Lovely, Dark, and Deep

Sometimes things happen for a reason. The optimist in me has always believed that. But now I know that sometimes, things just happen.

I sat and listened to Adam, sipping my Americano. We sat in our usual seats by the window, in just enough of a corner to be out of the way of the bustle of the morning coffee rush. I listened to Adam detail how his video surveillance equipment was responsible for catching a pair of burglars at an electronics warehouse. He was a former cop just like I was, though he still worked for River City PD as a technological guru. In this instance, his tiny hidden cameras caught a pair of employees on tape while they broke into the warehouse to steal a pallet of DVD players.

Adam was in mid-sentence when his eyes drifted right and locked on something over my shoulder. “Oh my,” he whispered, interrupting his own narrative. “Now that is something you don’t see every day.”

I cranked my head around and followed his gaze. All I caught was the tail end of a black SUV pulling away from the curb. “What?”

I turned over my opposite shoulder, looking toward the door. I knew from Adam’s reaction that it was a woman, but I wasn’t prepared for what entered the coffee shop.

She glided through the front door in a burgundy dress. Her deep, inky skin only accentuated the color of the dress. She had a striking figure, all rounded hips and full breasts. She carried herself with an athletic elegance that most women would envy and some would despise.

Adam let out a soft, barely distinguishable whistle below his breath. “Stunning,” he said.

I didn’t reply, too busy looking at her face. Warm features etched on ebony skin, punctuated by dark, intense eyes. The woman swept her gaze across the patrons of the Rocket Bakery, settling on a table across the room. The older man seated there raised his hand to her in greeting. She flashed a smile and made her way to the table.

The two immediately engaged in quiet conversation, leaning forward in their respective chairs. The barista approached the table, but the woman waved her away and continued to talk.

He pursed his lips. “Maybe she works at an office. You know, for a lawyer or something?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “Unless he’s fooling around on a wife who thinks he’s at work.”

I smiled knowingly. River City cops were as bad as cops everywhere about running around on their wives. Those women on the side had all kinds of nicknames and those names varied from city to city. Here in River City, they were called chips. I never figured out exactly where that word came from. I was a cop for four years and never had a chip. But then, I was never married, either.

We returned to our coffee and conversation. Adam gloated a little more about his surveillance success. Then we talked about his family. He asked how I was getting along. But we steered clear of the dangerous subjects between us, those wounds that were still there, scabbed over and not quite healed. He didn’t ask me about Cassie, a recent love of mine that never quite panned out. I didn’t ask after any of the officers on the job that I used to consider brothers. That made it possible for us both to ignore what a pariah I’d become in the police department.

As we spoke, Adam cast frequent glances over my shoulder toward the couple we’d been speculating about. After about five minutes, he interrupted me in mid-sentence.

“I’ll alert the media,” I replied with spare sarcasm, but I looked over my shoulder anyway.

She was on her cell phone, nodding her head while she spoke. He led the way toward a red Cadillac parked across the street. When he reached the car, he opened the door and rooted around inside. She hung back at the rear of the car, no longer talking but with the phone still pressed to her ear.

A black SUV pulled up to the sidewalk on our side of the street. I could barely make out the features of a white male behind the smoky window glass. He looked about thirty-five years old and vaguely familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place. Had I met him? Arrested him years ago? I couldn’t say.

The woman met the younger man at the driver’s window and spoke briefly with him. Meanwhile, the old man retrieved something yellow from the car and stood beside his open passenger door. From this distance, his face was only a fleshy blur with white hair atop it.

I turned around and met Adam’s eyes. “Her pimp?” My voice didn’t carry much conviction.

“White pimp, black prostitute? That’s not a very common combination, even up here in the lily white Northwest.”

“What the hell...?” Adam raised his eyebrows at the events happening over my shoulder.

I turned back again and surveyed the scene. The woman now stood next to the old man and presented him with a gift. The package was the size of a paperback, wrapped with grey paper and adorned with a bow. He accepted the box and a perfunctory hug from her.

She turned then and strode back to the SUV. Sure enough, she clutched the thick yellow envelope to her stomach. When she reached the SUV, she handed it through the window to the driver.

“If she’s a prostitute,” Adam said, “that’s the money in the envelope.”

She sashayed around the front of the SUV and toward the front door of the coffee shop. The swing of her hips spoke of sensual confidence.

I glanced over at the old man’s Cadillac. He’d closed the passenger door and now sat in the driver’s seat. His reverse lights were lit and a thin white trail of exhaust rose from tailpipe.

The door to the coffee shop swung open and in she came. She cast her eyes left and right, spotted her destination and headed in our direction. I followed her gaze and saw where she was heading: the ladies' room.

As she neared our table, her eyes dropped suddenly and caught mine. I felt a small electric charge at the base of my spine. A flurry of butterflies did a few quick flips in my stomach.

Her eyes were a deep, dark brown. I tried to read something in them, something beyond the cold confidence she was showing to the world, but I couldn’t get past whatever barriers were there. I thought I saw a flicker, but then the musky scent of her perfume washed over me and a hint of a coy smile came across her full lips. A moment later, she was past and I was admiring her calves and following her legs up to a sweet roundness.

“Je—sus,” Adam whispered when she had disappeared into the restroom. “That is a gorgeous woman.”

I didn’t answer. She was more than gorgeous. She had a quality that aroused a mysterious combination of primal lust and tender affection.

Adam smiled. “Because you looked like a seventh grader who just saw a high school beauty queen. I could almost hear ‘Dream Weaver’ playing in the background.”

Thoughts of Cassie flared up when he said that, but then I caught sight of motion at the restroom door. She swept out again, striding past our table without a sideways glance. Her perfume filled the air, her passage spreading the scent. The smell evoked a sense of erotic mystery.

I watched her until she disappeared through the doorway. Then I turned back to the old man in the Cadillac. He backed out of angled parking space, pointed his car north and drove away. He turned right and disappeared.

I waited for her to appear on the sidewalk in front of the store, but she never showed up.

“She went south,” I said, more to myself than Adam. “This is the most bizarre hooker and john arrangement I’ve ever seen.”

I turned back toward him and shook my head. “We saw her get the envelope, remember? How many hookers have you ever heard of who don’t get their money up front?”

“He probably drove around the corner and picked her up in the alley,” I said. “Then they go to the motel or wherever and do the deed.”

“Why the alley, though?” Adam asked. “He’s already been seen with her.”

“But not seen leaving with her,” I explained. “If he picks her up around the corner, he has plausible deniability if anyone saw them having coffee.”

Adam raised his eyebrows, accepting the possibility. “Okay. But what was in the present she gave him then?”

“Good,” I said and slid my cup across the table to him. “Serve me another cup of that.”

He rose and carried our cups to the counter, where the bouncy young barista refilled them both.

I sat and wondered for a few moments about what could’ve been in that present she gave the old man. Then I got to thinking about her deep, dark features and found I didn’t really care much about anything else.

Three days later, I sat down at Polly’s Diner for breakfast, opened the paper and almost spit out my coffee.

Councilman commits suicide! the headline raged. Below that was the subtitle, “Reason a mystery, say police.”

I shook my head in surprise and stared at the huge picture of a smiling Councilman Lawrence Tate plastered on the front page. It was obviously an official campaign picture. He wore the requisite blue suit. His hair was cut short and styled conservatively. A slightly blurred American flag was visible in the background.

I knew I had recognized him. I cared about politics about as much as I cared about migration of the Siberian Caribou, so my exposure to local politicians was fleeting. Still, I read the paper a couple of times a week and watched TV occasionally. It was hard not to come across video or pictures of the mayor and sometimes city council members.

The article was long but not very informative. Tate had been discovered by his wife in the garage of their South Hill home. She called medics, who found Tate slumped across the wheel of his black Yukon, dead from probable carbon monoxide poisoning. Medics, of course, called police, who took over the investigation.

According to the article, Lieutenant Crawford of the River City Major Crimes Unit would not disclose which investigators were assigned to the case or what any of the preliminary findings were. However, he was kind enough to confirm that the councilman was indeed dead and that the police were investigating. The journalist that wrote the piece expressed some latent frustration at this, but that was Crawford’s modus operandi and anyone at the police department or the newspaper knew it. He’d been the same way when I was on the job, over ten years ago. He had to be close to retiring, I figured. Then I figured a guy like him would probably never retire.

I couldn’t sniff out any hint of a scandal in the event, other than the act itself. Any time a public figure takes his own life, there is always speculation about why. Was it related to politics? Or was it personal? Either way, the article in the River City Herald didn’t answer my question, even after I skimmed it a second time. I tossed it aside and munched on some toast. My thoughts drifted to the scene at The Rocket earlier in the week. Tate was the driver of the SUV. I was certain of it. That piece of the puzzle only raised more questions than answers.

What was in the envelope? Was it money? Some kind of bribe? Or maybe pictures? Was he being blackmailed? If so, was it by the older man in the Cadillac? Who was he, anyway?

I sipped my coffee, my mind whirring. It’d been over ten years since I’d worn a badge, but I was afflicted with curiosity before I ever came to the job and the disease stuck with me after I left it.

Adam was supposed to meet me for coffee at The Rocket tomorrow morning. Maybe he’d have some inside scoop.

I finished my coffee, dropped a few bills by my plate and rose to leave. My knee groaned and creaked under the pressure, but I was used to it. Hell, I was used to a lot of things.

It wasn’t an uncommon event. His job with the police department was usually a pretty steady gig, but not always. Crime doesn’t keep business hours, so he was sometimes asked to do a rush job on a video tape or put together a surveillance set up at the last minute. That made him late at times and a no show at others. I simply accepted it. He usually explained the next time we had coffee, but I quit asking a while ago. I’ve learned to be more accepting of things.

I sat and read the River City Herald without much interest. The only article that seemed worth reading profiled the local hockey team, the River City Flyers, who were battling for a playoff spot. I’d been to a few games that year. Personally, I didn’t think that they had enough secondary scoring to get past the first round, even if they squeaked in. But hope springs eternal.

