by Rhys Ford
“Nah, it’s all good. I don’t know what else I can tell you I haven’t told O’Byrne. Shit, forgot she didn’t exactly have time to tell anyone what we talked about.” He shrugged and instantly regretted it. His side ached, and from the creeping tendrils of pain stretching over his skin, it felt like the painkillers were wearing off. “I went down to the store to meet up with Davis Natterly, but O’Byrne was there. Next thing I knew, someone was shooting at us.”
They went over the incident with Cranston coming at it from several angles, probing gently at everything Rook said until he wasn’t sure anymore if he’d been facing left or right when O’Byrne’s shoulder was hit. She walked him back, asking his impressions of the day, and then circled back to something he hadn’t thought about.
“Did Natterly ever show up?” The question was a soft one, lobbed innocently in the middle of a bunch of queries, but it brought Rook up short. “Did anyone tell you he came by? Did he leave a message telling you he wouldn’t make it?”
“Um… I didn’t see him, but we were supposed to meet later, so he could have.” Rook shook his head. “I was focused on O’Byrne, and then well, the doctors had me on my back at the hospital. I never saw him. The only messages I had were from Dante, and then well, afterwards, they brought me here. A couple of mundane things about an estate sale I wanted to go to but nothing else. Not from Davis. But like I said, he could have shown up and one of the cops told him what happened.”
“I have his contact number. I’ll follow up with him tomorrow and find out if he came by at all. Does he normally not show up?” Something in her manner tickled Rook’s attention, and he sat up straighter, handing his tea over to Dante. “Or is he pretty reliable?”
“Mostly reliable, but sometimes his brother, Jeremy, fucks something up and he’s got to take care of things. Usually sends me an I’m sorry text afterwards.”
“You think there’s an issue there?” Montoya held the cup only long enough to put it aside. “We can have someone do a welfare check on his home.”
“Might not be a bad idea,” Camden interjected. “Peripherals seem to be this guy’s MO. Hell, for all we know Harold was on the fringe of something and was killed just because he was in the way. There’s a lot of loose threads and nothing stitching them together.”
“So far, Rook seems to be at the epicenter of it all,” the female detective conjectured. “Is there anyone you fought with before any of this happened? This seems to have started when you purchased an item from Natterly’s and your cousin intercepted it. Was there someone else who wanted the movie prop? Someone who might have been angry about not getting it?”
“That I don’t know. But the bird was there when I got into Harold’s house. If the person who killed him wanted the thing, he’d have taken it,” Rook pointed out. The sight of the Maltese Falcon sitting on his cousin’s belly, then hitting the floor haunted him at the oddest moments. “The originals were about fifty pounds, but the replicas from the parody weigh a lot less because they’re resin. I mean, the damned thing’s still heavy, but it’s easily carried. The guy who attacked me… who killed Harold… could have taken it with him.”
“That’s the curious thing about this, Mr. Stevens,” Cranston replied, tapping at her phone to pull up a gallery of pictures. “Forensics found a couple of interesting things while going over the evidence for me today. First, there was a green contact lens in the bloodied debris near your cousin’s right hand, so that seems like a very solid explanation for your attacker’s oddly colored eyes. But what was more interesting than the contact was the falcon itself.”
The picture she pulled up was of the bird, its backside coated in dog fur, blood, and flecks of things Rook didn’t want to identify, but what caught his attention was the bright white gash cut into the statue’s left wing. Flakes and dust coated the glove of whoever was holding the statue up for its close-up, vividly bright on the black latex.
“That’s not resin,” Rook mumbled, leaning in to take a closer look. The detailing along the wing was perfect, and the mimicked dents in the bird’s body and beak were exactly as if it’d been cast from the battered original, but the damned statue was definitely flaking. “That’s plaster of Paris. That bird’s a fucking fake. That’s not the bird I saw at Natterly’s. I know it’s not. They’d be different weights. I held my bird. It was real.”
“Exactly what the forensics crew decided. So now, Mr. Stevens, I’m asking you again for your thoughts on this.” Her smile this time was professional, a bit hard but inquisitive, drawing Rook out of his racing thoughts. “Who else wanted this statue? And more importantly, who’d want it bad enough to kill for it?”
