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Riddell stumbled back, just barely avoiding the woman’s open palm, and slammed into a filing cabinet behind him.

“What are you doing?” Jessie demanded, too stunned to physically react.

“I’m not a hooker!” Samantha blurted, looking offended.

“Okay, okay,” Jessie said, stepping between her and Riddell, who had recovered and was moving forward angrily. “Detective Riddell is sorry for the insinuation, but you need to sit back down, Samantha.”

Collins, wincing in discomfort, retreated to the chair. Riddell, clearly still seething, reluctantly stopped his advance. Jessie thought she was going to have to re-set the whole conversation. But before she tried, Collins quietly muttered a response.

“I mean, he was clearly rich, and I guess part of me was hoping that it might become a regular thing and that he’d give me some nice gifts or something. But I never asked for anything, and I was not paid.”

“Okay, Samantha,” Jessie said soothingly, trying to get things back on track. “So how did the situation go from you being generally cool with things to restraining orders and financial settlements?”

Samantha took a cue from Jessie’s demeanor and calmed down a little.

"We hooked up a few times after that, same basic situation," she said. "But other than being pretty free with liquor and drugs, he wasn't very generous. And he was a real jerk. He wanted me to do it with his buddies while he watched. He wanted to tape stuff. And he was just really nasty sometimes. He'd talk down to me. After a while, I thought—why am I hooking up with this guy? He’s not very nice to me. He’s rich but doesn’t spread it around. He like to get rougher than I want in bed. And he keeps asking me to do things I’m not comfortable with. So I ended it.”

"And was that the end of it?" Jessie asked, even though she was sure it wasn't.

"Not by a long shot," Samantha said with a snort. "Taye wasn't happy that I cut him off. He kept coming to the club, asking me to meet up again. Then he started demanding it. He was relentless. At one point I had to ask club security to keep him out because he wouldn't leave me alone. It made it hard to get other guys to do privates or even just sit with me. One time, he got in when there was a new guard at the door. You know what he said to me?"

Both Jessie and Riddell shook their heads.

"He threatened to get me fired," she said. "He said he'd go to the manager and say that I was performing oral sex on customers in the VIP room. He also said he'd anonymously go to the police commission, which regulates adult entertainment clubs, and make the same claims. That was the final straw. I told him that I was going to get a restraining order against him. I had even started looking for a lawyer to help me out when I got served with one of my own. And by the way, even before that happened, the club ended up firing me anyway. They said I was too much of a hassle. So all of a sudden, my finances got tight."

“You didn’t try to go to a different club?” Jessie asked.

She shook her head.

“It wasn’t worth it,” she said. “I knew that he’d find me eventually. And then he’d either start the whole routine again, or if he was feeling extra petty, claim I was in violation of the restraining order and get me arrested when I was the one at work. I figured that even though the money wasn’t as good, I’d be better off as a restaurant server, which is what I did before I started dancing. I picked a family style restaurant, because then he’d be the one out of place. Plus, I could always just refuse to serve him. Then he’d have to go out of his way to cause trouble. It’s one thing to come on to someone at a loud strip club where all the girls are in G-strings. But it comes across different when people are having brunch after church.”

“So how did you get things turned around?” Riddell asked warily, apparently sensing that that if he was too aggressive, she might lose it again. For the first time during the questioning, he actually sounded sympathetic to her.

“The lawyer I got was a shark,” Samantha explained, seeming willing to move past their dust-up. “It was kind of an accident. I just took the recommendation of another girl at the club. This guy met with me. When he found out who Taye was, that he had money and worked for some big-time bank or something, he turned the tables. He said he would go to the bank with the allegations of harassment and the stuff about wanting to tape rough sex. He might have even implied that I had video footage of Taye pressuring me, which I didn’t. He thought of all kinds of things that I never would have. After that, Taye caved pretty quick.”

“You got a settlement check?” Jessie confirmed.

