by Tina Whittle
Her eyes flew open. “No!”
“It’s okay, Brenda, it’s me. Tai. What happened?”
“They…they…”
“Who, Brenda? Who did this?”
Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and she convulsed. I saw the spreading blood, more than I’d thought at first, a thick wet stain. My brain supplied the details—bullet wound, center mass—and I shook my head to clear it, shoving down the nausea and thickening shock. The gun in my hand felt heavy and useless, but I didn’t know what to do with it.
“Brenda?” I moved my hand to her shoulder. “Are they still here?”
She shook her head back and forth. “Gone, gone, gone.” And then she choked and arched her back. I could hear Trey on the phone, Brenda moaning, my own breathing, everything so slow, so stark.
I lay the gun on the pavement beside me, pushed 911 on the phone. Then I pulled off my jacket and pressed it against the wound, murmuring the best words I could, telling her to hold on. And I stayed on my knees, shivering in the bitter cold, until I heard voices and sirens, saw the red strobing lights of the ambulance, felt strong hands pulling me back.
And then I slumped against the wall, pulled my knees to my chest, and waited for Trey.
Chapter Thirty-seven
They put me in the backseat of a patrol car, the perp seat. No handcuffs at least. The EMTs were long gone, having hustled Brenda onto a gurney and into an ambulance, an oxygen mask obscuring her features. Only crime scene commotion remained—blue lights, murmured conversations, the chirp and hiccup of police radios.
Trey was deep in an interview with the uniformed officer who’d reached me first. From my viewpoint, it was hard to tell who was interviewing whom. I knew his goal was as clear and specific as a bull’s-eye—find and take down the bad guy—and his frustration at being unable to do so was showing. Any second now, the pacing would start, the restless relentless energy that he couldn’t dissipate, could only channel. But there was no channel for him now.
I took another swig of coffee. Two hours ago, he’d been a different man—surrender sharpening to demand then softening again to tenderness. Now he was a laser, an arrow unloosed. Once he’d determined that I was indeed alive and unharmed, he’d left me in the custody of one of Kennesaw’s finest and unleashed the protocol on the rest of the team.
Detective Perez joined me. She had her own cup of coffee now that she’d cleared what was officially a crime scene. “EMTs trash everything. Good for Ms. Lovejoy-Burlington, but a major pile of suck for me.”
I huddled deeper in the borrowed jacket. “Is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. Not my field.” Perez nodded Trey’s way. “Your boyfriend is being somewhat…overintense right now.”
“Perseveration.” I tapped my right temple. “Artifact of his brain rearrangement.”
“Ah.” Perez stuck her coffee on top of the car and pulled out a piece of yellow paper, covered with Trey’s neat angular handwriting. “He is hammering home a good point, though, about the security system. He says the same thing you did, that it malfunctioned. Someone switched off your electricity at the fuse box, then shot out your back camera—”
“From the alley. Where it’s dark and there’s a blind spot, vulnerabilities even the most inexperienced perp could notice.”
“Correct. So no video of our suspect in action. Regardless, there should have been an alarm because…” She read from the paper. “There was a redundant wireless system, with battery backup, that also malfunctioned, and your boyfriend says the only way this could have happened was if it were disabled too. But it’s not disabled, he says. Working fine, he says.” She looked up from the paper. “Sure seems convenient, doesn’t it? Blind spots? Busted cameras? Mysterious malfunctions that kept the police from responding?”
A curl of ice-laced wind nipped at my ankles, and I pulled my legs under me. “No, it’s the opposite of convenient, because video footage would prove that things happened exactly the way I say they did.”
“Unless it would prove otherwise.”
I put my coffee down on the floorboard. “Didn’t you get Trey’s statement? Where he corroborated my version of events down to the last detail?”
“I did.” She flipped backward through her notes, tilting her head as if in deep thought. “I also took down where he said that you and Brenda had been arguing for several weeks now about the back parking space, and that this very afternoon you threatened her with bodily harm if she touched your car.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my fingers, but the headache came anyway. “Yes, I said that, and yes, we had been arguing. It’s no secret. But even if it were a secret, Trey would have told you. You can ask him anything, and the answer will fall right out of his mouth most of the time. That frontal lobe damage again. But that also means he’s telling you the truth about what happened tonight—”
“What you told him happened tonight.”
“What he himself heard happening on the phone,” I corrected. “The man’s brain is a justice machine. There’s no room for mercy in it. If I were guilty, he’d hand me over on a silver platter. He’d be upset about it—maybe even devastated—but he’d do it.”
Trey now had his hands on his hips. He took two steps to the left, then two to the right. I kept one eye on him as I continued with Perez.
“Look,” I said, “I know you have to give me a hard time. That’s your job. But you know I didn’t do it. The GSR test came back clean—I haven’t fired a gun.”
She shook her head. “Easy to fool that test. Wash off the residue with soap and water. You have those, I’m sure.”
“Except that you’ve got my gun. So you know that it hasn’t been fired recently, and I know that it’s not going to match any ballistics test you run.”
“You’ve got an entire shop full of weapons to choose from.”
