Sam looked at the photos on the wall—from the house where Asta had killed her stepfather, from the bedroom where she slept all those years prior to fighting back, to her indifferent mother—and he still had questions. But like everyone else in the room, he sensed Jamil was building to a point and had no intention of interrupting the researcher now.

  “I tried to do what Jessie would do, and put myself in this girl’s head,” Jamil continued, “and I thought, if I was stuck in this hellhole for killing someone who deserved it and my own mother took his side instead of mine, would I want to keep his name? My answer would be a firm ‘no.’ Even if it wasn’t legally binding, I’d want to go with something else in my everyday life. And what better name than that of her father, who died when she was eleven? Until then, her life had been okay. After that, her mom met this new guy, and it became a nightmare.”

  “What was her dad’s last name?” Beth asked.

  “Bradway,” Jamil said. “His name was Zachary Bradway.”

  Everyone in the room gasped at the same time, but Jamil wasn’t done. “And one last thing, I also checked Asta’s middle name,” he said. “It’s Zoe.”

  There was a long second of silence as everyone processed the dual origin of Operation Z’s name before Captain Hernandez asked, “do you have an address?”

  “She’s had several since she got out of Twin Towers,” Jamil said. “I’m trying to reconfirm the most recent one now. Give me a minute.”

  While they waited, everyone looked at the photo on the wall again. Sam tried to get a sense of this young woman and just what she was capable of.

  “She looks more like a victim than a perpetrator,” Beth said, voicing his own thoughts.

  “True,” Karen said, “but remember, looks can be deceiving. This is a woman who has killed another human being already, whether you think it was justified or not. If she was capable of doing it once, she can do it again.”

  “And don’t forget,” Captain Hernandez added. “She was in Twin Towers with Andy Robinson for over a year and a half. She was already an unstable, psychologically vulnerable person when they met, young and impressionable. She’d been abandoned by her own mother. Then Robinson swoops in and provides her with the emotional support she’s been craving, along with a purpose. The bond those two established over their eighteen months together was likely intense and resilient. It might be the only thing that Asta—or Zoe—can cling to for stability when her world gets unpredictable.”

  “Maybe that unpredictability could work in our favor?” Sam suggested. “What if we could use it to make her question her loyalty to Robinson?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Captain Hernandez told him. “If Andy made Zoe her final acolyte, told her to complete this mission, even named it Operation Z after her and her father, there’s no way we’re going to be able to confuse her or talk her down. I doubt we can save her. I just hope we can stop her.”

  A shout from Jamil made them both look his way.

  “I’ve got the address!”

  “Text it to us,” Hernandez said. “Detectives Bray and Goodwin are with me. We’re leaving now.”

  He was already out the door before he finished the sentence. Sam was right behind him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jessie wasn’t sure how much further to let Valentine go.

  “Why do you keep lying?” the detective demanded, leaning down over the table in the Beverly Hills Police Department interrogation room, so that she was nose to nose with Dr. Jason Stinson.

  “I’m not,” he insisted for the third time since the questioning had started, as he sat handcuffed to the table, looking up at her.

  They’d been going back and forth like this for ten minutes now and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Jessie had let Valentine take the lead from the moment the detective had told Stinson that he was under arrest for murder and read him his rights in the car on the way back from the strip center. Part of her deference was because she felt bad about cuffing the guy outside the Peruvian café without involving her partner, but it was also because she thought that Valentine’s no holds barred approach might be more effective with a smooth operator like Stinson.

  But so far it hadn’t been. Strangely, the problem hadn’t been the doctor’s slippery style but rather his straightforward insistence that he was telling the truth. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer or invoked his right to remain silent. Instead, he’d answered all their questions, just not to their satisfaction.

  “Have you been giving these women injections in their homes?” Valentine asked soon after they first entered the room.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “What was in them?”

  After claiming that he had provided them with various treatments depending on the visit, Valentine pinned him down to the last week.

  “Vitamin injections,” he finally told her.

  “For all three women?” she wanted to know.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You didn’t give them anything else?” she pressed.

  “I don’t typically do anything else on vitamin days because they can be draining,” he explained. “I don’t want to overtax their systems.”

  Valentine had looked over at Jessie as if she couldn’t believe her ears at that statement, then turned back to Stinson. “If you weren’t involved in their deaths,” she wondered, “why didn’t you come forward when you saw the connection among them?” she pressed.

  “First of all,” he replied. “I was holed up in my office all morning. I didn’t know about Helena’s death until you told me in the car on the way over here. And as to Lydia and Julianne, I knew that they had died, but I didn’t know they were murdered, so I didn’t think there was anything to come forward about.”

  That response led to Valentine’s first accusation that he was lying and the first time he contended he wasn’t.

  “If you’re so innocent, then why did you run?” she demanded.

