Page 51 of The Liar

We left the coffee shop. West offered Portia a ride, but as I expected, she declined. She didn’t want to risk anyone seeing her with us.

West and I got into the car, and I drove us toward the police station.

“Where do you want me to drop you off?” I asked.

“Uh…” He sounded confused. “I thought we could finish looking through her diary together.”

“At the station?” I let incredulity enter my voice. “Wouldn’t it look odd for my bartender husband to be helping me work a case?”

He huffed. “Fuck. I guess so. But I want to know what you find.”

“If it relates to your operation, of course I’ll share.” If it didn’t, I wasn’t certain I would. So far, he knew more than me in almost every regard. It would be nice not to be the one in the dark for once.

I sensed him glance toward me, but he didn’t protest my wording.

“Take me to the apartment. I’ll make some calls,” he said.

“All right.” I stopped at a traffic light. “Tell me about Rodriguez.”

His was the name we’d found in the diary, but neither of us had wanted to speak it in public.

“He’s Ortez’s enforcer. Thanks to a bunch of corrupt officials, he doesn’t have a record, but he must have a body count well into the double digits.”

“So, he’s not a nice guy. First name?”

“Antonio,” West replied. “He’s in his late thirties. Maybe thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Reports directly to Ortez.”

“Hmm.” I pressed my lips together, my mind working quickly. “Do you think he could have been the one to kill Sasha? If anyone knew about her coded notes on the organization, she’d have been a liability.”

West hummed in thought. “I doubt it. From what I understand, Rodriguez prefers to strangle his victims. It’s less bloody, which means less mess to clean up. He’s a big guy. Strong. He could easily overpower almost anyone. Besides, if anyone knew about her notes, surely, they would have taken them when they left.”

“Or at least searched the apartment,” I mused. “It was tidy. Nothing out of place.”

We were back to square one. Plenty of people who may have reason to want Sasha Sloane dead, but no evidence tying any of them to the crime scene.

I pulled over outside our apartment building for West to get out. He leaned over, as if to kiss my cheek. I stiffened, and he immediately retreated.

“I’ll see you later,” I called, and pulled away as soon as he shut the door.

I parked in the underground parking area beneath the station and took the elevator to my floor. Instead of going to my desk, I shut myself in an interview room. I didn’t want totalk to Hanson. Not when I still wasn’t sure what—if any—role he played in all of this.

I withdrew my notebook and pored over the photocopied diary, recording everything that might be of interest. I paused at the end of each page to take a photograph of it. If I couldn’t trust my fellow officers, then the diary might not be safe in the evidence locker and I wanted as many copies of it as I could.

I’d worked out that “bacon” was a general phrase Sasha used to refer to members of the police. Every time she wrote “bacon” in combination with another food, I made a note of it, and then recorded any subsequent mentions of that same combination, certain that she was referring to individual members of the police.

I was nearly two-thirds of the way through when I found mention of the story Portia had recounted about a homicide detective who’d been with one of Ortez’s working girls. She labeled him “bacon and potatoes,” and described how he went to the strip club and was then invited to the brothel.

According to the prostitute Sasha had spoken to, “bacon and potatoes” had had doubts as soon as he’d arrived, but he’d been liquored up—possibly high—and had gone through with it anyway.

As soon as they were done, he’d started spouting regrets, but one of the brothel’s assigned guards had pulled him aside, had a quiet word with him, and he’d left as meek as a lamb.

There was no physical description of the man, and he was never mentioned by name. Could “bacon and potatoes” be Hanson? He doted on his wife, Deborah, so I could imagine him being upset by going behind her back with someone else.

That said, despite his occasional misogynistic tendencies,I had a hard time believing that he’d stray in the first place. He’d never had much patience for cheats.

I sighed. Dwelling on the possibility would get me nowhere. What I needed to do was go through police employment records and find all men who fit the description Portia had given within the city’s homicide departments. Then I could work through them methodically.

But how was I supposed to do that without alerting Hanson?

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