“SO THE fake’s a fake?” Hank poured himself what seemed like to Dante his fifteenth cup of coffee. “And we don’t know where the original fake is or where the guy who sold it to Stevens is. This night just keeps getting better and better.”
Getting Rook to bed had been simple enough. His lover was worn down to the bone, and he’d nearly fallen asleep during the quick hot shower he’d managed to talk Dante into letting him take. Keeping his stitches dry was an exercise in flexibility, and despite another round of reluctantly swallowed pills, he’d caught Rook wincing in pain when Dante helped him sponge off, sluicing bits of dried blood and dirt from his back.
The former thief was a fragile mess, and Dante hated leaving him alone, but tucked under the blankets, he’d grumbled about needing some sleep and was snoring before Dante could turn off the bedroom’s lights. Walking away was difficult, and he’d stood in the doorway, debating telling the world to go to hell so he could crawl into bed with the man who made his heart stop.
Dante could still taste the fear in his throat, a lingering metallic stain when Manny’d called him to say Rook’d been shot. No amount of swallowing would ever clear it away. He was certain of that, even as he returned to the study to hear Cranston and Camden hammer at the edges of the case in the hopes of breaking something—anything—loose from the murderous knot someone’d tied around Rook.
“I’m interested in hearing what you think, Montoya.” The West LA detective had her notes spread over the table, a makeshift murder board of Venn diagrams and lists. “You guys started this to debunk Vicks’s investigation. I know about Vicks putting his hands on Stevens, but nothing was filed. There was an old arrest attempt on Stevens for a burglary, but that was years ago. Vicks wasn’t primary on it, but there was a mark on the report that he’d handled the suspect—Stevens—a bit too hard. Do you know if he remembers seeing Vicks back then? I didn’t find any indication that Vicks recalled that incident.”
“Knowing Stevens, he took off after it happened,” Hank remarked. “He was slippery back then. Kind of sad if Vicks assaulted his arrests so often he didn’t even remember them.”
“He wasn’t the greatest guy to work with.” Cranston ruefully looked down into her cup. “You didn’t hear it from me, but he was always the short straw cases. No one wanted to work with him, led with his dick instead of his brain. I always thought he was hanging on by the skin of his teeth, but then the Martin case landed in his lap, and he seemed like he had a clear shot at the wife and, well, your boyfriend.”
“Rook didn’t kill Harold. Timing was off from the beginning, but I can’t say the same for Sadonna. I’ve been trying to corner her to follow up after Martinez was found,” Dante admitted, stretching his arms to work out a kink in his shoulder. “But I can’t see Sadonna shooting at a cop, though. She confessed her marriage to Harold was a sham, then tossed in the maybe-boyfriend, but I’m still not sold on her murdering someone.”
“But Martin does have a boyfriend,” she pressed. “I spoke to his mother. She said he was in a relatively new relationship, one he kept quiet from the family. Which doesn’t make sense. Why keep it quiet? The old man seems okay with Rook.”
“Wasn’t always the case. Harold’s older and was around for the formative years of Archie’s prejudices.” Dante liked the old man, but from all accounts, he’d be
en an abusive asshole for a long time, riding roughshod over his family even after Rook showed up on his doorstep. “He’s working to change his ways, but it’s a hard go sometimes. I can see Harold… and the others… leading a double life to keep in his good graces.”
“Keep the old man happy and you’ll stay in the will,” Camden commented softly, rocking back on his heels. “Then along comes Stevens and blows the whole thing up with his fuck-you attitude. That would stick in Harold’s craw. All these years of hiding, fake marriage, and slaving away at the company farm, only then Stevens fucks with the balance of things.”
“Rook’s good at that,” Dante agreed. “But Rook wasn’t a threat. Not to the family. He’s pretty adamant about not working for Archie.”
“I like the wife for the stabbing,” Hank countered. “She said she wanted a divorce… that she was the one pressing for it, but he wouldn’t give her one because now he’s thinking of setting up a nursery. I think she hacked at him, then ran.”
“Then who was there at the house the next day?” Cranston asked. “Harold’s dead. She’d have no reason to come back. I’d supposed it was the killer coming back to make sure he was really dead.”
