by Alex P. Berg
Quinto nodded. “You bet. We pair really nicely with each other. Play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”
“I was more interested in the salacious details, myself.”
Quinto rolled his eyes. “You would be. I don’t kiss and tell, but I’ll say that it’s all good. It’s a slow burn.”
I snorted.
“What?” asked Quinto.
“Nothing,” I said. “I really wanted to make a venereal disease joke, but luckily for you, I restrained myself.”
“Yeah, given how this day is going, I must be walking about with a four leaf clover in my pocket,” said Quinto. “So how about yourself. I, uh…noticed you and Steele weren’t on the best of terms yesterday.”
“What?” I waved it off. “That was nothing. A misunderstanding. A bump in the road.”
“You sure about that?” asked Quinto.
I’m not sure if he expected an honest response or if he simply intended to force the analytical part of my mind into a state of reflection. Either way, the fact of the matter was I still had no idea what set Shay on the war path yesterday. I assumed it was a combination of me waking up on the wrong side of the bed, acting in an unusually boorish fashion, and Shay suffering from a cyclical hormone imbalance, but what if the incident had been set off by something specific I’d said or done?
I shrugged. Since our relationship had risen back into positive territory, I was loathe to spend too much mental energy analyzing the matter. Better to put my brain to use thinking about the case and figuring out what objects passing clouds resembled.
“I’m telling you, we’re fine,” I said as I rose and collected the beverages. “Now are you going to loaf in here all afternoon, or do you want to join Steele and me in some brainstorming? She’s on a tear. Give me more time to mentor her, and I think she can give me a run for my money in the wild and crazy ideas department.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Quinto with a lazy wave of his hand. “I’ll come. Give me a few minutes. I still haven’t fully recovered from my ascent up paperwork mountain.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “We’ll be at our desks when you catch your second wind.”
I headed back into the thick of the pit, eager to see if Shay had loosened any more creative bits from the inside of her skull, but as I reached our workstations, I discovered they were empty.
I set our respective mugs down and scratched my head. I didn’t think I’d let Quinto distract me for that long, had I? And Shay’s smile and sparkling eyes had indicated her newfound love for my innovative methods. She wouldn’t skip out on that, not in mid thought. Perhaps she’d simply embarked on a trip to the ladies room.
I heard her laugh, and I turned to see if she’d stopped to swap jokes with one of our mutual office acquaintances. Sure enough, I spotted her inside the heavy double doors with a guest—but not a mutual friend.
Agent Blue.
29
My stomach churned as I watched the smartly dressed elf investigator, standing there in the heart of my precinct, smiling and laughing it up with my partner and my…well, not girlfriend, but hopefully that would change in the not too distant future, flashing his perfect grin and leaning in too far and acting interested in everything Shay had to say.
My mind offered up the morning’s mantra on a silver platter, and every rational instinct within me screamed at me to sit down, grab my coffee, and nurse it with the zeal of a mother whose milk had just come in. To ignore the laughs and smiles and relegate them to my mental dustbin. To treat Agent Blue with all the care of a stallion swatting at flies with his tail.
But what can I say? I’m an idiot.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets, donned my best sneer, and made my way to the precinct’s entrance.
Blue noticed me first, though he only spared me a glance before turning his attention back to Shay. “Ah, Detective. There you are.”
Steele faced me, and in her hands she held a length of cream-colored wool. “Look, Daggers. He brought my scarf back. Isn’t that sweet? Really, Agent Blue, you didn’t have to do that.”
Sweet? Was she kidding? I suppressed a snort, meaning the burst of air firing through my nose sounded more like a gag than anything else. “Yes. What a kind, undoubtedly motivation-free gesture on the part of the Agent, here.”
Shay narrowed her eyes at that, but Blue waved it off, as if he hadn’t even heard me. Apparently, he was too smitten to bother deciphering my thinly-veiled slights.
