Quintic

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Quintic Page 8

by V. P. Trick


  Chris walked in. He too was polite, discreet, silent and classy at times. Delightful moments. She sighed. Delirious moments in a sea of stubbornness, overprotectiveness and arrogance. Charles walked in on Christopher’s heels and took a chair close to the door while Christopher just remained standing like always. Today he picked a spot between Charles and LeRoy. Please let this not be what I think it is, she prayed silently.

  “OK, guys, listen up,” Christopher said as he motioned them to quiet down. “You all remember Charles?”

  Of course they do, the team met the guy just yesterday! What are you doing, Big guy?

  “Effective immediately, the motel murders are ours. Ham’s the officer in charge. Temporarily working for us, Charles will partner with Hamilton. The two will work full time on the motel case with DesForges as the backup guy. Only the motel case. Any questions?”

  And with that her prayers were shot to hell; she dreaded where this was going. Christopher took his damn time looking around the table to study everyone. None of the team looked surprised. Was he waiting to see how they would react toward her? Hamilton was smiling at the table top. She caught Reid and LeRoy studying her discreetly while Frankke, DesForges and Charles glanced blankly between Christopher and her. Impossible man.

  They were all going to keep her on a close watch and for what? She had already told them Lemieux’s name. She didn’t consider she knew him anymore. After all, she had not seen the guy in almost two years, damn it! A different time, a different life. Besides, she had only slept with him three or four times at the most. Well, less than a dozen times. Twenty, not one more for sure. Apart from the writing, everything was different now. Most infuriating.

  “No questions?” The infuriating man insisted before moving on. “OK then, let’s start. Charles will go over all the info he has so far.” Some tried to protest. “Yes, again. Then Ham will take over and fill us in on the rest.”

  So Charles droned on with all the details he had already given them the night before. He went on and on, through every damn detail, all the insignificant, trivial facts that cops find sooo fascinating. She stopped listening and started thinking. What if she hadn’t seen the pictures? Perhaps she had made a mistake, and it wasn’t him? After they had checked the corpse’s fingerprints, dental, DNA, retina scan and whatnot, someone somewhere was going to refute his (its?) identity as Lemieux. Oui. Bien sûr.

  Damn it, she couldn’t fool herself into believing her own delusional wishful thinking. No way. She had seen Lemieux naked often enough. Which raised another question: why hadn’t she recognised him in the dirt? He had lost weight since their time together. Unless she counted the small scar left by the hook, souvenir from their fishing trip (but she had not looked at his thigh that closely), Lemieux didn’t have any memorable scars. No distinctive tattoo like the kid. Nothing to tell his body apart from another (strikingly good-looking) guy. Tall, lean, well-defined muscles. He sure had not looked like a hacker. Not that he was one really.

  Lemieux had been the tool guy, the one that got them in and out of places. Even dead, his face remained handsome; in the photo, his face had been peaceful, as if he had been sleeping. He had sexy features, pretty without being feminine, soft, almost youthful. A surprisingly innocent visage when one considered his sexual tastes and the dumps he hung around to satisfy them.

  Charles marched on to the autopsy report. How much was there to say, the guy was dead? Vraiment. Strangled with a piece of lacy black lingerie. She knew Lemieux − not that it was him. If it was him...? No, it couldn’t be him − he would have appreciated the irony. It would make a hell of a story line if she ever decided to write such a book.

  The autopsy report said the woman had been as high as a kite, but the man had been clean. Lemieux had never been into illegal substances. The ME unofficially stated the cause of death as strangulation for the man, but, drum roll for the big change from yesterday, the woman had overdosed. Duh.

  “So, technically, she wasn’t murdered,” someone mumbled, DesForges perhaps. The guys had the annoying habit of all speaking with similar gravelly voices. Damn annoying. “Strangled after dead then?” Sick.

  Was it one of Lemieux’s kinky games or was the strangulation connected to Lemieux’s killing? ‘Oops,’ the killer might have said. ‘I hadn’t noticed she was already dead.’ I am so not writing that story.

  Charles finished up with a review of yesterday’s review meeting, with Lemieux’s name as the grand finale.

