Page 26 of Save Her Life (Sandra Vos #1)
TWENTY-FIVE
Sandra returned to the WFO, gutted that she wasn’t any further along in finding Olivia. Brice had texted before she left the Novak property to say that Duane’s lawyer had arrived. She’d fired back a message to ask him to hold off until she got back. She received two letters in response to that. O and K. Somehow it felt loaded in what wasn’t being said. Then another text, Rowe’s here . And that explained it. Brice was fine stepping back and letting her run with things at the motel but not with the assistant director in the audience.
She parked in the lot, and sat there for a minute, letting the car idle. She’d put off making a certain phone call for long enough. She pressed his name before she could conjure more reasons to procrastinate. By now, she’d hoped that Olivia would be back, and everything would be somehow okay. This entire nightmare would be something they could relay to Olivia’s father after the fact. But the truth was far from that.
She landed in Nolan’s voicemail. “It’s urgent that you call me back. It’s about Olivia.” It was enough detail to prompt a quick response but not so much as to give him a heart attack.
Next, she called Eric to let him know where things were with Novak. She could have easily texted him instead, but she longed to hear his voice and soak up his strength and confidence. With every passing minute of Olivia being out there somewhere it was slowly shredding her sanity. She kept coming back to one question. What does Duane want out of all this?
Every time it came up, all she could land on was revenge. Did that mean he’d permanently injure Olivia like had happened to his brother, as she thought before? But if this was about payback, wouldn’t Novak have boasted about hurting Olivia? Instead, he claimed no recognition of her. Or was this about money? Even still, none of this explained the other anomaly of why he’d shown up at his parents’ empty house in a mystery blue Ford sedan.
She entered the office and went to her desk. The sight of Olivia’s folded shirt sent a sharp pain through her chest.
“There you are,” Brice said.
She stuffed the shirt into a drawer and said, “No sign of her.”
“I had a feeling when I didn’t hear from you,” he told her.
Then she filled him in on what the good neighbor had told them.
“All right. Well, as I told you, Rowe’s here and he’ll be watching my conversation with Novak.”
“ Your conversation?”
“Rowe made it clear to me that I’m the only one he wants questioning him.”
She made a move to find their boss, but stopped when Brice held up a hand. “No sense pleading your case. He told me to tell you nothing you could say was going to work on him.”
Except he wasn’t confident enough to face me… “Okay. There are some things you need to ask.” She ran through them fast and then said, “Let’s go.” She brushed her arm through the air in a sweeping motion, hoping it would encourage him to get moving.
He quickly caught up and kept his strides even with hers. She entered the observation room and found Elwood standing near the one-way mirror looking in on Duane Novak and a portly fellow with a bad combover.
“That’s Otto Richardson, Novak’s attorney,” Brice told her.
“Thanks, but I figured as much. By that, I mean, his lawyer. I didn’t know his name,” she added.
Brice smiled at her. “I understood. Okay, so do I know everything?”
“You do.”
Brice left them and showed up on the other side of the glass a few seconds later. Both Richardson and Novak sat straighter when Brice knocked and then turned the door handle. Richardson touched his client’s shoulder briefly. Brice entered the room and no sooner sat down than the lawyer spoke.
“You might as well dismiss my client right now. You have had no right to hold him and have violated the law.”
Sandra could feel Elwood staring at her profile, but she refused to acknowledge him.
“What did you do?” he said quietly.
“Please, shh.”
“ Shh ? I’m your boss and you shush me?”
She looked over at him now. “I didn’t mean any disrespect. I’m just… frustrated, disheartened. The hours are flying by, and I’m no closer to finding Olivia. But that man in there”—she jabbed a pointed finger toward Novak—“knows where she is.” He has to!
“And if he doesn’t?”
She pinched her pendant. “Let’s not even discuss that possibility right now.”
Back in the interview room, the conversation had carried on with Brice and the lawyer. Brice must have rebutted with something, and Richardson was red-cheeked and on the defense.
“My client says that he requested a lawyer three times before the questioning stopped.”
“Is that true?” Elwood’s entire body was facing her now, and she turned to him.
“It’s not true.” Technically the first time the word lawyer was framed by a question about whether he should get one. Not a request. “It was once.”
“My God, Sandra.” Elwood looked up at the ceiling.
“I just need to know where he has Olivia.”
“By breaking the law. If this guy took her, he might never go away for it.”
