Either way, Jamie was not the right fit.
As far as Jamie as a suspect, motive was a little thing too. Sure, Jamie had reason to want Natasha dead eighteen months ago when she’d found Tim and Natasha in bed together. But, if she’d really had it in for her, why let all that time pass?
Hailey was also confident the killer wasn’t anywhere near here now. Every cop knew to look in the crowd first.
Jamie wouldn’t be that stupid.
It didn’t change the fact that after the shooting incident, people would point to her first.
Hailey would have liked to rule her out early. An alibi would have done it. Barney the dog would not.
Taking a moment, Hailey searched the crowd for Mackenzie Wallace. Propped against a black Chevy Blazer, the rookie stood stretched out, arms crossed, one ankle hooked across the other. Her lean legs were like the neck of a violin, strings taut.
Hailey approached and waited until the woman’s gaze shifted to hers. Fear was stark in her eyes.
“You’re new?” Hailey asked, though she already knew the answer.
Mackenzie looked down, ashamed. “My first dead body.”
“I’m sorry.”
Something like gratitude flashed in her expression. Young, naive, awkward were the words that came to mind. “Thanks.”
“Captain James could arrange for some time off,” Hailey said.
She shook her head, stood up straight, and rubbed her hands together. She dwarfed Hailey. Over six feet tall. “I’m sorry. I’ve tried to remember everything.”
Hailey drew her notepad out, poised her pen. “No need to apologize.”
Mackenzie nodded like it was a criticism. “It was too dark to see clearly and only one thing stands out.”
Hailey waited.
“Another car. I only saw it from a distance. The rear left brake light might have been missing a small section. The bottom right corner was broken.” She glanced away, then back. “Like I said, it was just a glimpse.”
“That’s helpful. Anything else? Type of car?”
“Only thing I saw were the taillights. Domestic, I think, and square. Made me think of an older model pickup. Ford, I’d guess.”
Hailey made notes. “That’s a lot of detail to remember about a car you only saw for what—”
“Less than thirty seconds. I used to work for the rangers’ service in Yellowstone. We tracked poachers and hunters in the park at night. Helps to be able to recognize cars by their taillights.”
For whatever reason, Hailey had the image of Mackenzie wearing a cowboy hat and riding horseback in pursuit of a car with a moose on its roof rack. Too many of her girls’ cartoons probably.
“Nothing about the color?” Hailey continued. “The car’s color, I mean.”
Mackenzie shook her head. “No good light, so all I saw was black. Could have been any color.”
“No reflection from other headlights?” Hailey asked. Man, she wanted a break in this.
“Just the way the taillights reflected on the back of the car.”
“Taillights usually make a car look red,” Hailey said. “I’m guessing this one wasn’t. Red’s pretty conspicuous.”
“Not what I’d choose if I were going to murder someone.” Mackenzie seemed to swallow the last words. “God, I’m sorry. That was inappropriate.”
“We all do it,” Hailey reassured her, quietly.
The rookie didn’t answer.
Hailey asked a few more questions, but the taillights were the best clue Mackenzie could offer. Hailey figured the description narrowed it to somewhere around twenty-five thousand cars in San Francisco alone. Better than the almost three hundred and sixty thousand she’d have otherwise.
Hailey thanked the rookie for the help. Mackenzie’s gaze drifted back to the empty car. The body was now en route to the morgue for autopsy.
“It gets easier.”
Mackenzie furrowed her brow. Intense. “Does it?”
Hailey saw Jamie leaving the scene, moving away like a much older person. The red ember of her cigarette glowed at her side. Hailey considered where Jamie was in her career. How far up she’d climbed. How far she’d fallen back down. She sighed, shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe sometimes.” Probably not, she thought.
Mackenzie seemed to understand the elusiveness of the answer.
It would be a long time before the rookie would shake the image of Natasha Devlin’s dead body.
Chapter 9
Stepping out of the car at Hunters Point Naval Station, Jamie zipped her flimsy jacket to combat the hostile wind. People milled around in front of the building.
She’d suffered enough talk this morning. And last night.
Damn Tim.
He swore he’d turn himself in first thing this morning. He’d begged her to give him time for a shower and a change of clothes. Promised he would take the ones he’d been wearing in with him as evidence. He’d be honest and smart and he would not, under any circumstances, mention that he had come to her house.
How would that look if her ex-husband had come straight to her, covered in his lover’s blood? The lover who had effectively ruined their marriage. He did it too. How quickly her brain shifted the blame onto Natasha. She was the instigator— Stop.
Now, here she was, and there was absolutely no sign that he’d spoken to anyone. And then she’d lied to Hailey Wyatt. Why hadn’t she ratted out the bastard? Damn, she was dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
Not as dumb as Tim, though.
She hoped he didn’t do anything stupid.
Anything else stupid, at least.
Blowing the last breath of smoke out her nose, she dropped the cigarette. She stamped out the butt, picked it up, and threw it away. She’d save a hell of a lot of time if she’d litter, she thought. Hell, if she didn’t smoke.
