Although Judy's first instinct was to immediately rush out to question Hyperion again, she grudgingly forced herself to wait until after the forensics team showed up and she had the chance to emphasize how important it was that they check out the rain coat. Considering that the perpetrator of the attack on Jacques had struck the bunny in the head with a pair of bolt cutters hard enough to break the skin and leave a puddle of blood on the floor, it seemed likely that the raincoat the perpetrator was wearing could have been splattered with blood. If Roberto's raincoat had bunny blood on it, the case against the squirrel would be more or less airtight. In the meantime, however, until they had a definitive case against Roberto, the investigation had to continue with the mammal that seemed most plausible as a potential accomplice.
Hyperion was at Green Gables Grocers, which was unsurprising since the store's grand opening was scheduled for the following day. Since their first visit to the store, an incredible amount of progress had been made; the building itself actually looked finished. There was produce lining most of the displays and the smell of fruits and vegetables fresh from the farm competed with the chemical scent of almost equally fresh paint. Hyperion, his store's general manager Jim Warren, and about half a dozen assorted other mammals were working their way down one of the still bare aisles and setting it up. Nick caught the bunny's attention by scratching his claws against the glass of the store front; Hyperion looked up with an annoyed expression (which Judy was sure she had shared, as the resulting noise was painfully loud from where she was standing at Nick's side) that vanished once he saw who his visitors were. He quickly made his way over to the door, let them in, and then ushered them to the manager's office at the back of the store while Warren and the other employees continued their work.
"Do you know Roberto Escurel?" Judy asked, carefully trying to gauge Hyperion's reaction.
"You mean Bobby?" he asked, sounding genuinely surprised at the question, "Sure, we were in a community theater group together. What about him?"
Judy had half-expected and half-hoped that he would deny any knowledge of Roberto; it would certainly make things easier if they could catch him in a lie.
"You said you were in a theater group with him. What happened?" Nick asked.
Hyperion scratched at one ear. "I joined the group when I first moved out here," he said, "The group needed someone to pay for everything, and I wanted a way back into theater that didn't need a lot of my time."
Judy recalled that Hyperion had said, when they first interviewed him, that he had been involved in acting until his sister's career started taking off and his mother switched her focus. He smiled thinly. "They never complained about how little I showed up, and I got to call myself the producer. Win-win. The group was doing a contest for a ten minute play, and Bobby wrote the script."
"He did?" Judy echoed.
Considering what his grandfather had said about him, it wasn't too surprising that Roberto had written a script, but considering the state of his apartment and how he had been described by mammals at the studio as being strange and standoffish it did strike her as a bit unusual.
"He did the lighting, too," Hyperion said.
"He must have been pretty good," Nick ventured, "At script writing, at least. I don't know about the lighting."
Hyperion chuckled. "He was, at both. We won first place in the drama category."
"Would you say you were friends with him?" Judy asked.
"Not really," Hyperion said with a shrug, "He was kind of..."
The bunny seemed to struggle for the right word. "Off. I mean, even for a squirrel he was twitchy. He'd never really look you in the eye when you were talking to him, and he was really thin-skinned about his script. He blew up at the lead actress when she had some suggestions for her monologue."
Hyperion shook his head. "There's a lot of drama in drama. Lots of mammals under a lot of stress, and considering the kind of mammal that acting attracts..."
Judy wasn't sure if that was a veiled dig at his sister or not, but Hyperion continued. "I made sure he apologized to her, and he was never as friendly to me after that."
"So why did you ask him to give your sister a letter? You did that after all of that happened, right?" Nick asked.
"I did," Hyperion acknowledged, "I figured it was the best way to make sure Holly got it. When we did talk, he was always telling me about how lucky he was to work with her and what an amazing actress she was. I didn't have her address and I thought that if I sent it to the studio or her agent that it'd never end up in her paws."
"You had said that you never heard back from Holly," Judy said, "But did Roberto say anything? About how she reacted to getting it?"
Hyperion's answer had been perfectly reasonable, but Holly had supposedly never received the letter. Judy was interested to see how he would respond to her follow up question, although it was more than a little leading. "He said she tore it up and told him not to give her anything else from me."
If Hyperion was lying, he was doing a very good job of it. He had sagged a little in apparent disappointment as he explained his version of events. If he was really trying to reconcile with his family after years without contact, his frustration that the bridges he had burned on his way out were still impassible was understandable, but it was still quite possible that he was just covering his own involvement in the attack on his sister. "Do you still see Roberto as part of the theater group?" Nick asked.
"I've had less time as we got closer to the store opening," Hyperion replied, "I haven't been to any of the meetings in about a month, but I heard that Roberto quit the group about three weeks ago."
