Page 63 of Don't Say a Word

She left, and I rolled my eyes. “Wow.”

“You were rude,” Tess said.

“She was rude first,” I said. “I don’t like her.”

“You think she’s dirty?”

“No,” I said and meant it. She didn’t have the vibe of a dirty cop. “Overworked, angry, hates her job, and doesn’t like anyone questioning her decisions. But not corrupt. I told her what she needs to know.”

“Remember, Margo—more flies with honey,” Tess said, and Theo laughed. I shot him a dirty look.

“Generally, I would agree with you,” I said, “but with her, no. Did you learn anything about the Bradford case?”

“A lot, but I don’t know how it’ll help. We just picked up the files from the court. It’ll take all night to go through it.”

“I can do that,” I said.

“No, I want to,” Tess said.

Tess loved research and paperwork. I didn’t, so I certainly didn’t offer twice.

I followed Tess and Theo to her office. Theo put the box down on the corner of her desk. Her office was tidy, like mine, but where mine was functional, hers had a charming, almost too-cute vibe. A thriving plant sat on the windowsill, artwork adorned the walls, and bookshelves were neatly organized. A framed photo of Tess’s college graduation and several pictures of Tess and Gabriel decorated her desk. A file cabinet doubled as a display for more photos, fresh flowers, and whimsical Hobby Lobby knickknacks. Instead of a lone office chair like me, she had comfy guest seating, and a table draped with a frilly cloth held a stack of artfully arranged books about old-time private investigators, both fictional like Sherlock Holmes and real like the Pinkertons.

Tess sat down and pulled out handwritten notes from her research. “I’ll type this up for you,” she said, “but here’s the gist. And Theo, if you ever decide you don’t want to work in the crime lab, you would be a whiz in the research department.”

He grinned widely, eating up the praise, and leaned back to stretch his long legs.

“You know the basics, right?” Tess asked me.

I nodded. “I met with Rick today, he served the warrant on the family, so I have his insight as well.”

“It started local, they brought in the feds after they started investigating. The wife is in federal prison, Bradford is in state prison. Eyman,” she added.

The same prison our dad was in. We locked eyes for a moment, both thinking the same thing, but we didn’t say anything about it.

“The investigation started after an anonymous call on September seventh, and culminated in an arrest on January thirteenth. A four-month-long investigation, which included four undercover cops, two on staff with the school and two posing as students. They gathered extensive circumstantial evidence, but no smoking gun—until Eric McMahon asked the undercover female out.

“Law enforcement suspected that McMahon was the primary go-between for Bradford,” Tess continued. “The undercover female—her name isn’t in the records, she’s known as UC3 in thefiles—had access to McMahon’s car, home, and locker. She gathered extensive evidence. McMahon was smart, and he didn’t talk about his illegal activities, but had money to flash, took her on expensive dates, and multiple times brought her when he delivered packages of what they later learned were drugs.

“She set up a sting where law enforcement swooped down on McMahon and offered him a plea arrangement—give up Bradford and he’d get probation. He took it without hesitation—provided his girlfriend got the same deal. I don’t think he even knows now that she was an undercover cop.”

I was impressed. It wasn’t easy going undercover. I don’t know that I could do it. As a PI, I sometimes pretended to be who I wasn’t, but I didn’t have to fake it for long so wasn’t worried about getting caught up in a lie.

“What happened to the kid who got juvie? Jimenez, I think. Attempted murder, right?”

Tess flipped through her legal notepad. “Scott Jimenez. I don’t have much yet, it’s probably in the records we pulled, but what I deduced was that Bradford became suspicious that McMahon was talking to the police and paid Jimenez to kill him. Bradford denied it, and Jimenez said no one paid him to, quote, ‘kill a rat.’ But when police raided Jimenez’s house and searched his car, they found a large sum of cash and McMahon’s home address written on a sticky note that only had Jimenez’s prints.”

Theo said, “I think someone higher up than Bradford, someone in the know, realized McMahon was working with the cops, and Jimenez was tagged to kill him.”

Maybe, but that seemed a bit too cinematic to be real.

“Is Jimenez still in juvie?” I asked.

Tess shook her head. “He was released a year later and given three years’ probation. I have his last known address.”

“Send it to me?”

Tess nodded and made a note.