The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set

by Danielle Girard

  “I caught one. At the Hall. Know what’s going on?” Bruce was Internal Affairs. If something was going on at the station, chances were he’d have heard.

  “No idea.” He paused. “Any chance for tonight?”

  Guilt. “I don’t think so.”

  Silence. Disappointment.

  “I wish it could be different,” she said. It was true, but she wasn’t sure how.

  “It could be,” he countered.

  “Bruce.”

  “I always know I’m in trouble when you use my given name. Like my mother.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Got to tell it like it is. Call me when you get in.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

  When they were apart for too long, he grew sullen, cool. It made him seem like another person to take care of. She tried to explain it to him once, that she couldn’t take care of another person. She’d fallen for him because he was strong, unwavering, but he wasn’t. No one was, really. Some people looked that way from first glance. What she’d seen was honesty, and she appreciated it. Still. Adored him for his unwillingness to pretend that things were fine the way they were, but it made the relationship complicated. Too complicated.

  Under a blanket of gray clouds and a shroud of guilt, Hailey crossed the bridge. Always guilty. For John. For Bruce. For Camilla and Ali. For everyone except herself. She had it all. If only there was a way to make it work.

  But there wasn’t.

  She knew there wasn’t.

  *

  Hailey exited the freeway at Civic Center. When she reached the street entrance to the police parking lot, it was cordoned off with bright yellow crime scene tape. She pulled perpendicular to the tape, put the car in park and scanned the faces. Dozens of them.

  Most from the department.

  Her stomach clenched. Christ. A murdered cop. There were too many people for anything else.

  The district police captain was there. Captain Linda James stood with a younger woman Hailey didn’t recognize. The other woman was thin and tan with long legs. A model from a Land’s End catalog.

  Linda waved. Hailey made a mental list of the people. A half dozen people from the crime lab were already at work.

  Beyond them, Jamie Vail stood alone, smoking. Several discarded butts littered the asphalt around her feet. Rail thin as ever, the cropped cut of Jamie’s hair that had once seemed manicured now looked shaggy. Her hair had fewer highlights, and the cheeks Hailey once remembered as being covered with golden freckles were sallow.

  Jamie stood ramrod straight, the veins in her neck taut, one leg behind the other like a runner ready to take off. Jamie’s presence was rare at a homicide scene. Occasionally, if the victim was sexually assaulted. Once it was a murder, the sexual assault was no longer relevant. Homicide trumped rape.

  Hailey scanned the other faces. Was it possible the victim was someone Jamie was close with? But who would that be?

  Linda James approached as Hailey stepped from her car, the younger woman behind her.

  “Who was it?” Hailey asked, looking over at the two uniformed officers who guarded the car.

  “Natasha Devlin.”

  Hailey saw Natasha’s flirty expressions, the hair flip. Felt a stab of guilt for wanting to tell her off the night before. One of their own. Damn it.

  Natasha had a way of riling people up, but murder…

  Tim and Natasha fought at the banquet. Tim had been furious.

  Hailey had seen Natasha make a lot of men angry and more than a few women too.

  Her gaze traveled to Jamie Vail.

  Linda nodded. “She showed up less than an hour ago. I told her.”

  Hailey looked back. “Surprised?”

  “I think so, but I wouldn’t put money on it,” Linda said.

  Jamie Vail had a reputation as a loose cannon in the department.

  Some rumors suggested she was dangerous to those around her.

  Some of the higher-ups agreed.

  But Jamie’s captain, Ben Jules, was a fierce defender. Jules was no pushover and Jamie was no kiss-ass.

  Hailey knew that no matter what anyone thought, Jamie was as dedicated a professional as they came. And she was damn good at her job. If she wasn’t, she never would have lasted after the shooting incident.

  And Jules wasn’t alone. Anyone who had seen Jamie with her victims knew she was as good as they came. That didn’t always mean stable and easy.

  The history between Natasha and Jamie would dictate that they clear her first. The break of her marriage to Tim was old news. Maybe. God, she hoped Jamie had nothing to do with Natasha’s death, but everyone would have questions. Hailey’s job was to nip them in the bud.

