Fortunately, he wasn’t attracted to her. He liked her—loved her, he often said—but when it came to sex, he was strictly into the girlish, weak and helpless type. Which so didn’t describe Ronnie.
That was a good thing. She liked him, a lot, but wouldn’t let him touch her with his cootie-covered self on a dare. That thing between his legs had been in more woman than Tampax and she’d often warned him it was going to catch some nasty disease some day.
“Okay, we can fix this,” he said.
“Eat something first,” she said, gesturing toward the big breakfast.
He sat down and ate, but she knew his attention was still on her head. He kept getting up between bites, walking behind her chair, pulling what was left of her hair, twisting it and muttering.
After he’d eaten, he reached for his big satchel, in which he’d carried over shears, combs and a drape, which he proceeded to slide over her shoulders. “I think this could end up being the greatest thing that could have happened to you. You know I’ve been dying to get a little creative on your boring head. Wish you’d let me add a splash of color, too. Blue streaks would be awesome with this jet black tone.”
“Forget it. Just do something simple,” she insisted with a sigh. “I don’t want to mess with it any more than I have to.”
That’s why she’d always kept her hair long. Yanking it into a ponytail, or a bun, which she always wore to work, was simple and quick, just the way she liked it.
Max didn’t make any promises, and immediately got to work with the comb and the shears. He was careful around her injury, but otherwise pretty ruthless when it came to yanking her head this way and that. “How’d it happen, anyway?”
She’d told him on the phone that she’d been hurt on the job, she hadn’t given him any details. Nor could she. That didn’t, however, mean she couldn’t tell him the truth.
“Got whacked in the side of the head with a two-by-four.”
He rolled his eyes. “Okay, don’t tell me.”
She chuckled. Hey, she’d tried, anyway.
As he worked, Max started telling her about his latest conquest, a girl he’d met at the supermarket. Ronnie barely listened, her thoughts going back to somebody else’s romantic exploits. Namely Leanne Carr’s. She just couldn’t stop thinking about the erotic relationship the woman had been having with the oh-so-young-and-innocent-looking Agent Bailey. He of the nine-inch schlong.
Okay, so maybe that’s why the relationship had continued.
Still, it was beyond frustrating to realize Bailey had been having sex with the victim and had been privy to every single bit of the investigation into her murder. She was, of course, incredibly suspicious of him, although she didn’t immediately like him as the killer. No, he hadn’t told anyone that he and Leanne were having sex. And yes, he’d stood right there by Leanne’s dismembered corpse and lied to Ronnie’s face about how well he had known the woman. But there was one thing that just didn’t fit. The killer had acted like he’d known about the O.E.P. device. And Bailey, she felt pretty sure, didn’t know about it.
First, there had been his confusion during the briefing. Then, of course, was the fact that he’d hidden their personal relationship. If he knew Leanne was an implantee, he’d have to have realized the authorities would have very blatant proof of their sexual relationship just as soon as they examined the downloads. Bailey could have made things a little less humiliating—and suspicious—for himself if he’d just come clean about it up front. Admitting the affair, he could have said they’d kept it secret because they’d hooked up on the job, and thrown himself on the investigators’ mercy.
He hadn’t done that. Instead, he’d lied, as if truly believing he wouldn’t get caught.So it was really doubtful he’d known about the device.
Meaning it was really doubtful he was the murderer.
Doubtful. Not impossible. He could just be very clever and manipulative.
“So, that guy I saw leaving late last night…” Max said, interrupting her thoughts.
“My partner.”
“Daniels, right?” Max said. Snip snip. “Is he the type you like—big, brawny, crude?”
“He’s the type I like for a partner,” she drawled back, knowing where Max was going. Just because he didn’t want to have sex with her himself didn’t mean he wasn’t constantly trying to push her to get laid by somebody else.
“Such a waste,” he informed her, tsking. “You’re too young to live like a nun, Ronnie. Your vagina’s gonna grow adhesions and close up one of these days.”
“And you’re too smart to live like a porn star. Your dick’s going to either fall off from some venereal disease or get chopped off by some woman you did wrong.”
He laughed. “Okay, okay, I’ll mind my own business.”
“Thank you.”
“So, you working on that White House murder?” he asked, changing the subject.
Ronnie stiffened. She hadn’t paid any attention to the news since she got out of the hospital and had no idea how much information had been leaked. “Yeah. What have you heard?”
“Just that some woman was killed there the other day.”
Whew.
“Plus a lot of nonsense that she was all chopped up and shit. Nobody really believes that.”
Double whew. “Good.”
“How’s the old place look?” he asked, sounding more interested in the construction project than in the case.
“Surprisingly far along,” she admitted, thinking about the hours she’d spent in the most famous house in the world. “It’s a lot better on the inside than the out. It was kind of strange walking down the corridors, going right into the Oval Office, imagining what it looked like five years ago. They’re rebuilding everything exactly as it was back then.”
Complete with one stupid tunnel the public isn’t supposed to know about.
His hands stopped moving. She didn’t have to look up to see he’d paused to reflect…to almost offer up a moment of silence, the way most everyone did when it came to that subject.
