Page 25 of The Perfect Betrayal

Jessie was about to agree when her phone buzzed. It was a text from Ryan:I have info on your victims when you’re ready.She held it out to Riddell.

“I’m ready now,” he said.

She called right then.

“Hey,” she said when he picked up. “I’m here with Detective Riddell. Please tell me you’ve got something good, because we’re hitting a wall here.”

“I might,” he replied. “When I was looking over Taye Boyce’s records, I couldn’t find anything criminal, but I did note that he had filed and then retracted a restraining order.”

“Is that what Jamil was upset that he missed?” Jessie asked.

“Yes,” Ryan said, “but unless he knew what to look for, there was no way to catch it, as I told him. The only indication that it had ever been in the system at all was an extra blank space in the record. Only years of experience told me that the extra space wasn’t just a formatting error but a gap where something had been deleted. He’s still annoyed with himself, but less so. I guarantee he’ll never miss anything like that again.”

“So what was this restraining order about?” Riddell asked, uninterested in the emotional well-being of HSS’s head of research.

“Right,” Ryan said in a tone that only she could tell indicated that he didn’t love the detective’s brusqueness. “So I talked to a friend at the courthouse, and it turns out that Boyce filed a restraining order against a woman named Samantha Collins. There’s no way to access it without a court order and even then the contents might have been scrubbed.”

“Do you think we should pursue a court order to get at it?” Jessie asked.

“It might end up being a wild goose chase,” Ryan allowed, “besides we may already have what we need.”

“Why do you say that?” Riddell pressed.

“Because once I had Collins’s name, we were able to cross-reference her against Boyce and found something very interesting. There was a financial settlement between them about a year ago.”

“She paid him?” Jessie confirmed.

"No, the other way around," Ryan said. "The thing is sealed, so there's no way to know the terms. But regardless of the particulars, I found it interesting thathefiled a restraining order against her but then ended up paying her a settlement.”

“That is odd,” Jessie muttered. She felt like there was an obvious next question to ask Ryan, but she couldn’t think of it. He helped her out anyway.

“So after that, I had Jamil and Beth do a little more searching,” he said. “And what did they find? Boyce has paid out at least two other settlements in the last five years. The terms of those are sealed as well, including the names.”

“Sounds like a pattern to me,” Riddell said. “Why wasn’t Collins’s name sealed too?”

“Not sure on that,” Ryan said, “but it is an interesting distinction.”

“So we have harassment allegations and a restraining order filed by nightclubs against Daran Peterson,” Riddell said. “And now we have multiple secret settlements involving Taye Boyce. It’s starting to look even more like these guys aren’t exactly Boy Scouts. I wonder what we’d find if we added their friends to the search.”

“Give us the names and we’ll start looking,” Ryan said.

“How about a trade?” Jessie offered. “We’ll give you that if you send us everything you have on Samantha Collins, including her address.”

“Twist my arm,” Ryan replied playfully.

Jessie smiled and barely stifled a giggle.

“Jeez,” Riddell grumbled. “Why don’t you two get a room?”

Jessie, who was starting to lose patience with the man, couldn’t help but respond.

“We plan to later on,” she assured him.

He scowled, which made her happy, as did something else. If she was getting pissed at Riddell again, that might mean the medication was finally starting to wear off. She hoped that was the case.

She needed to be at full power when they talked to Samantha Collins. The woman was their only good lead right now.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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