While Detective Blatch called in a team of dedicated forensic technicians to search Laura’s house, I drove to her law office. It was in a strip mall about a quarter of a mile from I-55 on Telegraph Road. There was an old Waffle House restaurant in the parking lot and a pet shop at the end of the row of shops. Laura’s office had a simple sign above it that said Lawyer in faded red letters.
I parked along the side of the building and walked to the front door. As expected, no one was inside. Through the dusty glass window, I saw desks and a waiting room. A hand-painted sign in the lobby advertised her services. Uncontested divorces started at $250, while simple wills started at $300. The sign was quick to note that all costs were negotiable.
Laura’s practice was on the fringes of the legal profession, but that was the life she had chosen. I liked that. It was a shame she had died.
A sign on the door listed her hours, but it also gave a number to call in case of emergencies. I called it on my cell. A woman answered on the third ring.
“Rojas and Associates,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“Yeah, hi, my name is Joe Court,” I said, looking around to make sure no one could hear me. “I’m outside your office right now. Who am I talking to?”
“Rojas and Associates, attorneys at law,” she said. “What can I help you with?”
“Who is this?”
The woman paused. “Tina. What do you need?”
“I need to talk to you in person.”
“Look, ma’am, we’re not taking on clients right now. If you tell me what the problem is, I can refer you to an attorney who can help you out.”
I paced in front of the office. The sun was setting, sending purple and orange streaks across the sky so that the horizon almost looked as if it were on fire.
“Has anyone called you about Laura Rojas in the past few days?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“It is my concern,” I said, “because I’m a detective from St. Augustine County and Laura Rojas is dead. We found her body two days ago. I’m trying to find out who killed her. Since you were Laura’s assistant, you might know something. If you’d like, I can call the county police and ask for somebody to pick you up.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Laura’s dead?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry to tell you.”
“If you’re a detective and you’re calling me, you think someone murdered her.”
“I’m positive someone murdered her.”
“Oh, God,” she said. She paused for a moment. Her voice was high, almost squeaky when she spoke. “I’m on my way. I’ll be at the office as soon as I can.”
She hung up before I said anything else. My stomach rumbled, so I walked over to the Waffle House, where I drank coffee and ate biscuits and gravy. It wasn’t the healthiest dinner around, but everyone deserved an indulgence now and again.
By the time I finished eating, a white Kia Optima had parked beside my SUV. A woman stepped out. She was in her late forties or early fifties and had strawberry blond hair and a deep, even tan. I walked toward her and flashed her my badge. She nodded and lit a cigarette with trembling fingers.
“Are you Tina?” I asked, stepping close. She was smoking a menthol, and her face and neck had the bronzed patina of a long-term smoker. She nodded.
“Tina Babcock,” she said, holding the cigarette to her lips. She didn’t offer to shake my hand.
“I’m Detective Joe Court with the St. Augustine County Sheriff’s Department. What kind of law do you guys practice?”
She shrugged and sucked on her cigarette so its tip burned orange.
“All kinds. Family law, DUI defense, things like that,” she said. “Laura wasn’t particular. She liked the work.”
I nodded and took out a notepad.
“Like I told you on the phone, I’m investigating Ms. Rojas’s murder. We found her body deep in the woods in St. Augustine County. Did she have clients in St. Augustine?”
Babcock looked at me and then drew on her cigarette. Her fingers had stopped trembling, and her expression had become calm and self-assured. We had stepped into her comfort zone now. I had the feeling she had given police officers that emotionless stare before.
“Do you have a warrant that would give you access to our client list?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I can’t answer that question,” she said. “Get a warrant, and I will comply to the extent the law requires me.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “That’s fair. I understand you’re a law office and that you need to take care of your clients. Hypothetically, would she take on a client from St. Augustine?”
Ms. Babcock tilted her head to the side. “To answer that question, you’d have to get a hypothetical warrant.”
I let the smile leave my face.
“Okay, how about this: I’m from St. Augustine. My neighbor keeps throwing his shit on my lawn. I’d like to hire a lawyer to draft a letter requesting that he refrain from doing that. Could your firm help me out?”
Ms. Babcock’s expression didn’t change.