On a day when so many had died and an entire section of one of the greatest cities in the world had been wiped off the map, the assassination of the president sometimes almost got overlooked. President Turner’s death would always just be part of the awfulness of 10/20/17, not a monumental minute in history in and of itself, the way JFK’s or Lincoln’s murders had been. Probably because killing the president had merely been a little side bonus for the terrorists. They were happy it had happened, but the point hadn’t been to try to destabilize the government by wiping out any key players. Rather they’d just wanted the whole country so terrified they’d make a tectonic shift in political direction.
And oh, had they gotten what they’d wished for.
“One of my clients went to the dedication ceremony on Tuesday,” Max admitted, his tone suitably subdued. “She said it was like the old days—King’s speech or Obama’s inauguration.”
“Minus about nine-hundred-thousand people, maybe.”
“Yeah. But I guess the way everyone was kept in close, with nobody sprawling all the way up both sides of the old reflecting pool, it seemed more crowded.”
She considered asking Max if his client had happened to notice anybody splattered with blood or carrying a head cruising around the place, but figured that was probably a long shot.
“I wouldn’t have gone even if I’d won one of the lottery tickets,” he said as he snipped and tweaked. “I don’t care if that whole place was covered with cameras, I wouldn’t be in a big crowd in D.C. on a bet.”
Cameras. Covered with cameras.
It had been, of course. There had been news cameras and security cameras on the Army vehicles. Ronnie knew one of the other detectives had been assigned the task of going through them, looking for any activity near the White House. Now that she knew there was a tunnel that ended up near the Washington Monument, she made a mental note to have him tighten the scope of his search.
She also started th
inking about something else. Each state had given out tickets by way of a lottery. Only a thousand per state.
It’s a long shot. A really long shot.
Still, it was at least possible that one of those fifty-five thousand people at the event was an implantee. What if someone attending the Independence Day event had an O.E.P. device in his or her head? And what if they’d been anywhere near the maintenance building where that tunnel ended up?
Her heart beat a little faster. Long shot. But not impossible.
“Thanks, Max,” she said.
“For what?”
“You just gave me an idea.”
“Well, don’t thank me for that, honey. Thank me for this.”
He retrieved a large hand-mirror from his bag and held it in front of her so she could see the results of his labors. Ronnie stared for a minute, stunned into silence. Her jaw fell open; she could see the reflection of her own fillings, and quickly snapped it shut.
“Wow,” she said, shocked at how quickly he’d made a real hairstyle out of a hacked-up mess.
She’d kept her hair long out of laziness, assuming that, if she ever did get it styled, cut or layered, she’d have to deal with curling and blow-drying and all that nonsense for which she just didn’t have the time. But Max had done some serious magic with nothing but some scissors, hair gel and his own hands.
Her hair was short, but not at all boyish. It was still feminine, just very modern, sleek. Though short on the sides—especially where it had already been chopped off, Max had left her some length that he’d swept forward over her brow in jagged bangs. It was sexy, attention-getting and, she had to admit, pretty damned hot. She liked it. A lot.
“That looks amazing,” she said, meaning it. “Thank you so much.”
“Any time girlfriend. If I’d known it would just take a two-by-four upside your head to let me give you a fabulous look, I’d have hit you myself long ago.”
“Spoken like a true friend,” she said, laughing as she stood up and brushed the hair off her uniform.
Promising him a home-cooked meal and a bottle of tequila in the future as payment, she said goodbye and walked him to the door. The attack the other night had been painful and dangerous, but she had to admit, something good had come out of it. For a moment, at least, she’d been able to laugh with a friend. She greatly feared she wouldn’t be doing much more laughing until after this horrible case was solved.
-#-
Though Daniels had offered to pick her up for work that day, Ronnie had insisted on getting a patrol car to swing by and get her. Daniels lived in the opposite direction, and she hadn’t known how long it would take to make something decent out of the mess on her head. It was a testament to Max’s skill that, not only did she get to the precinct by nine, but she also got a lot of looks and catcalls when she walked through the squad. Including from Jeremy Sykes.
She’d asked him to meet her and Daniels here so he could be present when they talked to Agent Bailey. Daniels had contacted the Secret Service agent this morning, told him they had a few questions and asked him to come in to the precinct. He should be arriving shortly.
When she arrived at her desk, she found Sykes sitting on a corner of it, looking every bit the cool, calm Fed and not a frenzied, overworked, perpetually irritated city cop like everybody else in the building.
“Nice,” he said, eyeing her closely and nodding his approval. A gleam appeared in his blue eyes, and she warmed beneath it, in spite of herself.
“What’s nice?” asked Daniels, looking confused.
“Forget it,” she replied with a laugh, knowing her brothers would have been exactly the same way.
“Got the background check on Bailey,” he said.
Sykes appeared confused. “Guess that’s part of what we need to talk about?”
“Yeah, it is.” She cast a quick look at her partner, who shook his head, telling her he hadn’t yet revealed anything about what they’d learned the night before. Wanting to get out of the loud bull pen, so they could actually hear each other during their conversation, not to mention avoid being overheard when she talked about watching somebody else’s uber-personal “sex tape,” she said, “Let’s go grab some coffee.”
