Not Without Risk

by Sarah Grimm

  Chapter Seven

  The first forty-eight hours of any investigation are critical. After those first crucial days, trails tend to go cold. Once cold, dead isn’t far off.

  One-hundred-and-two hours after Detective St. John was gunned down in his hotel bed, Justin sat on a case colder than Becky O’Riley the night he tried to go a little too far in the backseat of her daddy’s ‘79 Chevy. The first forty-eight hours had been and gone long ago. Were he to get them back, he was less than certain they would be any further enlightened about what brought a Boston narcotics officer three-thousand miles to his death.

  At least the dead man’s partner had finally decided to grace them with his presence. Sitting at the apex of the desks, feet propped just to the right of Justin’s coffee mug, Detective Jon Brennan didn’t do much to boost any hope for closure. Tall and lanky, he wore his otherwise ordinary brown hair short, its bleached tips slicked forward into spiky disarray. With cold blue eyes, he scanned through the crime scene photos once, before tossing them atop the desk, the corner of his mouth kicked up into what could only be described as a smirk.

  Justin set his teeth. He shot his left hand out and stopped the photos before they slid off the desk and onto the floor.

  “Detective St. John died no more than three hours before his body was discovered.” Unaware of Justin’s growing antagonism, Allan continued to bring Brennan up to date. “Cause of death is a single shot to the back of the head. By the starburst pattern of the wound and the bruising present, it appears he was held face-first into the pillow and shot point-blank. Ante mortem bruises present on the upper arms indicate St. John struggled briefly with the shooter. Since it would take considerable upper body strength to overpower a man of St. John’s size, we believe our shooter is a man, but the total lack of physical evidence at the scene leaves us without much to go on.”

  “Execution style, quick and easy,” Brennan stated, his tone cool and detached, as if the man they discussed was a stranger.

  For someone who just lost a partner, Brennan didn’t appear overly upset by the loss. Justin fingered his side. He shook his head. Detective Jon Brennan was either made of ice, or heartless.

  His face a mask of indifference, Brennan continued. “Any sign of a robbery?”

  “No.” Allan shifted through the ever-growing pile of papers before him. “The room didn’t appear to be searched. His cash and credit cards were still in his wallet.”

  “Did he place any calls?”

  “Telephone company records show he placed one call to Ms. Conroy. The conversation lasted two minutes, ten seconds.”

  It was not the hotel’s practice to log local outgoing calls. In order to verify Paige’s statement, they’d had to arrange for the telephone company log. “Just enough time to plan to meet,” Justin pointed out, speaking up for the first time since introductions had been made.

  Brennan’s chair groaned in protest as he lifted his feet from the desktop and straightened, his attention shifting from Allan to Justin. “So this Ms. Conroy, she’s the last person to see St. John alive?”

  “Not exactly,” Justin replied bluntly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Paige Conroy didn’t walk into that hotel room until four hours after the telephone call. By then, Detective, your partner was dead.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. What time did he place the call?”

  Justin shuffled through his notes even though he knew the few facts of the case by memory. “Three-fifty a.m.”

  “So for whatever reason, St. John felt it important enough to wake her, but not important enough for her to meet with him right away?”

  “I wondered about the same thing,” Justin replied. “She stated your partner claimed it was urgent he speak with her. So why didn’t they meet right then? Why did St. John apparently go to bed after placing the call?”

  “What did he have to tell her? What was he doing in San Diego?” Brennan asked.

  Allan quirked an eyebrow. “We hoped that you could tell us the reason behind his trip.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “None?” Justin asked with derision. “You were partners for the past two years.”

  In the first show of emotion since his arrival, anger flared briefly in Brennan’s eyes. His jaw clenched tight enough to bring out the white line of a faded scar along his left temple. “Leroy didn’t talk much.”

  “Great.” Allan’s frustration rose to match Justin’s. “Just wonderful. Let me just vocalize what I’m certain my partner would like to know as much as I would. What exactly are you doing here?”

  “Making certain you two give this case the attention it deserves.”

  “You arrogant, little sonofa—”

  “Justin,” Allan warned.

  “If you’re so worried about our handling of this case, where have you been for the last three days? What kept you from arriving on Tuesday as planned?”

  Brennan shrugged negligently. “Something came up.”

  “Something came up? That’s rich, really.” Justin rubbed at the tight muscles in the back of his neck as he pondered the man before him. Jon Brennan was arrogant, condescending and a tad too dispassionate when it came to the murder of his partner.

