Center of Gravity (Marauders Book 3)

by Lina Andersson

  CHAPTER TEN

  Who’s Your Alibi?

  -o0o-

  Anna had just left, and Mitch was standing in front of the door just staring at it. He was still completely thrown by the fact that they’d almost spent the night together without having had sex. Admittedly because he fell asleep while she was in the bathroom. When he’d woken up the next morning, she was already out of bed, and the thought of her leaving before they’d had sex at all had made him go after her in almost a panic. He’d found her in the shower and had fucked her thoroughly against the wall, because her just spending the night with him without any sex at all was just out of the fucking question. You did not cuddle through the night with a fuck buddy, you just didn’t. Not having sex and just sleeping next to each other was the kind of stuff you did with a girlfriend—not a fuck buddy.

  He wasn’t an idiot; he knew they were slowly, but at a disturbingly steady pace, venturing away from fuck buddy territory and into something else. But even if he was ready to admit it, she wasn’t. Not even close. Besides, he had no fucking idea how to bring that conversation up, ‘Hey, how about we say we’re not just fuck buddies, but fuck buddies with friend perks?’ Like some warped version of friends with benefits.

  When the doorbell rang five minutes later, he was still staring at the door, and he assumed it was Anna who’d forgotten her cell on the nightstand as usual.

  “I’ll get it for you,” he said as he opened the door, and halted completely when he stared at two complete strangers. A man and a woman, and the woman made him relax slightly because none of their enemies would bring a woman to take someone out.

  “Get what, Mr. Baxter?” the woman said with a sweet smile and held up a badge. “Can we come in?”

  “Do you have a warrant?” he asked and shot her a smile. He was very pleased that her reaction made the male gorilla next to her growl.

  “Is that really necessary?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s here or the station,” the gorilla said and tried to give him a menacing look, but it mostly made him look constipated.

  “The station it is,” Mitch beamed. “Do you want me to go dressed like this?” He indicated the towel he had around his hips.

  “You can get dressed.”

  “Okay.” He pointed towards the threshold just in front of the two police officers’ feet. “If you step over that, I’ll press charges. Unless it’s you,” he smiled at the woman. “If you want, you can come with me upstairs and watch me get dressed.”

  The gorilla grabbed her arm. “She’s staying here with me.”

  Judging by the wedding band he wore, the one she lacked, he was married and it wasn’t to her. But they were definitely fucking.

  Mitch had often thought to himself that he’d love to get into a poker night at the police station because most of them had no poker face whatsoever as soon as they became angry, and it was oh so easy to get them angry.

  He turned around, tore off the towel and walked upstairs with his ass bare, just to throw them both off, and possibly create some tension between them. It would make reading them during the interrogation so much easier.

  Twenty minutes later, he was in an interrogation room at the station. He had a cup of coffee in front of him, and before he’d even sipped it, he knew it would taste like shit. It even smelled like shit. He’d been in there alone for the past ten minutes, and he could hear the two of them arguing outside the door. His flirting and ass show had obviously had some effect.

  The Marauders had a standing order to immediately ask for a lawyer, but Mitch didn’t want to. Silver, the club lawyer, would tell him to shut up, and he knew he could get more info from the cops by talking, and he knew he’d be able to talk to them without actually telling them anything. He also knew they’d keep him waiting for hours before they called Silver, so he decided to make the wait worth it by finding out what it all was about. The only real downside he could see with the plan was that Brick might possibly make a serious attempt at ripping off his balls if he didn’t follow protocol.

  When they finally came into the room, the woman, who had introduced herself as detective Evans in the car, was holding a file.

  “Do you know who this woman is?” she asked and put a few pictures in front of Mitch.

  He knew who she was. It was Autumn, and she was very dead. It wouldn’t take them long to ID her, and when they did, they’d know she worked for them, so saying that he didn’t know was just stupid.

  “She’s one of the strippers at The Booty Bank. She’s called Autumn, but I don’t think it’s her real name.”

  Evans looked surprised when she answered; she’d obviously thought he’d lie. “No. Her name is Laura Parker.”

  He or Mech did extensive background checks on anyone they hired, or who just frequented the club. The girls rarely looked the same on the DMV pictures as they did on stage, and Mitch never made an effort to match the DMV girls to the chicks on stage, simply since he remembered what he read.

  He knew that Laura Parker came from Fulton, Missouri, her mom had died when she was twelve, her dad served time for killing a ranger in a drunken fit, she had a younger sister who lived in Dallas, and she had dropped out of college after the second semester. But he preferred to not think about those things when he was sticking his dick in her. So he rarely bothered to figure out which one of the girls was which unless someone had specific questions about one of them. The less he knew, the better.

  He looked at detective Evans. “Was that a question?”

  “No,” detective Gordon, the male gorilla, muttered. “She was murdered.”

  “That’s not a question either, but I can see that.”

  “She had numbers written on her torso,” Evans said and slid another picture over the table. “Do you know what this is?”

  Mitch looked at the picture, and written on her torso was the number 1.61803. He knew immediately what it was, but shrugged and looked at the cops.