  Linda James stepped aside and motioned the other woman forward. “This is Mackenzie Wallace. She found Natasha. She’s one of mine—a rookie—came to get an evidence file from upstairs.”

  Mackenzie said nothing. She had long, straight, brown hair that hung in a clean line across her shoulders and a shorter line of bangs that covered the tops of arched brows. Her eyes were a dark brown with flecks of gold. They appeared large against her olive skin.

  Despite her height, she looked young to Hailey, especially her eyes. Like a child taking in all new sights, most of them terrifying. Hailey wondered if it was because of the body she’d found, or if Mackenzie Wallace always looked a bit overwhelmed by the world around her.

  Hailey flipped open her notebook. “What time did you find her?”

  “Just before three a.m. Maybe two fifty-five.”

  “And no one’s been out before me?”

  “There was someone else,” Mackenzie said. “A tall man with blondish gray hair. Nice-looking.”

  Hailey searched for a match in Homicide but failed. “In uniform?”

  She shook her head. “Suit.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Made a few calls on a cell phone and then when the crime scene team came, he left. I never talked to him.” She glanced at Linda James. “I tried to, but he sort of waved me off.”

  Hailey couldn’t make anything of it. She focused back on the crowd. “Can you hang around a bit? I want to hear more, but I need to check in.”

  “Sure,” Mackenzie said.

  “I’ve already gotten a call from the chief on this,” Linda said. “It’s going to be ugly. Everyone knew her—she was popular.”

  Linda’s lips thinned into a straight line at the word “popular.” Hailey guessed that was the chief’s choice of words to describe Natasha and not hers.

  Hailey thought about Natasha.

  They’d been friends once—sort of. They’d joined the department around the same time. Not in the same academy class, but close. Back then, there weren’t many women. Hardly any, actually.

  Hailey had found a group of women she liked, and tried to get Natasha to hang with them.

  Natasha had mostly passed. Said she preferred male company.

  Rumor was, Natasha had had plenty of it—from the seniors in the department all the way down to the newly initiated rookies. Married, divorced, single, it hadn’t much mattered.

  And she’d pretty much gotten away with it.

  Even when she’d been caught in bed with Jamie Vail’s husband and Jamie had unloaded her weapon, Natasha had emerged unscathed.

  At least, until now.

  Hailey wasn’t one to pass judgment. Life was complicated. People too. What they wanted or needed, and why, was up to the individual to sort out. The problem with Natasha’s lifestyle was that it made for a long list of suspects in her murder.

  If the rumors were to be believed, Natasha had split up more marriages than Jamie Vail’s and those that had survived her weren’t always the best for the experience.

  That meant a lot of people with a grudge against Natasha. Take those old grudges, add a big party, alcohol and Natasha flitting about, and someone might have decided that enough was enough.

  Hailey ducked under the yellow tape and studied the car where Natasha had b
een found. She pulled on a pair of small, purple latex gloves and pulled the car door open. Blood on the passenger side seat and headrest. Natasha had been there. A small, plastic vase was stuck to the dash. In it, a single, fabric, red rose. In the middle console were several lipsticks, a Bluetooth earpiece, and a tin of Altoid mints. Nothing incriminating. Hailey stepped away to let a crime scene tech finish documenting the inside of the car.

  Hailey found Sydney Blanchard, senior criminalist with CSU, and waited while she gave directions to a man holding a small handheld vacuum used for sucking up hair and fibers from the scene. Tears were streaming down Sydney’s face, short blond curls falling into her eyes. She wiped the hair and tears away with the back of her forearm every few seconds. The man shifted on his feet as though he didn’t know what to do with a crying woman and couldn’t wait to get away. As soon as Sydney nodded at him, he took off.

  She wiped her tears again before addressing Hailey. “Looks like a blow to the head, but the real mess is upstairs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Primary crime scene is her office.”

  “She was killed in her office, then moved?” Hailey asked.

