Milo Sturgis and Richard Doss

Milo Sturgis and Richard Doss are joined by an investigation that repeatedly brings police scrutiny to Doss even as the murder inquiry begins to point away from him. Milo treats Doss’s alleged attempt to hire Quentin Goad to kill Eldon Mate as a serious, independently actionable crime; Alex Delaware, by contrast, argues that what he saw at Alice Zoghbie’s house gives the detectives a more urgent lead. Their connection is therefore less a personal relationship than a sustained contest over suspicion, evidence, and where the investigation should go next.

Doss Under Investigation

Milo’s pursuit of Doss reaches the Doss home as part of the police response to the Mate case. When Alex reports the visit, he says that Steve Korn and Brad Demetri rang the bell and took Doss away in front of his children. The account places police action in a domestic setting, making the investigation visible to Doss’s family as well as to the people questioning him. It also establishes that the inquiry has moved beyond suspicion discussed at a distance: detectives have come to the house and taken Doss in for questioning.

Later, Doss is home again, but the attention has not ended. Through Joe Safer, Doss tells Alex that the press and police have been around, and that an unmarked police car is parked down the block. The two occupants are Korn and Demetri, the same detectives who had accosted Doss at Alex’s home. Their continued presence turns surveillance into a lingering condition of the case: even after Doss returns to his family, the police remain close enough to watch the house. Safer says that the public commotion has largely died down, but the detectives’ stakeout makes clear that Doss is not simply beyond scrutiny.

Doss also complains that Milo keeps trying to search every part of his property and is pressing Safer for an interview. He treats the requested interview as a euphemism for more police pressure, although he says that everyone has a job to do and reports that Safer expects him to be free of the trouble soon. The scene records Doss’s own account of the investigation, not a finding that the search or interview has produced evidence. His confidence that the pressure will pass sits uneasily beside Milo’s continuing efforts to obtain records and keep the case active.

The Dispute Over the Mate Case

Milo’s suspicion of Doss has a concrete basis in the alleged solicitation of Goad. In a later conversation with Alex, Milo acknowledges that Doss solicited Goad to kill Mate and argues that Goad’s failure to complete the killing does not clear Doss. This distinction is central to Milo’s position: the alleged attempt remains serious even if it did not culminate in Mate’s death, and evidence pointing to another suspect does not erase Doss’s conduct. Milo is not claiming that Doss and the murderer must be the same person; he is resisting the idea that a different lead makes the attempted-murder case irrelevant.

The investigation has a practical legal timetable as well as a question of guilt. Milo says he cannot allow warrants in the attempted-murder case to lapse, because doing so could bring him onto Judge Maclntyre’s bad side. He plans to have Korn and Demetri collect financial records from Doss’s office and take them to the station. The move keeps Doss under active investigation while allowing Milo to turn from the immediate questioning toward documentary evidence. Milo mentions that Doss’s business associates describe his financial records as complicated, and considers sending the files to the fraud investigators. The possibility of a financial inquiry does not itself establish wrongdoing; it shows how Milo is trying to preserve and develop the Doss case while pursuing other leads.

Conflict with Alex Delaware’s Lead

The sharpest disagreement between Milo and Doss’s investigation comes through Alex. When Milo calls Alex, he is irritated: Alex has obtained Maclntyre’s number and has nearly disrupted Milo’s effort to get paperwork on Doss, though Milo says he has obtained some. Alex tells him that he is wasting his time and explains what he saw in Alice Zoghbie’s backyard, including that he reported the matter to the police clerk and left his fingerprints on the gate. Milo initially challenges the account, then has to reckon with a lead that redirects attention toward the person connected to the scene.

The disagreement does not make Milo abandon the evidence against Doss. He accepts that the discovery at Alice’s house matters, but insists that it does not put Doss in the clear. At the same time, he admits that he has been spinning his wheels on Doss and considers forwarding Doss’s complicated financial records to the fraud investigators so he can move toward Glendale. His response is neither a simple reversal nor stubborn refusal: he separates the unresolved allegation against Doss from the need to follow the new lead in the Mate murder.

Milo’s frustration becomes more explicit when he tries to understand what the new evidence means for the investigation. The suspected killer, Paul Ulrich, is also known as Michael Burke, and Milo struggles to turn the belief that Burke craves attention into a usable investigative direction. He speculates about further attacks, but recognizes that searching broadly for signs of them offers little guidance. The contrast with the Doss inquiry is telling: the alleged solicitation gives Milo a named suspect and a case with warrants and records, while the emerging Burke lead presents a different problem, one in which motive and attention-seeking do not yet point to a specific next step.

An Unresolved Investigative Relationship

Milo’s conduct toward Doss is marked by two convictions he keeps in view at once: the alleged attempt to hire Goad remains a crime worth pursuing, and the evidence Alex has found may lead to the person responsible for Mate’s murder. He therefore plans to preserve the Doss warrants and obtain the financial files, while also sending detectives toward Glendale to look for evidence connected to Burke. Doss remains a suspect under scrutiny, but the investigation is no longer organized around him alone.

The relationship’s defining tension is procedural as much as personal. Doss experiences the search efforts, interview requests, press attention, and police car outside his home as an intrusive cloud he expects to outlast. Milo sees continued investigation as an obligation: he cannot let the attempted-murder warrants lapse simply because the homicide inquiry has acquired another direction. Alex’s intervention forces Milo to reconsider where his time is going without asking him to treat Doss as innocent. By the end of the supplied episodes, the two cases remain distinct but entangled: Doss still faces investigation for the alleged solicitation, while Milo redirects part of his effort toward the evidence at Alice’s house and the pursuit of Burke.