Flirting with Disaster

“Yes.”

“Why?” Her tone suggested he’d lost his mind, and she was about to help him find it.

“Veronica didn’t have to come here. We can’t keep her prisoner. And it’s not like she wants to go to the state fair. It’s a private residence within shouting distance of our base. It shouldn’t be difficult.”

Mary was about to argue with him. He could see that as clearly as if she’d said it, but eventually she closed her mouth and nodded. “Okay. Fine. Who are you sending over?”

“You.”

“Me?” she screeched.

“I’m going, too.”

“What the hell, Tom? We’ve got twelve additional people here now, and this is a job for a first-year deputy.”

He couldn’t tell her that the real reason was that he wanted to spy on Isabelle. He also couldn’t tell Mary that he wanted her to meet Jill. She’d dig in her heels and tell him to mind his own business. She was always telling him to mind his own business; he never did. “Those guys need all their attention on the courthouse. We know how to pace ourselves. You can sleep in the next day if you need to.”

“I don’t need to sleep in!” she growled before stomping up the stairs. That was the end of the discussion. Good.

They’d debriefed in the meeting room after court had adjourned, but that didn’t mean there weren’t twenty emails waiting for him. So far there’d been no activity at the judge’s place, and Stevenson hadn’t been spotted in Jackson or Boise or anywhere in between.

Tom wrote an update for his chief, laying out his plan to feed only the smallest bits of information to the press so as not to inspire any of the defendant’s sympathizers. Then he sent an email to his team with a few more specifics about tomorrow’s detail, requested an expedited review of the letter from the consulting psychiatrist and was finally ready to turn in at eleven.

But he had something else to look into.

He’d considered taking a long-range photo of Isabelle and feeding it into a reverse image search, but if she’d kept a low profile for the past fourteen years, it probably wouldn’t pan out. No point stepping that far over the line into invading her privacy. He’d also considered that he could’ve lifted some small piece of garbage from her trash to get her fingerprints, but that felt even more wrong. He really wanted to leave a moral pathway open to sleeping with her.