by Liliana Hart
“Small-town life,” Jack said, smiling.
“Sounds like big-town problems,” she said. “Thanks for the snack. My stomach is still in knots, even though I know Ben’s going to be okay. I just need a decent night’s sleep, and I’ll be back on track tomorrow.”
“You’re not alone,” Jack told her, reaching out a hand to touch hers. “Ben’s family. Which means you’re family. Whatever you need, we’ll make sure you get it.”
She nodded and squeezed his hand, and then hefted her bulk out of the seat.
Jack blew out a breath. “What the hell are we going to do with a fifteen-year-old computer hacker?”
“Feed him snacks and hope he has a little bit of his uncle’s charm,” I said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke up in the right room the next morning, and in the right bed, but things weren’t back to normal.
My conversation with Jack had been brief the night before, both of us avoiding the elephant in the room. He’d gone off to talk to Martinez, and I’d put away the food and gone to bed. I didn’t remember him coming up, but his side of the bed was messed up, so I assumed it was him who’d slept there.
The space was empty now, and the sheets were cold, but there was a cup of coffee sitting on the nightstand. I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. What was he playing at?
It was still shy of seven, and the sun was shining through the windows of our third-floor bedroom.
“Gah,” I said. I squinted and pulled the pillow over my face.
I’d lowered the blackout shades before I’d gone to bed, but I was guessing Jack had raised them when he’d woken.
I didn’t have the energy to think too hard about what Jack was playing at, so I rolled out of bed and reached for the coffee. The first sip tasted like ambrosia. It just made me realize how bad my own was. And Nash’s hadn’t been much better.
My feet hit the floor and I shuffled into the bathroom to shower and get ready for the day. Jack hadn’t filled me in on who we’d be interviewing first, but if we had to make the half-hour drive to Nottingham, I was guessing he’d want to start with Gina Garcia and then we’d work our way back toward Bloody Mary. Jack was nothing if not efficient.
I took a quick shower and did my morning routine, and then I went to stand in the large walk-in closet Jack and I shared. My wardrobe wasn’t spectacular. It consisted of a lot of jeans and T-shirts on the casual side of things, and a lot of black dress clothes, which was an occupational hazard of owning a funeral home.
Since I had to talk to live people today I pulled out a pair of black leggings, a black-and-white sleeveless pinstripe silk shirt—because it was going to be hotter than Hades—and a lightweight black suit jacket. My black ballet flats finished off the outfit. I’d figured out the art of a messy ponytail from a YouTube video, so I pulled my hair up, slathered on my moisturizer and put on lip-gloss.
It was still shy of eight when I went down to the kitchen. Jack was sitting at the bar with his own cup of coffee and talking on the phone, so I went to the coffeepot to fill my to-go cup. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He was wearing jeans, a white dress shirt and a gray sports coat. I could see the bulge from his holster beneath his jacket.
“We’re heading out now,” Jack said into the phone. “I’ll keep you posted. Let me know what you find out about the samples.” And then he hung up without saying goodbye.
“Was that Nash?” I asked.
“Yeah. He’ll be at the lab by the time they open. You ready to roll?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said, snapping the lid on my cup.
The conversation was stiff and stilted between us. There was no good-morning kiss or affectionate touch. It felt like we were two strangers living in the same space.
“I figure we’ll see if we can run down Gina Garcia,” he said. “She’s a bartender at Rick’s on the River in King George. She works the dinner crowd, so she should be home.”
“I’m sure she’s an early riser,” I said sarcastically. I grabbed my bag from the hook and my sunglasses from the table, and I followed Jack out to the Tahoe.
“Is Martinez still here?” I asked.
“He took Michelle to the hospital to see Carver a couple of hours ago. Cross is inside now, and I’ve got a unit making pass-byes every hour.”
“Who’s Cross?” I asked.
“New guy,” he said. “John Cross. I’ve got five new hires from other counties I’ve been able to bring in with the new budget increase. They’re all experienced, and they were all looking to move to an area with less violent crime, so I had them hook up with their field-training officers last week to learn the ropes. They’re ready to go solo now. It gives me extra bodies to put in the protection rotation. I’ll have about five more fresh from the academy in a few months.”
“Make sure you tell the newbies I’m your wife so no one pulls me over.”
“I sent out a photo on their first day and told them you’re the one in the black Suburban who drives like a bat out of hell. They’ve all been warned.”
“Thank you. What about the kid?” I asked. “Any word on him?”
“Michelle said she’d call her sister-in-law this morning. From what I understand, it’s just a formality. Doug might be a minor, but he pretty much does what he wants. His body hasn’t caught up with his brain yet.”
“That sounds promising,” I said.
“Doug is Ben’s sister’s son. Apparently, the dad walked out when the kid was a couple of years old and hasn’t been back since. Joanie, that’s Ben’s sister, has busted her tail teaching school in the daytime and working part-time at some craft shop in the evenings to make ends meet. That doesn’t leave Doug with a lot of supervision.”
“I’m getting the feeling from your story that Doug needs a lot of supervision,” I said.
