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“Not yet, but it’s really early. Prine was murdered only forty-eight hours ago.”
“Where is Newton now?” Myron asked.
“Being held overnight. Bail hearing is in the morning.”
“Do you know her lawyer?”
“Very well. A guy named Kelly Gallagher. He’s a solid public defender. He’ll do his best.”
“Any chance you can get me in to see her?”
“You mean see Jacqueline Newton?”
“I do.”
Terese thought about it. “I’ll call Kelly.”
“I love you, you know,” Myron said.
“I do too,” Win added.
“I just think you’re hot,” Esperanza called out.
“I’ll take it,” Terese said through the speakerphone. “Group hug next time we are all in the same room. Myron?”
“Yes.”
“I’m staying at the Rittenhouse Hotel, room 817. I just checked my traffic app. You can be down here in one hour and forty-eight minutes.”
“Start the timer,” Myron said.
Myron made the drive in about ninety minutes.
Terese had left a key for him at the front desk. He took the elevator up to the eighth floor. When she opened the door, Terese was drying her dirty-blonde hair with a towel. When she smiled at him, Myron felt it in his toes and forgot all about dead bodies and serial killers. For the moment anyway. She wore the hotel’s terry-cloth robe. Myron flashed back to the first time he’d seen Terese in a terry-cloth robe, when they’d met up at the Hôtel d’Aubusson on the rue Dauphine in Paris.
“Well, hello,” Myron said.
“I love how you always open with the smoothest lines.”
“It’s the ‘well’ before the ‘hello.’”
Forget your merry widows, your frilly lace, your G-strings, your baby dolls, your camisoles, your bodysuits, your whatevers. There is nothing sexier than the woman you love drying her hair in a hotel-room terry-cloth robe.
“Want to see something that will really turn you on?” she asked.
Myron managed a nod.
She moved to the side. There was an overstuffed binder on the bed.
“Are those photos of you in a terry-cloth robe?”
“Close,” Terese said. “It’s a copy of the murder file on Ronald Prine.”
“Take me now.”
“God, you’re easy. Shall we?”
They sat on the bed. Terese paged through the file and told the story. Myron listened intently and resisted the impulse to untie her terry-cloth belt. When they got to the emails Jackie Newton sent to Ronald Prine, Myron began to see a pattern. In the beginning, while the Prine Organization was stalling, Jackie Newton’s emails were professional but firm. They increased in frustration and anger in a completely organic way. For the most part, Jackie Newton was contacting a Prine vice president named Fran Shovlin and copying in Ronald Prine.
