I thought for a long moment, trying to put the pieces together and understand the moves Fulgoni had made.
“You had the name Marco but he didn’t come into it until after the arrest went down and the locals had found the coke and the gun,” I said in summary. “So if Marco was behind this, then you had to figure out how he got the gun in there for the locals to find.”
Fulgoni nodded.
“Exactly. So I went to Hector and said, what if the gun wasn’t planted by the locals? What if it was already there under the mattress and planted earlier by somebody else? Who was in that room between the time you checked into that hotel and the bust went down? That was four days and I asked him for a list with the names of everybody who’d visited that room in that time frame.”
“Gloria Dayton.”
“Yes, we zeroed in on her. But she wasn’t the only one who had been in that room. There had been at least one other hooker, Hector’s brother, and a couple other associates, too. Luckily, we didn’t have to vet the housekeepers because Hector kept the do not disturb on his door the whole time. But we zeroed in on Gloria because I had a friend run all the names through the police computer and—bingo!—she happened to get popped one fricking day before they took Hector down.”
I nodded. The logic made sense. I would have zeroed in on Gloria as well. I also knew what I would have done next.
“How’d you track down Gloria? She’d changed her name. She moved away and then moved back.”
“The Internet. These girls can change names, locations, doesn’t matter. The business is based on the visual. Young Sly got her booking photo from eight years ago, when she got arrested on a possession and prostitution beef, and then he went online, checking photos on escort sites. Eventually he found her. She’d changed her hair but that was about it. He printed out photos and brought them up here. Hector confirmed.”
I was surprised. Sly Jr. had actually done something that created a significant break in the case.
“And you then, of course, had Junior paper her.”
I said it like the next move had been a matter of routine.
“Yeah, we hit her with a subpoena. We wanted to bring her in to put her on the record.”
“Who was the process server, Valenzuela?”
“I don’t know. Somebody Sly Jr. hired.”
I leaned across the table and started increasing the urgency and momentum, hitting him with the questions without pause.
“Was she photographed to prove receipt?”
Fulgoni shrugged like he didn’t know and didn’t care.
“Was she?”
“Look, I don’t know. I was up here, Haller. What’s so—”
“If there’s a photo, I want it. Tell your son.”
“Fine. Okay.”
“When did you paper her?”
“I don’t know the date. Last year sometime. Obviously before she got killed by her pimp.”
I leaned further across the table.
“How long before she got killed?”
“About a week, I think.”
I hammered my fist down on the table.
“She wasn’t killed by her pimp.”
I pointed across the table at him.
“You got her killed. You and your son. They found out about the subpoena. They couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t talk.”
Fulgoni was shaking his head before I was finished.
“First of all, who is ‘they’?”
“Marco, the ICE team. Do you think they would risk this coming out? Especially if planting firearms was common practice with that team. Think of all the reputations, careers, and cases that would be jeopardized. You don’t think that’s motive for murder? You don’t think they’d risk taking out a hooker if it meant securing their operation?”
Fulgoni held up a hand to stop me.
“Look, I’m not stupid, Haller. I knew the risks. The subpoena was filed under seal. Marco couldn’t have known about it.”
“So she ended up dead a week later and you thought, what, that the pimp did it and it was all just coincidence?”
“I thought what the police thought and what my son read to me out of the newspaper. That her pimp killed her and we missed our chance to have her help Moya.”
I shook my head.
“Bullshit. You knew. You must have known you set things in motion. How many days before the deposition was she killed?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t sched—”
“That’s bullshit! You knew. How many days?”
“Four, but it doesn’t matter. It was under seal. No one knew but her and us.”
I nodded.
“Yeah, only you and she knew, and what did you expect—that she wouldn’t tell someone who might tell somebody else? Or that she might not call up Jimmy Marco, who she used to snitch for, and say, what should I do about this?”