Piccolino gave me a tentative smile through the windshield. She was wearing sunglasses to shade her gray eyes from the weak, cloud-shadowed sunshine. It was good to see her. I don’t know why. I guess I felt like we’d bonded a little over that spanking. I didn’t like the realization—I wanted to be alone on the case—so I put the sense of pleasant recognition aside for the time-being and opened the driver’s door to the car.
“I’ll drive,” I told her, gesturing for her to get out.
“I told you I won’t do it again!” She was adamant, but at a stern look from me, she got out of the car and walked around to the dented passenger side, muttering curse words and insults as she got into the seat.
“That’s about enough of that, young lady.”
“I’m no ‘young lady’ to you, bub. I’m a fully grown, mature woman. Just because you spanked me once does not mean you can treat me like a kid.”
“Point taken, so long as you don’t act like one,” I replied, starting the car and progressing through the parking lot. “Did you get the accident reported?”
“Yeah. It was embarrassing, to say the least. But they bought the ‘slippery pavement’ story. I guess I should thank you for backing me up on that.”
“I guess you should.”
Sarcasm dripped from her lips when she said, “Thank you loads, boss.”
I returned her venom with a cheery, “You’re welcome.” That really needled her, which felt good, small-minded as it might be. It was pleasant to get under her skin just as she did to me. And she was on my radar far too much, which I resented.
Her face was dark with a frown.
“Lunch?”
She licked her lips. I guess she was hungry. I realized that she had lovely lips. No makeup on them, just a nice shape and a soft pink natural tone. I wondered what kissing her would be like. She was a sharp-tongued woman with a load of confidence. Would she be as aggressive in a clinch?
I really had to stop thinking that way.
“I know a good bar on Brand Street. It’s kind of a dive, but their food is good and they give a cop discount,” I said.
“Joey’s?”
“Yeah. Been there before?”
“Lots of times. I don’t think I’ve seen you there, though.”
“I drop in for take-out, mostly.”
“Eat in the car?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re antisocial, Striker. You ought to get out more.”
I turned my head to look at her. She was serious, though I couldn’t see behind her reflective sunglasses. I looked toward the road again and didn’t say anything. Fact was, I wasn’t antisocial; I was cynical. You can’t see all the human filth I see every day and not feel suspicious and distrusting of your fellow man.
We got to the bar and started on our lunch of burgers and fries. Best burger in town, I thought, and she agreed. I was unjustifiably pleased that she liked what I liked.
She opened up a bit over lunch and asked some pertinent questions regarding the case. I realized I was thinking of her as “Angelica,” rather than a more professional “Piccolino.” It was irritating for about ten seconds, then I decided that, at least in my head, it wouldn’t do any harm. Out loud, though, was another thing. I didn’t want to give her an advantage over me. Although we weren’t adversaries, I still wasn’t sure of her. I think it was the intimacy over the spanking that caused the switch.
“So,” she concluded after I brought her up to speed, “we have a serial killer.”
“That’s a possibility.” I threw my shredded paper napkin on the age-darkened wood tabletop. “Once CSI examines her purse, maybe we’ll know more about the second victim.”
“I hope so. I hate mysteries.”
“You’re in the wrong department, in that case, Piccolino.”
She frowned. “Maybe. I know you don’t like me.”
It wasn’t that I disliked her. I would have chafed at anyone working with me. But I was also a good cop and knew that good cops work together with other good cops. So far, Angelica hadn’t had much of an opportunity to test her skills. “You’re abrasive,” I told her. “Maybe you ought to think before you open your mouth.”
“Wow. Don’t pussyfoot around, Striker. Tell me how you really feel.”
I shrugged. Her tender feelings shouldn’t be my concern. Nonetheless, I thought maybe I could have phrased it better. My turn to frown, though it occurs to me now that the frown was at myself more than at her.
“Let’s get back to the station. I need to turn in the new evidence and see if we have any more info to sift through.”
She nodded, and we made our way back to the station.
There was a new report in my email when we arrived.
Chapter Three
I printed out the report and Angelica laughed at me.
“You know that you’re wasting paper, don’t you?”
“I like to have the hard copy to make notes on and for the files.”
“The department has copies of all this stuff on the server. You don’t need paper copies.”
My irritation rose. I might be old-fashioned, but I trusted paper copies more. They never got corrupted—unless you spilled coffee on them—and they were easy to read. Besides, they helped me piece together clues that I otherwise would have missed on a computer screen.
“If I don’t print it out, we won’t be able to work on it together.” Her smile didn’t falter. “But if you’d like it better that way. I can work this case by myself and you can… I dunno… do whatever you do to pass the time.”
“God, what a Neanderthal,” she exclaimed. “If you just send me the file—the computer file—I can see it on my computer and add my comments and questions.”
“I know that. But we wouldn’t be in the same room, discussing, brainstorming, comparing notes.” Why I cared if we were in the same room together, I didn’t know. Smitty and I had always done it that way, was all, and Smitty had been a good detective.
