“Why?”
“I was hoping you could shed some light on it. You offered Knight up as a witness to Rojas.”
Sienna closed her eyes and huffed out a breath. “And immunity.”
“Right, but don’t get nervous. The immunity is for gun charges. The murders are separate.”
“Fat lot of good that does us. If you can’t make a deal with Rojas until next week, Knight walks.”
“Bingo.”
“Why does the DA want Knight to walk?”
“He won’t say. Won’t even tell me who’s putting pressure on him.”
“The DA is willing to let a murderer go.”
“From what I could tell, he wasn’t willingly doing anything. I asked his secretary if he’d had any visitors lately, and she told me that two suits had been in his office earlier that day.”
“Suits? As in FBI?” Her sixth sense started tingling all over again. First she gets the runaround by the FBI; now they seemed to be directly meddling in her case.
“That would be my guess. What case are you working on right now?”
“Knight failed to yield to an emergency vehicle. When he was stopped, a sharp-eyed officer saw a military weapon in plain sight in his car. Not one easily purchased at a gun store. One thing led to another, and now I’m officially working with a Navy liaison to track down a military policeman who might be involved in the theft of hundreds of weapons.”
“How does Taylor fit into your investigation?”
“Knight said that the MP was working with Taylor, and the shipment was his.”
“Lots of connections to Taylor.”
“Right, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Do you have anything you can hold Knight on?”
“No.”
Jericho sighed. “We’ll have to console ourselves with Rojas for now. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick up Knight again.”
* * *
A.J. wasn’t there. When she sat down, she found a message on her desk. It was from the cyber forensics office.
Walking through the door, she immediately headed for Gary Mancuso, who was fiddling around with his keyboard. “What do you have for me?”
Gary smiled at her from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “That was one toasted hard drive,” he said as he moved from the computer he was working on to another model. “I managed to get a few files out. Some of it is routine stuff.”
“So it’s a dead end?”
“Not exactly.” He smiled even wider. “I was able to recover this Excel file intact.”
“What does that tell us?”
“Look for yourself.”
Sienna bent over his shoulder and gazed at the screen and her heart sank as she read the contents.
* * *