“Is he throwing literal shit, or do you use that term to refer to household refuse?”
“Does it matter?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“One is a serious sanitation issue, while the other might give you cause for a civil action.”
“Fine,” I said, closing my eyes. “It’s refuse. It’s not literal feces.”
She said nothing until I opened my eyes. Then she smiled and shrugged.
“My firm is no longer taking on any new clients. It seems our principal attorney has just died. If you’d like, I can give you the name of an excellent attorney who might help you out.”
I almost told her off. Instead, I looked down at the ground.
“You liked Laura, didn’t you?”
Tina drew on her cigarette. For a moment, her expression softened, but then she looked at me with hard, brown eyes.
“She signed my paycheck every week. I liked her fine.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, shaking my head. “You almost cried when I said she was dead. You liked her. The two of you were friends. Most people would help the police try to solve a friend’s murder.”
She drew on her cigarette again. “Laura believed in the law, Detective. Nobody’s above it. If you get a warrant, I’ll answer every question the warrant requires me to answer. That’s what Laura would have wanted. It’s the least I can do for a friend.”
“As her friend, you can answer this, then: Was she considering moving to St. Augustine?”
She narrowed her eyes and jerked her head back.
“No. Why would she move there?”
“Friendly people, beautiful landscapes, good restaurants…the usual reasons people move to small towns.”
She shook her head and tapped the end of her cigarette to knock off the ash. “If she moved anywhere, she’d move to Chicago. She liked it there and had a license to practice in Illinois.”
“I found printouts from a realtor’s website from St. Augustine at her house,” I said. “Does that seem strange to you?”
She shrugged. “Maybe she was looking for a friend.”
“That’s possible,” I said, nodding. “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”
Babcock raised an eye and lowered her cigarette. She stood straighter.
“No.”
“Do you know who the father was?”
She blinked a few times and then shook her head.
“I may have bitched about my husband some, but Laura and I didn’t talk about our love lives at work often. How far along was she?”
“Not far,” I said. “Ten or eleven weeks.”
She sighed and brought her cigarette to her lips again.
“That’s sad,” she said. “Laura was a nice woman. She would have made a good mom.”
“You sure you don’t want to talk about her?”
She shook her head. “I would if I could.”
“All right,” I said, reaching into my purse for a business card. “If you change your mind, call me.”
She took the card.
“Thank you for considering Rojas and Associates, Detective Court,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
“Me, too,” I said. I walked to my car where I closed my eyes and took two deep breaths. Even if we got a warrant to search Laura’s office, it would come with so many stipulations to protect her clients we wouldn’t find a thing. The office was a dead end for the moment, so I took out my cell and called Dr. Sheridan. It took three rings for him to answer.
“Doc, it’s Joe Court. Did you contact Laura Rojas’s family?”
“I did,” he said. “They cried a lot.”
“I need to talk to them, so I need their address,” I said, flipping through pages in my notepad. He gave me the information I needed and wished me luck before hanging up. At least that conversation had gone well. As I pulled out of my parking spot, Tina Babcock climbed into her car.
Part of me wanted to hate her, but an even bigger part of me liked her. Laura’s death upset her, but she didn’t break down, and she didn’t stop doing her job. I liked that. I liked even more that Laura Rojas had seen that in her and hired her when she could have gone with someone from a temp agency or a legal staffing firm.
I had never met Laura when she was alive, but I was getting a picture of her in death. She may have been a drug dealer, but she had guts.
I put her parents’ address into my GPS and drove. The Rojas family lived in a brick ranch home off Tesson Ferry Road. The home had mature trees in the front lawn and well-landscaped flower beds. An American flag hung near the front door, while boys played basketball in the driveway. As I parked, the boys took their ball and ran to the backyard of the home next door.
A woman with black hair and brown eyes opened the front door as I crossed the front lawn. She was the spitting image of her daughter. I gave her a tight, understanding smile but didn’t receive one in return.
“Mrs. Rojas?” I asked. She nodded. “I’m Detective Joe Court. I’m trying to find out who killed your daughter, and to do that, I need information. Can we talk for a few minutes?”
She crossed her arms and leaned against the door frame. Her eyes looked as if she was close to tears, but she nodded.