  “Here,” Justin stated as he made up his mind. He dug one of the larger files from the pile on his desk and dropped it before Brennan. “Let me introduce you to your partner. Leroy St. John, age thirty-three. Graduated from the academy at twenty, top in his class, moved through the ranks quickly, made detective in record time. Worked robbery for a while but switched to narcotics when his sister’s kid OD’d on bad smack at the ripe old age of ten.”

  With a flick of his wrist, the file flipped open and a few years’ younger version of Detective St. John beamed up at his partner. “He was a good cop, dedicated, made an impressive number of arrests.” All morning the sensation that he was missing something ate at Justin. It flared to life again. “None of this means squat right now because what I need to know, you should be telling me. What was the man like, on and off duty? Did he make friendships that lasted a lifetime? Was he careless, did he make a habit of sticking his neck out? Did he do that here, in my city, right before he had his head taken off?”

  Justin placed his elbows on the desk and leaned in. “Or was he the type of man who took his time, muddled through, working out all the details before he made his move? ‘Cause I gotta think he’s the latter. Otherwise, he just left Ms. Conroy swinging in the breeze. And if I’m right, we’re missing something here. If I’m right, St. John spent the time between his one call and our witness’s arrival, getting his ducks in a row. Are you following me, Detective Brennan?”

  Jon Brennan surged to his feet. The raw scrape of his chair across the floor echoed throughout the room. “Don’t talk to me as if I’m ignorant.”

  “Don’t walk into my precinct and insinuate I don’t know how to do my job.”

  Ever the mediator, Allan piped in. “Boys.”

  Brennan’s hands clenched into fists. He stared down at the file for a moment then said through his teeth. “You’ve got one problem, Sergeant.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “From what I’ve heard so far, you didn’t find any so-called ducks in that hotel room. You didn’t find jack shit.”

  True enough. Justin moved his pinching shoulder holster to a more comfortable position. He didn’t have time for this. Not the constant delays that meant he was losing ground on the St. John homicide fast, or his growing dislike of the victim’s partner. His patience had run out within five minutes of meeting the man, but anger wasn’t going to solve their problems. He needed to keep a level head. “Let’s go back to the beginning on this, shall we? What have you brought us that we can use?”

  Hands digging into the top of the chair he’d vacated, Brennan stood motionless as his gaze swept the squad room before him. After a moment, he shifted the angle of the chair and sat. “Upon receiving notification of Leroy’s death, I went
to his apartment. It had been tossed and not very professionally.”

  “Any prints?” Allan asked.

  “Hundreds. We’re still sorting through all of them. It’ll take a while. He wasn’t exactly a tidy housekeeper.”

  “Do you know if there was anything missing?” Justin questioned.

  “Hard to tell.”

  Hard to tell because of the mess, or because Brennan hadn’t taken the time to get to know the one man he should have known best?

  Justin shifted his gaze to his partner. After ten years of working side by side with Allan, he knew his partner’s furrowed brow meant he was thinking, turning Brennan’s answer over in his mind. For most people that expression meant confusion. For Allan, it meant contemplation. Justin knew this because partners, no matter how short a time together, grew tight. They learned each other’s ins and outs, their strengths and weaknesses. They learned each other’s quirks. That’s what happened when you spent hours together on the job, relying on each other to cover your back no matter the situation.

  And with that bond came communication. Partners talked about everything. They learned things about each other, the most personal things. Right now, if anyone asked, Justin could tell them what Allan and his wife, Suzanne, planned to name their baby, even though the decision had only been made the previous evening—Jessica for a girl, Andrew, a boy.

  Leroy didn’t talk much.

  Partners communicate. They share a bond not unlike marriage. They know things about one another no one else could. It didn’t make sense that St. John and Brennan’s partnership would be so much different.

  Justin rubbed at eyes that felt like they were filled with sand. He considered Allan’s opinion, voiced just that morning that he was taking this case far too personally. He knew the dangers of taking a case home with him, spending even his off time turning it around in his mind. But some cases chased you like a rabid dog and bled over into your personal life. For him, this case was that one.

  What about for Detective St. John? Did he have a case like that?

  “Did you find any files?” Justin asked. “Any notes or paperwork?”

  “About what?”

  “The Preston homicide.”

