by Rachel Caine
“She’s not a stranger,” she lied. “Look, Manny, you do this for me and you get a free lunch. Plus the usual fee.”
He stared at her for a long, long moment. “I don’t do criminal. You know that.”
“It’s not a criminal case, Manny.”
“No murders. No rapes. No violent crimes.”
“It’s maybe fraud, and that’s a maybe.” She was seriously stretching the truth, and saw Lucia watching her with slightly raised eyebrows. “You won’t need to do anything but give me results. No depositions. No trials.”
He swallowed, wiped his sweaty face with his grimy sleeve and nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he agreed. “But only because it’s you, all right? Follow me, ladies.”
Lucia started to pick up the gun. Jazz kicked it under the car with a skitter of metal on concrete, then reached through the window to shut off the headlights. Darkness closed in around them.
“You don’t want to do that,” she said. “Really. You don’t. Manny may look like some squirrelly little pushover. He isn’t.”
They followed Manny to the stairs.
Upstairs was a different world. This didn’t come as a shock to Jazz, but she saw it register on Lucia as Manny keyed a code into a lock and opened the door at the top of the stairs.
Because beyond was a state-of-the-art science lab, segmented by movable clear glass partitions. Beyond that was a thick leather couch and widescreen HDTV that doubled as Manny’s living area. Green hospital curtains hung on suspended rods hid the open-forum bathroom—which, Jazz had cause to know, was an interior designer’s wet dream of gleaming marble, Jacuzzi tub and spa shower—and the bedroom, which she’d only glimpsed but looked good enough that if she lived here, she’d never get out of bed. Manny shooed them away from the lab part of the room and toward the living room. He combed fingers through his disordered hair and avoided their eyes.
“Um, yeah, sorry, I don’t get a lot of—visitors—sit. Sit down.” He moved newspapers and piled them on a glass side table, then picked up the remote control and clicked the TV to some high-definition channel doing a travelogue of China. No sound. “So. Um, tell me what you want. Oh, and hi, by the way. I’m Manny.”
That last went to Lucia, who was standing, staring in bemusement. Jazz patted the couch. Lucia sank down gracefully, hands in her lap. Studying Manny like a new and alien life-form.
“This is Lucia,” Jazz said. “I’ve got two documents for you, plus envelopes. I want the full ride. Everything you can give me.”
Manny couldn’t seem to tear his attention away from Lucia. Apparently, his hormones weren’t dead. “Takes time,” Manny said.
“I know it does.”
“Also, the full ride doesn’t come cheap. And hey, I’m only saying that because, you know, I’ve got to pay for upkeep around here, supplies, stuff…”
Jazz winced inside, but smiled and nodded. “How much?”
“Two documents? Three grand. That includes my time and materials, by the way. Plus, you get to, um, stay here if you want. Wait on the results.”
Hotel Manny. He did have a nice place—scrupulously clean—but she could see Lucia was starting to wish she’d crawled under the car to retrieve the gun. “That’s a nice gesture, but how about if we come back later? You call me when you’re ready with the results?”
“Um…sure.” Manny stared at her with his slightly off-kilter eyes. “Jazz?”
“Yeah?”
“Is this about Mac?”
“No. It’s not about Mac.”
“’Cause you know I’d do it for free if—”
“It’s not about Mac. But I’ll tell him.” Ben McCarthy, she knew, would shake his head and roll his eyes, but he’d appreciate it somewhere deep down. Manny was a twitch, but he was an honest one. In some ways, he was also the bravest guy she’d ever met.
She took the plastic bag out of her jacket and handed over her letter; Lucia did the same. Manny raised the evidence bags, thick eyebrows going up, and stared at Jazz through the plastic. “You’re sure it isn’t murder or something? ’Cause I’m getting a weird vibe.”
“I’m not a cop anymore, you know that.”
“Yeah, well…still. It looks hinky, Jazz. There’s blood.”
“That falls under the heading of bar mayhem, not murder. Two guys tried to start something with me. They’ll live.”
“But you want DNA profile on the blood, right?”