  “No.” He didn’t know if they believed him, but he wasn’t going to help them. Not that he had any fucking idea why someone would scribble the Golden Ratio on her. “What are they?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  Either they didn’t want him to know, or they weren’t familiar with how Google worked.

  “When did you last see her?” Gordon asked.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “According to a few people we’ve talked to, she was seen leaving the strip club with you the night before yesterday.”

  It was either a cheap trick from their side, or someone had been lying to them. It could be they’d heard that he’d fucked her on occasion, but then that was true about most of the strippers. Or it used to be, before he started… seeing Anna, or whatever the fuck it was called. Fucking?

  Either way, he wasn’t worried about a fake witness. It annoyed him, but it didn’t worry him. It would piss Brick off, though, so for the sake of the fake witness, Mitch hoped he or she was a figment of the imagination of either Evans or Gordon. Probably Evans, when he thought about it, because he didn’t think Gordon had any imagination.

  “I didn’t,” was the only thing he said.

  “So you’re saying our witness is lying?” Gordon asked.

  “Yes I am.”

  “Why do you guys own a strip club?” Evans asked in a surprising change of subject. He was expecting them to ask for an alibi and hadn’t really figured out how to handle that yet, but he was glad for the delay.

  “Because we like tits,” he said and made a point of looking at hers. “Especially big ones, like yours. D-cup?”

  “Everyone knows it’s to launder money,” Gordon snorted.

  “Now, not everyone is happily married with tits readily available and free at ones wish. So some of us like to go to the strip club and get just that. Since we own it, we don’t even have to pay for it.”

  “How did you know I was married?” he asked with a side glance to Evans who looked slightly annoyed. Gordon’
s marriage was obviously a huge issue. Mitch had no idea why any cop would be stupid enough to fuck their partner, and he was already trying to figure out how the club could use the information to their advantage.

  “You’re wearing a wedding ring, Sherlock,” he answered.

  He figured the new line of questioning was a pathetic attempt to gather information while they had a good reason to bring him in. If they kept it up with questions that didn’t have anything to do with Laura Parker, he’d simply shut them up by asking for a lawyer.

  “What other businesses does the club own?” Gordon asked. That did it for Mitch.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  They both glared at him and got up without a word. He’d be sitting there for hours for sure. He realized it probably would’ve been a better idea to let them know he had an alibi, but the ‘don’t give anything to the cops for free’ rule was too firmly imbedded in his spine.

  Three hours and half a pack of smokes later, Silver came into the room.

  “Must say, Mitch, the fluorescent light really isn’t good for your complexion.” He put his briefcase on the table. “A murder?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Do you have an alibi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  “They never asked.”

  “Morons,” Silver muttered. “They probably knew you had nothing to do with it and thought they could drag out the interrogation if they didn’t have to write you off.”

  Mitch actually hadn’t thought about that possibility, but it made sense.

  “Maybe. They claimed they had a witness who’d seen me leave with her the day before yesterday.”

  “A lie to get you stressed, and if you’re stressed you might slip. Wonder if I should tell them that just because you’re the youngest, you’re not the easiest to break. How solid is you alibi?”

  “As a rock. A ballet dancer and her aunt both saw me pick her up for a picnic. I took her to the river, followed her home afterwards, and stayed the rest of the night at her place. Went from there directly to work. Both her and her aunt saw me leaving around eight-thirty, and I clocked in a eight forty-five.”

  “Oh, wow,” Silver smiled. “Alibis like that gives me the biggest hard-on. Works better than Viagra.”

  Then he started humming Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River’ while he went to the door and called for the detectives. When they were all seated, Silver smiled at the two of them.

  “Did either of you bother to ask him about an alibi?”

  “Do you have an alibi for the night before last?” Evans asked, giving Mitch a bored look, probably expecting him to give a crap alibi.

  “Yes. I was with a woman named Anna Dobronravov from around four p.m. to eight-thirty the next day.”

  “Would you mind spelling that?” Gordon asked.

  “D-O-B-R-O-N-R-A-V-O-V,” Mitch spelled as quickly as possible, and smiled when he noticed Gordon getting lost around the first r. “She lives on 87 Oak Street. Name’s on the door, just look for the one that starts with Dobr.”

  He really didn’t like throwing Anna under the bus like this, but he didn’t have much of a choice if he wanted to get out of there. Especially not if someone had said he’d been with Autumn, although he wasn’t fully convinced that it was true. He was getting more and more sure that Silver was right.

  They asked a few more questions, but gave up when Silver kept telling him to not answer, and they cut him loose.

  “Is the ballet dancer working at the strip club?” Silver asked as they walked towards the car. Apparently giving the client a ride home was included in his charge.

  “No. She’s a friend of Lisa’s. You know, Bear’s daughter.”

  “And her Aunt isn’t a lonely drunk who smokes menthols and is in desperate need of cash?”

  “No. She’s a… something at the Phoenix Ballet. Think it was called a ballet mistress. Like a trainer.”

  “Oh my! My dick is so hard it could support a small bridge right now.”

  Mitch just laughed and got into the car.

  -o0o-

  “What fucking part of ‘shut your mouth and ask for a lawyer when a cop looks at you the wrong way’ was hard for your superior brain to comprehend?” his dad yelled the second he saw him.