  Sydney bit back a sob, shaking her head. “Not enough blood here for a primary site. She’d stopped pumping blood before she was moved.” She turned away as her sobs shook loose. “I’d say at least ten minutes before, based on the blood quantity, but that’s a guess.” She pointed to the building. “Roger Sampers has a team up there.”

  Hailey touched Sydney’s arm. “You should go home. Someone else can do this.”

  “No.” Sydney almost shouted, shaking her head. “No. I’m not leaving. I need to be here.” Her voice high pitched.

  “If you change your mind…,” Hailey offered.

  “I won’t,” Sydney said quickly. She drew a shaky breath and pointed to the asphalt. “We’ve got some tire tracks. Maybe eight sets of good ones. We’ll cast them.”

  Thousands of cars were in and out of that lot every day. It was unlikely the tire tracks would lead to a single match.

  “Also, we found prints in the car—a lot of them, actually. Some are clean—they might belong to the deceased or to the perp. The rookie touched some stuff. I need hers to rule them out. I’ve got fibers and hairs—it’s a heyday of crap in that car. God, she always made a mess of her car.”

  Natasha had been driving a gold Ford Taurus. “Sydney, it’s a department car.”

  Sydney raised gloved hands. “I know. It’s going to be a nightmare to sort out. Can you get us a list of who’s been driving it?”

  “It’ll be a dozen people in the last two weeks, easy. We’ll need to go back further to rule them all out. These cars don’t get cleaned much.”

  “Go back a month. Most of the good prints will be newer than that. We’ll find as many as we can. You’re the one who’s got to find a suspect to match them.”

  “No prints on the skin, then?” Hailey asked.

  “One very nice index finger.”

  Hailey looked over at the tall, thin rookie. “Hers?”

  “Pretty sure. We’ll check it, of course, but it’s on the neck, right at the jugular.”

  “Checking for a pulse,” Hailey thought out loud. “Anything else?”

  Sydney sat back on her heels. “No.”

  Hailey could see her disappointment. She felt responsible to her friend.

  Hailey did too. Not that Natasha was a friend exactly. But she was a colleague.

  They owed it to her to find out who killed her. “We’ll get him.”

  “God, I hope so.” Wiping her eyes, Sydney returned to the evidence and Hailey pulled one of the uniforms away from the scene. He was on the skinny side, short reddish-brown hair and light eyes that seemed too young to be on the face of a police officer.

  She read his name badge. “Officer Grossen—”

  “Grossenbacher,” he said. “Means ‘big river’ in German.”

  “Okay, Officer Big River, I need you to compile a list of everyone on the scene right now. Get full names, phone numbers, when they arrived, and what they saw. Get your partner to help.”

  He jerked his right hand into the air as if starting to salute. He caught himself, stopped, his face going red as he turned away quickly. She glanced down at his shined boots. Army, she guessed. Law enforcement was a natural succession for people who’d served in the armed services. Always took a while to get the military out.

  Hailey scanned the crowd until she found who she wanted. Get the worst over first. As Hailey crossed toward her, Jamie fumbled with her pack of cigarettes, shaking one loose. Her hands seemed to shake as she lit it. Through the haze of smoke, Hailey smelled a mix of something like lavender and peppermint.

  “I figured you’d want to talk to me,” Jamie explained as a flame flared from her lighter with a hiss. When she opened her mouth, Hailey noticed that her teeth were clean and white. A sign of vanity, Hailey took it for good news. Deeply depressed people often had no regard for hygiene. That Jamie did was good news.

  “Just what you saw.”

  “Nothing,” Jamie responded, blowing smoke over her shoulder, although the wind returned it directly into Hailey’s face. “I got here about quarter to eight. I was stopping through on my way down to the lab building to check on some evidence from the Osbourne assault last night.”

  “What?”

  “Emily Osbourne was attacked and raped in the stairs last night,” Jamie said.

  “Oh, God,” Hailey said. Natasha and Emily. Two in one night. What the hell was going on? She pictured Emily’s face. She was so young. “Is she—”

  “She’ll live,” Jamie said flatly. Shit. “When I got here, I ran into Linda James. She told me.”

  Hailey shook her head. “Where were you last night?”

