Elisabeth didn’t pry, although she was dying to. “Back at my apartment, Kayoi’s picture gave me an idea. The drawing of the girl with an S on her shirt was Joslyn—she probably drew Joslyn since we were all talking about her. I remember that T-shirt. It said Sayawan, which means ‘dance party’ in Tagalog.”
Liam’s eyebrows rose. “So it was either a fashion statement or...”
“Or maybe a promo item from a club. And Nathan mentioned the Bagsics deal meth out of clubs, right?” Elisabeth opened an internet browser window and began typing. “There’s a club in L.A. called Sayawan,” she crowed. “Earlier, when I was looking through social media pics, I wasn’t paying attention to where the photos were taken.”
Liam grinned at her. “There’s a good chance someone has a picture of Joslyn at the club, especially since she was wearing the T-shirt.”
They each took different social media sites and searched for pictures taken at Sayawan. Elisabeth found the picture they wanted almost right away.
It was a shot taken several months ago, with Joslyn smiling into the camera with a handful of friends posing around her. The faces in the photo had been tagged with people’s names.
“Joslyn Dimalanta,” she said.
“You found her?” Liam left his chair to come look over her shoulder, close enough that she caught a whiff of cedar, and pine, and a lower note of musk. It made her want to close her eyes and breathe it in. She shook off the strange feeling.
“Isn’t that that guy in the gray suit from the shelter this morning?” Liam pointed to a man not posing for the picture, but caught in profile in the background.
“It’s fuzzy. I can’t be sure.” She hovered her pointer over the man’s face, but he hadn’t been tagged.
“Well, at least we’ve got a place to start.” Liam smiled at her, and her vision swirled for a moment before righting itself.
She was relieved when Liam returned to his chair.
“Now that we’ve got Joslyn’s last name, I’ll continue to look through social media. You take public records?” she suggested.
“Sure.”
Elisabeth looked at who had posted the picture of Joslyn—Esther North. She was very big into photography—usually people, a few nature shots—and according to her photos, she was friends with Joslyn and had seen her several times in the past few months.
Joslyn’s own social media had been pretty sparse in the months before she came to Sonoma. She was tagged on some older photos online, but not a lot of recent ones. Which wasn’t surprising for a woman in an abusive relationship—many times, the abuser isolated the victim from her old friends. Or she stopped going out because of the bruises.
But Esther had a set of candid photos of Joslyn at a chain electronics store, Perkins Electronics, dressed in an employee’s uniform. The photos were artistic shots, as if Esther were practicing taking wedding candid photos. She was taking pictures not only of Joslyn but also of other customers and employees, yet—perhaps because Esther knew Joslyn—the missing woman featured in a larger percentage of the photos.
Esther had caught her at several angles, with several different people who looked like customers. She was smiling in a few of the photos, with a shy tilt to her head and lift of one shoulder.
One photo was a candid of Joslyn speaking to a tall, handsome Filipino man dressed in an expensive gray suit. He was slightly turned away from the camera, but from his partial profile, it seemed he was smiling. Joslyn was clearly smiling up at him.
In the second photo, the two were posing for Esther’s camera and the man had his arm around Joslyn a little tighter than a casual acquaintance would hold her.
Elisabeth sucked in a sharp breath. It was the same man in the gray suit from this morning.
Joslyn looked happy. The date was a few months ago, so the photo might have been taken early in their relationship, before Joslyn had discovered what a monster he was.
The two comments below the photo seemed to be from Esther’s friends. User BillMP46U seemed to be a photographer because he said, “Cute couple, Esther! Nice way to work around those terrible lights in the store, too!”
The next comment was posted by user Fairydust9437. “Nice photo, Joslyn! Is that Tomas? Wow, he’s a cutie.”
Elisabeth hovered her pointer over his face to see if he’d been tagged in the photo. He had, but only his first name popped up: Tomas.
“Liam, I think I found him.” She swiveled her laptop around so he could see. She couldn’t have him standing so close to her again, looking over her shoulder. It did strange things to her breathing.
“Tomas.” The name came out from Liam’s throat like gravel.
“His clothes are pretty stylish here, too. I think he’s higher up in the hierarchy of the gang, a captain or something.”
Liam frowned. “Well, I think I found the murder she was talking about.” He slid his laptop across the table to her so she could read the website he’d pulled up. “It was buried at the bottom of the fourth or fifth page of search results.”
It was a newspaper article from a few weeks ago about a man found brutally beaten and then stabbed to death in his apartment off Silas Avenue. The victim’s name was given as Felix Dimalanta, a longtime widower. Police were looking for his missing daughter, Joslyn, who was wanted for questioning.
Her stomach twisted sharply. The murder victim was Joslyn’s own father?
The article was brief, barely two paragraphs, and there were no pictures. The report mentioned that the police welcomed any information on the case and that they had talked to Joslyn’s coworkers at Perkins Electronics and also to her classmates at Twin Springs College, where she was working to get her computer software engineering degree.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “It never even occurred to me that she might be wanted by the police. All I saw were her bruises.”
“When did she arrive at the shelter? How was she, emotionally, when you first saw her?”
“She arrived only a few days after this homicide. There was this...deep grief and horror in her eyes. You could tell she’d recently suffered a terrible blow. I had assumed it was from her last beating, but now I think maybe it was still shock from her father’s death.” Elisabeth blew out a frustrated breath. “I should have known there was something deeper going on than Joslyn just needing to escape her ex.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. She was injured. Naturally you’d be focused on her safety, not worrying about any type of criminal activity she might have been involved in.”
“We really don’t yet know how she was involved in her father’s murder,” Elisabeth said. “He was beaten and then stabbed, so based on her height and frame, it’s unlikely Joslyn could have caused that much damage. But did Joslyn witness her father being murdered, as she claimed, or was she involved somehow?”
“To answer that question, we’d have to find out why Tomas killed him. From what I’ve found about Felix Dimalanta on social media, he didn’t have any ties to the Bagsics or any other gang. He didn’t have a social media profile, but he had friends who do and they tagged his name on photos.”
“Can I see the photos?”
Liam took his laptop back, and after a few clicks of his track pad, gave it to her to look.
Felix Dimalanta had a strong face, a protective set to his shoulders. Elisabeth could see him doing everything as a single parent to care for his daughter and raise her right.
There were