“Did Harold know he had a fake?” Camden frowned, studying the photos again. “He’s not like Stevens. He didn’t collect movie stuff, so would he even know?”
The detective sighed, sitting back in her chair. “Why even swap them out? Natterly’s had to know they couldn’t cheat Stevens, so whoever gave Harold the fake either knew they could get away with it or—”
“It was a mistake,” Hank finished. “Forensics do anything to that statue other than pick at it? Maybe it’s holding something. Drugs? The Holy Grail?”
“What, like x-ray it?” She shook her head. “No, they hadn’t gotten very far on what we’d sent them. There’s a backlog. O’Byrne was lucky enough to get the bird on a table as quick as she did.”
“So you think something’s inside that plaster bird?” Dante eyed his partner. “And Natterly’s sent it to Harold by mistake. Then why go after Rook?”
“Because only the cops, Rook, and Alex knew the statue was recovered on the scene. Then Sadonna dropped the bit about the bird being broken, but she could have heard about that from your boyfriend. If you were an intruder… and say you worked at the auction house… wouldn’t you assume Rook pocketed the thing?” Hank asked. “Thieves always assume the worst of people, your boyfriend notwithstanding.”
“Oh no, Rook always assumes the worst of people. It’s when he doesn’t, that’s when he gets into trouble,” Dante replied. “Look at the crime scene photos. No one stepped in the blood. Our intruder didn’t check to see if Harold was still alive…. He was there for something else. Rook surprised him before he could get out, or maybe he found out it was a fake, seeing the plaster, so he knew then it wasn’t what he’d come for.” Dante tasted the theory, liking its flavor. “The Natterly brother—Jeremy—told O’Byrne Harold had the statue picked up and delivered. Then today, Davis, the other brother, didn’t show up for his meeting with Rook. Something’s off there. Sadonna killing Harold doesn’t make sense, but I’m liking one of the Natterlys for it. They knew him. Rook even said they’d done business with Harold before and Davis was a good friend. Suppose it was more than just friendship?”
“So what? Someone got pissy and Harold gets stabbed?” Hank rubbed at the short ginger scruff covering his jaw. “Why kill Vicks and Martinez?”
“Because they were loose ends. People digging into the mess someone’d rather be swept under the rug. Just like Rook. The shooter wasn’t after O’Byrne. He was after Stevens but is a really lousy shot. That statue really is a MacGuffin, just like in the movie. The real problem was Harold’s murder.” Dante reached for one of the detective’s diagrams, then grabbed a pencil from the pile near her hand, studying the sheet. “I don’t think the intruder was there for the statue. He was there to clean up. That’s why he wasn’t surprised to find Harold. He already knew Harold was dead going into the situation. Maybe the boyfriend pushed Harold to crawl out from under Archie’s thumb and they fought. Knives happen when tempers flare. There was a lot of anger in those stabs. They knew one another. Intimately.”
“There wasn’t any evidence of a relationship in Harold’s bedroom. Nothing. No photos, sex toys, nothing to lead us to believe he was having an affair.” Cranston huffed in a breath. “Hell, that’s what the intruder was doing. Erasing the boyfriend. My life’s full of my boyfriend’s crap. Even if you were keeping it under a rock, things leak. Pictures. Clothes. Small things.”
“My wife’s leaked all over my life. I’ve got about an inch of bathroom space. The rest of it belongs to her and the kids.” Camden nodded. “So assuming Montoya’s right, then that begs the question of which one of the Natterly brothers was Harold’s lover, and how far is the other one willing to go to protect him?”
Fifteen
“WHERE’D YOU leave it with Stevens?” Camden guided the unmarked sedan they’d been given through the posh neighborhood’s curved streets. “He still feeling like shit?”
“He woke up long enough for me to press a couple of pills into his mouth, slosh some water over his tongue, then hold his jaw shut until he swallowed.” Dante held up his still-throbbing fingers. “Fucker bit me, but he took them. Thought I was going in for a kiss, but that wasn’t happening until he got some meds into him. He had a rough night. Stitches along the rib cage hurt, and he moves a lot when he sleeps. So wasn’t a good night.”