  Brennan’s brow wrinkled. Justin could all but smell his skepticism. “You think Leroy’s death is linked to his obsession with Preston’s murder?”

  “The only case St. John was actively investigating that had any link to San Diego was Preston’s murder,” Allan supplied.

  “Which you should know. You were his partner, after all.”

  Brennan ignored Justin’s barb. “If he had any new information on Preston’s murder, Leroy didn’t share it with me.”

  “Apparently he chose not to share this information with anyone,” Allan replied dryly.

  “What about at his apartment? Did you find any files?” Justin reiterated.

  “His home computer had been wiped clean. We found nothing there.” As if he’d only just recalled possessing the item, Brennan reached into the case at his side and withdrew an oversized manila envelope. “I did recover something of interest from a locked drawer of his desk.” He passed the item to Justin. “A curiosity, really. Not much there to necessitate a lock.”

  Justin opened the envelope carefully and dumped the contents across the top of his desk. He separated the papers and lined everything up in no particular order. “Curious.”

  “What have you got?” Allan shifted to the front edge of his chair and took the photograph Justin passed him. An identical photograph to the one found in St. John’s hotel room. “Curious indeed. What else?”

  “One key chain: a silver bullet, no keys. A newspaper article regarding a drug bust. A transcript of Paige Conroy’s interview after Preston’s murder, complete with notes in the margins. Copy of Preston’s autopsy report, a photo of two grown men dressed head-to-toe for Halloween. The one on the right looks like Preston, the other could be St. John.” Justin held the shot up for his partner to see.

  “Superman and The Lone Ranger?”

  Justin shrugged. “Who knows.” He picked up the final item. “And a wedding invitation,” he began to read. “Mr. And Mrs. Joseph Martin Conroy request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter Paige Louise to Detective Rick Preston…”

  “Detective? The man’s rank is on his wedding invitation?” Allan shook his head. “Was she marrying the man or the job?”

  “The man was the job,” Justin replied laconically. It seemed he and Preston had a lot more in common than just Paige Conroy.

  Why did that leave an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach?

  “You’re right, Detective,” Allan leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. He stretched from side to side. “I don’t see anything here important enough to require it be kept under lock and key.”

  “There’s a reason. You don’t just lock up a bag of trinkets for no reason.” Justin shifted the items around once more, as if seeing them in a different order would help them tell their story.

  “You do if your name is Leroy St. John,” Brennan replied dryly. “The man didn’t always make sense.”

  “Perhaps he did, but only to those select few that knew him best.”

  “Speaking of which.” Allan tipped his head toward a spot behind Justin’s shoulder. “Justin, it appears you have a visitor.”

  “I’ll take that as my signal to go stretch my legs.” Brennan nearly tipped his chair over backwards as he stood. A grin split his face as he caught it. “See, too many hours on a plane has made me clumsy.”

  Justin swiveled his chair to follow Brennan’s retreat. He opened his mouth, prepared to offer a rather non-complimentary opinion of the departing detective, when he caught sight of his visitor.

  Paige. The cool professional was back. Hair piled atop her head, donning a suit and a pair of dark sunglasses, she stood just inside the archway, a leather computer case clutched in her left hand. Until that moment, Justin had managed to keep thoughts of her to a minimum. Just that quickly, the memory of holding her in his arms slammed into his brain—the warmth of her body against his, the taste of her lips. Desire shot through his system with the force of a mule kick. His pulse jumped into high gear, his gut tied into knots.

  The calm control she exuded as she turned and started in his direction came as a surprise after her attack of anxiety during her last visit. She walked with the grace of a high-fashion model. Tall and elegant, she crossed toward him and his partner.

  “You seeing her outside the capacity of this investigation?” In a way only Allan could, he kept his inquisition both casual and cautionary.

  Several pairs of male eyes tracked her progress with keen interest until her destination registered and they met with Justin’s icy stare. “She doesn’t date cops.”

  “Do you blame her?”

  They both rose as Paige neared. “Hell no.”

  “Why do I get the impression you won’t let it go at that?”

  Justin threw one last narrowed-eyed glance at his partner before she stepped before them. He faced her, unable to judge her intent through the dark lenses.

  “It’s good to see you again, Ms. Conroy,” Allan stated politely. “How are you?”

  “I have a bit of a headache, actually.” She tipped her face in Justin’s direction. “I need to talk to you, do you have a minute?”