One of the baristas, a waif named Ani, drifted over. The morning rush had receded and the traffic in and out of the coffee shop dwindled accordingly. Being a regular brought with it the benefit of occasional conversations with the employees.

I eyed her for a moment. I put her at maybe nineteen. Twenty-two, at most. She was a thin girl who wore low cut jeans with the beginnings of a tattoo peeking up from below. Her t-shirt barely covered her belly button. Whenever she reached up for something, the thin loop piercing flashed silver at the world.

I had a cup full of regular black coffee that morning. Sometimes I went with the Americano, but on mornings where I thought I might need more than one cup, it was safer to go with the drip black. They offered refills on that.

Ani smiled vaguely, picked up my cup and re-filled from the pot she held. She slid the full, steaming cup in front of me. I thanked her.

I shrugged. “It’s no big deal. It’s just the way his job goes sometimes.”

She gave me a slightly confused look. “With the police? That makes it sound like he’s dating the police department or something.”

I smiled a little. “I guess it does. Okay, he works for the police. He’s a techie.”

The door dinged and a couple of customers rolled in, so Ani slipped back behind the counter to take their order.

I turned to my coffee and dove back into the Herald. A few moments later, my reading light was blocked out in shadow. I glanced up and a large black man stood near my table holding a brown paper grocery bag. Even though he stood perfectly still with a flat expression on his face, he was menacing.

I recognized him in an instant. His name was Leon and he worked for a pimp named Rolo. The last time I saw the two of them, I ended up on the wrong side of a beating in the alley behind The Hole, the dive bar that served as Rolo’s home base. Leon and another one of Rolo’s muscle tuned me up in the alley. Then, to add insult to injury, they took my father’s leather bomber jacket off my back and sent me packing. It wasn’t like my Dad and I were close at all, but the goddamn jacket was the only thing I had left of him.

All of this happened in the middle of winter, and I think I would have ended up suffering hypothermia on the walk home if it hadn’t been for the kindness of a security guard downtown. Clell and I became friends after that, and we see each other once a week or so. But I’ve made a point not to run across Rolo or his thugs since that February encounter at The Hole.

I stared up at Leon, taking a moment to decide what to do. If he had wanted to hurt me somehow, he could have caught me by surprise while my head was buried in the newspaper. He hadn’t done that, so I had to think his purpose was a more peaceful one. Or maybe this was a chance encounter. Maybe he was downtown shopping or running an errand for Rolo and just walked in for a cup of coffee.

I thought about offering him the seat across from me, but the truth was I didn’t want him to sit down. I wanted him to leave.

I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s such a great idea. It didn’t work out so great for me last time.”

I wasn’t sure what different meant or why on Earth Rolo would want to see me, but the thought of delivering myself up to him on his home turf at The Hole was about as appealing as chewing glass.

I expected Leon to tell me that Rolo wasn’t asking, he was telling me. I sat there wondering what I could have done to offend him or even attract his attention since our last encounter, but I drew a blank. Leon stood there, unmoving. Did he have orders to grab me up and force me to come if I refused to cooperate?

After that, I started considering what Leon had in the bag, and what caliber it was.

The hiss and spit of an espresso machine filled the air, coupled with the casual conversation of the newly arrived customers. Everyone seemed oblivious to the exchange between Leon and me—meaning there’d be no good witnesses if this turned into a kidnapping, especially if Leon kept it quiet.

I took a sip of my coffee. It was still hot. Not hot enough to be excruciating, but still enough to seriously burn. And distract. If I threw it in Leon’s face, then stood up and hit him before he could –

Leon stepped forward casually and dropped the grocery bag on the empty chair across from me.

“Peace offering,” Leon said. The confusion on my face must have been plain, because Leon shook his head at me slightly. “So’s you don’t worry about your skinny white ass.”

He turned and strode from the Rocket, moving with the athletic ease of a running back despite his bulk. I watched him go until he was out the door and disappeared around a corner.

I looked at the bag again. I hesitated a few moments, but curiosity overcame me. If it was a bomb or a rattlesnake, so be it. I rose from my chair, reached out and grabbed it. As soon as I lifted the bag, I knew what it was, but I peeled open the top and looked inside anyway.

I’d debated what to do for another half hour after Leon left the Rocket, but in the end, I had no choice. Rolo knew where to find me, so if I refused Leon or someone like him would pay me a visit. And I'm sure it wouldn't be as peaceful as our discussion at the Rocket.

Even with the leather jacket as a peace offering, this could be a set up. I doubted that almost as soon as the thought formed. If Rolo wanted to eliminate me, there were better options, and he was too smart not to choose one of them. The cops knew The Hole was his place. He’d waited more than a year since our last meeting, so he couldn’t still see me as a loose end. No, I decided, our meeting had to be about something else.

Despite how sure I was about that, I swung by my apartment first and picked up my .45. The short barreled Smith and Wesson model 457 was a reassuring weight in the small of my back. Last time I was at The Hole, I really wished I’d had it. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of going in there a second time without it.

I pulled up outside the grungy bar in the East Sprague district and parked in the lot. I picked a space closest to the street entrance so it would be harder for someone to block me in without being obvious.

I locked my little Celica, adjusted my belt and canted the grip of my pistol toward the right for an easier draw. I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. The broken asphalt of the parking lot had weeds growing up through the cracks. Behind me, steady traffic slid by on Sprague. I looked up and down the street. Just across the street at a bus stop, a skinny woman in Capri pants and long blond hair stood pretending to wait for the bus. She gave me a querulous look and raised her head slightly. I could see the red sores on her neck from where I stood. I looked away. Several other hookers trolled the street in the distance.

I took a huge breath and let it out. The stench of stale, wet garbage wafted through the parking lot. There were a couple of other cars, both full size four doors. I was pretty sure the owners were looking at fifty in the rearview.

There wasn’t any choice, unless I wanted to leave River City. Rolo wasn’t all-powerful but if he wanted to find me, he could. He’d already proven that with Leon’s visit. And if he wanted to hurt me, he could. He proved that the last time we’d met. So the only way out of this dilemma was through it.

The door squealed on its hinges. The inside of The Hole was darker than the weak daylight outside, and it took a second for my eyes to adjust. Everyone in the place looked at me, but no one turned their heads to do so. The Hole was a place where everyone saw everything but if anyone’s asking, no one ever saw a thing.

I recognized the bartender, a stout white guy with a fading USMC tattoo on his forearm. There were a half dozen patrons scattered around the place, but my eyes went straight to the booth in the corner. Rolo was a big man, almost Leon’s size, though where Leon leaned toward muscular, Rolo leaned toward fat. His beard was tightly trimmed and he wore his hair shaved so short he was almost bald. That was the opposite of what I’d been seeing around town. The shaggy afro style was coming back among young men in River City, black and white, but it didn’t surprise me that Rolo went the opposite direction. He wasn’t one to follow trends, I didn’t figure. Unless they made money, of course.

I walked slowly toward the corner booth. Leon stood nearby. Rolo had spotted me the moment I walked in the place, but he was in conversation with an Asian girl at his side. His tones were quiet and playful and the two broke into conspiratorial giggling as I approached.

Rolo looked up at me. His expression didn’t change much, but he did lean over and whisper in the woman’s ear.

“Sure, baby,” she cooed at him. She kissed his cheek and slid out of the seat. As she headed to the bar, she brushed past me, her breasts grazing my arm. I felt her heat momentarily, then she was gone.

“You’re motherfucking right,” Rolo said. “Right as rain.” He pointed to the empty seat across from him.

I glanced around the bar, then at the bench seat he’d pointed to. Except for Leon, who stood fifteen feet away, I didn’t see any muscle.

“Relax,” Rolo said. “You ain’t got to be worried about shit. This is a business meetin’.” He smiled up at me knowingly. “’Sides, I know you brought yourself a little insurance policy this time around, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I slid into the booth across from him. “What’s this about?”

Rolo raised his finger and waved it at the bartender. A few moments later, the ex-Marine put a cold Molson in front of me. That was the same beer I’d ordered last time I was in the place, over a year ago. Rolo didn’t miss a thing.

I ignored the beer. Rolo and I stared at each other across the table. His expression was calm and unreadable, the face of a man who was both comfortable in his skin and confident of his mastery. I didn’t know what he read in my face, but I hoped it was enough to dissuade a repeat of my last visit.

“First things first,” Rolo said. He swirled the ice in his drink and sipped through the little black straws. “Our business from last time? Way I see it, we even.” He looked at me for confirmation.

Even? The last time I sat with Rolo in this very booth, his goons hauled me into the alley and kicked my ass. Then they took my jacket and sent me staggering away in subzero temperatures. And now we're even?

But I knew that he was right, at least in the way street accounting worked. In his mind, I still owed him at the end of our conversation because I’d tried to deceive him. The beating made us even.

“Good,” Rolo said. He pointed at my jacket and added, “And that’s on me, just to show you we cool.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I settled for “Thanks.” I reached for the bottle, and took a sip of the cold Canadian.

Rolo nodded and scratched his chin. “So now we move into new business, right? And the thing is, everything we gonna talk about got to be confidential. You get me?”

I clenched my jaw at the dig. He knew how most of the cops in this town felt about me. I’d blown an abduction case over a decade ago when I was still on the job. If I’d searched a house per protocol, little Amy Dugger would be about to graduate high school now. She’d be ready to go out into the world and get married and have her own little blond kids. But she was dead, and that was my fault. It’s why I turned in my badge. It’s also probably why I agreed to help Matt Sinderling last year. His daughter, Kris, was just about the age Amy would have been. She’d run away from home and her father wanted me to find her.

I did. But that didn’t work out so well, either. She’d gotten involved in pornography, and to get her out of it, I did some things that landed me in jail for a short time. All of this made me a complete outcast on the RCPD.

I reached under the table and rubbed my aching knee. The wounds I’d suffered in the line of duty before my fall from grace didn’t go too far when judgment day came. Cops don’t forgive.

