by Jenna Rae
“Yes, sir, I do.”
With the lovefest over, she spent fifteen minutes on the fourth floor getting messy, affable Dr. Benjamin Hill to sign off on her leave, after he extracted from her a promise to see him once a week. She rode the elevator down to earth with a patient, humble expression painted on her face. Eager though she was to get started, it wouldn’t do to look like a kid let out of school on the video cameras.
After a quick escape from the lobby, she bounded outside to find Tori standing on the front steps, tapping a patent leather Jimmy Choo. Brenda paused, wishing she could just once see her ex and not lose her breath.
“Hey, slow down,” Tori demanded. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“You know exactly what I’m doing. Donnelly didn’t just conveniently off himself. He was murdered, and whoever killed him is also at least partly responsible for Sheraton’s death. I’m going to solve Donnelly’s murder. And if you had a shred of decency, you’d be helping me.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Bren. For one thing, I am helping you, more than you know.”
She kept going as though she hadn’t heard, and Tori followed her, her stiletto heels assaulting the concrete with each step.
“Walton might’ve fallen for that helpless-female routine, but it was bullshit. You know it and I know it. By the way, he’s not as stupid as you think.”
“You’re the one who showed me the ends justify the means,” Brenda retorted over her shoulder. “So you can climb off your high horse.”
Tori’s smacking pace faltered for a second or so before Brenda heard Tori’s breath at her back.
“Brenda, wait! I’m not blaming you for playing Walton, or letting him let you think you did. Get over yourself. You’re not exactly la femme fatale, my brogan-wearing darling, whatever you may think. But you’re being an idiot. What do you expect to accomplish? You think you’re going to investigate the department from the outside? If you think I’m going to stand by while you commit career suicide—”
“Tori!” Brenda whirled to a stop and stood an inch away from the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. Facing her former lover’s blazing baby blues, she was unbalanced and unable to get enough air. Even now she couldn’t ignore Tori’s perfectly proportioned features, her smooth skin, her flashing eyes, her soft natural scent beneath her light floral perfume. “You forfeited any right to an opinion about my career or my anything six months ago.”
“Fine.” Tori’s composure slipped and she took a step back. She’d touched up her lipstick while Brenda was in with Dr. Hill, and Brenda wondered what that was about: a natural thing to do after lunch, or a calculated attempt to soften her? Either way, it was working.
Staring at Tori’s lush, full lips, Brenda could picture herself kissing them until Tori made the tiny moaning sound that meant she wanted more than a few kisses. It had been months, but she still thought of Tori as hers, still thought of Tori’s mouth as the mouth of her lover, and Tori’s eyes as the eyes of her darling.
She took a deliberate step away. Tori never did anything without careful consideration. She’d put on the lipstick for a reason. The perfectly flattering shade of Coral Dawn made her seem naturally pretty and not carefully made up. It was all a show.
Tori’s gaze hardened. “Fine,” she repeated. “Ruin your career. But don’t drag me down with you.”
“Of course,” she hissed. “All you ever think about is yourself.”
She fled to her car and veered wildly out of the parking garage. She spent the drive home working not to call Tori and rage at her. She pulled into the driveway and was blinded by the reflection of the afternoon sun off the living room window.
She remembered then and was wrenched by pain. Her hands shook, rattling her keys. It had been bright like this the last day she got home early. It had been autumn but had felt like summer then.
She’d been surprised to see Tori’s red Mustang in the driveway. There’d been another car, a white Lexus, parked in front of the house. The Silvermans across the street had just acquired a new son-in-law from San Diego, and Brenda had assumed it was his. She’d noted the plate number out of habit, but she hadn’t been alarmed.
She hadn’t considered the possibility that the owner of the luxury vehicle was in her house. Why would she? It was a weekday. Tori was at work. Everyone they knew was at work.