But that wasn’t going to happen. She’d already given up drinking. If she was going to quit smoking, too, she might as well jump in a freshly dug hole and start shoveling the dirt over her own face.
Her phone vibrated on her hip. She saw her captain’s number on the screen. He would want to pull resources off Marchek to work Devlin. She’d put money on it. She slid the phone back into its holster without answering.
The lab was down a hallway to the right, but Jamie turned toward the bathroom. She locked herself in the last stall and leaned against the metal partition. If only she could smoke in the damn bathroom. She didn’t feel ready to face Natasha’s friends.
How many times had she wished Natasha would drop dead? But not really.
She certainly hadn’t ever wished someone would murder her.
You drew a gun on her. Fired it into the wall behind them. How easily a bullet could have ricocheted. You might have killed Natasha yourself.
Jamie walked out of the stall, washed her hands and face. Whatever was coming, she deserved it.
After crossing the main entrance, she walked down the hall to the lab. She stopped to write her name on the sign in sheet.
Just inside, a group hovered by the door.
The senior criminalist, Sydney Blanchard, stood with three other lab techs. Two had their backs to her. Voices were low, bodies crossed and closed.
Hailey Wyatt stood with them.
Jamie raised a hand awkwardly. They were obviously talking about Natasha.
Sydney glanced over and saw Jamie. Her red eyes widened. She’d been crying.
Jamie scanned the other faces, her gut tight. She searched for something appropriate to say, and failed. “I’m here on Osbourne.”
Sydney wiped her cheeks. “It’s under the second scope.”
Jamie passed them and peered down into the eyepiece. Immediately, she knew something was wrong.
“Shit.” It was the same something as before. A normal sperm sample showed white and red under the scope. The red denoted the nuclei of the cells. Jamie exhaled. No red in this sample. “No cells at all?”
Sydney sighed. “Doesn’t look like we got any semen.”
Three police officers raped, one attempted rape, and she had absolutely nothing. “Have we processed anything else from the case?” she asked.
Sydney shook her head. “We’re working Natasha’s case full force.”
“Tim came forward after you left,” Hailey said.
Jamie didn’t respond.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Hailey pressed.
Jamie nodded.
“And you protected him.”
It wasn’t exactly a question, so Jamie didn’t answer it. She didn’t have a good answer for it anyway. Why would she help him? She had no allegiance to him. They weren’t friends. He didn’t call and check on her, or keep in touch.
Was it because he seemed so pathetic, so scared? So small.
No, sheer stupidity was the only thing that came to mind, but she knew Hailey could come to that conclusion on her own.
“That’s a hell of a risk, Jamie.”
Jamie didn’t answer.
“He’s lucky you care so much about him.”
Jamie met her gaze. “I don’t care about him. I trusted him to come forward.”
“It would have been better if he’d done it before he cleaned up.”
Silent, Jamie turned to leave.
She had to call Jules. Her surveillance on Marchek was going to get pulled, and she had no evidence to keep watching him.
She knew better than to think she was going to get any attention on Emily Osbourne’s case now.
Even dead, Natasha Devlin would steal the fucking limelight.
Chapter 10
Crouched inside his shed, Zephenaya watched the inspector lady through the window. She had a boy’s name. Or at least her name was like a boy’s.
One of his friends from school had a name like hers. He remembered, because they’d had to spell their whole names. James only had five letters, so his was easy to learn.
Zephenaya learned James. He remembered it was spelled J-A-M, too, just like the lady inspector’s. But her name had an i and James had an e, so maybe that’s how it was a girl’s name instead of a boy’s name.
When she sat on the bed, he picked up the jagged rock that he kept tucked in the small space under the cabinet. It was a good night tonight. His stomach wasn’t growling and it wasn’t cold. He held the rock tight in his fist and made a notch in the wood. Same as every night.
He’d been watching her for nineteen plus ten days.
When he got to nineteen, he started at one again, because he couldn’t remember what came after nineteen. He knew he used to know that number, but he’d forgotten it. He kept trying to remember, playing little games with himself. Like trying to count on his fingers to distract himself from the numbers or counting super fast, hoping the next number would spring into his head. So far, no luck.
Sometimes, he doubted that he ever knew what came after nineteen. He’d only been in school till kindergarten. He had a few weeks of first grade, but it didn’t seem much different than kindergarten.
Then, his father lost his job and they’d had to move.
After that, he remembered three different houses, but maybe there were more. He’d never really gone to school in those places. Oh, they made him show up a few days. But he sat in the back and didn’t listen.
Now, he wished he had.
He could have used some more counting. His sister could count higher and she would have told him, but she wasn’t there.
He didn’t know where she was.
There was a man who told him she was dead, that she took drugs, but Zephenaya didn’t believe it. That man was wearing a police uniform, but he was a liar.
No way Shay would leave him.
That’s why he came here. This lady was friends with his sister. She came to the house after Shay’s accident. Called her and stuff. She gave Shay her home address and phone number, wrote it right down for Shay. His sister kept that piece of paper from the lady in her top drawer.