But Rolo was talking about more than that. Last time we met, I tried to make Rolo think I still had some pull with the local police and that I could do him harm or good depending on how he helped me. That was the reason for the beating, and he was reminding me of it.

“Or,” Rolo added, “just the one that does the computer shit. You know who I mean. The chess player.”

I stared back at him, trying not to show that I was at once impressed and a little intimidated by how much he knew. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. For a man like Rolo, information was power. Even outside of his world, he could probably find ways to get the information he needed.

That surprised me once again. I’m sure it showed on my face. “What?” I asked.

“I said, I want to hire you.” Rolo took another sip of his drink and watched me.

He waved away my protest before I could even finish the sentence. “I don’t give a fuck about any of that. I got a problem I can’t solve. You can help me. You gonna do that?”

I sat there, a little stunned. This entire scene was almost the complete opposite of the last time I’d been in The Hole, looking for information from Rolo. Now he wanted my help?

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was still dry. I reached for the Molson and took a slow drink. Then I said, “What are we talking about?”

I took another sip of the beer, then asked, “How can I know if I agree until I know what you want?”

I considered for another moment, but I knew what my answer had to be. Even if I had to go straight to the police station after this conversation and report everything, I had to go along with him now.

Rolo nodded his approval. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a photograph and dropped it in front of me.

I looked down and was surprised again. It was the beautiful black woman Adam and I had seen at the Rocket. I tried to hide my recognition from Rolo.

“She doesn’t quite fit what I remember walking around out here,” I said. “That’s all.”

After a moment, Rolo leaned forward a little and beckoned me to do the same. I leaned in. His strong, earthy cologne mingled with the alcohol on his breath.

“Last time you was here,” he said, “you made the mistake of underestimating me. You gonna do that again?”

Then he leaned back, smiled at me and polished off his drink. The slurping sound seemed loud in the place. Almost immediately, the bartender brought him another drink and took the empty glass away. Rolo didn’t acknowledge him or touch the drink, but continued to stare at me.

I was tired of this jousting. Now that I was pretty sure he didn’t intend me any harm, I just wanted to be rid of him. But the only way to get there was to forge ahead.

“I got more going on than just this street action,” he told me. “Got myself what you might call an escort service. My bottom girl, Rhonda? I got her running four, five other girls outta an apartment up south. Real classy-like. Service them dudes who can’t or won’t be seen out here on Sprague Avenue.” He pointed at the picture in front of me. “She be one of them.”

“Name’s Monique. She’s Canadian. The French kind.” Rolo reached for his glass. “And somebody done fucked her up.”

“No,” Rolo said. “She up at the hospital, tubes and shit coming out of her. She got beat something solid.”

“Definitely not,” Rolo said. He shook his head. “Maybe you ain’t as smart as I thought.”

He looked at me for a moment, then burst out laughing. “I was right about you,” he said between chuckles, wagging his finger at me and shaking his head. “You maybe ain’t the biggest or the toughest cat around, but you got sand. I was right about that.”

Rolo took a drink, still laughing quietly to himself. When he put the drink down, he turned back to business. “I don’t know yet who put the boots to my girl. She in and out of being awake up at the hospital, so I can’t get nothing worth a damn out of her yet.”

He nodded. “Yeah, she keep a list of who Monique be seeing. But there’s two problems with that.”

Rolo held up a finger. “First problem is Monique didn’t get beat up on no date. She was off duty. You follow?”

“Nope. But there ain’t no way this shit was random. Whoever hurt her did it because of her work or because of me. And I don’t like not knowing which one it was.”

Rolo scratched his beard again. “The thing is, if whoever did this is in the game, I can deal with that motherfucker. Maybe it be the bikers trying to stretch their territory or some young buck thinking it’s time to test me. That’s easy enough to fix. But if this comes from the folks on Monique’s list, that’s a different sort of situation.”

I thought about what the average client for Monique would look like. Most likely, it would be some white man in his fifties with at least upper middle class money to spend. I didn’t quite understand why Rolo would have any problems with a guy like that.

“Exactly. My black ass shows up to talk to some of these white bread folk, that business is gone as a motherfucker. For good. But you?” He motioned toward me. “You perfect. Just scary enough to get them old white cats to talk but not scary enough to keep them from opening the door in the first place.”

Rolo shrugged. “Whatever. You the perfect tool to get the job done, and I need to know who tuned up my girl. That end of the business is what you might call more delicate than what I got going on out here on Sprague. But that don’t mean I can let some shit like this pass.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. “Just so we’re clear, the job is to find out who assaulted Monique. That’s it?”

Rolo nodded. “Yeah. If one of her tricks did this, fair enough. We done. If it was someone else, someone in the game, I’ll deal with that shit myself. We good?”

Rolo shrugged. “Ask Rhonda about that. Can’t be that many. Only so many hours in the day, you know?”

“All right,” I conceded. I paused, wondering how to broach the topic of money. I was glad I didn’t have to shoot my way out of The Hole, but at the same time, if I was going to do work for him, I wanted to be paid. Hell, I needed to be paid. The small medical retirement I got from the police department barely covered the basics.

In the end, I didn’t have to say a word. Rolo reached into his jacket, removed an envelope and plopped it in front of me. I opened it and looked inside. A quick count caused my pulse to quicken. There was six months’ worth of rent inside the envelope.

It was his turn to be surprised, but it only showed for a moment. Then he smiled. “Aw’right. You write that shit down, and I’ll pay it.”

After he gave me Rhonda’s telephone number, Monique’s last name and her room number at the hospital, I had one more question for Rolo that I had to ask before I left.

He considered me for a moment, then said, “I already told you that. You perfect for the job.”

He gave me a long look, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. Finally, he said, “You proved it.”

“You didn’t bring in the cops on that, either. That was stand up. Then how you dealt with that young girl. Star?”

I understood then. I’d held true to the code of the street, and that was what mattered to Rolo. “Okay,” I said. “I get it.”

“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” Rolo said, “but I think you’ll get the job done either way. And that’s why you.”

“Good enough,” I said. I stood and offered him my hand. He looked at it for a second, then grasped it firmly. We shook, and I left The Hole.

That night, I sat at my kitchen table, watching the news on a tiny television. I clutched a can of Keystone Light in my right hand, sipping at it slowly.

The evening news played out on the small screen. I shook my head as I listened and watched. It was the same thing night after night. Effusive, pompous talking heads repeating the same stories every night with a few details changed here and there to keep us thinking we’re getting something new.

The beer warmed my belly, but I forced myself to drink it slowly. After leaving the police department, I’d run into some problems with pain pills and booze. After I got off both, there were a few lapses, but for the last year, I’ve kept things under control. Still, I like to have an occasional beer to test that resolve. To keep it sharp.

My knee throbbed. Absently, I reached down and massaged the kneecap. My fingers glided over the now familiar hole. Images of streetlights and a full, hanging moon intermingled with the phantom sounds of gunshots. I winced slightly. Shadowy bursts of pain echoed in my left knee, my shoulder and my upper arm. I resisted the urge to rub each of these old wounds. Instead, I raised the beer to my lips and took a swallow.

Life can deal out some shitty cards at times, I decided. I had a promising career until I screwed up and fell from grace. After spending a number of years wallowing in self-pity, booze and pills, I started the long crawl out of that pit. Sometimes, though, it felt like one step up, two steps back.

I thought that maybe I could save Matt’s daughter, Kris, but I think all I really did was delay the inevitable. And then there was Cassie. Someone I cared about. I tried to help her and just ended up making it worse.

So why even try? Why not just sit here in this crappy little apartment, one of twelve subdivided dives in what used to be some rich guy’s house a hundred years ago, and drink and brood?

I stood and walked to the sink, where I poured the last several swallows of the beer down the drain. Then I threw on my leather bomber jacket, the last real piece of luxury I owned, and headed out the door.

The door to room 370 stood half-way open, with no nurses in sight. I rapped lightly on the door.

I nudged the door open a bit further and stepped in. The nearest bed sat empty. Monique Perrin lay in the bed by the window.

I stepped closer so that she could see me. “You should have asked that question first, instead of saying ‘come in’,” I said gently, trying to smile a little.

One look at her made smiling a difficult thing to do. Her swollen, bruised face and one eye were partly covered with bandages. The full lips that had cast a coy smile my way in the Rocket were battered and split. The bottom one looked like an over-cooked sausage that had burst.

She peered at me with her one good eye. Even that was partially occluded behind a pair of giant knots, one on her brow, the other below and slightly off-center.

She stared at me coolly. “If I knew, don’t you think I would have called him already? Or Rhonda? Look at me.”

“Not that bad?” A frown twitched at the corner of her mouth. “My doctor says I may have blood leaking onto my brain.” She shook her head slightly. “Imagine that. My brain is sprung a leak. They might have to operate.”

No, you don’t! I wanted to yell at her, but a moment later I realized that she did get it. She had me pegged at a glance.

I hesitated. A tickle of shame and anger formed in the pit of my stomach, rising slowly toward my chest. “I got hurt,” I said finally. “Why do you care?”

“I want to know who it is Rolo sent,” she said. “If you were dirty, or –”

“Okay.” She looked at me for a long moment. “How’d you get hurt, then?”

“Shot,” I said shortly. This conversation seemed to have devolved into a job interview, which was starting to piss me off. I already had the job. I didn’t need her approval. But then I realized that, on some level, I did.

She didn’t say anything for a few moments. When she spoke again, her voice lacked the veneer of any laughter, rueful or otherwise. It was a spare sound, with a slight tremor of fear reverberating through every word.

She sighed. “He just wants to protect his business. He does not give one shit about me.”

“Either way,” I said, “I’m here to help. Did you get a look at the men who beat you up?”

“It was one man. A white man. He had a flat nose and a fishhook shaped scar under his left eye. And that’s all I saw before he knocked me out.”

She didn’t answer for a long while. She stared at me, her deep brown eyes searching for something. Then she repeated, “I need help. I’ll pay you. But I need help. I don’t have anyone else I can turn to.”