“Doug is a certified savant. His IQ is off the charts, and he graduated high school a couple of years ago. He’s enrolled at Georgetown in the online program and starts grad school in the fall.”
“I feel like an underachiever,” I said.
“He needs to stay busy. An idle mind is the devil’s handiwork.”
I snorted out a laugh.
“No, really,” he said. “Doug hacked into the Pentagon when he was nine years old and the U.S. Treasury when he was eleven. He did a little rearranging of some financial accounts, and he got himself put on house arrest for a couple of years and is on every watch list known to man. We’re lucky because the kid lives in Williamsburg. If he leaves the state he has to alert the authorities.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “We’ve got a teenage felon coming to visit who eats like a Gremlin. This should be fun.”
“As long as he can do what we need him to do,” Jack said. “I’ll feed him whatever he wants.”
“You don’t think they’re going to notice he’s disappeared from his home?”
“Between Michelle and Doug, they can make it look like he’s there,” he said. “I’m guessing Michelle’s no slouch on a computer. We’ll have a few days with him at least.”
It was almost a half-hour drive to Nottingham, and I was finally starting to wake up about fifteen minutes into the drive.
“You still haven’t told me where you’ve put the flash drives you got from Ben,” I said.
“No.”
“You’re not going to?” I asked.
“I figure it’s safer this way,” he said. “Never put your eggs all in one basket.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I turned the radio on low for the rest of the trip.
Gina Garcia lived in the Sherbrook Heights neighborhood of Nottingham. Nottingham was the second biggest city in the county, and it was a big industrial area with a lot of plants and manufacturing buildings on the south side of the river. There were a lot of restaurants and bars on the north side of the river.
Gina’s neighborhood was mostly apartment complexes and manufactured homes. There weren’t a lot of trees like in Bloody Mary, and the gras
s was mostly brown because of the direct sunlight.
Jack turned right next to an outdoor basketball court surrounded by a chain-link fence, but it was empty at this time of the morning. Up ahead of us was a gated complex with four apartment buildings inside it. The gate was open, so Jack drove through.
“She’s in building four,” he said, finding a visitor’s parking spot.
“I can feel about a dozen eyes on us,” I said.
“That’s because there’s at least that many watching us. This neighborhood is no stranger to cops. We get calls out here all the time. Mostly drugs or domestic violence.”
I followed him along cracked sidewalks until we reached a cloudy pool surrounded by a white iron fence. The number four was on the outside of the building, and I looked at the zigzag of stairs all the way to the fourth floor.
“She lives at the top, doesn’t she?” I asked.
Jack looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Yep.”
“It figures we’d be that lucky.” It was already warm outside, and I was glad I was in sensible shoes.
I was only huffing a little when we got to the top, a fact I was pretty proud of considering I hated to exercise and I mostly sustained myself on coffee and gluten. Jack wasn’t out of breath at all and looked as perfect as he had when we left the house. I felt wilted from the inside out, and hoped my messy ponytail had held up through the ordeal.
Jack knocked three times on the ugly brown door of apartment 408. Then he did it again a couple of minutes later.
Jack looked like a cop. It didn’t matter what he wore or what mundane circumstance he found himself in. If I saw him standing at my door, I’d be hesitant to answer too.
“Gina Garcia,” Jack said through the door. “This is the police. Open up.”
“She’s probably sleeping,” I said.
“She’s standing on the other side of the door,” he said. “I saw her look through the peephole.”
I heard the locks snick open and a chain unlatch, and Gina cracked the door open.
Jack held up his badge and said, “I’m Sheriff Lawson. We need to ask you some questions.”
“Geez,” she said. “What do you want? People are going to think I’m trouble with the cops showing up here. The landlord will kick me out.”
Gina was what some would call a brick house of a woman. She was Latina with dark bedroom eyes and full lips, and she was all curves and sexy as hell, even though she’d clearly just rolled out of bed. She was wearing a silk floral robe that barely covered the essentials and she was sporting a fairly recent shiner.
“I’ve got to work tonight,” she said. “I need to go back to sleep.” She tried to close the door, but Jack’s booted foot was in the way.
“We’d really appreciate it if you’d let us come inside,” he said. “It’ll be a lot easier than having to do it at the station.”
She narrowed her eyes, but knew she didn’t have any other choice, so she stepped back and opened the door wide so we could come inside.
I was surprised by the inside of the apartment. Gina took care of what she had, and she had a flair for design. Brightly colored pillows littered the couch and purple sheers hung in the corners of the tiny living room. Different sizes of pillar candles covered almost every flat surface.
“We can wait if you want to get dressed,” Jack said.
“Hell, no,” she said, tossing long black hair over her shoulder. “And give you an excuse to snoop around my place? What’s this about?”
“Roy Walsh,” Jack said.
Gina froze and her eyes darted over to me. “Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Dr. Graves,” I said. “I’m the coroner for the county.”
“Did something happen to Roy?” she asked. Her eyes went wide and she took a step back.
“No, but Roy’s wife was murdered. We need to ask you some questions.”
