by Leif Wright
“I would have been at work, then,” the woman said, adding an often rehearsed, “Thursday is my Friday and Sunday is my Monday.”
“So you wouldn’t have—”
“Wait!” she interrupted, dropping the foot to the floor and leaning in toward Bain, pointing at her with a carrot stick. “I had a date the night before, and my ex had the kids, so I bet my date was still here.”
“Would you have his phone number?”
“Hers,” the woman corrected, casting her eyes demurely for a second, then recovering herself quickly. It was a move Bain recognized from watching herself in the mirror. “It didn’t work out, but I bet I can find her number in my email.”
“I should have asked before,” Bain said, thinking, But I didn’t expect you to be cute, so I was temporarily off my game. “What is your name?”
“I’m Jessica Vann,” she said. Was that an eye flutter at Bain? It sure looked like one. “I just thought a cop would already know that.”
Bain felt flush run through her cheeks as she considered that this woman was giving her all the right indications signaling availability and interest. But she was a professional. She could keep it under wraps. Dammit. “I wish real cop work was like TV. I’ve always wanted to say a quick tag line, put on my sunglasses, and walk away, but it doesn’t work like that.”
Jessica laughed, revealing a smile that probably melted the resolves of men and women everywhere she went.
“We used to have a drinking game for CSI Miami.” She laughed again. “That move was one of the triggers.”
Bain smiled. “Did you notice anything unusual in the neighborhood before the third? Like people you didn’t recognize?”
“There was a car parked across the street for a couple of days. I didn’t think anything about it until I saw the little man just sitting there. But he looked completely harmless. Like, I could have kicked his ass.”
“Could you identify the man or the car?”
“Probably not,” she said, furrowing her brow. “Maybe. I dunno. Neither one stuck out. He was bald. I remember that. I dunno. Maybe.”
“Did you know Ms. Edwards well?”
“Hell no. I really didn’t know her at all, except when she was yelling at me to control my ‘little ruffians’. She was kind of a mean old broad. I mean, who talks like that? Ruffians.”
Bain smiled. “Do you think she could have had any enemies?”
“Probably a lot of them if she was that mean to everyone.”
Bain stood up. “I’m going to give you my card in case you remember anything else,” she said. After another eye flutter from Jessica, she took out her pen and wrote on the card. “This is my personal cell. Call me anytime. Day or night.”
Jessica looked at the card, then smiled sideways. “Your work cell is already on the card,” she said, smile still clinging to the corners of her mouth. “You want me to use the personal one?”
“If you want,” Bain replied, her face revealing nothing. “Thank you for your time. I’m sorry I made you stub your toe.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, smile persisting. “Already better.”
12
“I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO’LL WALK ACROSS THE FIRE FOR YOU / I’M THE ONLY one who’ll drown in my desire for you.”
Then buzz, buzz. Pause. Buzz, buzz.
Bain’s arm pulled itself out of the covers by the shoulder and grabbed the phone before it could start singing again. The number on the screen indicated that the caller wasn’t in her contacts list, which led to a quick mental debate on whether to answer it or not. Who the hell would be calling in the middle of the night?
“9:33 p.m.” standing out rudely on the face of the phone told her “middle of the night” might be subjective.
“Shit,” she whispered as she cleared her throat and tried to sound not-sleeping. “Hello?”
“Oh, shit,” the raspy female voice on the other end said. Factory noise droned on in the background. “Did I wake you up?”
That voice was familiar. Someone cute, she seemed to remember. “No,” Bain lied. “I just kind of dozed off watching TV.”
“I’m sorry,” the voice said. “I didn’t realize it was this late. I can call later.”
“No, it’s no problem,” Bain lied again. “What’s up?”
“This is Jessica. Jessica Vann. From earlier today? You came to my house and I stubbed my toe?”
“I remember. Dr. Phil.”
“Yeah,” she laughed. “Well, I know this is crazy, and I hope you don’t get mad, but—”
“Where are you?” Bain interrupted as noise in the background weaved in and out with the caller’s voice. “I can barely hear you.”