“I told you before my priority is Olivia.” She’d deal with Novak in her own way if it came down to it, or at least she liked to think she could take the law into her own hands. Her dead father might come back and haunt her from the grave though. He was a good cop. She’d strived to be that all her career. So what the hell…? This situation with Olivia was knocking her off balance.
“We were just talking with your client,” Brice said in response to the lawyer’s accusation, drawing her and Elwood’s attention back to the room.
“It doesn’t look like ‘just talking’ when we’re both sitting here across from a fed, my client suspected of kidnapping a teenage girl. And all the while you’re harassing my client, he told me that he made it clear he has no idea who the girl even is.”
Brice set out a photograph of Olivia and pushed it across the table in front of Novak.
He shook his head and looked at his lawyer, who shoved the picture back.
“He doesn’t know her. What proof do you have against him?”
Brice took out a photo plucked from the coffee shop’s video. “He followed her out of DiversaBlend on M Street NW.”
“I told you I never went to that one,” Novak said.
Brice leveled his gaze at him. “Well, you didn’t go to the other one either. The lady at the front counter didn’t remember you. Yet one of their cups is magically in your garbage.”
“This is bullshit,” Novak swore, and Richardson held up a calming hand at his client.
“Where were you this afternoon between four thirty and six thirty?” Brice countered.
Richardson gestured for his client to answer.
“At Sands Motel, in my room.”
“Can anyone corroborate that fact?” Brice asked.
“Umm.” Novak started squirming and faced his lawyer, who nodded. “I was with a hooker.”
“A sex worker,” she murmured, unable to let the other term go. It wasn’t politically correct, and she had the insatiable need to keep things accurate.
“Where would we find her?”
“Just down the street from the Sands. She’s really skinny with red hair and smells like an ashtray. Goes by Lucy.”
“Okay, we’ll have a talk with her. It must have been at the earlier end of the time I gave you. We were told that you were at your parents’ old place around six thirty. Did we hear wrong?”
Novak wriggled in his chair and shook his head at his lawyer.
“What’s the relevance?” Richardson asked, stepping in.
Brice settled his gaze on Novak. “Why were you there?”
Novak rubbed his jaw. “I… I was just there because of sentimental reasons. That’s all. It was after… well, the hooker.”
“Sentimental reasons. Can you elaborate?”
“Maybe once you elaborate on the relevance,” Richardson slapped back.
“All right then. The thing is, your client has no need to be hanging around the place. One of our agents spoke with your client’s parents, and they had no interest in a reunion. They turned him away. That’s why he’s been staying at the Sands Motel.”
“Still waiting on the relevance.” Richardson tapped a hand on the edge of the table.
“We think he took this girl”—Brice pointed at Olivia’s face—“to that property and held her there for a time.”
A complete fabrication as there was nothing to support that. Elwood looked at her, and she shook her head, to which he gave a puzzled expression. She pointed into the interview room. He should know that interrogation was a game and if the criminals could lie, so could the good guys.
“I went for sentimental reasons!” Novak burst into tears.
Brice gave him a few moments to compose himself before continuing. “Which are?” he gently prodded.
“I grew up there.” Novak sniffled. “Everything wasn’t perfect, but it was all right. Jimmy could walk. I talked him into… into…”
The bank robbery where he wound up a paraplegic , Sandra finished in her head.
“My client needs a break,” Richardson said. “Or let him go. I still haven’t heard any compelling evidence against him.”
“Just one more question, and we can cut out for a break. Where did you get the Ford sedan from, Duane?”
“I borrowed it from a friend.”
“What friend? What’s their name?”
“No, Agent, you said one more question. He answered it,” Richardson shoved out.
Brice gathered the photographs back into a folder and left the room. A moment later, he joined her and Elwood.
“You did well in there. We’ll get him.” Her phone rang, and she pulled it out to see it was Lakisha and answered. As she listened to her message, she was smiling. Then she said, “We’ll be at your desk as fast as possible.” She hung up and signaled for Brice to join her. “You’re on a break from the interview, so you might as well join me.”
“Hold up,” Elwood called out. His authoritative tone had her stopping in the doorway and turning around.
“We need more proof against Duane,” she said, “and we just might have it. That was Lakisha Hester from the Science and Tech Branch. She has CCTV footage ready to watch from the area around DiversaBlend.”
“Go. In the meantime, I’ll dispatch agents to find this Lucy, see if we can poke a hole in Novak’s alibi. I’ll also send some to canvass the neighborhood surrounding the Novaks’ property to see if anyone else saw Duane at his parents’ place with someone or caught the plate number on that Ford.”
“Thanks.” She hustled out, not about to wait around in case he changed his mind.