Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(23)

Her office was in the elegant old Mercantile Bank at 4th and Main. It was on the historic registry, which guaranteed that the front of the structure still looked like a bank. But the once-grand interior had been renovated and chopped up into private offices and creative spaces primarily leased by lawyers, lobbyists, and others with business in the nearby civic center. Rachel had a two-room office with a secretary.

On the door it said raw data services. RAW as in Rachel Anne Walling. Her secretary was named Thomas Rivette. He was sitting behind his desk, staring at his computer screen. He handled much of the computer work involved in the background investigations that were the mainstay of the business.

“Hey, Jack,” Thomas said. “Didn’t expect you today.”

“Wasn’t expecting it myself,” I said. “Rachel back there?”

“She is. Let me just check if it’s clear. She might have client stuff spread out.”

He picked up the desk phone and called the room six feet behind him.

“Rachel? Jack McEvoy is here.”

I noted the use of my full name. It made me wonder whether there was another Jack in Rachel’s life and Thomas had to be clear about which one was waiting to see her.

He hung up the phone and looked up at me with a smile.

“It’s all clear. You can go back.”

“Thank you, Thomas.”

I walked around his desk and through the door centered on the wall behind him. Rachel had a long, rectangular office with a small seating area in front and then an L-shaped desk with large monitors on each side so she could work different jobs simultaneously on separate computers with separate IP addresses.

She looked away from one of the screens and at me as I entered and closed the door behind me. It had been at least a year since I had seen her and that was only at the crowded open house in these offices when she announced that RAW Data was in business. There had been random texts and emails in the meantime but I realized as I smiled at her that I had probably not been alone with her for two years.

“Jack,” she said.

Nothing else. No What are you doing here? No You can’t just show up here anytime you feel like it. No You need to make an appointment before coming here.

“Rachel,” I said.

I stepped up to her desk.

“Got a minute?” I asked.

“Of course. Sit down. How are you, Jack?”

I wanted to go around behind the desk and pull her up out of her chair into an embrace. She still had that power. I got the urge every time I saw her. It didn’t matter how long it had been.

“I’m good,” I said as I sat down. “You know, same old same old. What about you? How’s business?”

“It’s good,” she said. “Real good. Nobody trusts anybody anymore. That means business for me. We’ve got more than we can handle.”

“We?”

“Thomas and me. I made him a partner. He deserved it.”

I nodded when I couldn’t find my voice. Ten years ago we shared a dream of working side by side as private investigators. We put it off because Rachel wanted to wait until she was fully vested in her FBI pension. So she stayed with the bureau and I worked for the Velvet Coffin. Then the Rodney Fletcher case came up and I put the story ahead of what we had and what we planned. Rachel was two years shy of full vesting when they fired her. And our relationship fell apart. Now she did background searches and private investigations without me. And I did tough watchdog reporting for the consumer.

This was not the way it was supposed to be.

I finally found my voice.

“You going to put his name on the door?”

“I don’t think so. We’ve already done the branding with RAW Data and it works. So … what brings you here?”

“Well, I was hoping maybe I could pick your brain and get some advice on a story I’m working on.”

“Let’s move over here.”

She gestured toward the seating area and we shifted there, me sitting on the couch and Rachel taking the armchair across a coffee table from me. The wall behind her was hung with photos from her time with the bureau. I knew it was a selling tool.

“So,” she said when we were seated.

“I have a story,” I said. “I mean, I think. I wanted to run it by you, see if anything pops for you.”

As quickly as I could I told the story of Tina Portrero’s murder, the connection to three other deaths of women across the country, and the rabbit hole it had led me down. I pulled the printouts from my back pocket and read her passages from the GT23 informed-consent pages and some of the quotes from Bolender and Tina’s mother.

“It feels like there’s something there,” I concluded. “But I don’t know what the next steps would be.”

“First question,” Rachel said. “Is there any indication that the LAPD is going the same way with this? Do they know what you know?”

“I don’t know but I doubt they’ve come up with the three other cases.”

“How did you find out about this in the first place? It doesn’t feel like the new you. The consumer reporter.”

I had conveniently left out the part about the LAPD coming to me because I had spent a night with Tina Portrero the previous year. Now there was no way around it.

“Well, I sort of knew Tina Portrero—briefly—so they came to me.”