She frowned but backed down. “I like working alone,” she said in a small voice.
“So do I. But we’re partners, and partners work together. You had a team in Vice, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but on the street I had to think for myself. I had to piece together the picture and improvise. I did okay.”
“Well, that’s not how we work here.” I paused. “Still, if you want to work in your cube by yourself, go on and I’ll send you the file.”
Her expression closed down, she looked down at her hands in her lap. “No. You’re right. We should work together on this. I was… forgetting to be a partner. I’m not good at that kind of thing.”
A thought struck me. “Geez, Piccolino, haven’t you ever had a boyfriend? A girlfriend? Someone you wanted to share ideas with?”
She bit her lower lip, and my mind turned to kisses for a moment. “No. Not really. I tend to be sort of independent.”
“Independence is one thing, but isolated is another. And you called me antisocial,” I chided.
“I like parties. I like being around people. I just don’t like them getting too close.”
“Why not?” I admit, that was a personal question, but I was genuinely curious. What would lead a person—a very attractive, lively person—to be so self-contained? I knew that my problem was a combination of pickiness about how a case was handled, along with a healthy dose of wanting to prove that I was capable without the police-family influence. But in personal relationships, I wasn’t so standoffish. I’d had a couple of girlfriends, including one engagement. I wasn’t inclined to jump into that boat again easily, but it wasn’t utterly out of the question either. I’d come to terms with myself, for the most part. Angelica hadn’t done that yet.
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“Yeah, maybe we do. We can work together, Piccolino, or we can work apart. In any case, we have a case to solve and that needs to be top priority. If we understand each other better, maybe we can solve it sooner.”
She nod
ded. “Well… since you’re being an asshole about it…”
The expression on her face, and the fact that she wouldn’t look at me, suggested that she hadn’t meant it to be said aloud, but it bothered me nonetheless. “Keep it to yourself, in that case. I don’t want to ruin your day.” I stood up to go to the central printer for my file, but she grabbed the back of my shirt as I turned away.
“No, wait. It’s just that I used to tell my mother everything. She was like my best friend. I don’t know if other girls were like that, but Mom and I got along great. Then she met Mr. Daniels.”
I sat down again and focused my attention on her. We were getting somewhere. “Mr. Daniels?”
“My step-father—or, at least he was for two years. I never called him by his first name or ‘Dad’ because I didn’t like him from the beginning. The only father I’d ever known was my real dad, who died when I was six. Murdered in a Mafia thing.” She looked at me and added quickly, “He wasn’t Mafia. He got caught in the middle of a drive-by and was collateral damage.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, Mr. Daniels was a shmuck, but Mom told him everything: my secrets, my dreams, who I had crushes on in school. I found out when he started belittling me over some of those things. He was an ass-wipe, but it took my mother about two years to figure that out. When she realized that it was Daniels who had soured our relationship, she got wise and divorced him. It was never the same between us. It still isn’t. I don’t feel like I can trust her with my feelings anymore.”
It was a sad story, but I couldn’t really relate to it. My parents had been easy with each other. My mom was the Rock of Gibraltar, when you think of all the times my dad had to risk his life in the line of duty. And Dad was a man with a passion for law and order, a good cop with good intentions. I totally respected them both.
“I’m sorry. I know it was hard for you to tell me that.”
“I’ve never told anyone. But it kinda feels good to get it out there.” She frowned and speared me with her eyes. “Just don’t expect tasty confessions out of me again.”
I smiled a little. “I won’t. Partnership is a new thing for you, so we’ll go slow. Do you want to look over the file at your desk and then we’ll brainstorm together?”
Her face brightened. She looked like an angel with a pixie inside. “Would you mind very much?”
I would mind because I thought we should talk over the details linearly, but I also knew I had to flex. I had to be a partner, too. “I think it’s a good solution. Let’s meet up in an hour, okay? I’ll meet you in an unused witness interrogation room and we can spread out the papers and go over it together.”
“Great idea.”
“I’ll send you the file.”
She got up to leave, then turned back at the cubicle exit. “Thanks, Striker.”
I smiled and nodded. It was the right thing to do and I was pleased that we could get past her reticence and onto good police work.
Later, we met in one of the interrogation rooms. The conference space was for the head honchos, and really, the witness interrogation rooms were almost as comfortable. I spread out my printouts in a tidy, organized way.
“So,” I said, pointing to a report. “The autopsy on the first victim came back positive for street drugs. In particular, crack cocaine. She had a raging case of chlamydia, but the victim was otherwise unharmed, except for being underweight. The overdose killed her. She was identified as Amy Alexander, age twenty. She had one arrest for possession—the file is here, but it didn’t amount to anything. The coroner said she must have been a frequent user.”
“Right. I saw that earlier. I’m curious about the rose.”
“Me, too. CSI identified it as Rosa Carolinae, which is a rose often used for cut flowers. There are two interesting things about it.”
“Right,” she interrupted. “The thorns were all trimmed off precisely and it was in full blossom, over-bloomed even.”