“It wasn’t about the scarf,” he said. “You’ve been to my office multiple times already. It was only fair I return the favor. And if I was coming, then why wouldn’t I return your misplaced property?”
How magnanimous of him. I felt my scowl deepen. “That’s great, Blue. Now what do you want?”
This time, the elf agent finally paid me some mind, his smile melting as I forced him to interact with me. “Well, I came by for the reasons we discussed this morning. I was able to liberate some meager resources through my chain of command, and we’re in the process of interviewing those individuals in charge of watching over Privates Chavez and Delvesdeep. But I was hoping you and your fellow officers would’ve had more luck tracking down the pair. There’s only so much we can do on that front.”
I glanced at Shay, who looked back at me with pursed lips. We hadn’t discussed how we’d officially deal with Kelly and Drake’s departure, but at least we’d both agreed our encounter with them was strictly off the books.
As I thought about how to respond to him, Shay stepped in to save the day. “Unfortunately, Agent Blue, our investigation has shifted in a different direction. Between what we discovered this morning at our second crime scene and a few details that have surfaced since then, Privates Chavez and Delvesdeep aren’t our chief priority anymore. We simply can’t spare any resources to track them down at the moment.”
Blue lifted a brow. “Wait…what new details? What have you learned?”
I shouldn’t have opened my fat mouth, but I did anyway. Sometimes it works faster than my brain. “I think what Detective Steele is trying to say is that you should butt the hell out.”
Blue straightened and drew down his brows. “Excuse me?”
My machismo began to take over. “Did I stutter?”
“Look, Detective Daggers,” said Blue from between thin lips. “I thought we’d reached an understanding. We can achieve more together than we can individually. And as much as you might like for this case to be entirely within your jurisdiction, it isn’t. So until you’ve brought charges against someone for the murders of the two homeless men you’ve found, and those charges aren’t brought against one of my military charges, then you’re simply going to have to deal with my butt in your business.”
“Oh, I bet you like to put your butt on a lot of things. And other body parts, too.”
It wasn’t a particularly snappy comeback, but it was the best I could do under duress, especially considering I couldn’t get the mental image of Blue seducing my partner out of my mind, no matter how hard I tried.
“Daggers, what the—” Shay grabbed me none too gently by the arm. “Agent Blue, I’m sorry to cut things short, but I need to talk to my partner in private. We’ll be in touch.”
Shay dragged me down a side corridor until we arrived at one of our interrogation rooms, at which point she threw open the door, shoved me inside, and slammed the door behind her. Her eyes blazed with a fiery anger that I hadn’t seen since her first day on the job when I’d needled her mercilessly over the slightest minutiae. With her scarf dangling from one hand, she planted her fists on her hips and splayed her legs, and somewhere inside me, my logical self muttered, I told you so.
“Daggers, what the hell is wrong with you?” cried Steele.
I reacted instinctively. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. It’s that Agent Blue. Butting into our investigation. Thinking he owns the place. Why—”
“Stop it,” she said as she held her palm toward my face. “I don’t want to hear t
hat bullshit any more. This is not about him and the case. This is about you. So I’m going to ask you again. What is your problem with him?”
I felt my heart beat faster and my chest constrict. I didn’t want this to be how Shay and I broached the subject. Not here in an interrogation room, and not with her breathing fire and snarling demands. But she knew how I felt. She absolutely knew. There was no doubt in my mind. And she’d accept no less than the truth.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm my nerves. “Well, I… I mean, he was, you know…making advances. Putting the moves on you.”
“What?” said Shay. “No he wasn’t.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “With the smiling and the laughing and the googly eyes. He brought you your scarf.”
“I don’t know what you think that means, Daggers,” said Shay, “but even if you’re right, who cares? What does it matter?”
“It matters because… Because…” Good gods, she was really going to make me say it, wasn’t she? “Because I like you. Because I thought we were building something special together.”
Shay dropped her arms to her sides and sighed, and as she did so, some of the heat left the air. “Look, Daggers. I’ve never said it before, but…I admit it. I like you, too.”