“None of which have been fired tonight. Go ahead. Check. You can look in my scrupulous log book for a list of every firearm in the place.”
She didn’t say anything, and I wondered if they were already doing that very thing, checking out all the weapons in the shop, sniffing for gunpowder, shining flashlights down into the barrels.
“What was Brenda doing out back at night?”
“My best guess? She was probably writing a nasty note to somebody parked there. She’s done it dozens of times, and not just to me.”
Perez pointed toward the shattered camera. “She’d come over here at night? By herself? After hearing a gun go off?”
“She’s done it before, on Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Ask Raymond Junior if you don’t believe me.” Then I remembered. “Have you checked her cell phone records?”
“For what?”
“To see if she was calling a tow truck. That’s what she’d threatened to do. And I saw her phone lying next to her, smashed like somebody stepped on it.”
Perez looked interested. She could see it as clearly as I could. Brenda charging over, calling the tow truck. Being surprised by someone who wasn’t me, who wasn’t one of my friends. Someone murderous.
But Perez wasn’t bending. “Maybe you were the one she was calling to have towed?”
“I wasn’t. But it doesn’t matter. Because you know as well as I do that if I’d been the one to shoot her, I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to save her. I would have let her bleed out on that pavement.”
Perez shrugged slightly, kept her face blank.
“Come on, you know I didn’t do it. In your gut, where it counts. So stop treating me like a suspect and start treating me like what I am—an eyewitness, your very best hope for catching a very bad person.”
She rolled her tongue behind her teeth. “So let’s say you didn’t shoot her.”
“I did not.”
“And she didn’t shoot herself.”
“She did not.”
/> “Then who did?”
“Now that is the question.”
Perez slipped the yellow paper back into her jacket and retrieved her coffee. “Because I could do the usual detective thing and start trying to figure out who wanted her dead. Besides you, of course.”
I scowled. “I did not—”
“And I will. Due diligence and all that. But I’m thinking whoever shot her didn’t come here to shoot her. I’m thinking they came here to shoot you. So now the question becomes, who wants you dead?”
I gave a mirthless laugh. “You’re gonna need a bigger notebook, Detective.”
“I’m getting that feeling.” Perez pulled out her tablet computer, and with one swipe, flared it to life. “So here’s what I need, Tai—you said I could call you Tai, right? I need you to tell me everything you’ve done, everybody you’ve talked to, everything you’ve found, and everyone you’ve pissed off, starting with the day you found that skull. Lucius was a lowlife. But Brenda Lovejoy-Burlington is a citizen. I’m going to find out who did this to her, and you are going to help me do it.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
At some point, the sun dragged its way into a leaden sky, but in the fluorescent-lit shop, I barely noticed. I’d fielded the usual personal calls—Eric, Rico, and Gabriella—all asking the same questions. Garrity, however, spoke for exactly fifteen seconds, just long enough to tell me that he was on the way. Thirty minutes later, he was coming through my front door.
I stayed on my knees, a half-sorted pile of tee-shirts in my lap, and smiled wearily at him. “That was fast. You must’ve come in the helicopter.”
“Back in the Crown Vic. Sticking with the classics this morning.” He plopped a flat green and white box of Krispy Kremes on the counter. “How are you holding up?”
“Well enough.”
I stood, wiped the dust from my jeans, and joined him at the counter. The new suits gave him a dangerously official edge, less like the guy I drank beer and shot pool with, more like one of the impersonal authorities coming and going, opening and closing my life.
He surveyed the room. “Where’s Trey?”
“Asleep on the floor behind the counter.”
He leaned over to peer at Trey, who was curled up on his side, one arm around a pillow. He looked endearingly rumpled, as vulnerable and sweet as a toddler put down for a nap. Except for the nine millimeter two inches from his fingers.
Garrity managed a small smile. “How long did he last?”
“Until two-thirty this morning. Refused to go upstairs, though, as you can see.”
Garrity punched the opening on a coffee cup and handed it to me. There was no smell in the world as tonic as coffee, especially not this coffee, which was heavily dosed with pure cream and sweetened with a shot of doughnut glaze. I closed my eyes at the raw pleasure of it, realizing for the first time how numbed and disconnected I was.
“What about you?” he said. “You slept at all?”
“Not yet. I just finished hosing the blood off the pavement out back.” I buried my nose in the caffeinated steam. “Any news from the hospital?”
“Brenda’s critical but stable—they say she’ll pull through. But she hasn’t gained consciousness yet.”
“So no word on who shot her.”
“None.” Garrity threw me his cop look, as serious as a gavel coming down. “Except that they were probably aiming for you.”
“So you came to lecture me?”
His expression tightened. “I came to check on you. Because, believe it or not…never mind.”
I put a hand on his elbow, squeezed gently. “Sorry. Knee-jerk hostility, not directed at you. Thank you for coming. That’s what I meant to say.”
“Yeah, I know.” Garrity scrubbed his face, raked his hands through his hair, got back to business. “Trey said there was some weirdness with the security system, probably a jammer.”
“A what?”