His sister’s top drawer was filled with stuff like that. Notes from some of her boyfriends. Pictures like the one of him as a baby and the one of Shay and their mother when Shay was two or three. Her first driver’s license and the certificate saying she passed her police exam.
That top drawer was where she kept the things that she cared about.
When they told him Shay died, he got that piece of paper and came here. Found his way, to tell the truth. Took him a couple days.
Someday, he was going to talk to her. He was going to ask her about Shay. But not yet.
He kept waiting for her to be hanging around the yard or something, but she never did. And when she came home, she didn’t look too happy. He knew about waiting for the right time to ask a grown-up something. He got in lots of trouble for not knowing when to leave the grown-ups alone.
What he had to ask the inspector was important, so he had to be sure it was the right time.
All he had to do to pass the time was watch the lady. The yard didn’t have no swing set or sandbox like some of the ones around hers, but having no toys was nothing new to him. Where he came from, there weren’t playgrounds or nothing. Not close by, anyway.
He was good at making fun with what he could find. Sometimes, he made cool patterns from rocks or tested throwing pebbles at a tree to see how many times he could hit one place on it. He was getting better with that one.
But then, when the lady came home, he watched her. It wasn’t like he was trying to. He knew that wasn’t polite, but he couldn’t help it. He had to wait until he could talk to her, and the lady didn’t have blinds inside her house or nothing. Her big windows looked right out on the yard.
But he didn’t ever watch when she was changing or anything. He wasn’t gross or nothing.
First few days, he didn’t think it would work, him staying there. After all, he wasn’t invisible. She had a perfect view of him right down from her bedroom window. How could she not see him, no shades and all?
She was like one of the women in the park who fed the birds. They seemed to stare and stare, but not see anything. She was like that. Like she couldn’t see through that glass.
And it wasn’t like she spent any time in the yard. Truth was, she acted like she didn’t know she had a yard. Every day, she went out the front door. At all sorts of hours too. She’d leave at three in the morning, or not until two in the afternoon. That was mostly weekends, he thought, though it was hard to keep track of the days.
He didn’t have a calendar or anything, just his notches in the wood. He was careful with those. And he had his letter. He kept the letter in a secret place in his shed. When his sister got back, he would make her read it.
Sometimes he took the letter out to see her writing—to remind himself that she was real.
She loved him. That was the first line. She’d read him that first line before he went to the foster home and he knew it said, I love you, Z.
That’s what she called him. Z.
When he went for food or whatever, it was always early in the morning or at night, before he did the notch. It was best when it was dark and no one could see him. He couldn’t read or count, but he was smart enough to know a lot of things—like that people would call the police if they saw a little black boy in this neighborhood. Then, he’d have to go back to one of those homes. So Z kept to himself during the day, watched the house for signs of Jamie.
He mostly knew if anyone was home or not because he always heard the garage door open and close. He could tell by the motor sounds if she was coming or going.
Z could think about his mother now and it didn’t make him too sad. He used to miss her. He didn’t miss her so much now, but he missed having someone to talk to. He wished he could find Shay. Prove that man who said she was dead was wrong. Where could she have gone?
After the accident at her work, she was in the hospital for a few days. Whe
n she came home, she told him he would have to go stay in a foster home for a while. But she was home from the hospital, so he didn’t understand why he had to leave now.
She promised him it wouldn’t be long, but he should have asked how many days long was.
He stayed in the first house for fifteen days before he went to find her. That had seemed like long enough to him. But he didn’t find Shay. The police were real weird about where she was, looking at each other funny like they didn’t know how to tell him they’d lost her. How could they lose her? She was a police officer.
When the police people took him back to the foster home, Mom and Dad Williams didn’t want him back. Said they didn’t deal with runners.
The second home was worse. They were old and it was him alone, no other kids. Mrs. Parker was the one who told him Shay died. She said Shay wasn’t ever coming back ever, but he knew that dead meant never coming back. Dead people didn’t come back, except in scary movies.
Mrs. Parker tried to be extra nice to him when she said it about Shay. That Shay was real sad. That what happened made her sad, and Shay couldn’t deal with feeling sad.
He thought that was true. Shay was sad after the accident.
Zephenaya didn’t think it was really an accident.
Someone did that to her face—hit her and broke that bone.
She didn’t want him to come see her in the hospital, but he told her on the phone he had to see her. He begged, and finally she let him come.
When he saw her in that bed, he thought of their neighbor, Alice. Alice had a mean son, Troy. When Troy had too much to drink, he came home mad and hit his mama. Alice was sad too. Just like Shay.
But Shay was different too.
She stayed in bed during the day. And she didn’t do the puzzles like she normally did when she had one of her “lazy days.” She kept the shades dark and slept. She slept a lot.
She was real jumpy too. Like if he came out of his room to go to the bathroom at night too quiet, she screamed like he scared her. A little guy like him scaring her. That was weird. The only time she seemed okay was when the inspector called. Whatever they talked about made Shay a little better.
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 7