“What of it?”

“You said sometimes your boyfriend, Irwin Partridge, goes with you. Is that right?”

“Sometimes. Win and me go lots of places.” Albright flicked her cigarette ash against the railing.

“We want to ask you about Fresno,” Cipriani said.

“I didn’t do nothing.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Can we go inside and talk?” Eden asked.

Albright lifted her chin. “Tell me what you want right here.”

“It’s about a young woman who was killed in Fresno in 2017. Sandra Avelos.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I’m not going to talk about it, neither.”

“She was strangled. Her killer was never found.”

“I got nothing to say.”

“Day after the murder, the Fresno police set up a phone tip line for the public to call in information.”

“So?” Albright dragged again on her cigarette.

“The following night a young woman called the tip line and said she had information about the killing. She told the officer her boyfriend came home the night of the murder and was acting funny. He was wild and angry.”

“You’re making this up,” Albright said.

“The caller said her boyfriend hit her and cut her with a knife.”

“I don’t know anything about this. You all have no right coming here and talking to me like this.”

“The cut was a single mark at the bottom of her back. The caller told the officer her boyfriend cut her there. She was afraid of what he’d do.”

Cipriani stepped toward Albright. “I’m the one you spoke to. I was the officer on the line.”

Albright looked up at Cipriani with confusion. “That…thing was in Fresno, not here.”

“I was a police officer in Fresno then. I was on the tip line that night. You spoke to me.”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“We didn’t,” Eden said. “Until now.”

“You shit-bastards.” Albright threw her cigarette down to the parking lot. “All you cops. You’re shit-bastards.”

“Tell me what your boyfriend did that night,” Cipriani said. “He’s involved in other murders. You know that now, right?”

“I don’t have to tell you nothing.”

“The mark he cut on your back, the same mark was on Sandra Avelos,” Eden said. “It was on two girls killed here in Santa Rosa and one in Vallejo.”

Albright backed away from Eden. “Those things weren’t my fault. Don’t make it sound like they were.”

Eden could see the woman’s fight was gone. “All right. But you need to tell us everything you know. Right now.”

“Win’ll find out,” Albright said. “He’ll know I told you. He said if I opened my mouth about him cutting me, he’d off me. He knows things. Even if I don’t say, he looks at me and knows things.”

“Then come with us,” Cipriani said. “We’ll take you someplace safe.”