“I want every scrap of information you can pull off of either one of those, right? Everything.”
Manny nodded. “Okay. Everything.”
“Got any idea how long…?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“You’re not outsourcing, right?”
“Everything gets done here,” he said, and gave her an almost charming grin. “Jeez, grow up. Who would I trust?”
It was a really good point. “Call me.”
Chapter 3
Lucia kept silent all the way back down the steps. Without being asked, Jazz got on her hands and knees and fished the gun out from under the car.
“Thanks,” Lucia said, and returned it to the pancake holster behind her back.
“Yeah, well, you’re wearing a nice suit.” Jazz shrugged. “I don’t figure my jeans will suffer from a little contact with the concrete.”
Once they were in the sedan again, the metal door cranked up like a castle gate, allowing them to exit into the bright morning air.
“So what,” Lucia asked with absolutely precision, “the hell was that?”
“That is Manny Glickman.” Jazz pretended to concentrate on the flow of commuter traffic, which wasn’t too much of a stretch—K.C., like most semilarge cities, was hell in the morning rush hour. She was trying to decide what to share. “Used to be the go-to guy at Quantico for the big cases after the shakeup of the lab, you remember the scandal over the evidence problems—”
Lucia nodded, eyes fixed on the cars around them. Sweeping the street for surveillance.
“Anyway, he went through a bad patch. Started private practice a couple of years ago, after he got out of the hospital. Most of the P.I.s and lawyers use him, or try to, but he won’t do any cases with violent crime elements.”
“Sounds like he’s limiting his business pretty severely.”
“Yeah. But he’s got money, and he doesn’t want to go back into that world.” Jazz shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He’ll get us what we need. Manny’s hell on wheels when it comes to evidence.”
Lucia thought about that for a few seconds, and then turned her head to look straight at her. Sunlight flashed between the buildings and painted her skin in strobing flashes of gold. “What happened to him? Really?”
“Really?” Jazz made up her mind in a split second. There were few people she told about Manny—the real story—out of respect for his privacy, but she couldn’t start out with lying, not to Lucia. She’d know. “He was buried for almost forty-two hours in a black box eight feet under the ground, with nothing but some oxygen tanks to keep him alive, and a continuous loop recording playing the sound of the killer’s previous victim being tortured. That kind of thing will take all the fizz out of a person.”
Lucia understood immediately, it was all over her face. A deep, sad appreciation for everything Jazz didn’t say about that ordeal. “Did you find him?”
“No,” Jazz said softly. “No, I was across town, interrogating the suspect. My partner found the spot. He and two FBI agents dug Manny up.”
“My God,” Lucia murmured. “Did you know him?”
“Not then. He was a case file shipped down to us. I met him when he woke up in the hospital.” She’d never forget that bloodied, dirt-caked figure. Shaking. Weeping. The FBI agents turning away while Ben McCarthy pulled up a chair and took one of those filthy hands, nodding for her to hold the other. Holding Manny in the world.
“It was related to an investigation.” Lucia didn’t make it a question. “Something Manny was working on.”
“Serial killer
,” Jazz agreed. “Just our blind luck he decided to dump Manny in Kansas City. He was a coast-to-coast, equal-opportunity son of a bitch. We all got lucky. Me, Manny, Ben…”
Lucia didn’t ask about Ben. No doubt she knew everything there was to know on that subject already, had made up her mind as to Ben’s guilt or innocence.
“Anyway…now Manny’s a friend,” Jazz finished awkwardly. “And if he’s twitchy, well, hell, you’d be twitchy too after that. But he does his best. He gets by.”
“And three thousand dollars? You’ve got that amount of money lying around to pay him?” Lucia wasn’t being insulting, just matter-of-fact. She’d done her research, Jazz knew that. Lucia knew her finances, down to the penny that was breathing its last gasp in Jazz’s bank account.
“No,” Jazz said. “But I’ll get it.” She sounded confident.
Lucia threw her an interested look but didn’t ask.