“Wireless jammer.” He measured off a space the size of a shoebox with his hands. “It’s a device about yea big, blocks wireless signals from coming in or going out. They’re illegal as hell, but people still use them, and Trey suspected that might be the case here since something disrupted your system last night. Also—and you didn’t hear this from me—it prevented Brenda’s cell phone call to the tow truck company from going through.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“Which makes it my department’s concern. Major crimes, FCC violations, all that middle of the pie where the APD and the FBI come together.”
“Trey called the FBI?”
“He called me,” Garrity corrected. “Unofficially. He wanted me to know, that’s all.”
He said it so casually, one might suspect this meant nothing. But I knew better. Coming from Trey, such a phone call was as intimate as a valentine.
I heard a murmur from behind the desk, followed by a sharp inhale, and I froze. This was how it started, a shift in his respiration, words that made no sense. And then would come the tossing of the head, and sometimes the defensive strike, the instinctive blow. I held my breath, but Trey settled back into deeper slumber, and I relaxed.
Garrity did too. “How’s he holding up?”
So I told the story—the dive bar and back woods, the skate shop and Stone Mountain. I left out the part where we ravished each other on the desktop, but kept right to the truth with everything else. How Trey was challenging himself, stepping out of his comfort zone. Brick by brick unbuilding the wall.
“He’s doing amazingly well. Except for almost beating this guy bloody with his own musket. And some olfactory triggering.” I opened the doughnut box and pulled out a chocolate-glazed. “Which reminds me…Trey mentioned a drug bust, the Sinaloa cartel.”
Garrity’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “He told you about that?”
“He tried. Mostly he clenched and unclenched his fists, but I gather something serious happened.”
“Yeah. His one official reprimand. Mine too.”
And then he told me that story. One of the last busts they’d worked together before the accident—Garrity as lead detective with Major Crimes, Trey as point man on the SWAT entry team, the two units coming together to arrest a heavily barricaded drug lord.
Garrity reached for a doughnut. “They ran a dog-fighting ring out back, and it was one of the ugliest, sickest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Trey snapped. Grabbed the main suspect, dragged him upstairs to the third-story balcony, and for three minutes there…” Garrity blew out a breath. “But then he unsnapped. And we each got two weeks’ suspension—him for doing it, me for letting it happen—but I don’t regret it. I enjoyed every second of watching him dangle that son of a bitch fifty feet off the ground.”
I whistled. “Damn.”
“Damn indeed.” Garrity eyed me suspiciously. “Are you sure—”
“I’m sure. He’s kept the gun in the holster and his hands to himself.”
“That’s a good sign. I guess we’ll know for sure tomorrow.”
“What’s to–oh, crap!” I pressed a hand to my forehead. “Tomorrow’s the ninth! Shit, Garrity, what do I do?”
Garrity shrugged. “I haven’t got a clue. We seem to be dealing with a new Seaver here.” And then he smiled, fleeting and crooked. “Let’s try not to break this one, okay?”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Trey slept. I got a broom. In between sweeping, I looked up “how to get blood stains out of polyester” on the computer and checked the news for updates on Brenda. I also double-checked the A&D book—grateful for the color-coded and cross-indexed ease of it—but not a single firearm was missing.
My latest perp had come prepared for murder.
I occasionally peered over the counter to make sure Trey was still sleeping. What would I say to him come tomorrow? Hallmark didn’t exactly make cards for such occasi
ons. Happy three years since you almost died? Sorry about the brain rearrangement and having to resign your true calling, but congrats on your unique coping strategy?
The ringing of my phone jolted me back to reality, and I snatched it up before it could wake Trey. It was a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”
“You are such a liar!”
I bristled. “Excuse me, I—”
“You said you wouldn’t tell them. You said you’d keep it to yourself.”
I sighed. Chelsea Amberdecker. I’d been expecting this comeuppance ever since she’d upchucked in front of me.
“I didn’t breathe a word about the pregnancy, I swear. But the police wanted a detailed list of where I’d been and who I’d talked to and—”
“They came to Jeremy’s work! Now everybody’s looking at me like I had something to do with that dead guy in the woods!”
“That wasn’t—”
“Shut up! I can’t even go outside without somebody trying to take my picture. Jeremy is furious!”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. I suspected she was the first of many calls I’d get that day. I’d laid the whole mess in Detective Perez’s lap—every conversation, every suspicion, every oddball piece of evidence. I figured if Trey could stick a toe in the gray zone, I could buckle up and play in the black-and-white for a while. But I hadn’t spilled Chelsea’s bun in the oven.
Her voice crackled with fury. “Jeremy says if they show up again, we’ll sue. Slander. Defamation. We’ll own your tacky little shop, and you, and everything—”
“Do what you gotta do, Chelsea. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But I kept my word, so if you—”
She hung up on me. I switched the phone to vibrate and stuck it in my back pocket. Trey was still asleep, hadn’t budged an inch since he’d stretched himself on the floor, utterly exhausted. Still life with pillow and nine millimeter. I watched him for almost a full minute—his face relaxed, the wrinkle between his eyes softened—then pushed up my sleeves and got back to work.