Almost involuntarily, my hand slid forward until it found hers. She clutched at my hand, her long fingers wrapped tightly around mine. We sat, our hands clutched together with the desperation of two like, lost souls holding on for dear life.

She kept her voice low, as if preserving her strength. She spoke without embarrassment or apology. I sat next to her bed and listened, making mental notes but holding most of my questions. I didn’t want to break her rhythm.

“You know who I work for. It’s very low key, very quiet. Only about a half-dozen girls. We service an elite clientele. Some of them aren’t even bedroom jobs. Most are lonely, rich men who want company when they want it and then for us to disappear. They pay well for that privilege.” She paused, then said, “Lawrence Tate was one of my clients.”

She pressed her lips together, her expression a curious mix of frustration and hurt. Then she nodded and continued.

“He was married, of course. Most of them are. Only he never spoke ill of his wife, unlike some of the others. But it was clear that he was dissatisfied with her and with his life.”

That surprised me. Tate was a successful politician. He won his last election with something like seventy-eight percent of the vote. He came from a poor background, growing up in Hillyard, so becoming a councilman was quite a success. But then again, people often chase what other people define as success instead of defining it for themselves and then pursuing our own definition. We’re all social animals, craving the approval of those around us. Maybe that’s why I stayed in River City after the Amy Dugger disaster. To win back that approval. Or maybe I’m just stubborn. My grandma used to tell me I was. I didn’t agree with her, but before I was old enough to admit she was right, she’d passed away.

“We spent most of our evenings at the apartment I use for work,” Monique continued. “Many nights we just sat at the kitchen table, drinking wine and talking.” She paused. Her gaze took on a faraway look. “That’s the other thing that was different about Lawrence,” she said. “He listened. Most of the other men that wanted to talk didn’t want to talk with me. They wanted to talk to me. They needed someone to listen to them, to make them feel important. I think some of them needed that more than they needed the sex. Not Lawrence, though. He was interested in me. He listened to my opinions and ideas. He valued them.

“I thought at first it might be some kind of crazy crush. You get those occasionally. Some guy thinks he needs to ride in on his white horse like Sir Lancelot and rescue you from this life. He falls in love. He wants to marry you.” She shook her head. “I can see those guys coming a mile away. But Lawrence never said anything like that. He just...listened.”

She let out a long sigh and asked me for some water. I filled the glass and held it for her while she drew some through a straw.

She cleared her throat and went on. “I guess you could say we became friends of a sort. I looked forward to the times he would call. I even shared a thing or two with him about myself that weren’t made up. Simple things, really, but things I would never share with a regular client.”

She glanced at me then. Her penetrating gaze seemed to be sizing me up, as if asking herself if I was also someone she could trust. The silence between us grew to the point where I thought that maybe she’d decided that I wasn’t particularly trustworthy. Maybe I was just some guy her pimp hired to con her. Maybe there wasn’t any connection. No shared sense of being adrift and alone. No grasping at each other’s hands in the dark of this life –

“Small things,” she finally said. “Where I’m really from. My real name. Some things about my mother.” She shrugged. “My favorite ice cream.”

She exhaled with a half-chuckle. “That’s what I tell clients. That, or cherry, of course.”

She pointed at the water cup. I held it for her while she took another several sips. When she’d finished, I put the cup back and she resumed talking.

“Like I said, it wasn’t about sex for Lawrence. It was about companionship. For him, I was more a mistress than an escort. He brought me gifts. He confided in me.

“I knew he wasn’t happy. Not just with his wife, but with his life. I remember one time I asked him why he wasn’t happy in his career. He looked at me with the saddest eyes I think I’ve ever seen and simply said, ‘I’m just tired of being responsible for everyone else’s problems.’ That was it, all summed up.”

She shook her head slightly. “No. He said he didn’t want to get outside the community. It wasn’t about service at the state or federal level, at least in his opinion. Those people weren’t servants, they were politicians. It was all about power for them.”

She smiled slightly. “I suggested the same thing. But he pointed out that the new mayor had just begun a term barely two years ago. A popular mayor, he said, will in all likelihood be re-elected. That meant at least six years before he’d have a shot. And he didn’t think he could go on for six more years in the same way, which is what he’d have to do if he wanted a shot at the office on the seventh floor.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. “The picture you’re painting only reinforces the version of events that I read in the paper.”

“You’re describing a dissatisfied, middle-aged man in a dead marriage and at a dead-end in his career. All in all, a very unhappy guy. Suicide is a radical response to that, but it isn’t—

“He didn’t kill himself!” she growled with surprising force. Her uncovered eye shot an intense glare at me. After a moment, her eyelid fluttered. She brought her hand to her head, wincing.

She took several shallow breaths, her fingertips at her temple. When she finally looked at me again, the intensity in her eye had faded, but I could still see the remnants lurking there. “He didn’t kill himself,” she repeated calmly.

“Okay,” I conceded. “I was just pointing out that it wouldn’t be unreasonable for an investigator to conclude that, based on what happened and what you’ve told me.”

She took another breath and continued. “He seemed to have reached a point where he was ready to change everything. He said he wanted to break out of the prison he’d constructed for himself. Just run free. He even asked me to go with him.” She smiled sadly.

“A few months ago. It wasn’t a passing fancy for him. I could tell he was building up to it. The thing is, I don’t know how he was going to finance it. He wasn’t exactly poor, but I don’t think he was swimming in cash, either. Not enough to start a new life, anyway.”

She snorted lightly through her nose. “I thought so, too. But you know what? The city considers it a part time job, even though I know he put in a lot of hours. They didn’t pay shit.”

She rattled off a figure. I raised my eyebrows and gave a low whistle. I made more than that as a first year police officer fifteen or so years ago. “Not much to live on,” I observed. “How’d he manage?”

I shrugged. There was a coffee stand on almost every corner in River City. We probably out-coffeed Seattle on that point, even though we were a quarter the size of the Emerald City. Still, most of those stands were small gold mines.

“So he worked a coffee stand by day and was a council member by night?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. He owned the stand, but he didn’t work there. He had a manager that ran the place and pretty little baristas to serve the coffee. But between the money from that place and his council salary, he did okay.”

She looked at me as if she’d heard my thoughts, but said nothing about it. “In the last few months, he’d gotten excited about the whole idea of leaving River City and starting a new life. He never gave me any details, but he said that he was getting closer to realizing his dream. I always took that to mean that he was working up the courage to do it, but in the last few weeks, I started to think he was actually doing something specific to make it happen.”

“At first it was just a feeling. Then he started to say things like, ‘I’m getting closer’ and ‘Couple more moves.’ That made it pretty obvious.” She met my eyes. “And then he asked me to do something very important for him.”

“Well, yes, that was it. Lawrence stayed the night with me. We’d been up at my kitchen table all through the evening and into the morning, talking about everything but his plans.” She smiled, her eyes distant. “We’d rented an old movie and he kept quoting the funniest lines from it at random times throughout the night. It became like a secret, funny code.” She shook her head slightly, seeming to clear the memory away. “Then, around five in the morning, he asked to use my phone. He called someone, spoke cryptically for a few minutes, then hung up. After that, he asked me for a favor.”

“I don’t,” she repeated. “The package was already wrapped in a box, made to look like a gift.”

“I don’t know. Lawrence told me to go in and meet him. I was supposed to pretend he was a date, bring him outside and then exchange the package for the envelope.”

She nodded. “I went around the corner and Lawrence picked me up. He was very excited. He said that everything was done now and that he’d be leaving soon.”

“No,” she said adamantly. “He asked me to go with him again. He wasn’t planning on killing himself. He was planning on leaving River City and he wanted me to come along.”

We sat and stared at each other for a long while. My unspoken conclusion hung between us, but neither of us said a word. She didn’t seem to want to believe it was possible and I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was.

She shrugged. “Like he took everything. He absorbed it, internalized it. Acted like it was nothing.”

“Because,” Monique said, “he called me later on the phone. And I changed my mind. I told him yes. I’d leave with him.”

If what Monique was saying were true, it made Tate’s death more suspicious. Why would a guy with plans to run away with a lover and the money to do it suddenly kill himself?

“I mean, was it just ‘let’s run away together’, as in an idea? Or did you have a destination in mind?”

“Oh. Yes, we had a plan. Montreal. I grew up in Laval, Quebec. Montreal is the closest I’ll ever get to going home. And no one there will care about the color of our skin not matching.”

“So you loved him?” I asked. It was a cliché, a call girl and a john falling in love. I had a hard time believing it.

She didn’t reply right away. Finally, she said, “I can’t answer that question in a way you’d understand. The closest I can come is to just say yes.”

I stared at the floor and thought things through, running everything I’d learned through my mind. I looked for connections, for possibilities. The human heart is a dark place, though, and understanding motivations isn’t always easy. Then again, motivation usually comes straight out of the big three – sex, money or power.

When I looked up again, Monique had fallen asleep. Our conversation must have taken a lot out of her. The steady beep of the heart monitor and the slight whistle of her breath going in and out filled the quiet room.

It was late, but I figured that the escort business was a nighttime trade, so I called Rhonda from the hospital lobby.

She answered on the third ring. “Rolo said you’d be calling,” she said after I identified myself.

“Yeah, but I don’t know what good it’ll do you. It’s just code numbers for her clients. You’ll have to get her to match up who each one of them is, if she even knows.”

The drive to 29^th and Grand only took me ten minutes. I sat in the parking lot, backed into the spot farthest from the front door. I hoped Rhonda was on time. If I sat here for too long, I was pretty sure the clerk inside would make me for casing the place to rob it. The last thing I really wanted right now was to come across the boys in blue. Enough time had passed that it was becoming less and less likely that the responding patrol officers would know me. But I didn’t need the complication right now.

While I waited, I thought about the mad rush that had been the last twenty-four hours. I was involved now. There was no sense trying to change that, so I put my mind to work on how to solve this situation. Rolo wanted to know who put Monique in the hospital. No, more importantly, he wanted to know what world that man came from and why he threw her a beating. That was a mystery. However, it didn’t seem like it would be too hard to figure it out after some poking around. The harder part was what Monique wanted. She didn’t think Tate committed suicide. I didn’t necessarily buy that yet, but she was convinced and wanted me to prove it somehow.