  “Any questions?” No answer.

  Everybody appeared to have listened carefully. Unless they had spaced-out as she had. She sensed Christopher casually lingering on her as he glanced around the table. So he knew she had not listened. Surely he realised she was not going to get involved.

  I can spell it out for you if you want. No lecture necessary, Big guy, I got the message. She intended to stay well out of the way of this case. Never getting personally or emotionally involved in his investigations was one of Christopher’s rules. It was about time she listened to him. From now on, she swore to herself to only work on cold cases. They were just fiction-like stories.

  When nobody spoke, she took it as a cue the meeting was over. Very glad it was, she started to get up. Nobody else moved.

  “Not done yet, Princess.” Calling her Princess in public was a sure way to get her attention albeit not in a good way. Most infuriating. “Hamilton will take over now.” Christopher smiled, that sexy crooked grin of his. The man played dirty. “Would you like us to take a break before?”

  Yes! No. What could Hamilton add anyway? Charles had talked for nearly an hour, and they had already gone over it all less than twelve hours ago. She really should have stayed in bed. That was what she got for falling for a workaholic who never let it go, whatever the it was. She sat back down.

  Couldn’t he say, just once, ‘Let’s you forget about it, ma chérie.’ She should be dating a Frenchman. Or an Italian uomo. Anything but a cop. She sighed.

  “Let’s start by the guy’s name,” Hamilton began. “Rick Lemieux.” It was such a shame hearing wasn’t like smelling or seeing. She could stop herself from smelling or seeing (when she really, really put her mind to it), but couldn’t stop herself from hearing, not in a damn meeting at least. She should have brought her phone’s earplugs.

  “Fred and I went through two dozen insurance companies.” For sure the guys’ patience impressed Christopher. “We found the one making payments to a Rick Lemieux−” Lemieux had enough to live on for the rest of his life if he had had a life left “−According to the insurance company’s records, Lemieux has no next of kin. And check this. The Insurance’s address for the guy is a postal box. Domicile unknown. Fred is still checking through the databases, but so far, we haven’t found anything on him.”

  Lemieux has no police records; he was too good to get caught! She kept her thoughts to herself.

  The team wasted over an hour in a meeting to learn a name but not much else. Hamilton traced their next steps very succinctly.

  “We’ll contact phone companies to see if, by chance, Lemieux had a registered phone somewhere. We’ll go to the post office to see if anyone might have seen the guy when he went to get his checks. And, of course, we’ll try to find some of the hooker’s co-workers. We might get lucky. Some of her girly friends might remember Lemieux.”

  Christopher’s boys were going to be busy. Hamilton concluded by giving the guys homework. Meeting over.

  She desperately needed a coffee. Too bad she had a hangover and didn’t like scotch, Christopher kept a bottle in his desk bottom drawer. Perhaps if she had some in her coffee?

  No coffee, no scotch, Christopher grabbed her arm before she reached the door. His touch felt nice. He stopped Hamilton with a nod.

  “Ham, I think Patricia should give a background report. Write down everything she remembers about the guy. His tastes, his habits, where he took her out and such. Guys our age, we have our habits; might be the places he hung around then, he still we
nt to these days. What’d you think?”

  Rhetorical question. Hamilton agreed, “Anything can be useful at this stage.”

  Infuriating. Christopher gently rubbed her inner arm with his thumb. She really should learn to like scotch, straight, no ice. She needed something damn potent at this instant. She intended to consume a large amount of alcohol to survive writing Lemieux’s damn background report. Why hadn’t she stayed in bed this morning?

  The One Before Him

  Chris reluctantly let go of her arm and stomped to his office. He busied himself by pacing in front of his window and returning phone calls. He observed as she sauntered from desk to desk, talking to Bridget, and then Des, Reid. She stepped out of the room for five minutes, toilet break probably, before settling at her desk and shuffling papers around, open and close her drawers randomly (or so it seemed from his vantage point).

  She clicked the mouse a couple of times, but was up again, back to talking to Bridget. She left again, longer this time, to Fredrick’s basement most likely. She breezed in twenty minutes later and headed to her desk again. She was clearly not working.