Birds sang and morning glories opened as the sky burst from behind a thick bank of clouds—or so it felt for a fraction of a second before Shay continued.
“But, liking someone isn’t an end-all, be-all condition. There’s reasoning behind the emotion, and qualifiers attached to it. Be honest with me, Daggers. Do you even know why I like you?”
I gave the question the thought it deserved. “I assumed it was because of my rakish wit and undeniable charm.”
“Come on, be serious.”
I blinked and tried to figure out how my jaw worked, and based on the dispirited look Shay replied with, she knew I was telling the truth.
“Oh,” she said.
“Um…yeah.”
With her free hand, she reached up and rubbed her neck. “Well, maybe that’s something you should think about before we progress any further with this…whatever it is between us.”
I tried to come up with a worthy answer, but I needed more than a few seconds in which to do it. Heck, it might require geologic timescales. Regardless, a knock at the door interrupted my attempt.
Shay pulled the door open. “Yes? What? Oh…hey Quinto.”
The big guy stood outside the door. He averted his gaze to his feet as he took note of the expressions on our faces.
“Uh, hey guys,” he said. “I’m…sorry to interrupt. But Cairny found me in the break room. Said she wanted to share some things with you. I’d seen you walk this way, and so I started looking, and, well…you know…”
I knew the interrogation rooms had been constructed with silence in mind, but I also knew from experience the padding in the walls didn’t kill all the sound. How much had Quinto heard?
I swallowed back a lump in my throat and forced my mind to the task at hand. “It’s alright, Quinto. Lead the way.”
30
Even though I’d journeyed down to the morgue a half dozen times over the last day and a half, this trip felt different. The chill air hit me like a ton of bricks, the darkness enveloped me, creeping in at the corners of my vision, and my feet clattered off the stairwell steps like a bell tolling out a death knell. I interpreted the sensory bonanza as a metaphor for the direction of Shay’s and my relationship. Never mind she’d said she liked me—she actually liked me, for real if unstated reasons—but my life had been filled with enough whiffs, near misses, and outright, crushing disappointments that depression came to me as second nature.
I could battle against it. I’d turned the tide before, both through divine intervention and through copious consumption of hard liquor, but I’d yet to win the war. I sometimes wondered if I ever would.
Cairny stood in front of Burly’s corpse, now with the white sheet pulled to his neck, a clipboard held in one hand. She looked up at the sound of our feet and waved with her free hand.
“Steele. Daggers,” she said. “What fortunate timing.”
I didn’t think she meant it as a joke—despite progress in that area, I could count on one hand the number of zingers I’d heard from Cairny’s lips over the years—but she couldn’t honestly have forgotten she sent Quinto to find us minutes prior, could she? While her quirks sometimes irked me, I wouldn’t resent Cairny’s mooncalfish nature this time—especially if it kept her from asking too many questions about why Shay and I looked like jilted lovers and Quinto had miraculously reduced his opacity by a solid eighty percent.
I stepped to the far side of the examination table. Shay and Quinto took up battle positions at my arms, though based on their body language, the only bouts they might have a chance of winning were silence and awkwardness competitions.
I wasn’t in the mood for idle chatter either, so I cut straight to the point. “What have you got for us, Cairny?”
“Well, a couple points as a matter of accounting.” She held up a finger. “First, you’ll recall I mentioned I thought this man—Burly, I think you called him—died about four days ago. I’d like to revise that to place his death anywhere between ninety-two and one hundred and four hours ago. I’m not sure if that’ll be of any help to you or not, but more information is always beneficial, I always say.”
I couldn’t recall Cairny ever uttering such an adage, but again, I wasn’t in the mood to argue—or do much of anything for that matter.
“What else?” I asked.
“I also think this man suffered from something colloquially known as spotted fever,” said Cairny. “But don’t worry. It’s not contagious. It’s a zoonosis, transmitted via vector.”
