CUTTING ROOM -THE- by Jilliane Hoffman Page A

bathroom of the cabin and the driver’s side floorboard of the Mercedes. They were black viscose and spandex with a shiny silver poly weave that would seem to match the shirt Holly was wearing when she disappeared, but because the shirt was never found, we have nothing to compare it to. I’ll try to track down where and when she might’ve bought it. If it was recent enough, then maybe I can get the same shirt and test it against the found fibers.’
    â€˜How many fibers do you have?’
    â€˜About twenty or thirty strands in the boat. Another half-dozen in the car and in the trunk. They were torn, you know? Shredded. Enough to figure that the shirt was ripped off the girl, possibly on the boat, and then he carried some on his person that fell off in the car.’
    â€˜That would be something,’ Daria said as they both stepped on to the next floor’s escalator. ‘Better still, find me that ripped shirt stuffed inside one of Talbot’s toys. If we can also find something that can tie him to the sulfuric acid, that would be big. Really big. Receipts, Internet surfing. Where the hell do you buy that shit anyway? We have his computer, right? What’s on that?’
    Manny shook his head. He hesitated before speaking. ‘We have it, but it’s wiped clean. It had a sensitive password protection on it. One try and then it activated a virus that wiped the hard-drive clean. Our tech guy had never seen that sort of security before, and he blew it.’
    She stared at him. ‘You’re kidding, right? We can’t retrieve any of it?’
    â€˜Nope. The whole thing’s gone. Whatever he was trying to protect must have been pretty important.’
    â€˜What about his cell? Tell me that didn’t self-destruct.’
    â€˜Pulled the records. He stayed in Miami the night Holly disappeared, according to the cell towers. Made two calls between four and five-thirty a.m. — both to the same number, and that was a throwaway. No way to find who owns that phone.’
    She tapped her hand impatiently on the escalator’s handrail. ‘Well, we need something. Since you made the arrest already, time is ticking and we have to deal with the cards we have. I’d sure as hell like a better hand.’
    â€˜Hey, hey,’ Manny said, his face growing dark as they stepped off and went to get on the final set of escalators down. He moved in front of her, blocking her from getting on. ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t have arrested the guy? No, don’t answer that, because, yeah, that’s what you are saying. Listen, he was gonna run and you and I both know it. So let me ask ya, Ms Hard-ass, would you rather be standing here with me now and the scumbag tucked away safely in a jail cell trying to figure out how to make a good case better, or be sitting in your office with what looks like a better case but your fucking psycho playboy nowhere to be found? Or worse — living the high life up at the family chateau in Switzerland, thumbing his nose at us while we sit here and beg the Swiss to extradite his ass before he ups and kills some hot-looking yodler, knowing full well they won’t? And oh, yeah, by the way — your boy’s family does have a crib in Lucerne. I checked before I popped him. Dad’s a Swiss national. Ooh la-fucking-la.’
    Daria shrugged. ‘What I’m saying is that now we have a potential speedy problem. And what we don’t have is the luxury of waiting for shit to fall in our laps. I don’t want to see an acquittal because while we had plenty of evidence to prove the guy took pretty Holly for a spin in Mommy’s new Benz, we didn’t have enough evidence to actually prove him guilty of murder, ’cause then he can sit across the street from my office and thumb his nose at both of us for the rest of our sure-to-be-shortened-careers, and even if I find the bottle of sulfuric acid with his name on it that he