  He looked at her, bewildered. “Are you kidding?” he asked before pointing at Jessie. “First, this one admits to stalking me. Then you get super intense, demanding to be in the room for our consultation. I thought maybe this was some kind of weird vengeance situation for a friend’s past service gone wrong. Maybe you were planning to throw acid in my face or something. I didn’t know. And then when you said you were LAPD, I thought you were coming after me for operating without a medical license. When you said I was under investigation for murder, I thought that was just a way to get in my head. I panicked, okay?”

  But it wasn’t okay with Valentine, who continued to push. It was after that third accusation of lying and Stinson’s refusal to budge from his story that Jessie finally decided to enter the fray. She caught her partner’s eye and raised her eyebrows, as if to ask, “you mind if I try?” Valentine tensed up defensively for a moment, but recovered quickly, and shrugged.

  Jessie walked over and took the chair opposite Stinson. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “Jason,” she began. “Assuming we give you the benefit of the doubt here, help this make sense for us. You’ve admitted that you visited all three of these women on the afternoons of their deaths and gave them vitamin injections. The medical examiner has determined that they were each injected with a slow-acting poison, all in the afternoon, all in the left arm. The chemical that killed them came from the shots you gave them. Surely, you can see why your protestations ring hollow for us. Give us a reason to see things any other way.”

  He leaned in and looked her in the eyes, unblinking. “I get that this looks bad,” he conceded, “but I typically visit a half dozen women a day. Why would I, after doing this for months, suddenly kill these three women? Why would I kill any of them, for that matter? This is my livelihood. What motive could I possibly have? Besides, I’d have to be an idiot to think I wouldn’t get caught, right?”

  Jessie had to admit that he made a compelling point. He’d already fallen so far—from admired charity doctor in a distant land to promising LA plastic surgeon to disgraced back-alley Botox pusher. What purpose did it serve for him to start killing his clients? Unless he was truly a madman, which was still a possibility, there didn’t seem to be one.

  Jessie stood up and wandered to the corner of the room, away from the gaze of both Stinson and Valentine. There was something else that was bugging her, and no amount of recent head haziness could stop it from flashing loudly in her brain.

  Stinson had said that he saw about six women every day. But Lydia Philbin had died last Friday, Julianne Faraday on Sunday, and Helena Lannister on Monday. Why only the three victims out of . . .?

  She turned around.

  “How many total women did you visit from Friday through yesterday?” she asked him.

  He looked surprised at the question. “May I see my phone for a second?” he asked.

  Valentine, despite her confused expression, handed it to him. After a few seconds of scrolling, he looked up. “Seven on Friday, five on Saturday, three on Sunday, and six yesterday for a total of twenty-one.”

  “Did you see anyone yet today?” Jessie asked.

  “No,” he answered. “I had five visits scheduled, starting at 2:30, but obviously that didn’t pan out.”

  “Do you get your supplies fresh at the beginning of each day?” she asked, not interested in his black humor.

  “Not for everything,” he said. “Some items will keep for weeks. But the vitamin injections come from a compounding pharmacy and need to be kept cold. I get them new every morning.”

  “Who’s your supplier?” Jessie asked, her voice rising for the first time.

  He looked hesitant. “I don’t want to get him in trouble,” he muttered. “He’s just a pharmacist trying to get by. He could lose his job.”

  “Jason,” she said with quiet passion as she walked slowly toward him. “Three women are dead. Right now, you’re on the hook for that. If you aren’t responsible for their murders, then he is. He provided you with the syringes that killed them. Who knows if he’s supplying them to other doctors too? There could be other women at risk right now. So, he’s going to lose a lot more than his job. Now, tell me his name.”

  Jason Stinson leaned so far back away from her in his chair that Valentine, standing behind him, had to steady it so that he wouldn’t tip over.

  “His name is George Howe,” he whispered.

  “Write down his address,” Jessie instructed.

  As he did, she looked up at Valentine. The detective stared back at her. But then, still with a serious face, she did something that Jessie had never seen before: she winked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  “Breach!” Ryan ordered over the radio.

  The officers, all wearing body armor, broke into the apartment of Asta Malone, aka Zoe Bradway. Once they searched it, the head of the unit reported back.

  “All clear, Captain,” he said. “No sign of her.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Ryan said from the hallway. “We’re coming in.”

  He entered the unit, along with Karen Bray and Sam Goodwin. They all stood in the middle of the small living room and silently assessed the place. The apartment was on the fourth floor of a seven-story building in a nondescript part of Koreatown.

  Like all the others in the dingy complex, it was claustrophobic, with a bedroom barely large enough for a bed, a bathroom that would look tiny in a lower-floor cruise stateroom, and this living room, which also served as kitchen, dining area, and foyer.

  “Look around,” he instructed, “CSU and the evidence collections teams will be up here soon so don’t touch anything. But make note of whatever draws your attention. If something feels off, clock it. Look for things that either seem personal or tie into some larger, recurring theme. Even if you think it’s innocuous, like photos of bunnies everywhere, make a mental note. Maybe that means she’s working in the rabbit department of a pet store. Maybe she’s raising infected bunnies and plans to let them loose at a local petting zoo. You get the idea.”

