That didn’t mean he was happy about doing it or that he believed they would find anything up here. But partners stick up for each other, he said. If Juliet hadn’t been willing to back down-and he could tell she wasn’t-then his only choice was to let her lead or put in for a new partner.
They’d spent the first part of the drive up the 101 going over the details of the case. Since there were essentially no details, that took them about as far as Solvang; then they’d ridden the remaining ninety percent of the way in silence. That was fine with her. She knew if they’d talked Lassiter would have spent most of the time trying to convince her that Mandy’s death had been self-inflicted and that they should close the case. That was a conversation she wasn’t eager to have again because she still didn’t have a substantive response for him. She couldn’t say why she refused to believe that Mandy had killed herself. She just did.
She knew it wasn’t just because, as Lassiter had hinted several times, she was identifying with the victim. It was true that the sight of a twenty-eight-year-old woman hanging by the neck in her cheerleader’s outfit had an immediate emotional resonance with anyone who’d ever called the Rebel Yell or the Tiger Roar or the Duck Quack. You couldn’t help but think of that time you were at your lowest ebb, fired from a job or dumped in a relationship or just lost in your life, and you put on the colors “just to see if they still fit.”