She put a hand to her ample chest and breathed out a sigh of relief. “You had me worried. I thought something had happened to Roy.”
“It doesn’t bother you that someone killed his wife?” Jack asked.
“I didn’t know her,” she said. “I can’t pretend to feel something for someone I never knew.” She went over to an emerald-green Papasan chair in the corner and curled up in it like a cat, pulling a turquoise throw over her lap.
Jack and I moved toward the couch and didn’t wait for an invitation to sit down.
“I’m surprised Roy didn’t tell you about his wife,” Jack said.
“I’m not taking his calls at the moment,” she said.
“He mentioned that he came out to see you yesterday morning,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s two mornings in a row I haven’t gotten to sleep,” she said. “So what if he came to see me? He’s here all the time.”
“He told us you called his wife and told her about the baby.”
Gina shrugged and her robe slipped off her shoulder. “So what? Is that a crime? I know that bastard Roy has money. Not from firefighting, but from that other business he has. I just wanted to make sure I’d be taken care of. I figured the best way to make sure of that was to tell the wife. From what Roy said about her, she seemed like the real conscientious type.”
“Well, now she’s the dead type,” Jack said. “Roy says his wife was alive when he left her. What time did he get here?”
“I dunno. I had a little trouble seeing the clock,” she said, pointing to her eye.
“He gave you that?” I asked.
“He barely waited until I had the door open,” she said. “Which is why I’m not taking his calls. He called me a bunch of names and told me I was a liar, but I showed him the pregnancy test. I took three of them. He started to wind down and then I kicked him out. I don’t need that in my life. He was starting to get stale anyway. Married men are a pain in the ass.”
I raised my brow at that, but I didn’t say anything.
“What did you do after he left?” Jack asked.
“I got a bag of ice for my eye and then went back to bed. I turned my phone off. I don’t work Sundays, so I didn’t have to be anywhere.”
“Have you ever been to Roy’s house?” Jack asked.
“Never,” she said. “I don’t even know his address. I usually met him in King George at his office. I didn’t spend a lot of time with Roy outside of my bedroom or his office, you know? It’s not like we were dating. It was purely physical.”
“Is there anyone who can corroborate your whereabouts yesterday?” Jack asked.
“You think I killed Roy’s wife?” she asked, and then burst into laughter. We waited while she finished and then she wiped her eyes. “Man, that’s a good one. Look, I don’t do serious entanglements. Just ask anybody. There’s no man worth killing over. Guys like Roy are a dime a dozen. I like my life just how it is, and now I’ve gotta worry about bringing a kid into it. I don’t need any more problems.”
“Do you think Roy’s capable of killing his wife?” I asked.
“Roy’s got a temper,” she said. “Sure he’s capable. But they had a really weird marriage. He, like, worshipped her or something. It was creepy the way he talked about her.”
Jack handed her a card with his number on it. “Let me know if you think of anything else,” he said. “And call if you feel like Roy is a threat to you. We’d prefer not to have any more bodies show up.”
“I’d prefer that too. Good luck.”
We left Gina in her chair and showed ourselves out.
CHAPTER NINE
Firehouse Movers was in King George proper, and since Roy and his partners were all shift mates and they didn’t go back on shift until Tuesday, the plan was to catch them at the office. We made good time coming from Gina’s place, and Jack pulled through a Starbucks drive-thru to replenish our tanks.
“You should drink more water,” he said, handing me my cup and then opening his bottled water.
“You should mind your own beeswax,” I told him.
He snorted out a lau
gh and then asked, “Do you need to be back at a certain time?”
“I’ve still got Carl Planter in the cooler, and I’m still waiting to hear from the city about what day they want to do Mrs. McGowen’s memorial service.”
Rosalyn McGowen had been an influential member of the community for decades, and she didn’t have any remaining family so the city was stepping in to make sure she had a proper send-off and burial. It would be a simple affair since we’d had to cremate her on account of her cats had eaten her.
“Carl’s family is from Atlanta, so they’re making arrangements to have him transported back home for burial. Sheldon will take care of all of that.”
Sheldon was my assistant, and he’d really made my life a lot easier, especially since my job as coroner had ramped up over the past few months.
“I think Gina was right,” I said as we took the exit off the highway. “It looks like their side business is doing well.”
“Well, Gina strikes me as the kind of person who gets what she wants and sets personal goals of a certain caliber. She’s probably twenty-two, twenty-three years old. She won’t be in that run-down apartment complex forever.”
It was hard to miss the Firehouse Movers building. It was a bright red metal structure with a giant wooden cutout of three men in their fire gear moving a sofa on top of the building. There was a matching billboard at the highway exit. There were moving trucks parked at the back that matched the billboard and I could see the phone number to call all the way from the highway.
There was a truck, a Jeep, and a little compact car out front, and I was pretty sure the truck and the Jeep were the same ones that sat in Roy’s driveway the day before.
Jack parked and I got out of the Tahoe and pushed my sunglasses on top of my head. The front door of the building opened before we could get to it, and a man who looked vaguely familiar stood there.
“Hey, Sheriff,” he said. “Thought you might be coming by. Come on in.”