  Certain that they did, he stopped talking and let them focus as he began studying the room. But after five minutes of poring over every piece of paper in plain sight, looking under tables and chairs, and shining his flashlight in vents, he had come up empty. The only thing he could say with any certainty was that Asta Malone was cheap and messy.

  Her budget apparently only allowed for posters of a hodgepodge of movies, rather than actual art. He made a note to have the techs check behind each one just in case there was something hidden there. Her dishes were piled up in the sink, and food remnants had started to adhere to the surfaces. He had to dodge multiple pieces of popcorn lying on the floor. Nowhere in all the junk was there anything that indicated where she might be right now.

  The apartment was a dead end, at least so far. He still held out hope that the tech folks might discover something, but that might take hours. He, Bray, and Goodwin would canvass the building, along with the team of officers they’d brought, asking all her neighbors for any insight they could provide. They’d send Asta’s name and picture out to law enforcement all over the county in the hopes that they’d get lucky, and someone would pick her up before she did any damage. And Jamil and Beth were already poring through her digital footprint since her release from Twin Towers, looking for phone data, employment records, and anything that could get them closer to her.

  Any of those things might generate a hit and drop her in their lap. But Ryan’s fear, which he kept to himself, was that Asta had gone to ground from the moment she hung up that burner phone yesterday, maybe even before, and that she wouldn’t reappear until she activated Operation Z.

  He worried that this apartment had been their last chance to find her in time, and they’d been too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Jessie suggested that they walk into the pharmacy separately.

  Valentine agreed that it was a good idea and, as they sat in her car outside the place, made a recommendation of her own. “How about you throw on a cap and a pair of sunglasses?” she proposed. “Your face is almost as well-known as some movie stars in this town, and if George Howe sees you strolling up the aisle toward him, he’s going to know something’s going on before we can get a word in.”

  “That is a constructive suggestion,” Jessie noted. “Unfortunately, I don’t have either of those things on me.”

  “Luckily, I do,” Valentine said, reaching into the backseat and grabbing them. “Now, let’s go in there and find out if this scumbag is our killer or if the scumbag that we already have in custody is.”

  The Phriendly Pharmacy was on South Beverly Drive, just a few blocks away from the glitz of Rodeo Drive, but much quieter. It was treelined and walkable, populated with cafes, juice bars, antique stores, sushi joints, vitamin shops, and at least one other mom and pop pharmacy.

  Jessie entered first and wandered over to the cold and flu aisle, where she had a good view of the whole store. She texted Valentine that she didn’t see Howe. Her partner came in a minute later and walked straight to the pharmacist’s counter in the back, where a young woman with long, straight black hair, a pale, moon-shaped face, and a sunny expression stood.

  “Can I help you?” she asked Valentine.

  Jessie casually ambled in that direction so that she could hear the conversation clearly.

  “Yes, thanks,” Valentine said. “I’m looking for George Howe.”

  “Oh, he’s on his lunch break right now,” the woman said, “but I’m happy to help. My name’s Roberta.”

  Jessie watched Valentine smile apologetically. They’d gone over this scenario, and she wanted to see how the detective handled using misdirection instead of brute force to get her way.

  “I appreciate that, Roberta,” she replied, sounding genuinely pained at what she had to say next, “but I’m not actually here for a prescription. I’m new to town and a mutual friend from back home in Boise said I should look George up when I got here. She gave me his phone number and where he worked, but I think the number might be wrong because it keeps saying it’s invalid. So, I figured I’d just come by.”

  Roberta smiled warmly, apparently not offended at all that her services weren’t needed.

  “In that case, you can probably catch him,” she said. “George is a person of habit. He loves to get his veggie burrito from Pancho’s and then eat it in the parkette directly across the street. They’re both just up the block. Turn right when you walk out the front door.”

  “Thanks Roberta,” Valentine said. “And I promise, whenever I’m in the greater Beverly Hills area and have compounding pharmaceutical needs, I’ll come to you.”

  Roberta gave another one of those sunny smiles, along with an elaborate curtsy. Valentine bowed in return and headed for the exit. Jessie stayed an extra thirty seconds before following her outside.

  “Look at you,” she teased once she joined the detective a few doors down, “using charm and personal connection rather than threats of incarceration to get the information you need. How does it feel?”

  “Dirty,” Valentine said, “like I’ve cheapened myself.”

  Jessie tried not to laugh. “I don’t know whether I’d prefer if you were joking or serious,” she said. “Either way, we got what we needed. I see Pancho’s is just up ahead.”

  They quickened their pace at the sight of the joint. The mid-afternoon crowds were thick and dodging the sidewalk traffic was a challenge.

 

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