little in common between the two cases," she said, making a face as she stared at the lists of information they'd exhaustively compiled, with Wyatt looking up the available information from the police reports, and Sierra doing online research to get information on the victims.

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