Brenda knew there wasn’t a vehicle parked in front of her house now, but she swiveled her head to look anyway. She turned back to face the house before she stalked to the front door, jammed the key in the lock with unnecessary force and shoved her way inside.
Standing in the entry in the same bright afternoon light, she was raw. Was it now, she wondered for a lost moment, or seven months ago? She was falling down a hole in time and felt helpless to stop her descent into the past.
Tori was supposed to have been at a meeting until seven, and Brenda had decided to go home early and make a romantic dinner. She felt the remembered surge of excited anticipation. She scrambled to finish her paperwork, went by the marina to check on a surprise for Tori’s upcoming birthday, then stopped to buy flowers and steaks and petit fours, Tori’s favorites. She raced home, delighted to see Tori’s car. She thought maybe she and Tori had the same idea.
She snuck in, set the groceries on the kitchen counter and strode to the bedroom, planning to surprise Tori. They’d been drifting apart, spending less and less time together. She’d forgotten their anniversary just weeks earlier, and Tori had complained about her lack of romantic overtures. For whatever reason, that day, the one day she should have just stayed at work as usual, Brenda had an impulse to offer Tori some of the romance she’d been missing.
Now, seven months later, Brenda could still smell the mingled perfumes and see the tangled limbs and Tori’s stricken face and the languid smile of the woman—a stranger with short, bed-mussed blond hair—as Brenda interrupted their lovemaking.
Now, in the silence of the empty house, she staggered to the master bedroom and saw nothing and no one. Still, she felt seasick. She shook her head, backed away from the bedroom and gulped for air.
Kicking off her shoes, she sank into the beautiful couch Tori had chosen. She curled up, knees in front of her, and sobbed into her clawed hands. How could it still hurt so much after all these months? How could something as simple as coming home at the same time of day pull her back so completely?
She could smell the flowers she’d brought home, could feel her left hand, cold from holding the package of steaks. Brenda hiccupped and swallowed, fighting her tearful self-indulgence until she could breathe.
“This is ridiculous,” she scolded herself when she could talk again. “Forget your stupid, adolescent, poor-me crap. She cheated. People cheat. Happens all the time. Get over it.”
She pushed herself off the couch, made coffee and washed the ruined makeup off her stinging eyes. Enough was enough. She hadn’t taken the trouble to walk away from her job so she could sit around nursing a broken heart.
She’d put her career on the line so she could make things right. What if she found out someone she knew was involved in Donnelly’s scheme? She shook off the thought. She’d figure out who had done what and then decide what to do about it.
She would work the case like the murders she’d solved back when she’d been what she privately thought of as a real police officer, before she’d gotten the promotion to captain and become a project manager and babysitter. It was time to get back to being an investigator again.
Before meeting with her lieutenants and then heading to Walton’s office, she had made copies of the relevant files. Now she sat at the dining room table and went over each recorded detail with painstaking care, hoping she’d come across some random bit of information or evidence that had been overlooked thus far.
She set her badge down in front of her and again examined its seven-pointed star. She took seriously the vow to safeguard the people around her, and she wasn’t about to give that up now. The briar
rose represented the promise she’d made to safeguard the city’s most vulnerable and most essential resource, her citizens.
Bono malum superate.
The words were more than a slogan. They were a creed. She would do everything in her power to overcome evil with good.
She pushed the badge to the side to focus on the work ahead. Starting a fresh, spiral-bound and sunny yellow notebook, she developed and wrote out dozens of theories, feeling after a while that none of these were based on anything meaningful. This strategy usually helped her home in on the most likely scenarios. This time, however, nothing came together.
At eight thirty that night she answered Andi’s phone call with a guilty start.
“A leave of absence? Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You already heard?”
“Oh, sugar.” Andi laughed, a dry, raspy sound Brenda loved. “You know my place is the gossip center of this town. You should have told me. I shouldn’t have heard from strangers.”
“I’m sorry, Andi. You’re right. I’m not really falling apart. I just want to look into Donnelly’s death. I want to know who else was involved.”
