Hide From Evil (22 page)

Chapter 12

H
e paged through the open files, and Krista shook her head. “That was all in the last report he gave me. Wait.” She held up a hand and Ibarra kept the document up on the screen.

She took a few steps closer to the monitor as she read. The header read
Caparulo Suicide (?)
It wasn’t a formal report, more a collection of notes about what Kowalsky had uncovered.

According to source, powder burns and angle of entry consistent with self-inflicted gunshot. No sign of forced entry into house. Bedroom window unlocked and ajar. Source indicated ground beneath window was slightly disturbed but no discernible footprints. Fingerprint dusting revealed only victim’s print.

Canvassed the neighborhood. A Mrs. Elanor Vicks claims to have seen someone “lurking around Angela’s place” on and off for several days before Caparulo’s apparent suicide. No other claims of anything unusual. Vicks known to suffer episodes of dementia—unreliable witness. Claims police questioned her briefly but no follow-up questions asked.

There were a few spaces as if Stew had taken a break, and the next paragraph was just two days before, the day Krista had gone to talk to Sean, and Jimmy Caparulo’s case was closed and his body released for cremation.

WTF? Caparulo case closed, body released, no autopsy. Source in SPD has closed up tight, no one giving up anything. Why close ranks around apparent suicide if nothing to hide?

Why indeed, Krista thought.

Detective Jorgensen in charge of investigation gave no further info than official statement, but was extremely agitated when I tried to ask him about decision to release the body. Action items: follow up with E. Vicks, contact client to discuss how to proceed.

Krista swallowed hard. She was the client Stew had never had the chance to contact.

Ibarra cycled through the rest of the files. “That’s the only new information as far as I can tell,” she said and blew out a frustrated breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve managed to hack into the SPD’s network and find the official report?” she asked, almost dreading the answer. She was now a knowing accessory to cybercrime—against the Seattle Police Department, no less.

Hell, compared to two boosted cars and a suspected cop shooting, this was nothing, right?

“Here it is.” Ibarra pulled it up in on the opposite monitor, hiding for the moment the list of bank transactions.

“Is it just me or does that look a little light?” Sean asked as Krista scanned the two-page document.

Krista shook her head and drained the last of her coffee. “Like Cole said, the chief wanted the case closed, and fast.”

“But why?” Sean asked. 

“It’s impossible to tell. The coroner’s office had to sign off on it, but they could be getting pressure from any number of the higher-ups to close the investigation.”

“Like who?”

Krista shrugged. “A judge, the mayor…”

“Or someone from the PA’s office?” Sean bit out.

Krista took a deep breath and bit back a retort. “What happened with you and the Slasher case got a lot of people upset and now a lot of people feeling like they need to cover their asses.” She could feel the anger vibrating off Sean and instinctively lifted her hand but stopped short of touching him. “It’s no surprise they wanted to make anything even remotely related to the case disappear quickly.” The thought of anyone she worked with being involved in the cover-up made her sick, but she knew this wouldn’t be the first time something related to a controversial case was pushed under the rug.

“So you think it’s okay?” Sean snapped. “You and the people you work with fucked up and that gives them the excuse to make sure no one questions the fact that Jimmy committed suicide?”

His accusation, his fury, blindsided her. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. “How can you possibly think I’m okay with that? Would I be here risking my life to find out what really happened if that were the case?”

“Kids, can we quit with the bickering?” Ibarra broke in. “You’re keeping me from getting to the good stuff.”

Sean snapped his mouth shut. The fury had dimmed from his gaze, but hot color stained his cheekbones.

“What?” Krista said, focusing on Ibarra, feeling heat stain her own cheeks. It was humiliating how easy it was for Sean to make her lose her cool.

“I looked at that bank statement Kowalsky recovered,” Ibarra said, closing the police report. There was a reason they wanted the case closed so quickly, a reason that went beyond worrying about the public’s view on how they’d handled Sean Flynn’s case.

But who was really behind it, she wondered as she watched the document disappear from the screen.