  “You have a time of death?” Jamie asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Jamie dropped her cigarette, stamped it out and then retrieved her the collection of butts off the pavement and put them in her jacket pocket. “I left the station at about two. I was here for maybe an hour, so maybe it was two-ten or so. We pulled our suspect in after the rape exam. Washington was with me.”

  “You nail him?”

  She shook her head, looked away. “On the way home, I stopped for gas and cigarettes.”

  Hailey was poised to write.

  Jamie shook her head. “I can’t think of it.” She rolled her hand through the air. “The one with the tiger.”

  “Exxon,” Hailey supplied.

  “Exxon. Off the Central San Rafael exit. On Irwin, maybe. I paid cash. Marlboro Lights. Kid behind the counter had red hair, skinny, some tattoo on his forearm. A lizard or something. Oh, and one of those little squares of hair under his lower lip. What do the kids call that?”

  “Soul patch.”

  “Right.” Jamie fiddled with her pack cigarettes like she wanted to light another one. “Stupid-looking thing.”

  The details were good. Any cop knew that details were what made a story believable. Some things would be hearsay, but details like that could be checked. “And before the interview?”

  “I was at the awards thing with you until I got the call on Osbourne. I went straight to the hospital, and from there, to the station. Came back this morning. In between, I was at home.”

  Hailey hesitated. She hated to ask, but there was no way around it. “And at home. You were alone?”

  Jamie paused, pulling out another cigarette, lighting it and taking a deep drag before answering. “Alone,” she said, blowing smoke over her shoulder.

  Something about the way she said it made Hailey hesitate. “You sure, Jamie? If you weren’t alone, it would make it easier. I can be discreet.”

  Jamie inhaled a few, deep drags, then dropped the cigarette to the ground and stamped it out.

  “You were alone,” she prompted again.

  “I’ve got a dog named Barney. Don’t know if he’d be convincing in cross-examination.”

  Hailey
crossed her arms. Sighed. “This isn’t fun for me, either. You think I want to interrogate a friend? But, everyone’s going to be asking the question. You had motive. Big motive. Public motive. I get you out of the mix early, I can find the real killer.”

  Jamie picked up the cigarette butt and put it in her pocket. Then, turning, she faced Hailey for the first time. Jamie was taller than her by a good three inches, and she looked like hell. Dark circles, no makeup. She’d been up most of the night with a rape case, back early. From her appearance, Hailey would have guessed she’d been dragged out of bed a few days ago.

  Jamie paused. When she spoke, her voice was soft and void of humor. “Don’t feel like you have to lie. We’re not friends, Hailey. Feel free to bring me in if you have more questions. Sorry I couldn’t provide a better alibi.” Then she turned and walked away.

  Hailey didn’t watch her. The guilt bobbed to the surface like a buoy released from deep waters. Jamie was right. They weren’t friends, although once upon a time, they had been. In the way that women like Hailey and Jamie made friendships.

  Without the handholding and weeping of other women.

  And without the intimacy too. They didn’t share. Not much. Some not at all.

  The job was heavy enough. Hearing the wounds caused at home, in their private lives, would only make their heavy loads harder to bear.

  After the incident with Jamie’s ex-husband and Natasha, people had dispersed. At first, they took off all at once and rapidly, like a tree full of birds fled at the sound of gunshot. Women who had been her friends left. Many didn’t look back.

  Hailey liked to think that she wasn’t one of those, but she might have been. Less because she blamed Jamie or took Natasha’s side, but more because her own life was quickly growing complicated enough to absorb all her energies.

  Jamie would do well to drop the defensiveness. It made her seem suspicious and, as far as Hailey could tell, going after Jamie was the wrong move.

  At the very least, Jamie didn’t fit the MO.

  Though Natasha was found in her car, the evidence indicated that she had been killed in her office. That meant that the perp had killed Natasha, then moved her. No drag marks around the car meant she’d been lifted. It would take a man’s strength to move Natasha’s body. Plus, not many people would move a dead body—the very act indicated that whoever killed her also cared for her. Maybe the killer was trying to save her; maybe he was going to hide the body.