“Brave man, pilling Stevens like a cat. If I were you, I’d sleep with one eye open.” His partner chuckled, reaching for his coffee.
“What makes you think I don’t already?” It was a soft grumble, and the bite had been accidental on Rook’s part, more a reaction from shifting across the bed and a flare-up of agony so intense he’d gasped and clamped down on the edge of Dante’s fingers instead of letting Dante tip them into his open mouth. “Just… worried about him. Not used to that yet, I guess. I mean, sure… I had Manny, but this… this is different.”
“Yeah, it is. I might give you shit about Stevens, but he’s good for you. Loosens you up.” Hank shot him a glance, one Dante couldn’t read. “You’re having fun now. Before it was all work, and then you’d go home and work some more. Stevens makes you a little bit crazy, but it’s a good crazy. I don’t know what you see in him, but shit, it takes all kinds.”
“He makes me… feel,” he confessed softly, flicking his thumbnail along the ridge of his coffee cup lid. “You find a guy who can teach a Latino about passion, you hold on to him. No matter how wild the ride.”
“Talk to me about passion when you’ve been married for ten years and date night means cleaning the lint out of the dryer vent,” Hank teased. “And you’re thankful the kids have the flu because it means they’re huddled in bed and quiet.”
“Think about what you just said and Rook Stevens,” Dante replied. “You see us with kids?”
“Why not? Stranger shit has happened. I’d hate to be your kid’s teacher or, worse yet, the principal.” His partner began to chuckle in earnest. “You’d need a fucking vineyard to keep them tanked up on wine to put up with any kid raised by you and Stevens. Kid’ll rip you off blind, apologize, hand it all back, and do it again for shits and giggles.”
“We haven’t even talked about moving in together, and you’re already giving us kids? One step at a time, Camden.” Dante tapped at the dashboard. “Hey, back up. You just passed it.”
“How the hell can you tell what the address is if everything’s got these huge damned hedges?” Reversing the sedan, Hank took the curve a hair too tightly, squealing the tires on the bank. “Sorry. You sure this is the place? I got nothing but a wooden gate Godzilla couldn’t get over and another damned hedge. Maybe we should find a white rabbit to take us in.”
“Not a rabbit. Caterpillar. Blue hair. Wears a scarf.” Dante smirked at his partner’s withering look. “Hazard of hooking up with a movie buff. You end u
p watching a lot of weird shit. And yeah, this is the right place. Numbers on the curb match.”
“O’Byrne must be losing her shit being flat on her back in the hospital.” Maneuvering the car into the driveway, Hank pulled it in as close as he could to an intercom speaker mounted on an arm near the gate. Hank came to a stop, then rolled down the window to buzz the house. “Okay, one ding-dong, then we wait. No one answers, we’re storming the castle. You spoke to Cranston, right? She’s okay with chasing down the Natterly brothers while we’re here at Margaret’s?”
“Cranston’s fine. She’s digging out possible locations for them, but she’s got uniforms on the auction house. Staff got a voice message this morning from Davis, the older brother, telling them he’d be out for the rest of the week. Jeremy’s just MIA, but he doesn’t have regular hours according to the receptionist. Mostly you’re lucky… or unlucky… if he shows up for work on any given day.” Dante snorted. “That must be nice. Just show up whenever you want to. Buzz the house again. Maybe they didn’t hear you the first time.”
“You’d be a twitching pile of nerves if you didn’t show up for work. And we’re murder cops. We don’t show up, people don’t get caught. People don’t get caught… and there’s a shit ton more murders,” his partner pointed out with a laugh. “Seriously, thirty more seconds and we start knocking down doors.”
The neighborhood was claustrophobic, slender winding streets with spaced-out houses shrouded with enormous hedges and thick groves of trees. Cut into the hills, the tiers ran around the dips of canyons and along short mesas, shoving estates in where they could fit and, in the case of one mostly glass-walled house up the hill, perched on thick stilts anchored along a short cliff face. There was an eerie, nearly postapocalyptic feel to the area, devoid of life or any movement. With the rest of the city tucked down beneath the hills, the only sounds Dante could hear were the wind moving through the trees and the faint whirr of a lawn mower echoing through the clustered houses.