LITMIR.BIZ

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it’s him, we’ll need someone to come down to the medical examiner’s office to formally identify the body. If you’d rather one of his staffers do that, we can accommodate your wishes.”

      “No, I’ll do it,” she said.

      “Thank you,” Ryan said. “There is one other thing. We don’t have many leads on the woman we suspect of killing your husband. But she did take all of his credit cards and identification.”

      “What about his watch?” Mrs. Maines interrupted.

      “What watch?” Ryan asked.

      “He had a Rolex watch with his initials inscribed on the back.”

      “We didn’t find it at the scene,” Ryan said. “But we’ll add it to the list of missing items.”

      “I gave him that watch for our tenth anniversary,” she said, her thoughts clearly drifting back to that moment.

      Jessie had an idea but decided to put a button in it for now. Reluctantly, Ryan pulled Maines back into the present.

      “We’ll do our best to recover it, ma’am,” he assured her. “But regarding the credit cards, rather than cancelling them, we were hoping to track them in the hopes that we could catch her in the act of using one. She might also try to forge any number of documents using his ID. Would you give us permission to review his transactions and financial data to see if there are any anomalies?”

      Mrs. Maines cast a skeptical eye at him, clearly aware that his request likely had an ulterior motive.

      “That seems broad,” she noted.

      “It is,” he admitted. “We want to cast as wide a net as possible so we don’t miss anything. We can get a court order if need be. But that takes time and I worry she might slip through our fingers in the interim. But if you sign the releases now, we can get started immediately.”

      Mrs. Maines still looked somewhat unconvinced. But the way Ryan had framed it, saying no would look like she was hampering the investigation of her husband’s murder. After a moment it became clear that she’d decided that whatever skeletons she suspected he was hiding would ultimately have to take a backseat to catching his killer.

      “Give me the papers,” she said roughly.

      Ryan, who already had the envelope waiting, handed them over. Jessie saw him fighting the urge to smile and had to fight her own urge to kick him.

      He was lucky that Margo Maines didn’t know his expressions as well as she did. New widows don’t usually appreciate self-satisfied smirks.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Jessie was getting frustrated with Ryan.

      They were back at the station, sitting at their desks, rifling through confusing financial documents while they waited for the tech team to untangle the origins of “City Logistics” and where it got its resources. Captain Decker was at a meeting at headquarters, meaning Jessie had still managed to avoid the sit-down where he would inevitably warn her away from Hannah’s case.

      In the meantime, Ryan had floated the idea that Margo Maines was faking—that she had uncovered her husband’s dalliance and hired a hit woman to take him out, either for revenge, the life insurance, or both. In fact, he seemed fixated on it.

      “She just didn’t seem credible to me,” he insisted. “I don’t buy her claim that Gordon had to be drugged to go up to a hotel room with another woman. You saw that footage from the bar. He was all in. Margo had to at least have a hint about his lecherousness.”

      “I’m sure she did,” Jessie agreed, despite her agitation. “But that doesn’t mean she took a hit out on him. Maybe she just wasn’t comfortable acknowledging to two people she’d just met that she’d been looking the other way when it came to his bad behavior. Wives have been known to do that.”

      Jessie kept her voice steady so he wouldn’t pick up on how raw this discussion still was for her. Her own ex-husband, Kyle, had cheated on her for months. And though the signs were all around her, Jessie had somehow managed to miss them.

      In her more honest moments, she acknowledged that she might have intentionally ignored them because confronting them would have blown up her marriage and her life. Of course, that happened anyway when Kyle murdered his mistress, framed Jessie for it, and then tried to kill her too. But that wasn’t the point here.

      “Maybe she wasn’t comfortable revealing she knew he cheated because she was embarrassed,” Ryan conceded. “Or maybe she knew that admitting it would give her a motive.”

      Jessie didn’t want to dismiss his theory. It wasn’t crazy. And he’d been at this a lot longer than she had. But he seemed to be ignoring some other relevant details.

      “Let me ask you this,” she offered. “If this was a paid hit, why not go with the double tap to the head? It’s much quicker and more surefire.”

      “Maybe Margo Maines knew the details would eventually come out. Her husband would be shamed and she’d be the martyred wife. She’d get sympathy galore and no suspicion.”

      “That explains it from her end but not the killer’s,” Jessie countered. “The woman who killed him took her sweet time. Even if she’d been tasked to make the scene look tawdry, she could have been in and out in less than fifteen minutes. She was there twice that long. She lingered. That’s not the work of a professional. And she could have just drugged him and left it at that. A dead, naked, drugged-up politician found in a hotel room is embarrassing enough. Why the strangling too? No. This feels personal.”

      Ryan sat with that for a while. The argument seemed to make an impact. Jessie’s frustration level dropped a notch.

      “That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of it from the killer’s perspective.”

      “Yeah, well, you’re not the profiler,” she said, tweaking him slightly.

      He flicked her off playfully. But a sudden flash in his eyes told her he had a new theory.

      “What about this?” he began. “Maybe the woman was his mistress. It could be she didn’t know he was married or maybe he’d promised he’d leave his wife for her. Either way, by last night she’s discovered that he’s stringing her along and she’s pissed. So she decides to get a little revenge for herself. She kills him up close and personal. Then she gets everything: vengeance on the guy who used her, a chance to destroy his reputation and as a lucky strike extra, the wife loses her big-time important husband.”

      “I like that idea better than the other one,” Jessie allowed.

      Just then, Camille Guadino from the tech team walked over with some paperwork and a rueful smile. Fresh out of school, she was the rookie of the unit, assigned to the most mundane tasks.

      “Uh-oh,” Ryan said, looking at her. “Don’t tell me you’re going to give us actual evidence we’ll have to follow up on instead of just spinning endless webs of theories.”

      “Sorry, Detective, but yeah,” she said as she dropped a folder on his desk. “Real, fresh-brewed evidence coming your way.”

      “What have you got, Guadino?” Jessie asked.

      “It took a while but we finally figured out what City Logistics is all about.”

      “Urban planning enthusiasts?” Jessie quipped.

      “So close,” Guadino replied. “It’s a consulting firm that ‘offers feedback and recommendations on urban improvement issues.’”

      “What the hell does that mean?” Ryan asked.

      “It means it’s pretty much what you guys suspected. It’s a shell company run by a lawyer owned by a shell company also run by a lawyer who’s a partner in the same firm that represents a consulting agency that has done work for a strategist associated with—you guessed it—Gordon Maines.”

      “What does all that gobbledygook mean to us?’ Ryan sked.

      “It means that, via multiple cutouts,

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