Someone who had something to hide, someone who had enough weight to lean on both the coroner’s office and the detective running the investigation—or his superiors—to get the investigation expedited and the case closed before it even made headlines.

Six months, a year ago, Krista would have looked on the act with disapproval, but she wouldn’t have made any waves or gotten overly suspicious of the motives. Of course she believed everyone was entitled to a thorough investigation, even if all of the evidence pointed in the direction of suicide.

However, she’d accepted that not everyone thought or worked the way she did and decided the best thing she could do was keep focused on her own cases, fight her own battles. It wasn’t worth it to raise a ruckus when they all knew what the results would be whether the case took six days or six weeks to close.

But with Jimmy Caparulo dead and his case closed so quickly…no way she could ignore that. And now she couldn’t help but wonder how many other cover-ups had she missed as she kept her eyes on her own paper, convincing herself she was above it.

Sean was right. She had sat silently by while others around her cut corners, made compromises, accepted their excuses for not doing everything by the book.

“I ran a query on that account as well as Nate’s business account and found something interesting.”

Krista’s pity party faded to the background.

“So there’s this account that Kowalsky found, right? It’s a money market account registered under a bogus business name.”

“Right,” Krista said. “A deposit for fifty thousand dollars was wired in the day after he killed Bianca Delagrossa, and there was another one before that, which might link to the death of one of the earlier victims, a Jane Doe killed last year.”

Krista couldn’t help but shudder at the memory of the gruesome videotapes that had emerged of not only those two women, but of Nate Brewster’s other victims. Including a recording of him murdering Evangeline Gordon, a video made all the more haunting as it showed Sean slumped in the background, unconscious and helpless as Brewster brutalized and killed her.

“Those aren’t the only accounts, or the only deposits.”

Krista looked at Sean, but his expression was carefully blank.

“I was able to link this account to three others, all under fake LLC names.”

“How did you do that?” Krista asked uneasily, sure that it was highly illegal.

“Better you don’t know. But I wouldn’t expect it to stand up in court.”

“I already told Sean that this is about the truth, not a conviction.”

“Fair enough” His fingers clicked on the keyboard and three other documents appeared on the screen.

Sean noticed the pattern before she did. “The dates match the deaths of four other victims,” he said grimly.

Krista squinted up at the screen but couldn’t scan through the numbers fast enough. “How do you know?”

“When I first got out, I didn’t sleep a whole lot,” Sean said, “so I did a little light reading on my friend the Slasher. Look, he got two deposits into that account in the Caymans, one on June twenty-fourth, which coincides with the first victim—well, if you don’t count Evangeline Gordon. Then on January seventh, when the third victim was killed.”

Ibarra helpfully highlighted on screen while Sean rattled off dates and victims, all of whose deaths coincided with a hefty deposit to a secret account linked to Nate Brewster.

“Someone was paying him to kill them,” she breathed. Even when she’d showed the single transaction to Mark and then to Sean, she hadn’t really believed Nate was being paid for what he’d done to those women.

Murder for hire was one thing. Paying a brutal monster like Nate Brewster to do what he did to those women…

That was diabolical.

“Can you tell who? Can you tell where the deposits are coming from?”

“Not yet,” Ibarra said. “I’ve traced a few of the deposits back to one account. I’m still working on the others.”

“What about the others?” Sean asked. “He had a lot of money moving in and out over the past—how far do these records go back?”

“The most recent one was opened a couple months ago, the oldest…huh, that goes back almost five years.” Ibarra turned away from the screen to look up at Sean. “Looks like it was opened up right before we did that op in Mogadishu.”

“Does that mean anything?” Krista asked.

“Hard to tell,” Ibarra said. “But there were several deposits made into that account. The last one was after Colombia.”

“Both Nate and Jimmy were injured on that op,” Sean said. “They both got out on medical discharge a few months later.”

“And you stayed in another year,” Krista said. “You too?” she asked Ibarra.

He shook his head. “I went to para-rescue training. I didn’t get out until last year.”