  It didn’t take a genius to see she was upset, no fucking genius to know she didn’t want to write the report on Lemieux. The fuck if he desired to read it, and he sure didn’t want to have the others read it either. But they had no clue on the guy, and she had known him. If the amount of energy she was wasting by not doing the thing was any indication, she had known the vic a lot more than she let on.

  Chris sighed. They had ‘dated a few times’ she had said. Yah right. He had been around; he was no fucking choir boy, not by a long shot. Yes, he’d had more than his share of women. He had not discriminated on types, backgrounds and sizes. He fucked a dancer (not ballet), a doctor, all sorts in between, shy women, wild, sweet, bitchy, and all shades in between. His youth had been reckless. Before becoming a cop he had stood on the other side, angry at the world, and had excelled at being bad.

  Back then, he didn’t have any physical preferences as long as he fucked often enough, fast enough, and out the door he left. Women he dated, women he fucked, women he hung around with, even one he got engaged to, in a strictly business arrangement. His early thirties had been a weird period. The only time he had aimed to do what everyone expected of him and shut the MacLaren clan up. He had settled for a woman he didn’t like. Simpler that way. The engagement lasted less than a month. After that, he had passing lady friends and mistresses; he frequented a few concurrently if not assiduously. Simpler that way.

  He was at a loss to describe what Patricia was. His girlfriend assuredly, and his lover. Simultaneously his mistress and girlfriend. A friend too, his best friend. Someone he admired. He desired. He liked, as his current unrelenting attention betrayed. And still, she was more than that. It. Her. The woman. All of that and more. Fucking corny. The woman of his life. Lemieux used prostitutes for kinky fucks in cheap motels. The thought of her dating the loser while the jerk could have had her pissed Chris off. Mine.

  He had lunch over at Central; an interminable string of meetings with the Brass followed. When he got back well past three, Bridget was on the phone, the guys were out, and Patricia was busy typing at her computer, her back to him. On her first day, she had pushed her desk at the farther corner of the room, and positioning it so she faced the wall. Her way of showing that, unlike them cops, she was not afraid of sitting with her back to the entrance.

  Chris often sneaked up behind her to peek over her shoulder at what she was doing. She would make as if she had not seen him coming even though that big shiny kettle pot decorating her desk was her mirror to the room. This time, though, he didn’t sidle up to her; he fucking knew what she was doing or, more precisely, what she was not doing.

  Words filled her screen, not short lines of text or columns but long sentences. The damn woman did not kiss and tell (it had taken him weeks just to pry Joshua’s name out of her), so whatever she was typing, it wasn’t the fucking report. I don’t want to force you, Angel, but I will if we don’t get a handle on your guy soon.

  Hamilton and Charles got back before Chris had decided if he was going to give her extra time or start pushing. Or take her to dinner. Or straight to his place. The guys motioned to him, and they locked themselves in the conference room. Recap of their first day together? Nothing. Plan for tonight? Push. Dinner. His place.

  The first thing he noticed coming out was Patricia’s empty desk.

  “Patricia already left for the evening,” Bridget informed him. Four-thirty, closer to an after-work drink than coffee, Princess. You should have waited for me. “She mentioned a prior engagement and said she wasn’t sure if she was going to be in tomorrow.”

  So fucking typical! Running off was an old habit of hers. Whenever he was getting too close to her past, she took off. His mistake, he should have seen it coming. Should have sat her down in his office and locked the door. He sighed. Cursed. Whatever. For sure she hadn’t left to go to her place. Or his.

  He stayed at the office until seven. No point in rushing. He tried calling her a couple of times but got no answer. Knowing he had guessed right did not put him in a better mood. He reviewed the file, the photos, everything Charles had found. So little. Everything Ham had found. Not much more. He marked down the information on his blackboard, organising the facts according to his own logic. He liked that part of a case. Raw data to assemble, making sense and order out of seemingly unrelated and disorganised facts. Modesty was a waste of time; he knew how good he was at it. No preconceived ideas, no judgements, a thorough search for motives, means, opportunity that would explain the crime. He found it hard not to make assumptions in this case.

