“They’re not so bad,” she said. “I’ve been wearing them all my life, so whatever.”
“Yeah, for you maybe. I’d get headaches from the altitude,” she said, with a sneer.
“Maybe, but, if you weren’t so short in the first place, it wouldn’t be a problem.”
She laughed, and the two women settled into their desks, as Colby walked in.
“We got in a couple reports overnight,” he said. “Nothing too bad. You’ve got a new case downtown on the east side. A body in a Dumpster. Looks like she was an escort. I don’t see it as connected to any other case. But, of course, it’s up to you guys to figure that out, and we need to get moving on these other cases. I understand that we’ve made some progress, but we haven’t gotten anything we can give to the prosecutor. And believe me. He’s chomping at the bit on the drive-by shootings.”
“We’re getting somewhere on that one,” Kate said, “but it’s still not anything we have an actual suspect on.”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “We don’t have anyone to lock on to, so we don’t have anything to give him.”
“And you gave him what we had?”
“Oh, yes, he was happy with that. I mean, it’s progress. We have the guy who drove off with the vehicle. We have an eyewitness viewing of this guy from the back, which isn’t helpful at all, so what the heck are we supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “I wanted to go back to the older woman, who originally owned the vehicle.”
“And what will that tell you?” Colby asked her in surprise.
“If she had any idea who stole the vehicle.”
The others turned to look at her; she shrugged. “They had to have shown it to somebody at some point. It was kept in their locked garage at home, so who would have known it was there? Could have been a random theft maybe, but it’s not exactly a collector’s item. It’s not something that would have had a GPS on it or some car alarm for sure. But chances are also good that nobody would have known it was even there. So what are the chances that her husband showed it to somebody, and then it went missing, either right away or a little later?”
“Follow it up,” Colby said. “And make sure you’re checking on the Forensics Division.”
“They’re all over it,” she said. “We’re just waiting for the reports.”
At that, his lips twitched. “Looking good. We’re always waiting on something, aren’t we?”
“Forensics usually,” she said, with spirit.
He nodded. “I hear you, but I’ll talk to the DA anyway.” And, with that, he turned and walked back out again.
She looked over at the others and shrugged. “I’m not wrong, am I?”
“No, the backlog is usually Forensics. Like everyone, they’re short on budget. We need more people down there, and we’re not getting them.”
“I think the cities are always short on budgets, aren’t they?” Kate asked curiously. “Is this really an issue, or is it an ongoing excuse?”
“I think it really is an issue at this point,” Rodney said, stepping up. “I’ll come with you to ask the wife about the truck.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I like the idea,” he said, “and just because the husband may have shown it to somebody doesn’t mean the wife knows.”
Lilliana added, “Remember too that she’s in a home. So just because she might have known something at one time doesn’t mean she knows it anymore.”
With that warning in the back of her mind, Kate drove this time and took Rodney to the retirement home, which was located in the Locarno area. “Nice area,” she said, looking around.
“Yeah, it’s really built up in here. We have a lot of really high-end places, but this area being close to the university has always been popular.”
“As long as you don’t mind hills,” she said, as she turned off Eleventh Street and headed down to Tenth.
“Absolutely,” he said, as he looked at her in surprise. “You’re going up the alleyway?”
“Yeah, I checked online, and the parking is a little on the scarce side,” she said, as she parked at the back, and they got out and took a look around. “Looks like a nice little place.” The lot was very large, with trees on the side, a nice wooden fence, and lots of little benches.