“Oh, sorry, I’m on break at work. I make adult diapers. I can call later.”
“No, no biggie. What’s up?”
“Well, I’m probably way off base, but was I getting a vibe from you when we met?”
Oh, shit. This woman was a potential witness, however tenuous, in Bain’s first murder investigation, and here she was giving her vibes when she had thought she had kept herself under control. Yeah. Control like giving her your personal cell when your work cell is right there on the card. You’re the model of professional self-control, Bain. “What do you mean by a vibe?”
The woman on the phone paused a bit too long. “Shit. Never mind. I’m sorry.”
Bain sighed. “No. I’m the one who’s sorry. You did get a vibe from me, but I’m a cop investigating a murder in which you could possibly be a witness. I really can’t be handing out vibes to potential witnesses.”
Jessica laughed. “Handing out vibes? Did you really just say that?” She laughed again.
Bain smiled. “You are currently obstructing an officer in the line of doing the right thing,” she said, smile in her voice. “Don’t make me come cuff you in front of all your adult diapers.”
“Ooh. Already with the rough stuff. You move fast, Detective Bain.”
“I’m not moving at all,” she said, remnants of the smile still clinging to her lips, right next to the line the pillow had left down the side of her face. “You’re right; I really can’t get involved with you right now. It’s kind of against the rules. If you were ever called to the stand, it could be used to discredit the investigation, and a killer could get away with it because I couldn’t keep it in my pants.”
Now it was Jessica’s turn to smile. Bain talked butch, but she was tiny and adorable. And even though Jessica had only been experimenting with this side of her sexuality for a few months, she liked the combination of tiny cute with badass cop.
“We should be okay, then,” she said cheerily. “Because I don’t know shit. Let’s get together for dinner on one of my days off.”
Bain laughed. Jessica liked the sound.
“It’s hard for me to pass that up. But I think I’ll have to take a rain check. Maybe we can see how the investigation goes, and if it becomes clear that I won’t need to talk to you again in an official capacity, we can revisit the idea.”
“Well, you can come talk to me in any capacity you want,” Jessica said. She was surprising herself by being so forward, but it felt natural, right. The problem with men was they were this way all the time, but absent their clumsy pawing, it was kind of fun to be brassy. “I could pretend to know something if you want.”
“Please, no,” she laughed. “I promise, you’ll be my first call if it seems like I don’t need you for the case.”
“That’ll have to do. My break is almost up. I have incontinence to cure for millions of fashionably conscious old people. Save my number in your phone!”
“Will do. Bye.” Bain clicked the “End Call” button, then saved the number under “Jessica”, smiling as she sat up in bed, leaning against the headboard, phone held to her chest. Jessica was good looking—and funny—but did she really want to get involved with someone who had kids? She was getting to the age, she feared, where that might be a moot question anyway. Pretty much everyone had kids nowadays. I
t was nerve-wracking whenever someone saw through the cop act, but it didn’t seem to bother her this time. Maybe because this someone was a woman, not a man. Men pissed her off in general.
Now that she was awake, she might as well get up and have a glass of water. And maybe the rest of the cheesecake she had brought home from her solo dinner at the restaurant downstairs. If she was going to keep getting hit on by pretty girls, she would have to watch the cheesecake, but tonight, it was beckoning to her. She swung her legs out from under the quilted covers, jerking her knees back up to her chest when the cold wood floor reminded her why she was using a quilt in the first place.
“Shit!” she exclaimed absently, without conviction. Her refrigerator was twenty feet away, the only room in her tiny apartment closed off by walls being the bathroom. Twenty feet. Bother with socks, or tough it out? Twenty feet. That was a lot of cold on the tootsies. She decided on socks, big fluffy pink things that she would never let the assholes at the station even know she owned, much less wore. They didn’t seem to make big fluffy socks in colors other than pink, and since she was using them as house shoes, she hadn’t seen the problem with buying them, even though they were girly pink.