  His stomach reminded him of the time (lunches at Central were never copious). Not in the mood for a dinner for one at his place, not in the mood to eat out, he drove to the piers. The heavy traffic slowed down his drive across town but he was in no hurry. He let the ride soothe him. The impatient drivers trapped in traffic with him relaxed him. He for one had all the time in the world. He had nothing particular to do tonight except stopping at Patricia’s hotel later, much later.

  Although he hadn’t called, it was like the A-team was waiting for him when he showed up at their bar, no question asked. Lonzo and MacCarmick owned a guys’ bar near the piers and each had an apartment on the second floor. Fuck, he liked those guys.

  They hugged bear-like before Lonzo poured him a drink. Lonz kept a bottle of scotch around even if he wasn’t an amateur himself. Real friends. Over their twenty-five-year friendship, they had done a lot of shit the three of them (mostly wicked but not all wrong). They still did from time to time (only when necessary or so they justified it). Chris thought about telling them about the case but decided not to. Not yet. He had a feeling Lemieux might turn out to be the type of guy Lonzo and MacCarmick met on a regular basis.

  His buddies rented out their muscles in all kinds of places and did security jobs in their spare times. The guys did not object to not-so-classy places of employment or not quite legit work. Chris didn’t mind them doing suck work. Sometimes being on the official side of the law made getting things done more complicated. He had called to them for help often, the murder trial being their latest opus.

  Lonzo entertained him with a recap of their latest job at a private party. “You should have seen us, Chris. We spend the entire weekend on security detail, so some big shots making too much money− The jerk sells counterfeit electronics. Would you buy a TV off-market? You know me, I’ve got nothing against entrepreneurship, but no way I’m going to risk the equipment breaking in the middle of a game.” Lonz took a breath and a swallow of his beer. “Anyway. The jerk had an all-weekend party for some foreigner clients, and he gave it his all. Half-naked babes, poker games, and us.”

  Worse ways to spend a weekend. Chris’s shoulders were slowly loosening up. MacCarmick made them seafood pasta. His friend wasn’t much of a talker, but he was a great cook, which suited Chris just fine. Besides, Lonzo was talking
enough for the three of them. Lonzo’s chatter was entertaining. The guy was worse than a teenage girl when it came to gossips.

  And the guy liked women, any and all women, and described every babe from his weekend in graphic details. He had probably sampled a few of them too; after all, he did have a whole weekend. Lonzo’s non-stop chatter was as soothing as driving. MacCarmick listened and smiled low-key. The guy had probably seen all the women Lonz was describing, been told all about them too, and more than once.

  Chris couldn’t remember MacCarmick ever dating a woman. He did spend nights with one every once in a while, but never a woman any of his close friends knew or had seen before, or would see again for that matter.

  Patricia had asked Mac once if he considered himself lucky to have known a woman such that no other could ever replace. Had she been teasing or had she known something Chris didn’t? No other living soul dared question MacCarmick on his love life. She didn’t get an answer that night, but if anything, his bud grew more indulgent toward her. His team was the same.

  It wasn’t on his account they were nice to her. No way in hell would he have tolerated any disrespect toward her, but their actions went beyond simple deference. Ham avoided touching her. Lonzo and Mac covered for her. Reid and Bridget liked her. Their commitment to her had to do with her specifically. The way she put herself on the line, thinking of their happiness and safety before hers. They respected that. He did too. It drove him crazy, made his life hell, but damn he enjoyed every fucking minute of it. Of her.

  “Thanks, guys. Great meal, Mac. It was good to see you guys again.”

  “You mean outside work? You got any job coming up? Can’t wait to see the Puss.” Fucking funny.

  He left after midnight. The drive back was smooth; he had the streets to himself. Hoping that she would be tucked in her bed naked, he stopped by her hotel. He smiled in anticipation, but the damn woman wasn’t in. His bad mood returned. He drove to his place. You better be there, Pussycat. No lights on his floor when he circled the building. He parked underground and took the stairs (faster than waiting for the elevator). She didn’t hear him arrived because she wasn’t there.

 

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