Monique was convincing. More so than Rolo’s money or the underlying, unspoken threat of force. Her manner, her aura, whatever you want to call it, it all spoke of truth, or at least less guile than I’ve seen everywhere else I’ve looked these days.

Or maybe I was just kidding myself because I wanted to be a hero for someone. I’ve only worked three cases since I quit being a cop, if you can call what I did “cases.” Better to call them “helping out a friend,” even though I only did two of them for money. The third one was for love. Unfortunately, none of them turned out so great.

Sometimes you do the right thing for the right reasons and the outcome still sucks.

A few minutes later, a small, sporty silver Lexus turned into the parking lot. The parking lot lights glinted off the high gloss of the metallic paint. The car drove directly toward me.

Times had changed. Last time I'd seen Rhonda, she'd been slutted up, working in The Hole. The Lexus spoke of her change in station as much as her classy new hairdo and understated makeup.

When she rolled down the window, I caught a faint whiff of her perfume. Even that smelled subtle but expensive, an untouchable jasmine.

She handed a thin manila envelope out her window toward me. I took it and set in on the seat beside me.

Rhonda stared at me for a few seconds, her eyes seeming to calculate some equation before she spoke. Finally, she said, “Monique isn’t my best girl.”

I raised my eyebrows a little. That didn’t seem like a nice thing to say about someone who was currently hooked up to an IV.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Rhonda said. “Don’t judge. Everyone judges, and all that judgment is bullshit.”

“The thing is,” she said, “even though she doesn’t earn as much as a couple of other girls, she’s sweet. She’s easy to be around. She doesn’t lie. That’s probably because she’d never been in the life the same as some of us. Never worked streetside.”

Like you, I almost said, but didn’t. Somehow I didn’t think Rhonda wanted to remember her past.

“Maybe that’s what got her beat,” Rhonda went on. “Maybe she didn’t have the street smarts to see it coming. I don’t know.”

I looked her in the eye. “Rolo will get what he gets, and that’ll be whatever I can give him. I’m not a magician.”

“You better work some motherfucking magic,” she said, her voice hardening, “or that night in the alley behind The Hole is going to seem like a play date.”

She stared at me with a hard, flat expression as she powered up the window. Then she backed out and zipped away.

I sat for a few moments, wondering what to make of her. Were those her words, or a message Rolo wanted to send? A spark of anger flared in my chest. I never gave him a guarantee.

In the end, I figured it didn’t matter whose message it was. If it was Rhonda saying it, she was probably just pissed to have to talk to someone who knew she’d once trolled East Sprague and thrown blowjobs in alleys and the front seats of cars. If it were Rolo sending a message, it wasn’t going to change whether I was going to be successful or not.

I drove away from the convenience store before the clerk decided that the suspicious guy in the Celica wasn’t casing the place but was dealing drugs and called the police for that instead.

Grand Avenue turns to a twenty mile an hour zone all along Manito Park, and I dropped my speed to comply. When I approached the entrance to the park, I turned the wheel and drove in. There were some parking spots that looked over the duck pond. The moon reflected off the acre-sized patch of water and when I rolled down the window, the air smelled fresh, and good.

There were no names, only numbers. The highest one was eleven. As I went down the appointment list, there were only four or five regulars. And all I knew was that one of them was Councilman Lawrence Tate.

The next morning, I brewed a strong pot of coffee and sat at my small kitchen table, thinking things through as light streamed through the window and filled the room. Monique’s client list sat on the table in front of me, but it was useless until she translated it.

I needed to decide if I could do what Monique needed – find out if Tate was murdered and be the hero I wanted to be– and still satisfy what Rolo was paying me to do. The only way I saw it working out for everyone concerned was if Monique was right about Tate being murdered and if her being assaulted was related to that murder somehow.

Those seemed like two giant what-ifs to overcome, and there was not a whole lot of what-if to how Rolo would react if I didn’t get him the answers he needed.

Still, it was odd. Tate tries to get Monique to run off with him and she refuses. Then, as soon as she agrees, he kills himself? It didn’t make sense, unless he was full of shit about the running away part the whole time.

I considered that. Rhonda was right about Monique being sweet. Her kind nature radiated from her in quiet waves. But maybe the price of that kindness was that she didn’t see that Tate’s talk was all fantasy.

I sipped the last of my coffee and tried to get my grip on that thought. I grappled with it for a few minutes, then rose and put my cup in the sink. I’d work it out on the way to the hospital.

I got in my car, my mind still working on the questions of this case as I drove.

If Tate really was serious about leaving town, then suicide makes no sense. If he really intended to leave with Monique, there was no way he would kill himself right then.

Murder was a stretch. A huge stretch. Especially the way it happened. The guy suffocated on carbon monoxide in his own garage. I suppose someone could have just cracked him over the head and propped him up in the front seat, unconscious. Then all the killer would have to do is turn on the car and leave.

But if that happened, the autopsy would show the head trauma, and the cops would know it was murder.

So what did someone do, stand next to his car and hold a gun on him while wearing a gas mask? Even that wouldn’t work. The gunman would have to be wearing to self-contained breathing gear. How ridiculous was that?

“Okay,” I muttered, “let’s roll with it. Tate was murdered. Now what?”

Actually, once I got past the improbability of Tate’s death being a murder, the assault on Monique wasn’t as difficult. She’d passed something to the old man in the red Cadillac. It had been wrapped as a gift, but she said it was really light. The envelope he passed back to her for Tate had almost certainly been money. So Tate was obviously up to something crooked, and bad things can happen to people who mess around with crooked things.

So maybe Monique’s beating was a message from someone to shut up about something?

Could be, I thought. Only it was a mistake, because she obviously didn’t know what they thought she did, or she’d have told me already and this would be less of a mystery.

I paused there. Now I was making an assumption that I didn’t necessarily know was true. That Monique was telling me the truth, or at least all of the truth. I couldn’t forget what she did for a living. She played to men’s needs, physical and emotional. I imagine that the emotional, the ego, was probably the most important part of that equation. And to do that, to make them believe enough to keep coming back and keep paying her, she had to be good at it. She had to be able to convince them it was true. Or true enough.

At her bedside, touching her hand, looking into her eyes, she seemed so sincere. She seemed so lost. So tired. Like she needed me.

A little anger tickled my gut at the possibility of being played by Monique like just another gullible john. Then I felt stupid for falling for it. A moment later, doubt crept in. The truth was, I didn’t know for sure if that was what she’d done.

The only way to know was to confront her. Ask her who did this and why she was hiding it from Rolo. Watch her reaction, listen to her explanation. Then decide what to do.

By the time I parked and walked into the hospital, anger won out over the rest. The most likely answer to everything was that Tate had committed suicide and that, for whatever reason, Monique was manipulating me like every other man she came across.

I followed the orange lines to the elevator and headed up to the third floor. On the short ride up, I took a deep breath and let it out. It wasn’t going to do any good to go stomping in there like a mad bull. The nurses would pick up on that and might not even let me see her. I needed things to be a controlled burn, not a wildfire.

The elevator doors slid open. I walked in a measured gait to room 370. The door was half open, but I knocked anyway. There was no answer.

I walked out of the room and found the nurse’s station. “The woman in 370,” I asked, “where’d she go?”

“Sir, there are laws regarding medical information. I can’t just tell you things about patients. It doesn’t work that way.”

“I can’t even confirm if she was a patient here,” the nurse said. “The laws are very strict.”

“I visited her in room 370 last night,” I said. “Her name is Monique Perrin. I just want to know where she is now.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, showing some frustration that wasn’t all contrived. “Everywhere we go, it’s the same bullshit.”

“She’s my step-sister, all right? And yeah, my dad’s white and her mom’s black and what’s the big deal?”

“You assumed,” I snapped at her, warming to the role. “But I’m sure you’re not racist.”

Her face reddened some more, but a scowl also appeared there. I worried that maybe I’d overplayed my hand.

“I am most certainly not a racist,” she said, biting off each word. “I am, however, complying with medical privacy laws, which are very strict in this state, Mr...?”

I saw no point in lying. “Kopriva.” I glanced down at her nametag. “And you’re Roberts. So now we know each other, and you know I’m related to Monique, so please tell me where she is now.”

I forged ahead, changing tactics. “Ms. Roberts, I’m sorry I was rude. I’m just worried about my sister, all right? She’s a long way from home, and she’s hurt. I saw her yesterday, then I come up here and she’s gone. You can understand why that’d freak me out, right?”

“She’s from Laval,” I said. “It’s in Quebec. In Canada? And her favorite ice cream is Tin Roof Sundae. Now how do I know all of these things about her and what room she was in last night if I’m not her brother?”

She hesitated again, but I could see that she’d made up her mind, so I didn’t push any farther. “She was moved.”

My reaction must have been the final hurdle to convincing her that I was Monique’s brother. She came around from behind the desk to check on me.

She pointed to the elevator. “Sixth floor. Nurse’s station is right off the elevators.”

“Sir, I respect that you’re her brother,” a steel-haired nurse told me in firm tones, “but she is listed as critical and is being closely monitored. As a matter of policy, we do not allow visitors in these circumstances.”

“At least tell me what is happening,” I said. Then I added, “I have to call her mother.”

The nurse frowned, then consulted her computer. After a few key taps and some searching, she turned her gaze back to me. “She has a subdural hematoma. It may require operation.”

“There is bleeding in her brain, sir,” she explained. “It creates pressure.”

I swallowed, then asked, “Can I leave you my phone number? For when her condition changes. Or if she needs something.”

The nurse tapped a few more keys. “I already have her sister listed here. Rhonda?”

I sighed. “We...well, we don’t talk these days. Let me give you my number, too.”

I couldn’t run down any of Monique’s clients without her first translating the code. And I couldn’t even know if she was playing me without talking to her.

