Page 67 of The Lost Heiress
He kept reading:
Police have reason to believe the unidentified remains discovered on the Towers family property last month may be those of a staff member hired to work the party at which Saoirse, and this unidentified victim, were presumably killed. A probable cause affidavit filed on Wednesday reveals the victim was male, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, and approximately 6 feet tall. The affidavit was filed with a search warrant requesting access to the Towers family tax returns from 1982, in an effort to track down the staff members who were hired to work the event.
This would not be the first time a staff member attending to the Towers family has ended up dead. Readers may recall, in 1978, that a young woman working at a hotel where Theo and Ransom Towers were staying drowned while sailing on their yacht.
Church stopped reading.
“Shit,” Church muttered under his breath. “Senator, I can promise you I didn’t know anything about this,” Church said.
“This came from your department, did it not?” Ransom asked.
“Yes, it did, but—”
“I’ve been cooperative, haven’t I?” Ransom cut in. “Any questions you asked, I answered. I opened the door to my home. I instructed my staff to be open with you as well. When you told me you couldn’t tell me anything about the investigation or the body found in my own backyard, I let it go. I acquiesced. And this is what I get in return? Details I wasn’t allowed to know, splashed across the front page of the paper? Private truths about my family, out there for the whole world to read about? It’s a transgression of my privacy, of my family’s privacy, and our trust.”
Church was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. This shouldn’t have happened, and I can give you my word nothing like this will ever happen again.”
“Your word means very little to me now,” Ransom said. “Detective, you will find me less than cooperative going forward. I’m afraid both my understanding and my patience have run out.”
And with that, the senator unceremoniously hung up.
There was a bar called Pour House on State Street in Santa Barbara, not far from BFS, where Church and Nisha met up occasionally for drinks to talk about the cases they were working on together. They’d throw darts, knock around a few balls on the pool table, sip their pints at the bar. And case talk would inevitably lead to talking about other things. Conversation with Nisha felt as easy as breathing—never forced.
Tonight, they didn’t make it to the dartboard or the pool table; they just sat at the end of the bar with their pint glasses of beer and talked.
“I don’t understand,” Nisha said, taking a sip of her beer. “How did that reporter get all that information about the second body anyway?”
“From the search warrant that Leland filed for the Towerses’ tax returns,” Church said. “You have to file a probable cause affidavit, basically explaining to the judge why we need access to the documents we’re requesting.”
“And the public has access to those?” Nisha asked.
“No,” Church said. “I mean, not if you petition to have them sealed, which any detective worth his salt would have, in this case.”
“Ah,” Nisha said.
“It was a rookie mistake,” Church seethed. “And it’s fucked me. The senator won’t even return my calls now.”
What really got under Church’s skin was that Leland should never have been assigned to the case in the first place. He didn’t have the experience. Church had told Wallis that from the get-go. If Wallis had only listened to him then, they wouldn’t be in this mess now.
“I’m sorry,” Nisha said. “That’s awful. But—” She paused.
Church looked over at her. He cocked an eyebrow. “But?”
“Okay, just hear me out on this,” Nisha said, raising her hands defensively. “I know Leland is super green, but I do think he’s trying. He really wants to do well, and yeah, this time he fucked up, but it was an honest mistake, and he owned up to it. And, from what you’re telling me, the sheriff and Sergeant Wallis really went at him hard for this. So, maybe, you could cut him some slack.”
Church exhaled. He recalled with particularly cutting clarity the other day in Sergeant Wallis’s office, as he had sat next to Leland while both the sheriff and the sarge basically chewed Leland a new asshole, and Leland just sat there, the tips of his ears red, looking chastened and embarrassed. He reminded Church in that moment so much of a wounded golden retriever, and while Church hadn’t been able to bring himself to add to the barrage, he also had not come to his defense.
“I just think,” Nisha went on, “let he among us who’s never made an error when they’re tired and overworked throw the first stone. That’s it. That’s all. I’ll step down from my soapbox now.”
“Thank you,” Church said. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore, didn’t want to even think about it. “So what’s new with you? I trust you’ve had a better week than me?”
“Well,” Nisha said excitedly, “we’re trying 3D forensic facial reconstruction on our John Doe.”
“3D facial reconstruction?” Church asked.
“Yeah,” Nisha said. “You basically digitize the skull with a CT scanner, and then you map the face onto it, with the help of tissue markers. It’s painstaking. It takesforever. But it’s a good idea, and it’s worth a shot.”
“That sounds promising,” Church said.