“Duh, I get that. But you should have told me.”
“You’re right.” She grimaced. “I’m really sorry. I guess I got a little caught up.”
“No kidding, Bren. What else is new? Listen, I get it—you don’t like a dirty cop in your house, especially one who murders sweet young kids with damp ears.” Andi huffed loudly. “But, honey, you get to the point of obsession. Especially when you feel like you’re all that stands between Briarwood and Satan. I don’t want to see you tear up your life again. When can I see you? I wanna make sure you stay level.”
“No, I know.”
Funny, she thought, Walton just brought up that old case too. The traffickers operated out of a house dubbed “Satan’s Lair” by local rag The Briarwood Sentinel. Brenda and her partner Darius Brown had grown obsessed with shutting down at least one tentacle of that monster. They had sat in Dave and Michael’s living room night after night for weeks, staring across the street at the plain ranch home that housed the monsters and their young victims.
As if reading Brenda’s mind, Andi asked, “Do you ever hear from Darius?”
“Once in a while. He came down to see his uncle last summer, and we hung out.”
“Don’t turn this into another crusade.”
“I won’t. This isn’t like that.”
“Isn’t it? Innocent gets slaughtered, cop obsesses over making things right? That sounds awfully familiar to me.”
“That was different. Those were little kids. Sheraton was young but she wasn’t a child. She should have—ah, well.” She made a face at herself. “You’re right. Listen, I’m pretty wide-open right now. You’re the busy lady. When are you available?”
There was a loud exhalation, and Brenda waited while Andi sorted through her various schedules. Her café was not only the busiest bakery and coffeeshop in town, but one of the primary venues for local bands, artists, poets, and writers. Opening her doors to the offbeat and the unknown made Andi’s business a mainstay of the creative community. It also made her café a twenty-hour-a-day project.
“I don’t know. I’ll get back to you on that tomorrow. Listen,” Andi muttered in a gruff tone that made Brenda swallow hard, “don’t be an idiot, okay? If someone out there killed the guy who killed Tami Sheraton, he’s dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Hey, now.” Brenda grimaced, hearing what Andi wasn’t saying about having already lost her wife. “After twenty years, you’re not getting rid of me that easy.”
“Has it really been? God, we’re old.” Andi gave a wheezy laugh. “Well, you are anyway. You were so damn young. I still see you, wearing a buzz cut and acid-washed jeans. All I could think was, ‘So much ugly on such a pretty girl.’”
“The jeans or the buzz cut?”
“Both.”
Brenda smirked. “Before you get too high and mighty, please recall you were still wearing harem pants and a high-top fade. Or don’t you remember?”
“I wish I didn’t. Lauren always said—” Saying the name of her late wife seemed to take the breath from Andi.
Brenda bit her lip. After three years, she still didn’t know what to say to console her best friend. Lauren only lived for two months after her cancer diagnosis, and she spent her brief, precious last weeks ravaged both by the evil disease and by the toxic treatments designed to slow its progress.
Brenda had done what little she could to help. She’d brought food and picked up prescriptions and cleaned their house and managed visitors. She’d held Andi’s hand. She’d hugged and rocked and consoled her. She’d called Lauren’s parents and begged them to come first to visit and later for the funeral, and she’d kept secret from Andi their refusal to do either.
She’d also convinced Andi to go back to the café after only a few weeks, knowing her connections to the community were the only lifelines Andi could grasp. Since losing Lauren, Andi had thrown herself even more fervently into the role of savior for one lost soul after another, and Brenda could only hope at some point her friend would be able to slow down and stop running from her grief.
Andi cleared her throat. “Anyway, it’s not our fault we came up in the eighties, is it? We can be forgiven for our fashion choices. What can’t be forgiven is it’s all coming back. Kris, the new cashier, is wearing neon green one day, fluorescent orange the next. Looks like a highlighter. Good kid, though. Sweet. Not like you. You were a pain in the ass and you still are.”