Roberto had been fired from his job about a week before that, which made Judy wonder how long Roberto's downwards spiral had gone on. "Have you heard anything from him recently?" she asked.
"No, I haven't," Hyperion said, "I tried calling him a few times when I heard he quit, but he never answered his phone."
There didn't seem to be anything else to ask Hyperion at the moment, so Judy thanked him for his time and headed out of the office, Nick slightly ahead of her. On their way out of the store, Judy noticed Nick fixing his attention on a display of fresh blueberries. "Nick!" she hissed up at him, "Don't even think about it!"
He favored her with a wounded expression and shook his head in mock dismay. "You think so little of me, Officer Hopps," he said sadly.
She rolled her eyes. "I'm hungry too," she admitted; they hadn't stopped for lunch and the sun was starting to set.
"Let's grab something," Nick said, "I can make you a better stir fry some other night."
Judy felt a stab of disappointment, but she had no intention of stopping for the day; she had the feeling it was going to be a long night.
"OK," Judy said, "But I'm paying this time."
"Then I'll make sure it's something expensive," Nick said with a grin, plucking the keys to the cruiser out of her paw before she could react.
"Well, someone's lying," Nick said between bites of his (actually quite reasonably priced) sandwich, "But does it matter?"
Judy could see the point to his question. There were, as she saw it, four basic possibilities about the letter from Hyperion to Holly. Either it existed or it didn't, and if it had existed, Holly had either received it or hadn't. At a minimum, either Holly, Hyperion, Roberto, or the Mammal Resources director at the studio was lying, but it was also possible that more than one of them was lying. Perhaps Hyperion really had written a letter and given it to Roberto to deliver, but Roberto had simply discarded it and really had been going through Holly's underwear to his own ends. To Nick's point, none of that affected the basic facts of the case. If Hyperion had told the truth and Roberto had lied to him about delivering the letter, it might be a motive for Hyperion to go after his sister as revenge for ignoring his attempts to mend their relationship. But if that was the case, had Hyperion acted alone or with Roberto's help? The raincoat and the frankly disturbing shrine to Holly that they had found in Roberto's apartment, along with the camera footage from one of the shops near Holly's apartment building that placed him in the general vicinity of the crime scene at the right time, strongly suggested Roberto's involvement. "Maybe not," Judy replied, "But what else can we look into?"
They were sitting in a booth of the sandwich place that Nick had driven them to, which was on just the right side of the spectrum that ran from "should be shut down by the health department" to "charming." The floor was well-worn checkered tile, many of which had cracked, and the corners of the building were caked with grime that whoever mopped the floors had apparently never bothered to clean. Smoking in restaurants had been banned for years, but the yellowish-brown tint to the white walls and the faint scent of stale smoke probably meant that either someone on the staff kept smoking in defiance of the ban or that it had been a very long time since the place had been thoroughly cleaned. The table in the booth was topped with chipped Furmica laminate, and the seat covers were cracking red vinyl. Despite the less than encouraging status of the restaurant itself, the sandwiches were surprisingly good, but that could have been influenced by how hungry Judy was.
At her question, Nick slowed the pace at which he was demolishing his own sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. "It's really looking like Roberto did it," he said, "But if he didn't act alone, who could have helped him?"
"Hyperion, obviously," Judy said as she ran down the other options in her head.
Nick nodded. "The only other possibility that I'm seeing is Holly's agent."
Judy considered his answer. The other mammals who might have been involved didn't seem like they could have any potential connection to Roberto, and when Nick had interrogated the squirrel it had seemed as though he had been about to suggest someone before the lawyer had shut him up. Considering that Holly's agent, Marty Thanatopsis, had been banned from the studio early on in the filming of Black and White, it seemed at least plausible that he had tried to recruit someone on the inside to report to him. Considering that Rich Wolf was attempting to squeeze the opossum out, perhaps the opossum had decided that if he couldn't have Holly as a client than no one could. She repressed a sigh. It was a shaky lead, but it was worth looking into.
Compared to the rather shabby appearance of the waiting area for Thanatopsis's office, his office itself was about what Judy had expected. He had a cheap desk, filing cabinets that covered three of the walls, one of which had a rather droopy looking fern on top of it. The carpet was made out of the same cheap, high-wearing material that most of the office space in the police station had been carpeted with, and the pattern, a seemingly random speckling of gray and blue, was almost identical. There were a few more expensive items, including a gold pen set, but the cheap nature of everything else in the office made them stand out as vulgar touches. Thanatopsis himself looked worn out; his suit was crumpled and he had dark bags under his bloodshot eyes, as though he hadn't been getting much sleep. The agent's immediate reaction to seeing the pair had been to swear loudly, and then mutter under his breath about his nightmare getting worse as he ran a paw through the already wild fur of his head. "I'm sorry," he said, "But really, what do you want? I'm up to my eyeballs here!"
