by Hannah Jayne
“Sophie?” Sampson asked.
The conversation felt wrong. The slight, nagging accusation was bitter and bothersome. Sampson, I reminded myself, Sampson wouldn’t do this.
But the evidence was overwhelming.
“Find him,” I said before clicking off the phone.
I had made my decision the moment the heavy steel doors slid open on the cheerily lit police station vestibule.
I was chicken.
I could ask Sampson straight out. I couldn’t let him know that I suspected him, that my reservation and mistrust was growing. But I could confront him with the most damning evidence.
And I knew exactly where to find it.
I hitched up my file-filled shoulder bag and cut through the main police station, walking with purpose. I nodded to a few meandering file clerks and complimented the dispatcher on her Farrah hair while I blasted out my I-totally-belong-here vibe.
And then I slipped down the hall toward Alex’s office.
The door was closed, but unlocked. I slipped in, shutting it behind me, and clicked on the lights, stifling a very un-I-totally-belong-here scream when the buzzing overhead lights illuminated the white board where eight-by-ten photos of both crime scenes were pinned up. Each time I saw the destruction, the spattered blood, the torturous fear that these women must have felt, my stomach dropped lower and I found it hard to breathe. I did my best to avoid the photos and went to work picking through Alex’s things until I found what I needed: the evidence collection kit for the Pacific Heights murder.
I tossed aside Ziploc bags of blood-spattered clothing, a soaked swatch of carpet and sofa pillow, and finally landed on the videotapes. There were six of them, identical, unlabeled.
“What are you doing in here?”
I stood with a start. I had already shoved two of the tapes in my bag and I clutched the others to my chest, my heart hammering against the flimsy black plastic. I licked my lips and pressed my lips into the warmest, kindliest smile in my repertoire.
“Officer Romero! What are you doing here?”
Romero didn’t smile back at me. He simply crossed his arms in front of his chest and quirked a questioning eyebrow.
“Me? Oh, I was, um . . .” I glanced down at the tapes in my arms. “. . . picking up something for Alex.”
Romero took a step in. “Alex asked you to come down here and gather state’s evidence?”
I pumped my head. “Yeah, he meant to do it himself but”—I twirled an index finger a half-inch from my head—“doy! He forgot when he left today.”
Romero shifted his weight, the edge of his lips turning up a quarter-inch. “Why would Alex need the tapes from the crime scene?”
“From the crime scene? Oh!” I barked a completely overzealous laugh. “Now I get it. You said ‘state’s evidence.’ Yeah, these aren’t that.” I hugged the videotapes. “They’re personal.”
“Personal?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What kind of personal videotapes does Alex keep in his office?” Romero took a step into the office, moving closer to me, his hand reaching for the tapes.
I spun, gripping the tapes harder. “They’re sex tapes.”
Both of Romero’s eyebrows shot up, were lost in his dark hair. “You and Alex made . . .” He paused, counted. “. . . four sex tapes?”
Heat shot through me, and I was certain I had gone from my normal day-glow pale to lobster red in three short seconds. “Yes.”
“Alex?” Romero’s eyes raked over me. “And you?”
I was humiliated, but oddly indignant. “I could make a sex tape. I’m saucy.”
Romero paused for a beat, and I nearly thought I was home free. Then he pulled his cuffs from his belt, held out his hand, and said, “Sophie, I need you to bring me the tapes.”
I shook my head. “No.” My voice had more power than I’d intended and I was surprised. I licked my lips. “Can’t you just trust me on this? Or, give me twenty-four hours. That’s it. I’ll have them back to you in twenty-four hours. Please?”
“You know I can’t do that. Look, I’ll compromise. If you drop the tapes and leave right now, nothing has to happen.” He shrugged. “I won’t even tell Alex.”
“How is that a compromise?”
He shook the cuffs. “Otherwise I’m going to have to cuff you. I’m going to have to file a report.” Romero took a step toward me and I sidestepped, letting Alex’s big oak desk block me.