She swallowed tears. “I was so happy to meet you. I couldn’t believe I’d found another dyke in such a hick town. You and Lauren—I thought I’d be all alone out here in the boonies.”
“Well, it’s not the boonies anymore, for better or worse. Listen, I gotta set up tomorrow’s dough. Love ya, Bren.”
“Love you too.”
After a grim, sleepless night of thinking and note-taking, Brenda stretched her stiff muscles and made a fresh pot of coffee. She took a quick shower and spent Tuesday morning theorizing and eliminating options. Unfortunately, after several hours, she had come up with a plethora of theories and a dearth of clarity. She’d given herself two weeks, and a whole day was already gone.
Every crime had a true narrative, and usually she could sift through the evidence and eliminate most of the options to isolate the most likely scenarios. In this case, there was very little of which she could be sure.
She ended up leaving at the last possible minute to meet Jonas Peterson at his favorite pub for their prearranged lunch. She sped past police headquarters, where she would’ve been had she been on the clock.
The top floors were reserved for the mayor, various city managers and department brass, while its ground floor housed city council meetings and events like Friday night’s hearing. The undistinguished second floor housed the South Central Station that had, until the day before, been her dominion.
South of the city building by just enough to be slightly seedy, sat The Hole, a cop bar opened decades earlier by a trio of beat cops and purchased six years back by a retired detective named Richie Simpson.
She had only worked with Simpson for a few weeks on a case some years back and remembered him as reasonably intelligent but lazy, willing to cut corners and ride his assumptions rather than examine evidence with rigorous attention to detail.
They had not been good partners, not least because old-fashioned Simpson had been convinced Brenda’s job responsibilities included providing him with both secretarial support and sexual favors. It had taken a sharp elbow to his solar plexus to clarify her position on the latter and a convincing show of clerical incompetence to avoid the former.
After regaining his breath and stammering out a reluctant, insincere apology, he had treated her with grudging respect that only occasionally sagged into pouting petulance. Now that he was finally on the other side of the golden handshake, he play
ed magnanimous lord of the manor in his rundown bar and sulked whenever he saw Brenda.
She was only willing to tolerate Simpson’s sullen attitude and the pub’s cocktail of testosterone-laced bravado and despair out of affection for Peterson. Her former partner was seated at the long, pitted counter to the right of the door when she came in. Judging by his reddened eyes and sallow skin, he had been there more than a few minutes. She slid onto the green vinyl stool next to his, sipping the still-cold beer he’d ordered for her. His bottle was half-empty and stood in a nest of empty highball glasses. She pretended to ignore the evidence of a morning spent drinking, but she examined her old partner closely.
Peterson wore his customary white shirt, navy trousers, black loafers and red tie, but his shoes were dull and his shirt rumpled. She noted with dismay his shaking hands and bloodshot eyes. She summoned a teasing tone and a sardonic smile, pointing at the evidence of his heavy alcohol consumption.
“Breakfast of champ—”
“Shut it,” he snapped.
“Whoa, what the hell?”
He took off his trifocals and rubbed his overgrown eyebrows. He shook his head and gave her a baleful sideways look. “You’re an idiot, Borelli.”
“So you’ve said.” She eyed Peterson speculatively. “Any particular idiocy you’re focused on today?”
“Are the rumors true? You’re taking compassionate leave? You’re a girl and you might cry, so the department should give you paid time off?”
He gestured at The Hole’s owner and bartender, Simpson, who stared meaningfully at Brenda before sliding over what looked to be Peterson’s sixth scotch.
“The gossips didn’t waste any time, huh? It’s only so I can work Sheraton’s murder, obviously. You need me to connect any other dots?”
He grunted and looked away.
“How are you, partner? You’re looking a little rough around the edges.” She adopted an amused expression, shaking her head at his pique, hoping she hid her concern over his disheveled appearance and surly manner. The last thing he would want was some kind of intervention.
