Hester nodded. Then: “Let my client go now, please.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Right now.”
“Your client killed our only lead!”
“Wrong,” Hester snapped. Her voice boomed through the room. “If what you’re saying is true, Ed Grayson gave you your only lead.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“How did you bumbling idiots finally find this phone?”
No one answered.
“You searched Dan Mercer’s room. Why? Because you thought that my client had murdered him. So without that, you’d have nothing. Three months of investigating and you had nothing. Until today. Until my client handed you your only clue.”
Silence. But Hester wasn’t done.
“And while we’re on the subject, Frank, I know who you are. Essex County investigator Frank Tremont, who botched up that high-profile murder case a few years back. Washed-up has-been ridden out by his boss Loren Muse because of his lazy-ass incompetence, right? And here you are, on your last case, and what happens? Rather than redeem yourself and your pitiful career, you never bother to even look at a well-known pedophile who crossed paths with the victim in a fairly obvious way. How the hell did you miss that, Frank?”
Now it was Frank Tremont who was losing color in his face.
“And now, lazy cop that you are, you have the nerve to come raining down on my client as an accessory? You should be thanking him. All these months on the case and you found nothing. Now you’re closer than you’ve ever been to finding this poor girl because of what you allege my client did.”
Frank Tremont deflated right in front of them.
Hester nodded at Grayson. They both started to rise.
Walker said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“We’re leaving.”
Walker looked to Tremont to protest. Tremont was still reeling. Walker picked up the ball. “Like hell you are. Your client is under arrest.”
“I want you to listen to me,” Hester said. Her voice was softer now, almost apologetic in tone. “You’re wasting your time.”
“How do you figure?”
She looked him dead in the eye. “If we knew something that could help that girl, we would tell you.”
Silence.
Walker tried for bravado, but it wasn’t there anymore. “Why don’t you let us decide what might help?”
“Yeah,” Hester said, standing all the way up now, flicking a glance at Tremont, then back to Walker. “You’ve both done so much to inspire confidence so far. What you need to do is concentrate on finding that poor girl—not on prosecuting a man who may be the only hero in all this.”
There was a knock on the door. A young cop opened it and leaned in. All eyes turned toward him. Walker said, “What’s up, Stanton?”
“I found something on her phone. I think you’re going to want to see this.”
CHAPTER 19
FRANK TREMONT AND MICKEY WALKER followed Stanton down the corridor. “Hester Crimstein is an amoral shark with scruples that would shame a street hooker,” Walker said to him.
“You know all that incompetency stuff was just to throw us off our game.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ve been all over this case. You’ve done more than anyone could.”
“Right.”
“So have the FBI and the big-time profilers and your entire office. Nobody could have foreseen this.”
“Mickey?”
“Yeah.”
“If I need to get stroked,” Frank said, “I’ll find someone a lot hotter and more feminine than you, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
Stanton led them to a corner room in the basement where the tech guys hung out. Haley McWaid’s iPhone was plugged into a computer. Stanton pointed at the screen. “This is basically her cell phone blown up for you to see on this bigger monitor.”
“Okay,” Frank Tremont said. “So what’s up?”
“I found something in an app.”
“A what?”
“An app. A phone application.”
Tremont hoisted up his pants by the belt. “Pretend I’m an old fossil who still can’t program his Betamax.”
Stanton pressed a button. The screen turned black with small icons neatly aligned in three rows. “These are apps for the iPhone. See, she had iCal, which is where Haley kept her appointments, like lacrosse games and homework, on a calendar; Tetris—that’s a game, and so is Moto Chaser; Safari is her Web browser; iTunes so she could download songs. Haley loves music. There’s this other music app program called Shazam. It—”
“I think we get the gist,” Walker said.
“Right, sorry.”
Frank stared at Haley’s iPhone. What song, he wondered, had she listened to last? Did she like faster rock or heartbreaking ballads? Typical old fart, Frank had made fun of these devices, kids texting and e-mailing and walking around with earbuds, but in a sense, the device was a life. Her friends would be listed in her address book, her school schedule in the calendar, her favorite songs in some playlist, photos that made her smile—like the one taken with Mickey Mouse—in her photo file.
Hester Crimstein’s accusation was there. True, Dan Mercer had no history of violence or rape, seemed to be into girls younger than this, and really, the fact that his ex-wife lived in the same large town was hardly a big warning sign. But Crimstein’s words about incompetence hammered him, and in them, Frank feared that he heard the echo of a truth.
He should have seen it.
“Anyway,” Stanton said, “I don’t mean to go into too much detail, but this is a little weird. Haley downloaded a bunch of songs like every teenager, but none since her disappearance. Same with surfing the Web. I mean, you know every place she visited on her iPhone because you got the server to show you. So what I saw in the browser won’t surprise you much. She had done some searches on University of Virginia—I guess she was bummed that she didn’t get in, right?”
“Right.”
“So there was also a search for some girl named Lynn Jalowski, who’s from West Orange, a lacrosse player who got into UVA, so I guess maybe she was looking up a rival.”
“We know all this,” Frank said.
“Right, the server—so you also know about the instant messages, the texts, stuff like that, though I have to say, Haley did a lot less of it than most of her friends. But see, there’s a separate app we didn’t really know about for Google Earth. You probably know what that is.”