Page 7 of Don't Say a Word

“A woman accused of murdering her husband.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “It’s the Madison O’Neill case.”

Mom nodded.

I grinned. “Well, either way, I’m all in. That sounds like fun.”

Tess wrinkled her nose. “What if she’s guilty?”

“Still fun. If she’s guilty, we’ll prove it and the defense lawyer can work out a plea. If she’s innocent, we’ll prove it, and she won’t go to prison for life. Mostly, it’s completely different than the boring crap we’ve been doing for the last few months, dropping subpoenas and running background checks.”

“Which pay our bills,” Tess countered.

“Tess,” Mom said, sounding sharp and irritated. Was she sensing that Tess was picking on me because of the dress argument? “Let’s shelve this discussion for the time being. I’ll let you know what I learn on the O’Neill case, and then we can decide—as a group—whether to take it or not.”

“Circling back to what you said, Mom,” I said, “that you wouldn’t stop us from working a case we had a passion for. I want to help Alina. Uncle Rafe asked us to.” And he wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important to him, which made it important to me.

“It’s difficult to say no to my brother,” Mom said with a small smile.

Tess glanced at me. “I can handle the background checks solo.”

An olive branch? “Thanks, sis. And I can check whatever you need in the field. I can multitask with the best of them.”

Tess preferred working in the office, or researching at the court archives, or going down an internet rabbit hole. I much preferred field work.

Jack said, “Uncle Rafe said he talked to Josie.”

“I’ll talk to Josie this morning,” I said.

“I can feel out the case with my contacts at 620,” Jack said. Jack had been a Phoenix PD officer, then detective, for more than a decade, until three years ago. By “620” he meant the main police headquarters at 620 Washington, which wasn’t far from our office. “I can do that and get the subpoenas served on time.”

“So you’re all on board,” Mom said. “I need to leave to make my meeting, but I’ll talk to Manny. He wants to help, but for now we’ll respect Alina’s wishes and not accept money from him. He may be useful in gaining access to Elijah’s coworkers, which will make things easier for us.”

“That works for me,” I said.

“I’ll tell them, then send them back here.” Ava rose and left the room.

“Do you think this kid is really the saint his mom made him out to be?” Jack said. “I mean, we were pretty good kids, but we all had our moments of stupidity.”

“We won’t know until we start asking,” I said.

“She deserves to know what happened to her son,” Tess added. “It’s heartbreaking.”

It was, but it happened all the time. Kids made bad decisions. Most of the time they didn’t die, but sometimes they did. Sometimes they went to jail. Sometimes they got away with it and did it again... and sometimes they had a wake-up call and turned their life around.

But sometimes, a kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time and whatever happened was not his fault.

Where did Elijah Martinez fit in?

Uncle Rafe and Alina walked back in, sat down where they had before. Ramos stood on the threshold and said, “I can’t stay, I have a meeting, but I wrote my cell phone number on the back of my card. If you have any questions, or need any access to the Stop where Elijah worked, call me direct and I will make it happen.”

He put a couple cards down on the table, then crossed to Alina, bent over and kissed her cheek. “I’ll stop by later this week. If you need anything, call. I mean it, Alina.” He then shook Uncle Rafe’s hand. “Good to see you again, Father,” he said, then walked out.

“He’s a good man,” Alina said. “Is it... is it truly a burden to help me without payment? I can pay, but not all at once.”

“It’s not a burden,” Jack said. “If we find this taking longer than we expect, we can revisit the issue.”

I had a pretty good grasp of what we needed to do. Talk to Elijah’s friends, coworkers, the responding officer, and the detective. Find out where Elijah was the twenty-four hours before he died, and in learning the timeline, we may be able to piece together who he was with and where he obtained the drugs. It seemed pretty cut-and-dried. Of course, people could lie, especially kids who thought they might get in serious trouble if it came out that they left their friend dying of an overdose. But in this day and age, they wouldn’t be prosecuted. They might at the most be put on probation or sent to drug rehab. And that could be a wake-up call.