Neither man seemed inclined to say any more. “Is it significant that they both were discharged after that mission?”

Sean shook his head slowly, not so much in denial but as though he were trying to clear out the cobwebs. “Didn’t seem like it at the time.”

His eyes took on that dazed, thousand-yard look that told her he’d shifted his focus out of this room. She started to question him again and thought better of it. Sometimes it was better to let a person parse all the information before she went after them with both guns blazing.

She shifted her focus back to Ibarra. “What about the dates of the other deposits? Seattle doesn’t have a huge homicide rate. How difficult would it be to match homicides in the Seattle area with the dates of the deposits?”

Ibarra shrugged and tapped a few keys. “The fastest way would be for me to get into HITS.”

The Homicide Investigative Tracking System was a statewide database of information about homicides and other violent crimes.

“Are you sure you’re okay with that?” Ibarra asked.

With every step, she was getting herself into deeper and deeper trouble. God, she hoped it would be worth it. Her gaze snagged on Sean, who had moved in front of the open window to take in deep lungfuls of cold mountain air. A warrior to the core, they hadn’t been able to break him, but the scars ran deep. If she had any doubts before, she knew in that split second she’d do whatever it took to expose everyone responsible for hurting him, and to erase any doubts Sean had about her. “Do it,” she said, her gaze never leaving Sean.

He didn’t look up, but the tension coiling through his broad shoulders eased a degree. It wasn’t much, but she’d take it. Krista didn’t know when or how it had happened, but at some point in the last two days it had become very, very important what Sean thought of her.

“You might want to do a check in northern California and Oregon too,” Sean said. “That’s where Nate said he was headed the last time I talked to him.”

“When was that?” Krista asked.

“After I was arrested, he came to visit, asked if there was anything he could do to help,” Sean said, his upper lip curled in a snarl. “I thanked him. Dumb fuck that I am, I never realized he was coming to gloat.” He shook his head. “Anyway, who knows what the hell else he was up to before he came back up here.”

Another thought occurred to Krista. “Is it possible to flag any suicides that were rushed through?”

“No problem,” Ibarra said. “And in the meantime I’m going to keep following the money thread and see what we come up with.”

Even with the window wide open and chilly air flowing into his lungs, Sean couldn’t shake the tight, confined feeling. Ibarra’s office was huge, and the door was partially ajar, but Sean couldn’t convince his brain that the door wasn’t about to slam shut, lock itself, and trap them all inside.

He forced himself not to look at Krista, who had positioned herself back behind Ibarra’s desk. Over the sound of his heart pounding in his head, he could barely make out their quiet conversation. He snuck a glance, snapped it back to the window, and told himself he didn’t care that she was standing so close to Ibarra, that every few seconds or so Ibarra’s attention wandered from his computer screen to the firm curves of Krista’s thighs and ass in those form-fitting jeans.

And now he knew exactly how soft the skin was that was hidden underneath, knew exactly how she tasted between those long, sleek legs…

And that was exactly why he had to stay over here in his corner and push her back into hers. He’d hurt her with his accusations. She was used to taking hits in the courtroom, but she hadn’t been able to mask the pain when he’d lashed out and questioned her integrity.

A month, hell, a week ago, he wouldn’t have felt a lick of remorse for tarring her with the same brush as those she worked with. But having spent the last forty-eight hours in constant, too close contact, he didn’t believe her sincerity was false.

And after last night, it was hard to dismiss the notion that she was starting to care about him.

The thought filled his head with a rush of possibilities that he had no business entertaining. He tried but couldn’t shut any of it out, his tangled-up feelings for Krista, the pain over Nate’s betrayal, oozing like a fresh wound after what Ibarra had uncovered.

He’d always been able to shut everything out when he needed to, first in the army when he was on an op and his life depended on it. Then in prison, when he closed up in on himself, the only way to stay sane when every bit of power was taken from him.

But now—he couldn’t keep a lid on anything, and it was all hitting him at once in a giant tidal wave of suppressed emotion. The muscles in his chest tightened, making it hard to breathe.