Page 159 of Don't Say a Word
“Don’t pick up that phone. I mean it.”
“Who’s going through my house?” Her voice ended on a squeak.
“Who killed Elijah?” I countered.
“I don’t know! I told John he was asking the wrong questions and two days later I heard he was dead. Kids make bad choices.”
“Sometimes they do.”
“I didn’t know until Monday that Elijah was dead.”
As if that made her innocent.
The door opened, and Webb looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Cliché, but in this case very true.
Detectives King and Chavez entered. “Melissa Webb, you are under arrest for the murders of Lena Clark and Dwight Parsons.”
She turned from them to me. “I didn’t! I—I didn’t.” Her voice trailed off.
Chavez read Webb her rights.
“I thought you had a search warrant,” Webb said, looking at me. “You lied about that?”
“No,” I said. “I just didn’t say who was executing the warrant. I think it was the feds.”
I, unfortunately, couldn’t participate in Melissa Webb’s interrogation, but Cal was in there with King and Chavez and came out an hour later grinning ear to ear.
“She spilled everything and all we had to do was reduce her sentence to twenty years for second-degree murder and promise a federal penitentiary as far from Arizona as she can get.”
“And?”
“I have a list of all the drug houses, a statement of how the operation worked—you were right about that—and all the players she knows, including John Brighton. It’s a multimillion-dollar operation. Plus the kicker—Webb has Elijah’s backpack. John Brighton gave it to her and told her to put it in a locker. She did, in the gym, since there are no other lockers on campus. No one thought to look in it, not even the coaches, because the lock was standard for the school. Your cousin Josie and her partner are getting it now and will transport it to the crime lab for processing.”
“What now?”
“The FBI is going to raid the corporate offices, Phoenix PD and DEA are going to raid the drug houses, and I’m going to serve the warrant on Manny Ramos at his house. I’d love for you to come with me, because you’ve earned it, but I can’t.”
“I don’t need to be there,” I said. “Just get him—and be careful.”
He smiled. “This is why I love my job.”
While Cal was having all the fun serving the warrant on Manny Ramos, I went back to the office to clean up the mess we’d left in the conference room on Friday night. I was surprised that it was already clean.
My mom was in her office, her reading glasses on the edge of her nose as she was reviewing a file. She looked up when I came in and smiled. “Adventurous weekend, wasn’t it?”
I sat down. “You didn’t have to clean up.”
“It wasn’t me—I would have made you and Jack do it, just like when you were kids. But Iris has a soft spot for you both.”
“I’ll get her those flowers she likes, the mums.”
Mom nodded her approval.
“So. The Madison O’Neill defense. Are Jack and Tess on board?”
“Reluctantly,” she said.
“Why?”