“Right. You know cut flowers from a florist rarely bloom so fully.”
“That’s true. Do you think it was home-grown?”
“It seems plausible.”
“Will this kind of rose, the Rosa Carolinae, grow around here?”
“So I’m told.”
“Hmm. So we’re looking for a person who grows roses but trims off the thorns.”
“Or, at least he or she trims them off before leaving them with his or her victims. It looked like the thorns had been cut recently.”
“Do you think maybe the perp was also responsible for Amy’s regular drug use?”
“We can’t assume that. We also know there’s a man involved. One, because Barry Alexander says a man told him to keep the details surrounding his mother’s death a secret. And, two, because Galinas, the motel manager, said she had a pimp. I want to find this guy and question him.”
A tiny frown creased her forehead. “Okay. I’m not sure how we’ll do that. The description could fit anyone. Any chance we can get Barry to talk?”
“I’ve been told to back off and let the kid come forth on his own.”
“Frustrating.”
I nodded.
“What about the business card in the second victim’s purse?”
“Once we have her name and a CSI pic, we’ll go over and ask some questions.”
“I feel like I’m in a slow-moving cop show, like… like…”
“Banacek?”
“Huh?”
Obviously not a fan of old TV detective shows. “Never mind.”
She shook her head slightly. “So, what do we have?”
“Not a whole lot, but there will be further information regarding the second victim.”
“So, you’re convinced the two murders were related.”
“It seems likely, based upon the roses. It could be a copy-cat, sure. But even that would lead us somewhere because we haven’t let the information out to the public yet, so if it’s a copycat, the killer would have to be an associate of the first perp.”
“I see. Well, what do we do now?”
“We wait for further reports.”
Her frown got a little deeper. “Great. I hate waiting.”
I wasn’t too fond of it myself, but solving murders was hardly ever instantaneous. I gathered up our papers and notes. “We can go see if we can track down her drug dealer. She didn’t give his or her name when she was arrested.”
The frown disappeared and she was back to the beauty she’d been before we started. “Okay!”
We cleaned up our mess and got out onto the street.
No one wanted to talk to us, of course, but we put some pressure on a few users, and Piccolino used some charm. We got two names to work with: “High-and-Mighty” Mason, and “The Wall” Pender. Pender was known to the narcotics division but Mason was not.
By the time we’d finished shaking down the users and small-time dealers we knew, it was time to call it a night. A cop has to be careful not to dig in so deep that they don’t rest and let the hindbrain do some calculations while he’s idle.
I took Angelica home and, to my surprise, she asked me in for a cup of coffee. Normally, I don’t drink coffee at night because I tend to be a restless sleeper anyway, but she appealed to me, in her little girl way, and I wanted to know her better. For professional reasons, of course.
Her apartment was west and north, in the less affluent part of town. It wasn’t a crap neighborhood, but lower middle-class. I lived closer to downtown. It was a decent enough apartment, beige stucco with cast iron accents and balconies looking out on the street. There was a small gate at the entrance to the large, open courtyard with a pool at the end, and from there, we walked up a couple of flights of stairs to the third floor, number 302. She let us in and immediately apologized for the state of the place. To me, it looked perfectly okay—maybe a little cluttered, but otherwise neat and clean.
She picked up a coat that had been tossed on the couch and offered me a seat.
“I’ll go make coffee… unless
you want something else. I’ve got some cola and maybe some lemon-lime stuff.”
“I don’t usually do caffeine after work,” I explained. “Lemon-lime, if you have it. Water, if you don’t.”
“I have a bottle of wine in the cupboard, too.”
“Driving.”
“Of course. Well, I’ll see what I’ve got.” Her smile was a little tentative, as though she was having second thoughts. I hoped to help her get past that and learn that I wasn’t a threat.
I wondered, yet again, why it mattered to me that she like me. We had to work together, yeah, but that was a business relationship. One I hadn’t asked for or particularly wanted. This encounter seemed like much more than business. It made me uncomfortable, but it was irresistible just the same.
She walked away and into what I presumed was the kitchen. It connected through an archway. While she was gone, I looked around a little more. There was a large stack of books in one corner, in front of a packed bookcase. Two armchairs sat in front of the case, one clearly more used than the other. The place was done in light browns and blues. It was a restful space with good lighting and a cozy atmosphere.
In a few minutes, she came back with two clear sodas in glasses. Handing one over to me, she smiled and sat in the worn armchair in front of where I sat on the sofa. “This is silly, huh?” she asked with a wry smile.
“Silly?”
“I mean, we see each other all day, and now into the evening. I’m probably preventing you from doing something.”
I smiled and sipped at the soda. “Not really. There’s nothing at home I should be doing.”
“Really? No wife and kids to grace the Striker mansion?”
“No. An almost-wife once, but that didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“You weren’t.” I wanted to tell her that the lighter blonde in her otherwise brownish hair looked like golden waterfalls in the incandescent light, but I thought it might be over the line.
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