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“She has no idea.”
“Well,” she said, “if anyone can, it’ll be you.”
A kid easy to give up on.
That’s when I decided to take the consult.
CHAPTER
17
By ten to four, Milo had wrested listless agreement from the phone carriers to look out for his subpoenas.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, as we left for the meeting.
I said, “How far back do their logs go?”
“For Meagin a little under two years, before that she used another carrier, they have no idea who. Not worth chasing down, dead data gets destroyed. Gio’s American account goes back seventeen months.”
“Soon after he arrived in L.A.”
“Before that, it was probably an Italian carrier, good luck getting through that fog. And, again, not worth the effort.”
He stopped. “Unless some enraged hubby from the Old Country was still waging a vendetta.”
I said, “If Claudio knew about that, he’d have told us.”
“Good point. So forget think globally, act locally. I’ve got enough to deal with on this continent.”
—
Milo had scheduled the meeting in a familiar venue: a large interview room adjacent to the space where we’d just spoken to Claudio Aggiunta.
A whiteboard on wheels was equipped with a pointer and a bluemarker. A pair of rectangular folding tables had been pressed together and set up with four chairs. He’d transferred the coffee urn from the smaller room but when the three young detectives arrived together they bypassed caffeine and took seats behind the tables. Eyes aimed at the board, obedient pupils.
Alicia Bogomil, hard-bodied and clean-jawed, wore a snug denim jacket, black slacks, and low-heeled Chelsea boots. This week’s hairdo was shoulder-length, softly shagged and side-parted. Brown-black on top, electric blue at the tips.
Moses Reed, blond, crew-cut, pink-complexioned and baby-faced, had shifted gears clothing-wise. As long as I’d known Moe, he’d contended with conventional garments that fought his power lifter’s body, the result suggesting imminent explosion. Today he wore a pale-blue polo shirt and athletic-cut, black stretch chinos.
Sean Binchy—tall, rangy, and freckled, ginger hair spiked and neatly trimmed—was the sole holdout for Old School Investigator. Black suit, gray shirt, gray-and-black tie. Mirror-polished Doc Martens the sole memento from his time as a ska-punk bassist.
He ended up next to me, said, “Hey, Doc,” and smiled. A few years ago, I’d saved his life. We’d finally gotten past that.
Milo strode to the board and said, “In answer to your next question, everything’s gonna be on the final.”
Small smiles but tense posture. The routine anxiety of detectives new to a case.
Bright eyes remained fixed on Milo, eager for enlightenment.
Nowhere else to look because this was a sad board: empty white space broken only by enlarged photos of two victims and a few crime scene photos that conveyed little.
He pointed to Meagin March, then Gio Aggiunta, and summed up what he’d learned over the past two days. No one took notes. Likely because Alicia knew everything and had passed it along.
Milo said, “Questions.”
Reed said, “Any hunch about which one was the primary?”
“Wish there was. I was set on her because she was married and her husband’s an odd one. But what I learned about Gio back in Italy makes me wonder.”