The thought made my gut wrench. That told me something. I learned a long time ago to follow my instincts. They were usually right. Whether it was dumb luck or something the subconscious did to figure things out faster than the conscious mind was capable or requiring less concrete proof, instinct usually proved out.

I sat in my car in the hospital parking garage, my stomach uneasy. I recognized the feeling, though I hadn’t felt it for anyone in a while. Worry. I was worried about Monique. I cared about her. I believed her. And because of that, I was going to help her.

Besides, the only lead I had now was Tate. He’s the only one client of hers that I knew about. So following up on that was the only thing I could really do for Rolo’s job right now, too. The paths had converged.

Tate’s home address might be public information, but I needed more than that. I needed some details about the case.

I called Adam. He answered on the second ring. I told him what I wanted to know.

“I don’t know if all the reports have been filed yet,” he said, his voice a little thin.

Adam sighed, and I knew he could. “Yeah, I suppose. But I can’t print anything. That gets flagged to the Records Manager, and he’s worse than the IRS about this stuff.”

“So take good notes,” I said, and told him again what I wanted to know. “I’ll meet you at the Rocket in an hour.”

I thought about teasing him that this phone line was probably a recorded line and that he’d just committed a felony by accepting payment for providing confidential information to a civilian. Then I realized that all of that was probably true and kept my mouth shut.

It was almost three hours later when Adam showed up with a small folder under his arm. He sat down and slid it across to me wordlessly. He raised his hand to Ani, ordered a large coffee and a sandwich and waited while I thumbed through his meager notes.

Tate’s address was in there, along with his wife’s name, Paula. Detective Browning had the case, and there were two things I remember about Ray Browning. The man was a damn good detective and he kept his paperwork current. Right now, I was pretty happy about both traits, but especially the second one.

I read through Adam’s scratchy handwritten notes, some of which seemed mundane and unimportant and most of which I already knew from the newspaper account. Then I stumbled on something interesting and grunted.

I tapped the paper with my finger. “The Herald didn’t say anything about this.”

“The autopsy. If I can read your chicken scratch right, it says that Tate died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He suffocated, basically. But it also says that he had an extraordinarily high amount of lorazepam in his system.”

“So, a lot of lorazepam helps you sleep a lot. As in, too much to wake up while you’re sitting in the car with the engine running.”

Adam swallowed and washed it down with some coffee. “I said, maybe he took the drugs so he didn’t chicken out.”

“Maybe,” I said. I thought about Monique, and how certain she’d been that this was a murder. “It still seems odd to me,” I said, “that he’d kill himself for no reason.”

“I said, he had a reason,” Adam said. “Browning’s too professional to put something in a police report that the newspaper can eventually get a copy of through public disclosure. At least not until he’s sure it’s relevant.”

“I know what it means,” I said, a little sharply. I looked around sheepishly. A couple of patrons looked at Adam and me quizzically. I lowered my voice, and leaned forward. “I’m just surprised.”

Adam shrugged. “Who knows anymore, right? It’s not such a big deal.” But he looked at me while he took another bite of his sandwich, and we both knew that was bullshit. Here in River City, in the conservative bastion of Eastern Washington, it was a big deal. Especially if you were holding public office. This wasn’t Seattle.

“Just since he died. Turns out Glen Bates caught him at the porno theater about two years ago while he was doing a walk through. He was with another guy.”

I thought of the two block strip out on East Sprague that was home to the raunchiest of dirty book stores and the one small pornography theater in town. The poor cops assigned to that district had to do occasional walkthroughs of those establishments to keep things as clean as possible. Otherwise, history has shown that they devolve into prostitution and drug pits instead of where lonely or hard up guys go to get off.

Some cops didn’t mind the duty so much, but for most it was just another dirty job that had to be done. And along with that job, you inevitably stumbled across people engaged in sexual acts that you really didn’t want to see.

“Two years ago?” I asked. “Bates caught him with another man, having sex?”

“And he never told anyone. For two years?” I found it hard to believe. My own experiences with Bates, both on the job and after, had never been that good. I figured him for something of a prick, truth be told.

“One thing about Bates,” Adam said. “He doesn’t gossip. He never said anything about your little dust up at the hockey game a couple of years ago, even after the whole Kris Sinderling thing came out.”

Adam shook his head. “Not a word. I only know about it because you told me.”

I thought about that for a second. “A fight is one thing, but this is something else. This is a public figure. I can’t believe he sat on it.”

“Well, he did. I guess he figured it was nobody’s business. He said he only brought it up because he thought it might explain why the guy killed himself.”

Adam frowned. “Jack Stone was on call with Browning when the call came out. He’s support on the case.”

It all played out in my head. Stone was a world class son of a bitch who I figured took great pleasure in the misery of others. He hated me, and at this point in my life, the feeling was entirely mutual. I could see him taking a perverse joy in whispering something slanderous to the right people around the department for salacious news like this to spread like the plague.

“If the whole department knows, the Herald will soon,” I said. “Unless someone has plugged up the leaks down there.”

“I think they’re a little tighter these days,” Adam said. “The paper has been kicking the hell out of us for a few years now. Most of the guys don’t subscribe or even read it online. Anyone floating tips their direction now has to pretty much hate the department or something about it more than he hates the paper.”

Adam shrugged. “Or they, I suppose. But the point is that the newspaper doesn’t know about this yet.”

I considered the scenario. “So the guy can’t live a double life anymore and he kills himself?”

“Or maybe someone was getting ready to out him,” Adam said. “Or he was getting blackmailed over it. Who knows? But one thing’s for sure. If it did come out, his political career here in RC would be done.”

I’d like to have believed Adam was wrong about that, but wanting to believe something doesn’t make it so. But who knows?

“No, I know that. But if this was a suicide, it was more of a statement suicide, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “I’m just looking at all possibilities here. Don’t you think that if a guy killed himself over something like this, he’d leave a note of some kind? To explain. Or apologize. Or deny. Something.”

“Denying would be pretty stupid,” Adam said. “I mean, if it wasn’t true, why kill yourself?”

“Maybe there isn’t an answer,” Adam told me. “Maybe it just is exactly what it looks like.”

“Could be,” I said, but saying that didn’t make me necessarily believe it.

“Please,” he said quietly, but with an intense tone. “Don’t bullshit me, Stef. Obviously you’re working for someone again. And that’s fine. It’s good for you to do something, and if you ask me, being a cop was your first best calling. So that’s cool.”

“Then just be careful, I guess. The way I see it, you did two jobs for your friend Matt and both of them ended up shitty. You’re not going for the hat trick, are you?”

“Good. So just be careful. That’s all I’m saying. You’re poking around things that could get touchy. Or dangerous.”

“Nothing,” he said. “But this much I do know. Tate is – was a politician and that alone makes whatever you’re doing dangerous. So be careful.”

When he walked among us, Councilman Lawrence Tate lived in a nice house in an even nicer neighborhood. I found his place on the short South Hill, not far from the Manito Park duck pond where I’d parked last night. The house was one of the older ones in the neighborhood but meticulously maintained. Everything about it said organized neatness. I wondered how much of the work he did himself and how much he hired out.

Then I remembered what his pay was as a councilman and I wondered how he afforded this house.

I took another look at it as I strolled up the long walkway. It was an old house for this city, probably built in the 1920s. Maybe he inherited it outright or bought it from a family member on a low mortgage rate.

Or maybe he got rich off the stock market. Hell, there was a lot I didn’t know about Lawrence Tate.

I knocked on the oversized, solid front door and waited. I half expected a servant to open the door and to bid me wait for the mistress of the house. I was slightly surprised when a woman in her fifties opened the door and stared out at me.

She stared at me another moment. Her eyes were bleary and slightly unfocused. Her head bobbed languidly as she studied me. The once neat French twist had sprung a leak and a huge lock of hair fluttered around on her left side of her head.

I wondered if the ‘den’ was an accent or if she was just that drunk. I glanced at the grandfather clock in the entryway as I walked into the house. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. That made it after five on the east coast, if she cared about cocktail hour at this point.

Wordlessly, she led me down a short corridor that opened into a large living room. The television was on but muted. A white fluff ball eyed me from the couch, distrust plain in its feline eyes.

The lady of the house flopped beside the cat and let out a long whoosh of air. “Ashk aways, officer.” She lifted a glass from the table beside the couch and sipped her drink, motioning toward the chair opposite her.

I sat down. Impersonating a police officer was a crime. I knew that. But I also knew that she didn’t know any better right now. She wouldn’t be sober enough to give the cops enough information to make a case against me. Hell, if she was a chronic drinker, they might not even believe her.

I smiled, and hoped she didn’t ask for my name. “Okay, Paula it is. I just had a couple of clarifying questions about your husband’s death.”

“Uh, I don’t quite know how to ask this, so I guess I’ll just be straightforward. I’m having a hard time figuring out why he did this.”

Her face broke into a smile. She took another drink, laughing into her glass. “I guess you’ll have to discover that one on your own, detective. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“I know he may have been struggling with some things about himself,” I said carefully, “but what I don’t understand is what changed. Why now?”

“What great gossip that will make,” she said. “And then everyone will look at me and wonder what was so wrong with me that I turned a man that way.”

Paula Tate finished her drink. The ice cubes clinked against her teeth. She stood and sauntered over to a small bar to make another one.

“Not that there’s much of mine left,” she said while facing away from me. “Most of it was used paying for his campaigns. Foolish me, I thought perhaps he was going somewhere.”

I remembered what Monique had told me about Tate’s aspirations. They’d seemed noble to me at the time, but it was clear his wife had other ideas about what defined success.

“I got a call from the insurance company this morning,” she said, pouring from a bottle. “Know what those vipers said?”

“No.” I didn’t think she was ever going to stop pouring, but eventually she did.

“That Larry’s life insurance policy might not pay off for suicide.” She turned around and looked at me, swirling her glass again. “Nice, huh?”

She looked at me more closely, then sipped her drink. “You weren’t here before.”