If there was a tail on them, it was good enough that neither Jazz nor Lucia spotted it. Just in case, Jazz did some acrobatics on the freeway, taking I-435, then I-70 toward St. Louis through Independence before looping back home. “You know, they have to know where you live,” Lucia pointed out. “Don’t you think this cloak-and-dagger business is a little over the top?”
“No,” Jazz said shortly, and felt a blush high in her cheeks. Dammit. Lucia made her feel like some unschooled hick, which she wasn’t. She’d been one of the youngest, most highly decorated detectives ever in KCPD. She’d trained with the FBI at Quantico. She wasn’t an idiot. Okay, maybe she wasn’t up on international terrorism and proper spy etiquette, but dammit, she was trying.
Lucia let it go. “Your gas to burn.” She shrugged and tapped her fingernails on the window glass. “If your lawyer was sincere, and if these letters mean what they say, what does that tell us? What are we going to do, in that case?” Lucia’s dark eyes turned toward her. Jazz didn’t take her attention off the road. “Are you tempted to accept?”
“Hell, yes, I’m tempted. That’s a hundred grand you’re talking about, not to mention the time and resources to devote to clearing my partner’s name. And an actual job would be a good thing, for the sake of my apartment rent, not to mention the gas-burning you’re so concerned about.” Jazz blew out her breath in an irritated sigh. “But you’re probably not into this thing, are you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh, come on. You fly in from some supersecret mission looking like you dressed out of a Bond girl’s closet. You’re so hooked up that you can score a gun without leaving the airport, for God’s sake. Why would you tie yourself down with a partner? Particularly one that isn’t, you know, all spy-worthy?”
Lucia blinked slowly. “When you put it that way,” she murmured, “it’s a very good question.”
“Yeah. Well.” Somehow, this didn’t feel like a victory.
“You don’t know anything about me,” the other woman said. “Yes, I have a job. I have a decent wardrobe. I have resources. That doesn’t mean—” She shook her head, frowning. “That doesn’t mean I’m not trapped, Jazz. Or that I don’t want out of the place I’m in.”
She didn’t say anything else. Unsure how to take it, Jazz didn’t push things.
She rolled up to her apartment building, cruising at a normal speed, and said, “See anything interesting?”
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither. Don’t you think that’s interesting, in itself?”
No sounds or movement, all the way to her apartment. Jazz motioned Lucia away and took the lock-and-handle side of the door. She slotted the key into the dead bolt at arm’s length, staying well out of range if anybody decided to put a bullet through the door itself.
Nothing. Lucia watched as the door swung open, then snapped her gun up into an effortlessly graceful firing position and flowed forward, shouldering the door flat against the wall with a soft bump. The speed with which she checked and dismissed blind corners was incredible. Jazz shut the door and dead-bolted it again, then went to the gun safe in the corner and keyed it open.
The familiar weight of her H & K nine-millimeter pistol felt cool and heavy, weighing her down, grounding her against that feeling of having been blown off course by the day’s events.
Lucia stopped appraising the room from a tactical point of view long enough to say, “I like your taste in colors.”
“You’d be the only one, then,” Jazz smiled. The rug was olive green, the furniture a throwback to the worst of the seventies—dull oranges and duller golds, a truly obnoxious plaid that somehow captured all three colors plus a muddy brown for variety. She’d finished it off with a kitschy velvet painting of a matador and a print of one of Dali’s lesser works from his conquistador period.
“I was being polite,” Lucia said, and ran her fingers over the gold armchair’s back. “Possibly even sarcastic. Tell me the place came furnished.”
“Nope, it’s all mine. However, in self-defense, I did have to match the carpet. This was the best I could manage.”
“Plus,” Lucia said thoughtfully, “it makes people think you have no sophistication. Which is all part of your persona, isn’t it?”
That came as a shock. Not a pleasant one. “What?”
“You, Jazz, are a lie. A subtle one. It probably works very well for you. Under all that ragged hair and frumpy clothes, you’re good-looking. You could make this place look sophisticated—you deliberately choose not to. I think you like having people underestimate you.”