Would Jessica make fun of them? Probably not.
If Jessica ever came over here, she decided she would wear the fluffy pink socks. Something told her they would come off as cute. She shuffled to the fridge, which was mostly bare, except for Styrofoam cases full of leftovers from restaurants. Some of them she was afraid to open. But not the cheesecake. She opened it and grabbed a fork from the drawer, not even bothering to put the cake on a plate, instead, cutting off bits with the edge of the fork right in the Styrofoam container, closing her eyes and savoring every last bit of the silky, sugary pleasure as she leaned up against the fridge.
“I’m the only one who’ll walk across the fire for you / I’m the only one who’ll drown in my desire for you.”
Then buzz, buzz. Pause. Buzz, buzz.
She looked at the phone in her hand, but the screen was dark.
She made a mental note—for the fiftieth time—to change the ring tone on her work phone so it wouldn’t be so easy to confuse with her personal one. She would never get around to actually doing it, but it gave her something to think about.
Bain shuffled over to the bedside table, where her work phone was dancing as it buzzed.
“Sheriff,” the screen said.
She quickly put the cheesecake down on the bed, instinctively hiding her pink socks underneath the bed, as if Humphrey would know she was wearing them when she answered the phone.
“Bain,” she answered the phone with her cop voice.
“Detective Bain,” the sheriff said calmly, as if they talked every day. “I’ve got some good news on your case. The DNA came back.”
“Seriously? Do we have a name?”
“No, we don’t have a name. But we do have a match.”
She waited for him to add to that statement, but nothing came. She could feel him grinning on the other end of the cellular connection at the thought of her twisting in the wind at the end of such a bombshell.
“Oh, you’re fucking killing me here, Sheriff! Who’s the match?”
“Well, I called your chief,” he said, noticeably dragging out his words, accentuating his natural drawl. He was doing it on purpose now that he knew she was dying to know who the match was. He was probably smiling like a jackass as he said it. “And he told me you’d be very interested to find out who this one was.”
Then nothing else.
“Goddammit, I’m going to have to come kick the shit out of you. I can see that.”
He laughed. “Calm down, Mighty Mouse. I’m just fucking with you. The match is for an A-and-B you were working a couple of weeks ago. Guy who killed the old lady is the same guy who beat some guy named Richard Turner into a coma.”
Wait. What? Bain’s mind raced. How could those two cases possibly be related? The Turner case looked like a robbery, but all the money had been left behind, while the killer in the old woman’s case hadn’t seemed interested in robbing anything at all. “Seriously? You’re not playing some sort of prank on me?”
“No prank. DNA matches. The perp in two of your cases is the same guy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear in any other DNA databases, so he doesn’t have a criminal record, and we can’t get a name on him. I’m having the results sent over to your office tomorrow morning, but I left myself a sticky to tell you about this tonight, so that’s what I’m doing.”
“I appreciate it,” she said. “I think. That’s just too weird.”
“Chief thought so, too. Looks like you got a serial beater on your hands, little lady.”
“That’s crazy,” she said, more to herself than him, ignoring the “little lady” crack that she knew was half good-natured jab, half fatherly hug. “I mean, what are the odds?”
There was no chance for sleep now. When she hung up with the sheriff, she quickly took a shower and got dressed so she could rush down to the station to go over her notes from the cases. The murder had excited her so much that she had let Turner’s case kind of slip between the cracks, but if he could wake up enough to talk, it’s possible that he could name the murderer. Or at least describe him. She could solve two cases with one witness.
She would have to interview the son again, too. And the cute nurse. Somebody somewhere had to have heard or seen something. She made a mental note to find out where traffic cameras were around both locations and then get the footage from the days of the crimes. Maybe convenience store security cameras near the locations. It would be hours and hours of work, poring over the tapes to see if anyone matched. And Jessica. She would need to talk to Jessica again—in a professional capacity—about the guy she had seen sitting in the car outside the old lady’s house.