“I’m not a criminal, Romero. You know that.”
Romero looked at me reluctantly. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, please.”
“I’m not. I told you: twenty-four hours. No one has to know.”
Romero’s eyes went toward the white-corked ceiling as if the answer were pinned up there. “Fine.”
I felt the relief crash over me in a tight wave. Deep down I had always been certain Romero was on my side, but he was a good cop and a new cop—deciding to help a newish friend couldn’t have been easy for him.
“Thank you.”
I dumped the remaining tapes in my shoulder bag and it yanked down on my shoulder. I really had no intention of bringing the videotapes back and that little fact nagged at me as I stepped toward the boyish-faced Romero. “I really appreciate this.”
He just nodded.
I reached up to turn the lights out, hearing the cuffs snap on me in the darkness.
“What the—?” I thrust my arm out into the buzzing fluorescent lights of the hallway and jiggled my wrist, hearing the clink, clink, clink of the steel cuff against itself. “I thought we had an understanding.”
Romero said nothing, just gave the cuffs a gentle pull until we were back in Alex’s office. He flicked on the lights and unceremoniously clicked the loose cuff to Alex’s chair.
“I get it,” I said between gritted teeth. “I’ve seen this before. You’re a bad cop.”
Romero had my shoulder bag now and was pulling out the videotapes one by one. “A good cop captures criminals. That’s what I was doing.”
“I am not a criminal! I’m a—a good girl!”
“You told me you were saucy enough to make a sex tape. And you stole state’s evidence.”
“No,” I said, yanking the chair along with me. “I attempted to steal state’s evidence. If I didn’t actually leave the building with it, it can’t be called stealing and thus, not a crime.” I wrangled against the chair. “Now get this off me.”
Romero shot me an exasperated look before dropping the tapes and coming around the desk. He put a hand on each of my shoulders and guided me down into a sitting position in the chair.
“I’m going to do you a favor. I’m not going to file a police report and I’m not going to put you in a holding cell.”
I crossed my legs and used my free arm to rest my chin in my hand. “No big. I’ve been in a holding cell before.”
“What happened to you being a good girl?”
I demonstrated my range of motion.
“I’ll keep you in here while I call Alex and he can escort you out. That way no one has to know.” Romero smiled, a dumb kindness in his eyes. Had I not been handcuffed to refurbished office furniture, I might have thought his smile was warm and his eyes, intelligent.
Not now.
“Wait.” My head snapped up. “Did you say you were going to call Alex?”
“Yeah, he’ll come down and get you, won’t he?”
I opened my mouth and then shut it again, suddenly mute. I shrugged my shoulders. Romero turned to leave, but turned back to me in the doorway. He pointed a single finger at me. “Now don’t you go anywhere,” he said with a smile.
I rolled my eyes. “You really think this chair won’t fit through that door? You’re an idiot,” I huffed under my breath.
I waited for Romero to disappear completely before I grabbed my shoulder bag—tapes repacked inside—and began my seated scoot toward the doorway. I lined myself up and crept closer, attempting to clear the entire door frame like some sort
of bizarre Operation game.
It hadn’t occurred to me what I would do once I got out of the office. Not a lot of things raised eyebrows in this city—I’d once carried a six-foot-tall piñata on the bus and no one had batted an eye—but a woman handcuffed to a metal office chair and scoot walking down the block just might.
Whatever.
I squared myself up and launched myself through the door with a massive amount of F-you glee. Or at least I would have, had an arm of the chair not caught the door frame. Instead my chair stopped and I slid right off the leather seat, sailing until the slack went out of the cuff and I was slammed to the ground, my arm at an odd angle above my head.
“Epic fail,” I muttered.
I pressed myself back into the chair and tried to ignore the new throb in my shoulder. On a determined sigh, I repositioned myself and slid toward the door frame once again, this time gently. I did my best to keep an eye on the arms of the chair, as they narrowly rubbed against the door frame. I could feel the edges of my lips turning up. I could feel that F-you smile.