  It was about an hour after Silver had dropped him off at the garage, and he was standing talking to Bull, Bear, and Sisco when his dad finally found him.

  “I thought they were just rattling our cage. I didn’t know there was a fucking murder.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you thought. Chapel, everyone, NOW!” He turned to Wrench. “It won’t take long, keep an eye on this place and ask Mel if something comes up.”

  “Sure,” Wrench said and turned his attention back to the Toyota he was working on.

  With a slightly too firm grip of Mitch’s arm, Brick dragged him over the lot, through the clubhouse, and into the chapel.

  “Spill!”

  “Autumn has been murdered, someone had said they’d seen me with her the night she was killed—”

  “Who?” Brick asked before he was able to continue.

  “I don’t know—yet. I got the impression it was something they made up to get me rattled, and Silver said the same thing.”

  “Find out for sure. Anything else?”

  “She had the Golden Ratio written on her.”

  Brick stood in silence for a while before walking towards his own chair at the head of the table.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the number 1.61803.”

  “I’m afraid to fucking ask, but what does that mean?”

  “No idea. Maybe he thought Autumn was perfection,” Mitch said and chuckled to himself. He looked around the table at the questioning faces. “The Golden Ratio is sort of nature’s formula for perfection. For example, the face on a person generally considered beautiful is mathematically formed according to the Golden Ratio…. Does this matter?”

  “I don’t know,” Brick sighed. “First off, does her murder have anything to do with us?”

  “Think it would be stupid to assume anything else,” Sisco said. “At least until we get solid proof that it’s not. Also think we should take into account that someone keeps trying to hack our computers, and that we recently had guests from overseas.”

  “Servers,” Mech muttered next to Mitch. “They’re trying to hack our… fuck it, it doesn’t matter. Either way, we’ve gone through everything, they haven’t left anything behind, nothing, so there were no subtle messages in the hacking attempt.”

  “Did you trace it, yet?” Brick asked.

  “They’ve gone through an anonymizer, that’s it.”

  “And you can’t unanonymize it?”

  “Fucking hope not,” Mech smiled. “That’s the kind of shit we use to stay under radar. He keeps coming back, and he’s not very good, so we’ll get him. He’ll fuck up eventually.”

  “Okay. So those numbers are all we have at the moment,” Brick sighed. “What do we know about them? And you shut up,” he said to Mitch. “I wanna know what the others have to say.”

  They sat silent, and then Tommy spoke up. “I don’t wanna be that guy, but don’t you think you’re making this more complicated than it has to be? Besides Mitch, how many people would immediately know what those numbers are? Can’t it stand for something else?”

  “Google it to see if it can mean anything else,” Brick said and pointed at Mech, who immediately stood up and went outside to one of the computers. No phones were allowed in the chapel, so he had to leave to do it. “You’re on to something, Tommy. Good job, but I think we should also pay attention to what you said about Mitch immediately knowing what it was.”

  Mitch had been thinking the same thing. That the message could be directed at him.

  “Was she a favorite?” Bull asked Mitch.

  “Not really. Don’t think I’ve been with her more than any of the others.”

  “Anyone who’s af
ter you especially?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “I know someone.” It was Mac, and he was looking right at Mitch when he continued. “Hump. Do we know where he is now?”

  “Hump didn’t know shit about computers, so he didn’t try to hack us,” Mitch protested. “It might’ve been a lame attempt, but it was still someone who knew the basics. No offense, but none of you would’ve been able to do it, and Hump was about as tech savvy as Dad. And why would he kill Laura?”

  “The numbers, do they have anything to do with anything of his? Like the account number, phone number, address, anything?” Brick asked.

  Mitch sat still and went though the numbers in his head. Any number he could think of, and he came up with nothing. He slowly shook his head.

  Mech came back into the room. “Only thing I found was about how the Fibonacci sequence is connected to the Golden Ratio.” He looked at Mach. “Could that be anything?”

  “Doubt it. It’s just a sequence. Each number is the sum of the two previous ones.” Mitch shook his head. “Don’t think it’s related to any of this.”

  “Okay, then,” Brick said. “We need to have a look at Hump.”

  “Uh, Hump?” Mech said and looked properly confused for a few seconds. “Oh, if this is aimed at Mitch it’s probably Hump, you mean. I’ll check.”

  “I’ll call Rabbit to see what he knows,” Brick nodded. “Mac, you call your friends in Emporia, see if they have anything to say off the record. And you two do a search.” The last part was directed at Mech and Mitch.

  “Hack the cops, too,” Bear said. “Need to keep an eye on what they know about the murders.”

  “We’re already in,” Mitch sighed. “But I’ll check.”

  He tried to point that out every fucking time they said that, and he had no idea why he kept trying. There was no fucking need to hack their server every time. Once you had root access, you were in until they noticed, and he seriously doubted they’d notice, considering the rootkit they had installed there to keep their poking around hidden. It was hidden in the kernel, and without reinstalling the entire operating system it would stay there. They were as fucking in as they could be short of going to the police academy and infiltrating them that way.