Her friends had seen Jenna alive after the concert, near her apartment, the cops hadn’t been focused on the concert in the first hours of the search. Not unexpected. Evie was interested only because whatever had happened that night hadn’t been solved, and this was a prime location for Jenna to have been spotted by someone who took an interest in her. The details she needed would be in the other documentation somewhere. She’d find it when she was back at the office.
She’d seen enough to tell her the core of it. Evie shoved the folders back into the backpack, dug out car keys, and reversed course. She’d come back with Ann for a more detailed excursion.
Jenna had been around a lot of people that night. Past midnight or one a.m., Evie doubted this was a quiet area on a Friday night. If Jenna had doubled back this direction after leaving her friends, someone would have seen her, noticed her, likely said something when the area got papered with missing-person fliers and cops and friends were asking questions. Evie wanted to see the tip file, the called-in comments that cops might have looked at and not been able to do something with at the time.
She didn’t know yet where the crime had happened. That felt like the critical missing fact and the most likely reason the case hadn’t yet been solved.
Evie dumped her backpack on the desk and went to see what David was doing. The conference room whiteboard had been turned into a visual look at the PI’s life. David was sitting on the opposite side of the table, studying the mosaic.
“Welcome back.” David slid over an open bag of pretzels, and Evie pulled out a chair, took a handful. She hadn’t worked with him long enough to recognize his mood at a glance, but she had the impression his thinking stints were probably as intense as hers, and interrupting was best timed for when he was ready for a break. She was rewarded for the silence with a smile and nod by him toward the board. “I’ve been looking through his files at the type of work he did. A PI doing his job is spying, sneaking around, collecting rumors and evidence to prove someone is a criminal or an adulterer or otherwise a bad person. Really bad people are the ones who tend to turn around and kill you.”
Evie thought that was a fascinating observation, and considered the board. A missing PI defined “interesting” simply for the parallels with what law enforcement did plus the sheer number of directions it might go.
David scooped up another handful of pretzels. “I’ve glanced at his personal life. Saul Morris was forty-eight, never married, a clean record with local cops. He worked at a newspaper as a photographer before he got into PI work. Nothing showed up that set off alarms—no sex scandals, no revolving set of girlfriends, no gambling problem.” He pointed with a pretzel at the photo of Saul’s house. “Nothing was found in his place suggesting he was using or dealing drugs, trafficking in stolen goods, or doing some blackmailing alongside his investigating. Hobbies were sports and cars—several car magazines subscriptions, he’d paid to drive around a race track in a performance car—that kind of thing. He preferred to work alone, sole proprietor, no history of hiring any staff. His life was his PI business.”
“An older guy with an interesting career,” she commented, “maybe a few painful breakups with girlfriends in his twenties and thirties, so why settle down now?”
“Pretty much how I read it,” David said with a nod. “He was actually pretty tame as PIs go. He was good with a camera, good at tailing people. He worked a number of infidelity cases. ‘I think my spouse is cheating on me’ kind of thing. He was getting referrals from satisfied clients, who told their friends about the PI who’d helped them out. It’s sad when you think of it—the cottage industry that exists around infidelity. It looks to be about twenty percent of his business.
“He also did a lot of background checks. Prospective business hires, as well as people being considered for promotion to sensitive positions. Numerous traces locating people skipping out on debts and child-support payments. Some of his personal bills he paid by camera work—a newspaper needs a photographer on a breaking story, he’d stop what he was doing to take the job.”
Evie was seeing a picture form as David spoke. “A realist about the work, a lot of jobs that would take five to fifteen hours, keep the client list full, the income diversified.”
“I’d say that’s how he was thinking,” David concurred. He nodded at the board. “Notice what’s not up there?” He gave her a minute to scan it. “There’s no work for insurance companies, suspected fraud, thefts, the ‘he said it was stolen and put in a claim, but he’s actually still got it,’ kinds of cheating attempts by people who aren’t very good at it. There’s also no work for lawyers, which is surprising. Most PIs are doing some trial-related work, probing the veracity of statements from defendants, trying to locate witnesses.”