Page 83 of Hard Evidence
“Only BuzzHub?”
“She’s juggling projects.The corporate gig, keeping Nolan on track at the vineyard, a side hustle involving national security stuff, and now this dumpster fire.Give her time—she’ll nuke Saige from orbit.”Jez nodded at the screen.“Don’t you know a dude from the Diamondback Devils?”
“From the Vegas chapter.”
“Aren’t they basically the same club?”
“Yes and no.It was started by two brothers, only they had a falling-out and one moved to Fredericksburg.There was a tug-of-war over the name, and the upshot is that they’re both using it.The question is how Raelene and Serafina got mixed up with them.Some of the members are friendly on an individual basis, and if they owe you a favour, they pay up, but they’re not good people.”
“If they’re not good people, I wonder how many of them are incarcerated in Redding’s Hill?”
“Huh.We should ask Alexa to check.Or…wait a second…” Ari pulled out her phone and tapped away.“Or just ask Google.The answer is that at least three of them have been sent to Redding’s over the past several years, but I can’t say how many of them are still there.Or whether they’ve moved between the various levels.”
The Redding’s complex was a sprawling correctional facility in southwest Virginia, consisting of three separate prisons.The level six supermax was Redding’s Gap, and Levi had started off in there, confined to his very own seven-by-twelve box for twenty-three hours a day.Each cell contained only a steel slab with a thin mattress for a bed, a steel desk and shelf, and a steel toilet/basin combo.Meals were served through a slot in the door, and the layout meant inmates couldn’t see any of their fellow guests.Levi had deserved it.After what he’d done to Ruby, he should have been in a fucking casket.
But over the years, it seemed he’d earned his way through level five at Redding’s Grove by good behaviour, and now he was languishing in level four at Redding’s Hill, where he had access to the cartoon channel and the chow hall.If he was lucky, maybe he got to do laundry for five cents an hour.
“You think he worked out a deal on the inside?Arranged for the Diamondback Devils to do his dirty work?”Jez eyeballed the office building.“Are the lawyers working under duress?”
“From what I’ve learned about Raelene Holtz, she’d chew off their balls if they tried threatening her.She might have lost her faith in the system and joined the carpool Mafia, but she was always a shark in the courtroom.And Serafina brought the pair of them coffee this morning.”
“I’m usually good at working this shit out, but I have no idea what’s going on here.”
“Well, there’s one obvious answer.They think Levi is innocent.”
Jez snorted.“Yeah, right.One look through the evidence, and they’d know he did it.”
“I mean, that’s what they’ve requested.”
“But they only need to read a couple of news articles to get the gist.The Sykes family had a team of PIs and high-priced lawyers working for years, and those knuckleheads couldn’t find a loophole—shouldn’t that tell them something?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Yeah, I know.But the only other person with the opportunity to murder Ruby was Justin, who firstly, has the personality of a Care Bear, and secondly, spent the middle of the murder window on the phone to his fiancée, who was a neurotic mess of a woman, and even she stuck by him.”
“To start with.”
“They only broke up because reporters kept hassling her, not because she thought he was guilty.”
“Also, you realise there are a whole bunch of Care Bears, and they each have a different personality?”
“Too much information.”
“I have a daughter, remember?I need to know this stuff.”
“Okay, fine.Justin’s whatever the boring one is.”
“Grumpy Bear?”
“That’ll do.”
“The articles I’ve read said there was camera footage from the house, and it proved nobody came or went during the murder, but what exactly did it show?”
“There was a three-hour window on Saturday night, and that’s when Ruby was killed.Nobody apart from us arrived or left before or after.”
“How did you determine the window?”
“Alexa spoke with her at three minutes past seven.Nothing exciting—just a conversation about groceries.I knocked on her door around ten to see if she wanted a glass of wine.The door was locked, and we now know she didn’t leave, but I assumed she’d gone out because I wasn’t her fucking keeper and she often went out.So between that and the autopsy results, we were able to work out the time she died.If I’d just gone upstairs an hour earlier, if the idiot next door hadn’t been playing his damn bass so loud…”