I was sure that somewhere in our house, Vlad had stashed some kind of medieval weaponry that would free me forever.
But I didn’t count on being stuck. The arms of my chair squeaked against the door frame.
I gripped them and wriggled, trying to loosen it up. I pressed my feet to the floor and clenched every muscle in my body as my sneakers tried to gain traction while I pushed. I was searching through my shoulder bag, looking for lotion to slather myself and my chair with when I heard Alex clear his throat.
His T-shirt was disheveled, his jeans wrinkled, and his dark curls had the unequivocal look of bedhead. He didn’t look happy to see me.
“I’m stuck,” I said, looking up with my best puppy-dog eyes in an attempt to win him over.
Alex blinked at me. Then, without saying a word, he lifted one foot and used it to spread my legs. Images of hot prison sex or Fifty Shades of handcuff sex flashed in my mind. My heart began to pound and the throbbing of my shoulder had moved to the pit of my stomach, threatening to drop lower.
“Alex.” My voice came out a sultry whisper as I stared at his foot nestled a half-inch from my crotch.
Again, Alex didn’t answer. He simply flexed his foot and gave me a solid shove back into his office. The back of my chair gently thumped against his back wall and I stared while Alex shut his door, then angled himself on the edge of his desk.
“You have exactly two minutes to tell me what the hell you were thinking and one to tell me why I should take the cuffs off.” There was no humor in his voice, no trace of the easy half smile that usually graced his lips. His eyes were a dark, slate grey. The accusation in them pinned me to my seat, regardless of the cuffs.
“I wasn’t going to steal them.” The words were out of my mouth before I had a chance to review them, to edit them. I was lying and we both knew it.
Alex let out an exhausted sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on with you lately?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re hot, you’re cold, you’re on edge and”—Alex licked his bottom lip—“you’re a liar.”
“A liar?” I was truly—and inappropriately—stunned. “What the hell are you talking about?”
It was rare that I had seen the kind of anger that flashed across Alex’s face. His lips were pressed together, his teeth gritted. He crossed his office and yanked open a top drawer, throwing a sheaf of papers on the desk.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t recognize it?”
I got a little closer and poked at the stack with a single finger. “No, I really don’t.” I looked him in the eye. “Honestly. I’ve never seen any of those papers before.”
“They’re from Mort’s place.”
“What?”
“I told you, I wasn’t about to get pinned in his pile of crap and have nothing to show for it. I left them in my car after the emergency room. They slipped under the console; I didn’t go through them until tonight.”
“The expired Enfamil coupons.”
Alex wasn’t fazed. “I got lucky. A few of them were of use.”
“Okay,” I said with a shrug. “But I don’t know what any of these are. I don’t recognize any of them. Should I? Are they mine or something?”
He immediately looked away from me and grabbed a few sheets, shoving them under my nose. “I thought these were kind of interesting.”
I looked down at the gridded sheets. “What are they?”
“I’m assuming pages from Mort’s calendar. See? Doctor appointment, shit delivery.”
I reluctantly took the pages. “Okay . . .”
Alex looked at me, the rage radiating off him in waves.
“I don’t see what you want me to—” I stopped, my chest suddenly tightening.
A few of the boxes were marred with Mort’s messy scribbles, but only one box had writing on it that was legible and in color: a big red circle and the word Sampson. The calendar date was the exact day that Sampson appeared at my front door. “Oh my God.”
“How come I had to find out from Hoarder Mort about Sampson, Lawson?”
“I—I—” The words were truly caught in my throat.
“I asked you point blank and you lied to my face. Multiple times. You’ve held up our investigation. Now another person is dead.”
I looked up, narrowing my eyes. “Oh, no. Don’t you put that on me. I didn’t kill anyone. I was trying to protect someone.”
“I wasn’t accusing you. If you feel guilty for something, that’s all you. I’m just trying to clarify what our relationship was.”