"We just have a few more questions," Judy said, "We heard you got banned from the studio."
"What, is that supposed to be a question?" Thanatopsis snapped, "Yeah, so what? I try fighting for my client and that makes me the bad guy?"
"Whoever attacked your client in her own home is the bad guy," Nick said, "But you don't know anything about that, do you?"
"Why would I attack Holly?" the opossum demanded, "What would I get out of putting my client out of work or in a coffin?"
"There could be a lot of reasons," Judy replied, "Maybe it was a publicity stunt. Maybe you were making sure no other agent got your client. Maybe—"
"That's ridiculous!" Thanatopsis cut her off, "Holly's been like a daughter to me. I've been her agent since she was this big!"
He held his paw fairly low off the ground. It was true that they had worked together for years; there had to be something about the abrasive opossum that kept Holly from leaving for another agent. It could just be the familiarity, or maybe the two mammals really were like family. That seemed somewhat unlikely, as from what Nick had said of his first encounter with the opossum, Thanatopsis hadn't seemed particularly concerned about Holly's well-being. Still, throughout their current conversation, Thanatopsis had been getting more and more worked up, which was just what Judy wanted for her most important question. If he was off-balance, he might be more likely to blurt something out rather than think it through. "Do you know Roberto Escurel?" Judy asked.
"What, like the mayor?" Thanatopsis asked, his anger replaced with apparent bafflement. "I think..." he stood up from behind his desk, which required both paws to force himself and his significant girth upright, and made his way to one of the filing cabinets that lined his wall.
He rifled through it, muttering to himself, before he pulled a file folder out. "Kit wanted me to represent him," Thanatopsis said, holding out a file folder, "Try to shop his scripts around. Not my usual line of work, but hey, he's related to the mayor, right? Might be something in it for me if I land him a movie deal."
Considering the conversation that Judy had had with the mayor, she was sure that he would be less than thrilled that the opossum thought he'd grant political favors. "Can we take this?" Judy asked.
Thanatopsis shrugged. "The files are all in the computer anyway. I don't need it."
Judy gladly took the thin folder, neatly labeled with Roberto's name. "How recently have you spoken with Roberto?" Nick asked.
The opossum cocked his head thoughtfully. "Maybe about six months? It's been a while."
As Nick and Judy got up to leave, Thanatopsis had one question of his own. "You don't think that this guy was the one who attacked Holly, do you?"
"We're still investigating," Nick said smoothly.
"If he was, you make sure he stays locked away," Thanatopsis said with surprising fierceness, "Make him rot."
After returning to the station, Nick and Judy claimed one of the more comfortable conference rooms and started spreading out the material that had been gathered in support of the case. Despite the fact that the case had only been open for about three days, there was enough material to fill four banker's boxes. While Judy started organizing the case files on the table, Nick turned on the TV mounted on one of the walls and flipped it through to a news channel. When Judy had looked up from her work, he had explained it simply. "I want to see if they're saying anything about Roberto yet."
They didn't have to wait long. After the station finished their run of commercials and went through the weather forecast, the first news item was about Roberto's arrest.
"The mayor's grandson, Roberto Escurel, was arrested today on charges of attempted sale of prescription drugs, assaulting an officer, and resisting arrest," the news anchor intoned solemnly over footage that had clearly come from a security camera.
Judy recognized the setting as part of Zootopia University's campus, which made sense considering the charge; a lot of colleges had problems with students buying and selling ADHD drugs for the supposed edge that it gave them in studying. If Roberto had been trying to offload one of his many different kinds of pills at a profit, a college campus was probably the best places to do so. In the clip, Roberto was clearly in the process of handing off a small packet to another mammal in exchange for something, which had been a poor decision considering that Grévy and LaMerk had been standing less than ten feet behind the other two mammals. There wasn't any sound, but when the two officers confronted the other two mammals, it was clear that something had been said before Grévy attempted to arrest him and the squirrel clawed at her face and then took off like a shot. "This comes as a blow to the mayor's election campaign, already mired by questions about his knowledge of Bellwether's—"
Nick turned the TV off. "Well, at least the mayor will know who arrested Roberto," he said with obviously false cheer.
"Come on," Judy said, beckoning him away from the TV and towards the table, "We're overlooking something or someone. I can just feel it. And we're not leaving this station until we figure it out."