She felt the stares of the secretaries silently follow her as she walked past them, like moving pairs of eyes in paintings that decorated the halls of a haunted mansion. The walkto the corner definitely seemed a lot longer than it looked, and she was all too happy to be out of direct staring range as she rounded the second corridor and entered another long hallway, this one lined with closed office doors, each adorned with the engraved nameplate of the resident lawyer inside – most of whom, she was realizing, she’d never met, and some of whom she’d never even heard of. Apparently, no one in Major Crimes was particularly social. Not that it was a constant party up on three, but among division prosecutors, office doors always seemed to be open, and attorneys wandered in and out of each other’s claustrophobic offices all day long to ask for advice on a case, bitch about a PD, chat up the weekend, or gulp down a quick shot of café cubano – hot, liquid, Cuban adrenaline – made fresh at three every afternoon by her best friend, Dayanara Vega, the B in Judge Stalder’s division. On Julia’s floor there was a sense of camaraderie in the pasty gray halls. Here, on what was known as ‘The Power Floor’, she just felt shut out from the rest of the world.
Next to the door marked 207, was the nameplate, ‘Charles August Rifkin, Division Chief. The three cups of coffee and bowl of Lucky Charms she’d had for breakfast suddenly began to threaten mutiny, and she prayed her stomach wouldn’t start making any weird noises. Inside, she could hear Chief Rifkin talking in a low voice, his words muffled. She hoped he was on the phone, because an audience was the last thing she needed this morning. She wiped her hands one last time on her skirt and tapped on the door. There was a brief silence before she heard someone say, ‘Come in.’
‘Hi,’ she answered cheerfully as she pushed open the door. The file cart she was trying to negotiate behind her nailed the metal doorframe with a loud thud.
‘Leave that outside,’ commanded another voice from somewhere on the other side of the door. One she immediately thought she recognized.
She nodded with a wince, backed out of the room, and pushed the cart up against the hall wall. She blew out a slow, steady breath before stepping back inside. The door closed softly behind her, but it wasn’t Charley Rifkin who’d shut it, because he was sitting right there in front of her, in a high-back leather chair behind an oversized wooden desk, wearing what looked a lot like a scowl. The door-shutter moved from behind her to one of the two small red leather side chairs positioned in front of the desk and motioned for her to take a seat in the other.
Yes, the day could get worse.
‘Good morning, Julia,’ said the Assistant Division Chief of Major Crimes, Richard ‘Rick’ Bellido, looking cool and reserved in a conservative black Hugo Boss suit, crisp white dress shirt and gray silktie. The gray in the tie accentuated the vibrant silver strands sprinkled throughout his otherwise jet-black, wavy hair, but in a flattering way. She stared at him for what felt like an incredibly long moment, but he didn’t smile. He didn’t nod. He didn’t wink. God, he didn’t even blink. Julia couldn’t help but think that even the most talented psychic would be hard-pressed to guess at that moment that the two of them had slept together for the first time only three short nights ago. Even she was now doubting the memory.
‘I saw you in court today,’ Rifkin began. ‘You like to test old Farley, do you?’ Before she could reply, he turned to Rick and said flatly, ‘She’s going to trial on a domestic with no victim. Lenny had a fit.’
‘Nothing unusual there,’ Rick replied with a shrug as he sat down himself.
‘How long have you been in his division?’ asked the Chief, tapping his hand impatiently against his coffee mug. His wedding ring made a soft, distracting tink, tink, tink against the ceramic.
‘About four months,’ Julia answered. Four months, one week and one day, to be exact. Four months too long, she wanted to say. She sat up straight in her chair and got ready to defend herself, ticking off invisible bullet points in her head. ‘He was going to dismiss—’
Rifkin cut her off. ‘That’s not why you’re here.’
