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CHAPTER 28

WHEN I GOT to my desk the next morning, I texted Muriel Roth, Warren Jacobi’s partner, and she called me right back.

“Any news, Lindsay?” she asked me. “Did you get the guy?”

My heart rolled over when she asked me that. I wished I had something promising to tell her, but I only had the same lame comments to offer, the ones we say when we’re at minus square one.

“We have nothing yet, Muriel, but we will find the SOB. Warren’s case is open until we nail his killer.”

She said, “I still can’t believe that he’s gone. Warren and I were planning a trip to LA this weekend. And we had just started looking into taking a big trip—like a month or more in Europe,” she continued. “Warren probably didn’t tell you, but he’d recently had quite a windfall. He got a million-dollar settlement.”

I wonder what that was about? I didn’t press, and she didn’t offer any further explanation.

I didn’t have any response other than to promise Muriel again that we were still investigating. I needed to go through Jacobi’s phone, and knowing him, I suspected he would’ve saved any potentially useful evidence. I asked, “Do you know if Warren backed up his phone to a computer or to the cloud?”

“Gosh, he mainly put photos and things on external drives that he kept in his sock drawer. You want them? Do you think there could be something useful on them?”

“Let me take you to lunch today, Muriel. Tell me where and when, and bring the external photo drives.”