“Who would kill my baby?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “From all I’ve found so far, Laura was a special person. It’s always sad when someone like her dies.”
“Don’t use her name like you know her,” she said, her voice sharp. I stepped back and nodded.
“You’re right. I never met her,” I said. “I apologize if I was presumptuous.”
“Just ask your questions and leave us alone.”
I took a notepad from my pocket. Interviews with the loved ones of a murder victim were always hard, so I started with open-ended questions that would get her comfortable talking. She told me Laura was the first person in her family to go to college, but after watching her succeed, three of her cousins had followed her footsteps and enrolled in the University of Missouri. Two more had enrolled in trade schools.
Laura’s mom was proud of her, and she had every reason to be, but she saw her daughter through a mom’s rose-colored glasses. In her view, Laura may have had flaws, but they weren’t serious. She shut me down when I asked about drugs, and, when I asked about a potential boyfriend, she told me her daughter was a virgin who would remain so until her wedding night. She deserved to know Laura was pregnant at the time of her death, but she didn’t need to hear that from me.
The conversation didn’t waste my time, but it came close. Mrs. Rojas said Laura had a cell phone, though, which we had yet to find. We presumed she had one, but we hadn’t found it. Now that we knew the number, we could track it down.
Before leaving, I told Mrs. Rojas once more that I was sorry for her loss and promised that I would do my best to find out what had happened to her daughter. Back in my car, I flipped through my very sparse notes as waves of frustration washed over me.
Despite working all day, I hadn’t accomplished a damn thing. Homicide investigations were like that sometimes, but it still disappointed me.
I sat in the car and rested my eyes for a moment before calling my station. Trisha had gone home for the evening, leaving me to talk to Jason Zuckerburg, our night dispatcher. He was a thirty-five-year veteran of the department. Now, he was coasting until the county forced him to retire. I liked having him around. People liked him, and he knew everybody in town. He was a nice guy. During the holidays, he dressed up as Santa and handed out presents to kids whose parents couldn’t afford them otherwise. The world needed more people like that.
“Hey, Jason, it’s Joe Court. How are you?”
“Can’t complain,” he said. “I heard you found a naked lady out in the woods.”
“Something like that,” I said. “Listen, I’m working a homicide, and I need you to work on a cell phone for me. It belonged to my victim. See whether you can get a list of incoming and outgoing calls. It’d be helpful if you could ping the GPS chip on it and track it down, too.”
He paused for a moment. “Do I need a warrant?”
“The owner’s dead, so you shouldn’t,” I said. “See what we can get without one. If her carrier won’t cooperate without a warrant, we’ll get one as soon as we can.”
“Okay,” he said, sighing. “What’s the number?”
I gave him the information he needed and then thanked him before hanging up. When I hit the interstate, the city lights behind me almost looked like distant stars on the backdrop of the horizon. It was peaceful. As I drove closer to home, the night grew darker and traffic grew thinner until there were large stretches where I was the only car on the road. Jason called about ten miles from St. Augustine’s exit.
“Hey, Joe, sorry it took so long,” he said. “Right after you called, it got busy around here. Someone shot a woman in front of her kid. The daughter is here, but she’s upset. We’re trying to find her dad, but he’s MIA.”
My shoulders slumped.
“I’ve got too much on my plate already to pick up another murder.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jason. “Delgado and Harry are working this one. Harry’s at the woman’s house now. Delgado is trying to talk to the little girl. She’s crying, but she won’t talk about anything but fish.”
“Someone shot her mom right in front of her,” I said. I paused. “That’s rough.”
“It is,” he said. “You run across the name Aldon McKenzie yet?”
The name sounded familiar, but it took a moment for me to remember why.
“Yeah. His name was on a notepad in my victim’s car. Why?”
“He’s the missing girl’s father. He and your victim spoke on the phone eleven times in the past two weeks.”
I gave myself a moment to process that. “Do we know where Laura’s phone is?”
“No, but her last call went through a tower in south St. Louis County. Mr. McKenzie called her this evening, but he didn’t leave a message.”
I sighed. “Okay. Thanks for your work, Jason. Looks like my long day will turn into a long night.”