She wasn’t sure if the invisible weight actually moved off of, or onto, her chest. With an almost ceremonious wave of his hand, Rifkin motioned to Rick, and the scowl seemed to deepen. She felt her cheeks go hot and she knew they were probably glowing like Rudolph’s nose – another genetic curse from her mother, this one the result of being half Irish and fair-skinned. Oh God. Please, please, please don’t let this be about the State’s policy on dating in the office …
‘There was a family murdered in Coral Gables over the weekend,’ Rick began. ‘I’m assuming you’ve heard.’
She let out the breath she’d subconsciously been holding, so hard and so fast it sounded like a sigh. ‘Yeah, yeah, of course I’ve heard. It’s been all over the news. A mom and her kids, right?’ The horrible story had taken up the first five minutes of the news last night, and another five this morning, and made today’s front page in both the Miami Herald and the Sun Sentinel. A whole family in ritzy Coral Gables apparently the victim of some psycho intruder. Other than the names of the victims and the fact that it was a homicide scene, she’d noticed that the news didn’t have much to really report, though. The only people offering up long-winded, on-camera opinions were the chatty neighbors – everyone important was being very tight-lipped. The press, meanwhile, was having a field day whipping up fears of a late-night-serial-killer-type madman, cautioning everyone to lock their doors and windows and call police if they notice any strange behavior. In Miami, Julia knew that vague warning was sure to have the 911 lines ringing off the hook.
‘Jennifer Marquette and her three children, Emma, Danny and Sophie, all under the age of seven, murdered in their beds. The little one, Sophie, was only a baby. Just a few weeks old, in fact,’ Rick said, with a shake of his head as he tapped his Montblanc thoughtfully on the top of a yellow legal pad that had appeared on his lap. ‘It’s pretty bad.’
‘Only dad’s alive. He’s over at Ryder Trauma,’ Rifkin remarked.
‘That’s what I heard on the news,’ Julia said. ‘He’s a doctor, right? Is he going to make it?’
Grandma opened the door at that moment. Apparently no one messed with her, because she didn’t even knock first. ‘Ruth Solly’s headed over to court, Charley. She needs those files.’
‘Okay, okay. Let me get with her before she goes,’ Rifkin said, rising, his coffee cup in hand. ‘Excuse me, I’ll be back in a minute.’ He headed out of the office with Grandma teetering close behind, in a pair of black stilettos and a skirt that was shorter than anything Julia could remember her own cookie-baking grandmother ever wearing.
Okay. Now she was confused. Apparently, this little tête-à-tête wasn’t about Judge Farley or her combative attitude or her taking Letray Powers to trial tomorrow morning. She didn’t know the name Marquette and she couldn’t think of any connection she might have with the weekend massacre in Coral Gables, other than maybe one of her 102 defendants was being investigated as a possible suspect. And thank God, as far as she could tell, it wasn’t about the SAO policy on sexual harassment and sleeping with one’s superiors in the office. But five minutes into a conversation was still a long time to go without knowing if she should be floating a few résumés on Monster.com, so she decided to ask the incredibly awkward question that she didn’t want to ask when she figured Grandma and her boss had cleared listening distance. ‘Do you know why I’m here?’ she asked quietly.
Rick nodded. ‘I was the on-call this weekend.’
‘Oh,’ she replied, unsure if his response was being offered as an explanation for why he hadn’t called her since Friday night, or actually an answer to the question. She suddenly remembered the last time they’d been together, his mouth on hers in the shower, his hands on places she shouldn’t have let them go. She felt her cheeks start to grow warm again, and she looked away for a moment, finding a gray spot on the gray carpet to concentrate on. Where in the Gables was it?’ she managed to ask, hoping her voice didn’t betray her thoughts.
‘Off Sorolla, near UM. Oh, I forgot,’ he added with a touch of an amused smile, when she finally did look back up and caught his dark-chocolate eyes watching her, ‘you’re not from around these-here parts.’
It was no use. She lit up like Bozo at a birthday party. Her shower was in Hollywood, a twenty-mile trip north of Miami.