She considered for another moment, then clenched her jaw. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

A jolt of electricity shot through me. For one crazy second, I wondered how in the hell she knew Rolo.

“You work for those vultures, don’t you?” she snarled at me. “You're an insurance agent.”

She cocked her glass as if to throw it at me but reconsidered. I thought about trying to talk her down, but there was too much going against that. She was drunk. She was distraught. And she might call the cops. All bad.

I rose without a word and walked to the door. Behind me, I heard Paula Tate sobbing.

I decided I needed to work the official angles pretty fast. If Paula Tate got sideways over our discussion, she might call the police to report it. Or if she wasn’t the kind of person to call the police, she’d be on the phone with her attorney. Whoever she called would start checking around and if they got to people before I did, the chances of any of them opening up to me were slim.

I figured that after an important man’s mistress and his wife, the person who might know most in his world would be his secretary. Hell, she might even be the most objective of the three. Maybe I should have started with her.

The front desk at City Hall was almost as secure as an airport. I had to show identification, walk through a security station complete with metal detector and clip on a ‘visitor’ badge. Despite all that security, no one asked me the purpose of my visit.

I consulted a directory and saw the council offices were on the third floor. I rode up alone in the elevator, wondering if I was getting in over my head. Poking around official offices, talking to the wife, all of that might catch the attention of the police. Given my history with RCPD, that wasn’t likely to turn out well.

Still, the only other option was to do nothing. I couldn’t check any of Monique’s other clients until she told me who they were, if she even could. And there was something goofy going on with Tate, anyway. Something not right. Maybe it wasn’t my duty to figure out what it was, but I couldn’t see where anyone else was going to do it. Browning was a thorough detective, but he didn’t know what Adam and I saw at the Rocket, or what Monique had to say about the situation. In the end, wouldn’t he see what everyone else saw? A local politician, unable to deal with his conflicted sexuality any longer?

I wished it were that simple. But even though I wasn’t that deep into this situation, I knew it wasn’t. Someone beat up Monique, for starters.

The elevator bounced to a stop and the door slid open. I wandered around briefly until I located Tate’s office. Surprisingly, the door was open.

A red haired woman about the same age as Paula Tate sat at a desk inside the office. A single, closed door was to her right. She stared at the computer, not moving. The nameplate in front of her desk said her name was Lara Monroe.

Lara glanced up. Her eyes were glassy, though not for the same reason Paula Tate’s had been. She’d been crying, and recently.

“I hope so,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Councilman Tate.”

“I’m not a reporter,” I said, “so don’t worry. But I am looking into his death.”

I shook my head. This conversation was giving me déjà vu. I wondered for a second if Paula had called her. The idea wasn’t crazy. As long as she didn’t suspect Tate of having an affair with his secretary, I imagined the two would be friendly. Unless Paula had already been a drunk before Tate’s death, which I suspected was true. But as long as she wasn’t a mean drunk, the two of them could still have been friendly.

She gave me a cold smile. “Well, I can say who I work for, sir. His name is Councilman Lawrence Tate. And confidentiality applies for me as well. So I don’t think we have much of anything to talk about, do we?”

She didn’t reply. Her cold stare was impenetrable. There was no way I was breaking through these walls, at least not right here, right now. The best thing to do was to walk away and try another approach later.

Clell liked his Maxwell House coffee. Ever since I bought him a tin of it to say thanks for taking me in one cold night, it’s the only brand he’ll drink. So when I stopped by his small apartment in Cannon Hill, he brewed a pot without even asking.

“I just don’t get it,” I said. “Part of my brain says maybe the simplest answer is the easiest.”

“It usually is,” he said, pouring us both a cup. He still wore his security guard uniform. I’d caught him just a couple of minutes after he’d gotten home from work.

Clell walked over to the kitchen table and set the cups of steaming coffee down. He lowered himself into the seat, a pained expression on his face.

“I know how that is,” I joked. In another life, a gangster put a bullet through the back of my left knee. A thin patch of skin is still all that covers the hole that’s there.

Clell smiled back. “I don’t mean to complain. The bank job I’m at now lets me sit more. It’s a daytime job, and it’s warm, too, so I’m living high on the hog these days. Much better than those nighttime jobs.”

“That’s what I like about you, Clell. You’re a blue collar philosopher.”

He snorted. “You live over half a century on this planet, you best figure some things out. It don’t make me special.”

I didn’t bother arguing with him, even though I thought he was wrong about the last part. I rolled my left shoulder and gave it a rub with my fingertips.

“So what don’t jibe?” he asked me after a while. “Why isn’t the simplest answer the right one?”

I sighed and dropped my hand to my knee, where I continued rubbing. “It’s a jumbled mess,” I said. Then I laid it all out for him. I didn’t hold back anything. When I’d finished, we both sat in silence for a couple of minutes.

Clell stared into his coffee while he thought. Finally, he said, “You just don’t really know enough yet.”

He drank his coffee and was quiet a while longer. Then he said, “Way I see it, you have to decide if you believe this lady Monique or not. If she’s telling the truth, and if she’s right, then you probably are investigating a murder. And that does get dangerous, ‘specially when you factor in who it is.”

I detected a tone of disapproval in his voice. “Something more you want to say on that, Clell?”

He shook his head. “Not much to say. You figured you had no choice but say yes to the man, right?”

He shrugged. “Then done is done. It just don’t sit right with me, you working for a man like that.”

I wondered if he meant a black man, which surprised me a little. Clell had never spoken a racist word in the time I’d known him, which was over a year now. Still, people can shock you sometimes.

“A criminal,” Clell answered. “And the guy who had you beaten up like that.” He shook his head some more. “It just don’t sit right.”

I thought for a while before answering. In my head, I had questions. I knew she had to be good at manipulating men. That was her job. Plus her version of events was less plausible than the simpler explanation.

I told Clell all of this over our coffee. He listened, offered a comment or two, but otherwise let me talk it out.

“Men don’t usually kill themselves that way. Usually, they do something more violent. A gun, or a rope. Pills are more often a woman’s choice.”

Clell shrugged. “Maybe it was insurance. So he couldn’t change his mind at the last minute.”

“Yeah, that’s what Adam said,” I agreed. “And it could be. It’s just odd, that’s all. You don’t hear about murders happening this way.”

“You don’t hear about a lot of murders in this town, period,” Clell said. “Not like the big cities.”

I smiled grimly. There was plenty of dark goings on in this city, including murders. They just didn’t make the paper, or at least not the front page, because of who it was. Drugs were the usual culprit.

“I saw it in a movie once. Or maybe it was a TV show. But the guy, he said that you should always follow the money.”

I thought about that for a minute. The difference between money and everything else that was swirling around this case so far was that money wasn’t based on emotion. Money is business. And Adam and I already saw firsthand that money was part of this equation somehow. “Clell, you might just be a genius.”

He rose to refill our cup, but I held out my hand to stop him. “I’ll get it.” He smiled his thanks around his bushy mustache and sank back down into his seat.

I went to the counter and poured us both a new cup. When I brought them back, Clell smelled the coffee’s aroma and grinned. “I owe you big time for this discovery, pard. I would have never tried this brand on my own. I’d still be drinking store brand.”

“It’s probably the same stuff,” I teased him. “Just packaged differently.”

“Oh, no,” he told me. “There’s a definite difference. This coffee is...richer. It reminds me that some things in life were meant to be fine.”

Clell sipped and swallowed. “You should enjoy something like this in your life, my friend.”

“Yeah, but you don’t really enjoy anything, as far as I can tell. It’s like you just tolerate everything. Like you’re still angry about something from a long time ago.”

I didn’t say anything. He was probably right, but the thought burned in my stomach all the same.

Clell was watching me. “You ask me, I think you’ve done some things to even the scales, Stef. I don’t think you need to be so angry any more. You don’t have to prove anything, or be a hero for anyone.”

“Hey there, now,” Clell said. “Don’t be leaving angry. I didn’t mean any offense.”

The River City Library’s main branch was a four-story building right on the edge of downtown. The dour, gray federal building stood across the street, but the library was all open architecture. Big windows, wide stairs, and rooms and rooms with light pouring onto all the bookshelves.

I was more interested in the computers, which were in the basement. A library card affords every patron three hours of Internet use a day. Both the card and the computer use were free, which was something that I appreciated, given my usual condition. That is, broke. I’d put most of Rolo’s money in my bank account, which hadn’t seen that kind of cash since I left the police department.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have been searching microfilm, but almost everything was archived on the net these days. All I needed was a connection and a search engine, and thanks to the taxpayers of River City, I had both for three free hours a day.

I found out more about Lawrence Tate than I expected. He was in his second term as councilman. His district was the same South Hill area where he lived, which included some posh neighborhoods. He was the sponsor of the ordinance that set up warming centers for the homeless in the cold months, which was a decidedly liberal sentiment. Yet he tended to vote against tax hikes, which was more conservative. He seemed to avoid becoming embroiled in the more controversial events that divided the city’s population. He either wasn’t mentioned in those articles, or his comments were vanilla.

The picture of Tate that emerged over the next couple of hours was a little bit of a people pleaser, but not necessarily a weak person. Some compassion was apparent, such as when he voted to prop up the local food bank after the director embezzled just about every dime and skipped town. Other times, he seemed quite practical, and willing to make tough decisions, including voting against a raise for the fire department.

That impressed me. Everyone loves the fire department, so voting against them took some guts. He took a few hits for it, too, according to an article I read in the online Herald and in a Fire Association newsletter. But Tate simply said that our police and fire employees were fairly paid and the citizens couldn’t afford to give them a raise while they were struggling themselves, and the city faced a deficit.

Funny how he put that. The citizens couldn’t afford to give the cops and firefighters a raise. That completely reframes the context of the situation. Pretty smart, politically. It made me think that Tate was a savvy politician, or at least knew how to manipulate people. Hell, that was probably the same thing.

But that meant he could have been working Monique, too. That maybe all that talk about running away with her to Montreal was just pillow talk, especially since he was gay.

