“I don’t recall Beck being attached to the Pink case at all.”

“He wasn’t. Other than the fact that he was a known associate of Cross—they were often photographed at the same Hollywood parties—there was no hard evidence tying him to anything illegal. At the time, the bureau already had an open file on Cross—a lot of smoke, but again, no actionable evidence. Heather didn’t know his last name, but Cyrus was eventually determined to be Beck, and that was a new wrinkle.”

He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Back then, trafficking was not understood well, and it was often the women being exploited who suffered the full force of the law and not the traffickers. Sure, the occasional street pimp fell, but there were a lot of others who escaped the long arm of the law. It would have been standard operating procedure for Harrison to be charged and tried for prostitution because of the sweep, with no one considering that maybe it had never been her choice. In one way it was lucky for her that Isaac Pink was the vice cop who interviewed her.”

“Lucky for her, not for him. Pink and his whole family were murdered with his service revolver, and she disappeared. She’s the prime suspect in the murders. She had access.”

Tess frowned as she remembered the manhunt for Pink’s killer. Though she was not yet a cop herself at the time, her father was involved; he’d known Pink. And after the case was long cold, Pink’s partner, Aaron Graves, gave a presentation on the investigation to her academy class. He was convinced that Heather Harrison was complicit in the murder but conceded that she hadn’t worked alone. Tess had read that Graves died a couple of years ago, and his dying wish was that no one would forget Pink or stop looking for his killer.

“That was the line of thinking back then,” Bass said. “When the girl disappeared, the grand jury was canceled. And the case against Cross disintegrated.”

“Heather Harrison would have to have been a cold character. Along with Pink and his wife, his twelve-year-old daughter was executed that night,” Tess mused out loud.

“If you truly believe she was the killer.”

“You doubt that?”

He shrugged. “There are just a lot of blank spots in the case. Back then, Harrison was not the only potential witness against Cross who disappeared. Twice before, he was implicated in crimes, not pandering, but murder. Once in Florida, a woman who’d been seen with him ended up murdered. Unfortunately, so did the person who could put them together. No charges filed. Then in Mexico he was involved in the deaths of two women. Mexican authorities tried to extradite him, but the case fell apart when the witnesses recanted or disappeared.”

“I hadn’t heard about those cases.”