Jazz blinked, nonplussed. “That’s a load of crap.”
“Yeah?” Lucia’s carefully shaped eyebrows rose and fell. “My specialty is in controlling perceptions. I do it consciously. I have to take command in a psychological way when I enter a situation. I have to make people believe that I’m capable of anything and everything to avoid a fight.”
“You don’t strike me as the kind to avoid a fight.”
“My point exactly,” Lucia said, and smiled. “I’m not nearly as strong as you are, Jazz. It’s better for me if I can avoid the fight instead of taking things head-on. Not that I can’t win if I’m pushed, but I can’t do it fairly, like you can. I fight dirty, and I try not to fight at all. Like most women, actually.”
Jazz cocked her head, trying to get all that through her head; she knew, intellectually, what Lucia was saying, but she’d grown up fighting just as hard as her brother, and the idea that most women weren’t wired that way…it had always thrown her off. She’d blamed it on wussy girl attitudes about not mussing their hair or breaking a nail, but she had to admit, there was nothing wussy about Lucia. And she didn’t strike Jazz as somebody who admitted to shortcomings just for the hell of it, either.
“Okay.” Jazz shrugged. “So maybe I like to sucker people in. You like to intimidate them into avoiding a fight. We can agree to disagree.”
“Actually,” Lucia said, and picked up a particularly hideous ceramic bull getting ready to gore a gaudily gilded matador, “looking at this, for the first time, I believe we have something we can use to form a solid partnership.”
“Because of my amazingly bad taste?”
“Strengths and weaknesses,” Lucia said, and put the bull back in its place. “We complement each other. Also, I like your sense of humor.”
“How do you know I have one?”
“The bull.” Lucia smiled. “It’s anatomically correct.”
“You should see the matador in the bedroom.”
“It’ll be twenty-four hours before Manny gets back to us,” Jazz said about a half hour later. “You want to stay?”
Lucia, who was sipping coffee from a plain black mug and watching low-playing CNN on the TV, said, “Why?”
“Why not? I’d say you might have cats to feed back home, but women like you don’t have cats,” Jazz said, and made kissy noises at Mooch, who was peeking around the corner of the bedroom door. He froze, slitted green eyes wide in his smushed-in fluffy face, and darted back out of sight. “Women like you have, oh, fish.
Colorful ones.”
“I might be a dog person.”
“The only animal you’d keep on a leash is a boyfriend.”
Lucia laughed. It had a nice sound, easy and unselfconscious, and Jazz found herself smiling in return. “Mira, have you been through my closet? I thought I’d put all the leather away where nobody else could find it.”
“Am I right?”
“About the boyfriend?” Lucia still sounded on the verge of laughter.
“About the pets.”
She nodded. “Too much trouble. I travel.”
“So, you can stay another day.”
“Actually, I was thinking that the two of us might want to use the waiting time productively,” Lucia said, and finished her coffee in three gulps. “How do you feel about taking a flight this afternoon to New York?”
“To see Borden.”
“Yes.”
She had to admit, she felt a little tug in her guts at the thought. Good tug? Bad? Not sure. But then she felt a wave of frustration roll over her. “Not possible.”
“Why not?”
God, she was going to hate admitting this. “I’m tapped. I’ve got no cash, and I’m already on the hook with Manny for three grand. I’d better not. You can go on, if you want to, and let me know what you think of the setup.”
“I have half a million frequent-flyer miles in my account,” Lucia said.
Jazz, openmouthed, just stared at her for so long that she was sure she was starting to look like the hick Lucia made her feel. “Oh,” she finally said. “Right. And you’d buy me a ticket with—”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
Lucia rolled her eyes in exasperation. “I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t mean it. Of course I’m sure. Also, the three thousand for Manny? If this works out, you can pay it from the hundred thousand. If not, I’ll cover it. Call it an investigative expense. Believe me, I won’t miss it.”
Mooch abruptly left the shelter of the doorway and stalked over the carpet to stand directly in front of Lucia, tail high, back arched. Staring.