“Was?”
“Are we just friends? Colleagues? Were you using me to let your pals at the UDA get one over on us?”
“Friends?” I said to my lap. “We’re more than friends.”
Alex tucked a finger under my chin and tilted my head up to face him. “Are we?”
He let the question hang between us and I could feel the tension in the air.
Alex pulled a tiny silver key from his pocket and held it up for me to see. Silently, he pushed it into the keyhole and the cuffs clicked open.
“I’m not using you, Alex. I wasn’t trying to get one over on you.”
“But you didn’t feel like you could trust me enough to tell me about Sampson. Even when I asked.”
I swallowed hard, the tears rimming my eyes mirrored in his hard ones. “Sampson asked me not to tell anyone.”
“I asked you to tell me. We could have saved a lot of time.”
“Time?” I straightened. “You mean because Sampson is responsible for all these murders.”
Alex shrugged, noncommittal. “Look at the calendar, Lawson. The dates match up.”
“But it’s not true! And I have proof it’s not. There’s another werewolf. The one we saw in North Beach!”
“You know that for a fact?”
“You saw him, Alex.”
“I saw a werewolf, Lawson. I have no idea if it was or wasn’t Sampson.”
“It wasn’t,” I said, my voice sounding small.
Alex’s eyebrows rose. “Did he tell you that?”
I nodded, suddenly slightly less certain.
“Was it also Sampson who told you to go see Mort?”
I didn’t answer and Alex hung his head. “I’m just looking at the evidence, Lawson.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you!” I stood up so fast my chair went sputtering back, bouncing off the wall a second time. “Because you’d rush to judgment.”
Alex shook his head. “We’d treat Sampson like any other person of interest.”
“Don’t you mean ‘suspect’? And you would not treat Sampson like anyone else because you know what he is.”
“So do you.”
I jabbed myself in the chest. “I also know who he is. He’s being framed, Alex, I’m almost sure of it. Or another wolf is tailing him and he’s the one re
sponsible. It’s not Sampson. It’s not.”
“Where is he, Lawson?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, teeth gritted. “I’m not turning him in.”
Ice settled over Alex’s face. “If you don’t tell me, I can charge you with obstruction of justice.”
I hardened my expression, too. “Do it.”
Challenge.
Alex slid his hand in mine and pulled me near him. I felt the cool metal of the cuff as it slid onto my wrist once more, locking with a terminal-sounding click.
Accepted.
I kept my eyes fix on Alex’s. The muscle at his jawline jumped. “You can still get out of this, Lawson.”
He was right.
As he went for the second cuff I snatched my shoulder bag and bolted out of his office. I speed-walked through the work floor, keeping my cuffed arm inside my bag. I took a chance, thinking Alex wouldn’t follow me.
I couldn’t understand why, but by the time I busted out into the clear, ink-black night, hot tears were rolling down my cheeks.
I cried all the way back to my apartment, hiccupping and sniffling until I parked my car. I pulled down the lighted visor and blinked at myself in the reflection: what remained of my hair was a wild, fuzzy, humid mess; red-rimmed eyes; bright red cheeks crisscrossed by mascara-edged tears. I slapped the visor closed, smacking myself in the face with my one dangling cuff.
“This better be worth it,” I mumbled, rubbing the reddening spot on my forehead.
I had my key in the door when it snapped open. Nina stood there, framed by brilliant yellow light. Her hair was in a greasy topknot and her eyes were hooded and sunken until she saw me.
“The hair was one thing, but . . .”
I pushed past her and dropped my shoulder bag on the couch, giving ChaCha a cursory snuggle. She licked my chin and then must have been nipped by the cuffs because she jumped out of my arms and went running down the hall.
“So much for an ever-faithful companion.”
“Sophie, you’re wearing a handcuff. Stabbed, bad hair, hand-cuff.” Nina counted on her fingers. “I know I said the heat makes people do crazy things but, sweetie, I think you may be taking it to extremes.”