“Gabby, your help, right now, could be the difference between us catching whoever did this to Claire or not. Every second we’re in the dark is another second her killer has to hide his involvement and cover his tracks. You don’t want to be responsible for that, do you?”

She shook her head.

“And you don’t want to face charges of obstructing a federal investigation either,” Dolan added forcefully.

“No,” Gabby whispered.

“Then let’s have it,” he demanded.

“We didn’t break any laws,” she insisted plaintively. “We just…date a lot of guys. Mostly older guys, sometimes married.”

“Are you escorts?” Dolan asked, refusing to play nice.

“No!” she said adamantly. “We just let them buy us stuff. Every now and then, we hit the jackpot and one of them becomes a—have you ever heard the term ‘sugar daddy’?”

“Yes,” Dolan said, admirably keeping the condescension out of his voice this once.

“Well, that’s what we’re after,” she said before turning to Harrington and adding, “no offense.”

“Believe me,” Jessie said, “none of this comes as a shock to him. He knew what he was signing up for. Go on.”

“So when one of us found a sugar daddy, he’d usually agree to help pay for our rent and other stuff like that. Sometimes that might last a few weeks. Sometimes it would go on for months. We’d usually rotate guys in and out. But sometimes it would turn into something more. One of us would become sort of a professional mistress for a while. Eventually, we’d break it off when it got boring. It almost always got boring. Sometimes he’d end it, usually if he thought his wife might find out.”

“How might his wife find out?” Jessie asked, sensing the answer. “And remember what Agent Dolan said about lying to the FBI.”

“It’s possible that me or Claire would tell a guy his wife should know the truth. Usually that would scare them off. Sometimes they’d even give us a little extra to make sure we kept quiet.”

“That’s called extortion,” Dolan pointed out.

“It’s what?” Gabby said, genuinely clueless.

“You didn’t want to keep the relationship going?” Jessie asked quickly, not wanting to get tripped up on secondary issues. “Maybe hope the guy would leave his wife for you?”

“Are you kidding?” Gabby asked, sounding almost insulted. “I’m twenty-three. I’m not ready to settle down. This way I get all the perks but I can still party without being on someone’s leash. The whole point of this is to have fun without having to work too hard for it. I mean, maybe I’ll settle down when I get old, like twenty-six or something. But right now, I want to have a good time.”

There was a long silence in the room. No one seemed to know how to react to that truth bomb. Jessie tried to wrap her head around the fact that in Gabby’s mind, as a near-thirty-year-old, she was elderly.

“How did you find these guys?” she finally managed to ask.