"Kind of," Samantha said. "The settlement was for $300,000. But my lawyer took a third right off the top. He got all his money upfront, but Taye's lawyer negotiated it so that my portion was paid out over five years—$40,000 a year. And after taxes, it's even lower than that. And that's not all."

“What else?” Jessie asked, partly because she genuinely wanted to know, but also because she sensed that this was the first time that Samantha Collins had been able to get any of this off her chest.

“There was a non-disclosure clause in the settlement that said I couldn’t mention where I got the money or even that I had gotten it, other than to my lawyer and accountant,” she explained. “I think that’s why people would keep showing up and following me. It only started after the settlement agreement. I think Taye was having people check on whether I’d violated the terms so that the money could be snatched back. I think he may have even had these people seem threatening on purpose in the hope that I would tell someone because I was scared and then lose the money.”

“Wow,” Jessie said. “That’s a pretty raw deal all around.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, clearly happy that someone sympathized with her plight. “Looking back, I’m still amazed that I got anything. My lawyer’s threats to go to the bank probably helped, but I think the real reason that Taye eventually caved was that I might not have been the only one.”

“What does that mean?” Riddell asked.

Samantha shrugged, then stopped herself. Apparently, the movement was too uncomfortable with her chest injury.

“Just the way he talked,” she said. “It sounded like he’d done some of the same things with other girls: the rough stuff, the pressure to be with his buddies—all that. I think he didn’t want his dirty laundry aired.”

Things began to click into place for Jessie. Jamil had mentioned that Boyce had agreed to at least two other settlements in the last half decade. Even though those agreements were sealed, one could make a few assumptions about the nature of them.

She looked over at Riddell and could tell that he was thinking the same thing she was: if Samantha Collins’s claims were correct, then it seemed that Boyce and his friends had a history of treating women badly. And by extension, they’d likely have made a lot of female enemies. Maybe one of them was pushed too far.

Of course, that 'one' could still be Samantha. Jessie could hear the ambulance siren in the distance and decided that they couldn't put this last part off anymore.

"We need to ask you, Samantha—where were you the last two nights?"

The woman’s face fell. She’d clearly begun to assume that someone was finally on her side. Now she realized that she wasn’t out of the woods yet.

“You think I killed him?” she said, sounding almost hurt.

“We need to eliminate you as a suspect,” Jessie acknowledged. “You can see why you might be on the list. But if you can give us your whereabouts the last two evenings, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

Samantha nodded, flinching slightly at the pain even that movement caused.

“I get it,” she said. “But why the last two nights?”

“Because Boyce wasn’t the only one killed,” Riddell allowed.

“Who else?” Samantha demanded, seemingly stunned at the revelation.

“A man named Daran Peterson,” Jessie answered.

“I know who he is. He was a real jerk too,” Samantha conceded, not seeming to grasp that the admission made her a more likely suspect.

“All the more reason to give us an alibi that proves you didn’t kill either of them,” Jessie noted.

“Fine,” she said, squinting as she tried to recall. “Last night I was working. I even closed up. I don’t know when these guys were killed, but I was at the restaurant from 2:30 until 11. On Tuesday, I worked the day shift. I got home a little after 4 P.M. and stayed in. I binged a show I like.”

“Alone?” Riddell asked.

“Yes.”

The sirens were getting louder. Jessie’s earlier hope that they had the killer in custody had started to fade the second she first started talking to Samantha Collins. Now it was almost completely gone. They’d have to check with her co-workers and access her streaming data to be sure, but she was confident that the woman in front of them was a victim, not a perpetrator.

The expression on Riddell’s face as he uncuffed Collins from the chair suggested that he thought they’d wasted their time here. But Jessie felt differently.

It seemed clear that Taye Boyce, Daran Peterson, and the rest of their yacht boy friends had a proclivity for sexual aggression at the least and perhaps worse. If she could find a common thread in their actions, maybe it would lead to another suspect.

Jessie had a sense of who she was looking for now: someone who had chosen not to count on a shark of a lawyer to get retribution. Someone who decided to get it herself.