I checked a box in my mind. So…I had been right. The hobo did suffer from a disease. Of some sort, anyway. “A zoo nose what?”
“Zoonosis,” said Cairny as she placed her clipboard on the edge of the exam table. “A disease transmitted to humans via animal contact. In this case—” She picked up a covered cell-culture dish and held it out. “—these little guys.”
I shuddered as I lay eyes on the beady, black bloodsuckers. “Ugh! Gross. Ticks.”
Shay grimaced, her lips sagging in disgust. “Well, I’ll be taking a thorough shower later.”
“A prudent choice,” said Cairny as she replaced the dish on the table. “But I doubt any of them jumped ship to you guys. In fact, contrary to popular belief, ticks are physically incapable of jumping. Rather, they transfer to suitable hosts by a process known as ‘questing,’ where they hang onto leaves or blades of grass, or human extremities, and wait for a new host to brush past.”
“Thanks for the biology lesson,” I said. “Now I feel much better about the possibility of small insects crawling all over me and hiding in my nether regions.”
“You’re welcome,” said Cairny, oblivious to my sarcasm. “You know, while I spent most of my time in college studying anatomy and histology, I did always harbor a soft spot for entomology. Which, if you’re wondering, means the study of bugs.”
“I got that one,” I said. “But thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“This is all fine and dandy,” said Shay, “but I don’t see how it’s going to help us identify the man or figure out who murdered him.”
“Well then, why don’t we move on to something more relevant?” offered Cairny. “Like the manner of his death.”
Quinto walked to the top of the table and squatted, staring at Burly’s skull. “Let me guess…he died by blunt force trauma to the back of the head?”
“Oh, Folton,” said Cairny. “I expect that kind of cheek from Daggers, but you?”
“Wait,” said Shay. “Are you saying he didn’t die from blunt force trauma?”
“Well, he was hit in the back of the skull with a blunt instrument, to be sure,” said Cairny. “But he didn’t die from the blow. He was smothered.”
Interesting. Clearly Lanky had eventu
ally died from the blow to his head, but if Burly had died via asphyxiation, it indicated a further key point to the killer’s M.O., one that hadn’t been implemented with Lanky—perhaps because he escaped.
“How can you be sure, Cairny?” I asked.
Cairny brandished her finger again. “Good question. Smothering is extremely difficult to prove, you know. Sometimes you’ll find evidence of cyanosis, or bluing, around the nose and mouth, but given the age of this cadaver and the man’s spotted fever, anything I told you in regards to that line of thought would be guesswork. The most obvious telltale signs of smothering are bloodshot eyes and the presence of a bloody, frothy fluid in the air passages, and of those I found evidence of both. And besides—the blow to his skull missed his occipital artery. He shouldn’t have bled out from the wound. Not unless the impact knocked him unconscious for a longer period of time than I expect it would’ve.”
Shay joined Quinto at the top of the exam table and knelt to look at Burly’s skull. It wasn’t an angle that gave the best possible view of his wound, but given Cairny’s revelations about the man’s parasite problems, I wasn’t too eager to reposition his head, either.
Shay pursed her lips. “What can you tell us about the…well, I want to say murder weapon, but that may not be accurate, so I’ll just say weapon.”
“I didn’t find any evidence of wood fibers in his brain or muscle tissue,” said Cairny, “so I’m guessing it was something made of metal. Something strong, and with enough heft to it to fracture his skull.”
“What exactly are we talking about here?” I asked.
Cairny retrieved the clipboard from the table and flipped over a couple pages to a crude but effective sketch, which she handed to me. It showed a weapon somewhat smaller than I’d originally anticipated based on visual inspections of Lanky and Burly.
“I thought you might ask that, so I drew you a diagram,” said Cairny. “I’m guessing a rod, perhaps three quarters of an inch in diameter. It could be anything, really. My guess would be a pipe or structural support rod or—”