“Be right there,” said Daniels. “I want to read this over before our friend shows up.”
“Okay, come to the back when you’re done.”
She led Sykes to the break room, which was fortunately empty. To her surprise, the hardest part about filling him in on the latest twists in the investigation wasn’t admitting she’d sat with her partner and watched their victim having wild sex a few days before her death. It was telling him how she’d gotten Leanne Carr’s data dump.
She’d sort of hoped he would forget that part—and her promise not to do any work the night before. But not Jeremy Sykes. As soon as she finished telling him everything she’d learned—from Daniels’s discovery of the tunnel, to Leanne and Bailey’s graphic sexual encounters—they’d found two so far, and she wasn’t finished going through the downloads—he went right for the part she’d hoped he would forget about.
“How’d you get the files?”
Daniels had come into the room, but he remained quiet, watching her, waiting for her to answer.
“I had every right to access them,” she finally said. “You brought them for me, remember?”
“I know that. But how did you get them? I still have the micro-drive I brought up to Tate’s lab.”
She busied herself pouring another cup of stale coffee into a cracked mug and mumbled, “I burned a copy when you went to find Dr. Cavanaugh.”
To her surprise, Sykes merely barked a deep laugh. “You coulda just taken the original drive. I brought it for you, ya know.”
Maybe. But he’d only shown it to her; he hadn’t exactly handed it over.
“I figured you’d harass me for wanting to work last night.”
“You mean you seriously thought I believed that, ‘I’m much too weary to do any more work today,’ crap? Jeez, Veronica, how big an idiot do you take me for?”
Her jaw dropping, she snapped, “Well then why’d you make such a big deal about insisting I promise not to think about the case?”
“Because I figured that would at least get you to put it out of your mind for a couple of hours. I knew you’d try to keep your promise. But you’re too good a cop to spend a whole night ignoring a murder investigation.”
Her hand tightened around the mug; she was both glad he knew her well enough to understand how she worked, and annoyed that she’d gone to such lengths to get the data. Here she’d jumped through hoops, thinking she’d been so clever, and he’d been ahead of her every step of the way. And once again, he’d managed to surprise her. She had recently begun to wonder if her assessment of Sykes—made on the first day of training in Texas—was totally accurate. Had she put him in a round hole, when he was actually a square peg?
“So, anything else you want to tell me before we dive in?” he asked, raising a brow, as if he already knew she had something else to confess.
She caught her lip between her teeth, wondering what he’d figured out. She hadn’t yet revealed what she’d learned about those six dead O.E.P. test subjects, but there was no way he could know she’d acquired that data, too. Wanting to get them both caught up on everything before Bailey arrived, she told them what she’d learned.
“Wait, you’re telling me you actually hacked into Tate Scientific’s files and stole a proprietary list of patients involved in a medical trial?” Surprisingly, that indignant question came from Daniels, not Sykes. “Shit, Ron, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking,” she explained, “that maybe there are more than two victims out there. That maybe those other six men somehow tie-in to our case.”
Sykes, who’d listened quietly during her explanation, reached into his pocket, pulled out a small, folded sheet of paper, and slowly unfolded it. He lowered it to the break-room table, pushing it toward her with the tips o
f his fingers. She glanced down and saw six names. Six familiar names.
“Damn.”
“What can I say? Smart minds.”
“How’d you get them?”
“I hacked into the Tate network when we first started working, before we watched the Carr files.”
Her eyes rounding into saucer shape, she exclaimed, “That’s so non-Sykes of you!”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
No, maybe she didn’t. Square peg. Round hole.
“How long did it take you to get them?” she asked.
“Six minutes.” His brow rose in challenge. “You?”
She smirked. “Four.”
“I had to do it while you were still in the room,” he pointed out.
“I had to do it after I’d also had to copy your microdrive.”
“Okay, okay, you win this round,” he said with a helpless laugh.
“Amateurs,” Daniels said with a scowl. “You’re pretty proud of yourselves, regular little hackers, huh?”
“Oh yes,” Sykes replied.
“You’re as bad as she is.”
Sykes leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, studying Daniels. “Funny, you don’t strike me as somebody who always plays the rules.”
While Sykes usually did. Which made this conversation all the more surprising.
“I’m not,” Daniels replied. “But she usually does, and considering one of us needs to keep our nose clean, I kinda count on her to do it. We don’t both need to land on the D.C.P.D. shit list.”
Ronnie was barely listening to her partner’s complaint, still too stunned to realize that Sykes had also been stepping out of bounds, following interesting little twists and turns in the case. Here she thought she’d been the only one with that suspicious mind, the only one who’d heard about some other implantees dying of natural causes and leapt to some pretty startling conclusions.
Sykes had not only thought it, he’d beat her to the punch in starting to investigate.
Somehow, though, despite always being in competition with the man, she found herself exhilarated by that realization, rather than annoyed by it. She was actually smiling by the time Daniels finished chewing her out for being reckless.
Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) Page 21