Her mind consumed with ideas about the cases, she didn’t even notice as she ran a red light. Red and blues in her rear-view mirror reminded her.
“Shit.”
She pulled over and grabbed her badge, preparing to show it to whatever uniform didn’t recognize an unmarked city car. She rolled her eyes as she looked in the rearview mirror and saw it was a rookie getting out of the cruiser, tilting the wide brim of his cop hat forward to look more intimidating. She had been that rookie once, and she remembered the feeling well. Traffic stops were incredibly dangerous, because drunk assholes were sometimes lubricated just enough to think pulling a gun on a cop was an acceptable idea. The rookie pulled out his flashlight as he approached Bain’s window, using the light to count how many people were in the car and see if any of them were doing anything suspicious. She knew that, as a rookie, his other hand would be nervously hovering near his service weapon. He would discretely touch his finger to her taillight so that if anything crazy did happen and she shot him, his fingerprint could be used as evidence of the traffic stop.
He was smart enough to do all that, but not smart enough to look at her plates and see it was a city car owned by the police department. She sighed.
Satisfied that the car held only the driver, who was doing nothing but calmly sitting, he approached her window, staying safely behind her and flashing her in the eyes with the light, partially to disorient her, partially to determine if her irises contracted correctly with the sudden introduction of a bright light—the way a sober person’s were supposed to.
“License and proof of insurance, please,” he said professionally.
She handed him her badge.
“Oh. Detective Bain. On the job?”
“Absolutely,” she said, peering to the nametag underneath his badge. “Officer Cummings.”
“Well, we have a bit of a problem,” he said, returning the light to her face. “You ran a red light back there, and since your globes weren’t on, technically, that’s a crime.”
“Technically, you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” she said angrily. She knew he was right, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. “I’m working a homicide, Officer Cummin
gs. They got me out of bed to review new evidence, and I’m not in the mood to have a roadside conversation with some doe-eyed rookie. Give me my fucking badge back, and if you need to write a fucking ticket, get back into your fucking car and fucking do it. But I’m going on to the station. Just put it on my fucking desk when you’re done—if they’ll fucking let you into the Detectives department.”
“Ma’am,” he stammered. “If we don’t obey the law, how can we expect everyone else—”
“Spare me the ethics bullshit,” Bain said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not trying to get you to not write a ticket. Just do whatever the fuck you want. I’m just saying I’m about to put this fucking car into Drive and I’m going to drive to the station.” To illustrate, she kicked the brake and put the car into drive. “Now give me back my fucking badge.”
“There’s no need to cuss,” he said weakly, looking deflated as he handed her back the badge.
“Fuck you,” she said and drove off. She knew she would probably hear about it later, but she was in no mood to stroke a rookie’s ego. He could learn the hard way like everyone else.
13
THE BMW’S LEATHER SEATS CARESSED HIM, ELECTRONICALLY PROGRAMMED to fit him like a glove, as the cruise control held at a steady sixty-eight miles per hour, three miles above the limit. He knew cops could technically pull him over for it, but most of them wouldn’t put forth the effort for an infraction that could possibly be within the margin of error for a speedometer.
Dr. Henry Lipscomb wasn’t thinking about that, though—he had worked out those details years ago, and now his body set the car on its way automatically every day, freeing his mind to enjoy Howard Stern on the way home. Today, however, Stern was turned all the way down. It was a re-run, anyway, an old interview with 50 Cent, where Artie Lang was making everyone but Fiddy laugh by doing an impression of Mike Tyson, from whom the rapper had bought a house.
“Y’all act like Mike don’t still be knockin’ motherfuckers out,” Fiddy replied to Artie’s impression, eliciting raucous laughter from everyone else in the studio. Henry knew the episode well, because 50 Cent had impressed him as an intelligent, cunning businessman, which was a surprise for a guy who thought all rap music was addled with drugs and dumb, vacuous shells who just happened to be able to rhyme.