‘Sorolla and Granada, to be exact,’ he continued when she didn’t respond. ‘It’s in the older section of the Gables. A lot of expensive historic homes and mansions. Course nowadays, I don’t think you can touch a trailer in Leisure City for less than six figures, so expensive is a relative term.’
‘Is it going to be your case?’
‘Hell yeah. I was at the scene all day yesterday.’
‘What department’s handling it?’ she asked.
‘John Latarrino’s Metro Homicide. Steve Brill’s working it for the Gables. You know them?’
The Miami-Dade PD used to be the Metro-Dade PD before they renamed both the county and the police department Miami-Dade more than a few years back. But even though the letterhead was different, for many old-timers in law enforcement the name change simply hadn’t stuck. Even though he was only forty-five, with over twenty years in the office as a prosecutor, Richard Bellido was definitely an old-timer.
Julia shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she answered. Of course she didn’t know them. She suddenly felt very young and very out of her league in the conversation, and not just because of her age. Senior trial attorneys and DCs knew all of the homicide cops in each department by name, because they worked with them all the time. It was a pretty small, macabre sort of clique. And given the hard, emotionally draining nature of the cases they worked, she knew that for many prosecutors and homicide cops working relationships oftentimes developed into tight, personal friendships that existed outside the office and after the clock struck five, at happy hours and family barbecues and kids’ weddings. Julia didn’t have any of those kinds of friendships yet herself. Most of the time she didn’t even recognize the names on the bottom of the arrest form.
‘I’ve worked with Lat before,’ Rick said. ‘He’s good. Brill’s a character, though. You know, the Gables doesn’t get many murders.’
‘They don’t let them in,’ she mused.
‘Very good,’ he said, with another hint of a smile.
‘Why would the Gables need the County’s help?’
‘As I said, they don’t get many murders. In fact, their department doesn’t even have a Homicide Squad, just a Persons. Metro has the experience and the manpower. They also have the lab.’
Strike one, not knowing that Coral Gables lacked an actual homicide detective. She cleared her throat. ‘So, do you know what happened?’
‘We’re still trying to piece it together,’ he replied, glancing over at the door, obviously waiting for his boss to come back in.
‘Are there any suspects?’
Rifkin returned at that moment with a full, steaming cup of coffee, but no Grandma. ‘I see you tried a DUI Manslaughter last month in front of Farley,’ he said to Julia as he slid back behind his desk. ‘Have you handled any other homicides?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘My A, Ellie Roussos, passed that down to me because I did DUI when I was in County.’
‘Misdemeanors?’ Rifkin asked, incredulously.
Julia shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘Yes. That’s what we handled in County Court.’
‘Misdemeanors,’ he said again. ‘What’d your jury come back with?’
‘Guilty as charged.’
‘And what did Farley actually give him?’
She cleared her throat again. ‘Two years and a lecture.’
Rifkin shot Rick a look, leaned back in his chair, and began impatiently tapping away on his coffee mug again.
‘It was the defendant’s first offense,’ she added defensively, because she thought she had to. She suddenly felt very conspicuous, like a bug trapped under the burning rays of a kid’s magnifying glass. Any direction she ran in offered no cover.
The tink tink tinking ticked off the seconds like a sledgehammer and no one said anything. Then, finally, just as she had begun to think maybe she should have another lawyer in the room with her, Rick leaned in closer, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him, like a coach about to call a play. ‘To answer your question from before, Julia,’ he began in a low, excited voice, ‘we do have a suspect in the Gables killings.’
‘In fact, I just got the call from Joe Marchionne over at Metro. Our suspect’s out of surgery,’ Rifkin added with a snort. ‘Looks like he’s going to make it after all.’
Rick shook his head, but his intense, dark eyes remained locked on Julia’s. ‘That’s why you’ve been asked here this morning, Julia,’ he said after a moment had passed. ‘That’s why I wanted to see you. I want you to help me nail the sick bastard who murdered his wife and kids last Saturday night.’