I read through the minutes of old council meetings over the past year, which was dry enough to make my eyeballs roll back in my head. After the first session’s notes, I started skimming through, using a FIND feature to search only for Tate’s name. Even that didn’t speed things up too much.

The thing was, a lot of council business had to do with money. Most of it, in fact. They dispensed small amounts of dollars here and there and then some of it was serious money. But I didn’t see where Tate’s vote gave away a fortune to anyone. More than that, I didn’t see any real opportunity for corruption, unless more than one council member was in on it. That wasn’t a possibility I liked to believe, but even if it were true, it wasn’t one I was going to chase down. I figured the old adage about fighting city hall was doubly true when things were on the dirty side of the fence.

Near the end of my second hour, I only had a couple of things that interested me. Tate chaired several committees, as did all council members. One of them was union contract review. The committee consisted of three members and two needed to approve a contract before it went forward. Such a narrow margin for something that important might invite some graft. Maybe one of the unions wants to buy a vote to get a lucrative contract through?

I frowned. Tate voted against that fire department contract in full council, but he voted in committee to approve it for a full council vote. And he was the swing vote, too, making it a 5-4 downward vote. So where’s the angle there for money to change hands? Maybe if it had gone the other way, but that outcome didn’t make sense.

Unless maybe Tate was playing hard ball. He could have been telling the fire union that they either pay him off or their contract gets tanked. It was a pretty rich contract and they weren’t likely to get anywhere near that much if it went to binding arbitration. Maybe that was Tate’s play.

The other committee that looked promising to me was the one that oversaw all contract bids. This was also a three-member committee that forwarded a recommendation to full council. In what little I read in the minutes of several meetings, these contracts were breezed over when the committee’s recommendation was in favor. In fact, there really wasn’t much discussion when it came to ones that were recommended for disapproval, either. The full council seemed to place a fair dose of trust in Tate and the other two members of this committee.

I supposed this would be an even easier way to make some cash. If someone wanted a contract badly enough, they’d be willing to grease Tate’s palm. Of course, he’d have to be selective about it. And how many contracts were big enough to make it worth the risk? Most of the ones I saw in the council minutes were for thousands of dollars. While that was a lot to me, it wasn’t big money in the world of city government. Just how much would someone be willing to cough up in bribe money to secure a fourteen thousand dollar city contract? A few hundred, maybe. There was no way someone like Tate would risk everything for money that light.

I skipped forward to the last few months’ worth of council minutes, searching through for some kind of project that might mean big money. Another half hour and I found it: The Looking Glass Condominiums.

The city agreed last year to sell some prime riverside property in the valley along the Looking Glass River. Downtown River City sits right on the river before the water rushes into a series of falls into the valley below. The subject property had the advantage of being just west of the downtown core, within easy walking distance, but also removed and secluded because it was down in the valley. It was a perfect mix, especially for single, wealthy people who wanted to live in condos.

The city was giving a ten-year tax exemption to whichever developer purchased the land and put high-end condominiums and townhouses on the property. The logic was that after the ten years, the properties would be full and the taxes on them would be a windfall for the city. The developer won out, too, because he didn’t have to pay taxes on the property during development and sale. Also, he could use the tax exemption to lure buyers.

The land purchase price was projected to be between fourteen and twenty million dollars. The request for bids were issued two months ago. All responses had to be submitted by last week. The committee review and recommendation was due in two weeks. The bid process was obviously sealed, and Tate’s committee was to recommend to the full council which one to accept.

Time Expired flashed in the center of the screen. The browser closed and a message popped up thanking me for using the River City Library.

I leaned back in my chair. Could this be it? It was big enough. All Tate had to do was take some cash to push one developer over another during committee meetings. As long as the bids were comparable, he could manufacture reasons to go with the one who paid him.

I stood and left the library. I had to talk to somebody, and this time I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

That evening, I went to the hospital to check on Monique. A different nurse was working in ICU.

I prepared to play the race card, then changed gears. “Check the computer,” I said.

She frowned, but tapped a few keys. Then her eyebrows went up slightly. “Oh,” she said. “It is here. I’m sorry.”

The nurse was young, maybe twenty-five, but even with petite features, she had a strict professional air about her. “The doctor has determined that surgery is necessary to relieve the pressure on her brain. She’s scheduled for six o’clock tomorrow morning.”

The young nurse gave me a patient look. “Sir, your sister’s been badly injured. The bleeding and the pressure have slowly increased over the last day. We’ve kept her in a medical coma to relieve the pain and prepare her for tomorrow’s procedure. Dr. Haakin is the best neurosurgeon in town.”

She pressed her lips together. “I couldn’t predict. Every surgery has risks. We will do everything we can.”

I wanted more from her, but I knew from long ago experience that she was giving me everything she could. “Thank you,” I finally managed. “I’ll...I’ll check back tomorrow.”

“She’ll be out of surgery by eight, but you won’t be able to see her until she’s out of recovery.”

She shrugged. “Hard to say. Sometimes a couple of hours, sometimes a full day.”

On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store. In addition to a few groceries, I threw in a six pack of Molson. When I got home and made dinner, I sipped on one of the beers. I made it last through dinner and finally washed down my last bite with the dregs of the bottle.

The next day, I woke up late and with a sharp headache. I washed some aspirin down with my coffee and toast, then drove down to City Hall.

I spent an hour and a half sitting in a metered parking spot, watching the employee entrance, and hoping. Sometimes persistence pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t.

At about eleven fifteen, Lara Monroe exited the building and walked south toward the River Park Square downtown mall. I plugged another couple of coins into the meter and followed.

Lara was a power walker, whether naturally or by design. I was still a quarter block behind her when she entered the mall doors and my busted knee was already crying out in protest. I ignored the pain as best I could, at least until I got through the doors. Then I slowed and looked around.

I spotted her on the escalator, headed to the second floor. There was a food court there. I walked at a leisurely pace toward the escalator, keeping an eye on Lara. I wanted to make sure she got off on the second floor and didn’t make the turn to continue up another floor.

She didn’t, and disappeared from my view a moment later. I wasn’t too worried. There were a dozen or so eateries in the food court. I was confident I could find her because the area wasn’t too large. And if she was there for lunch, she’d be there for a little while.

Then it occurred to me that she might get her food to go and return with it to her office. I hustled the rest of the way to the escalator and quickly walked up the moving stairs. When I got to the top, it didn’t take me long to find her standing in line at the Japanese food vendor. I took a seat and watched.

Even though it was before noon, the line was long. When she took a plastic tray before ordering, I knew she’d be staying here for her meal. I watched as she got her order, wandered around and eventually chose an empty two-seater table. Then I approached and sat down.

She looked up at me. Her expression turned distasteful. “Leave me alone. I already told you I have nothing to say to you.”

She twirled her fork around the long yakisoba noodles and shook her head. “No good will come from you poking around other people’s business.”

“A councilman’s work is the people’s business,” I ventured. “But his private business is his own.”

Her eyes narrowed but did not soften. She didn’t reply, only stabbed a carrot slice with her fork. She crunched the carrot with equal vigor.

I leaned forward slightly. “I already know his secret, Lara. And pretty soon, for better or worse, so will everyone else in the town.”

Her cheeks flared red. The coldness in her eyes flashed hot. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to confirm something like that,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “You’re obviously loyal, and that’s an admirable thing. But here’s the thing. The cops already know about him being gay and it will eventually get out. That will be his legacy, not any of the good work he’s done. Not the fiscal responsibility, not the warming centers. Just him being gay.”

She didn’t reply right away. Instead, she glared at me, the anger palpable on her face and crackling in the air between us.

“I don’t think that’s right,” I continued. “I don’t think it’s fair.”

“Fair?” she scoffed. “Fair? What on earth do you know about what’s fair?”

“What in the hell do you want?” she growled at me. “Because I am about three seconds from screaming out to security that you just propositioned me right here in the food court.”

She froze in place. The angry expression on her countenance softened. Her lips, which had been tightened along with her scowl, fell open. She stared at me, two emotions apparent on her face. The first was surprise, and it was the most apparent. But under that was hope.

She recovered quickly, looking away and taking a deep, shuddering breath. “Why are you doing this?” she asked quietly.

Lara looked up at me, considering. I stared back, no guile or pretense on my face. After a long minute, she pushed her tray away.

We speed walked at first, getting out of the downtown square and across the street to Riverfront Park. Then Lara abruptly slowed to a stroll. She stared down at her hands as she fidgeted with her nails. Most of them were chewed down to the nub.

“Look at me,” she said, her voice wavering a little bit. “I’ve never chewed my nails before.” She dropped her hands and looked over at me. “Now I don’t have any left to chew.”

She laughed but there was no mirth in it. “Better than vodka? Because I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been trying that solution, too.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. “I made some mistakes. A long time ago. People got hurt.”

She stared at me, digesting my words. Then she asked, “Why do you think Mr. Tate was murdered?”

I hesitated. Finally, I shrugged. “The person I’m working for thinks so. It’s my job to find out for sure.”

She frowned, watching me. “Fine, but you believe it, too. I can tell. It was in the way you told me about it. There wasn’t any doubt in your voice.”

I didn’t argue. “I think there’s a chance. There’s some strange things about this whole situation.”

Lara looked nervously in both directions. No one was paying attention to us. We could have been any couple out for a walk in the park. Lovers or friends, it didn’t matter. We blended in.

She spied a bench nearby and waved me to it. We sat down and she leaned in conspiratorially. “I know he wasn’t happy,” she said in a low voice.

She glanced around again, then added, “I think he might have been up to something. He was acting strange, especially for the last few weeks.”

“I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe it was...well, him being gay. Maybe he was struggling with that. Like, maybe he found a boyfriend or something and things were getting complicated.”

“But it seemed like more than that. He was having a lot of meetings with developers. More than it seemed like he needed to have. And they were strange meetings, too.”

“Just...strange. Like he was a little more secretive about the meetings than normal. He’d close the door for everything, something he never did. And then he went to great effort to act like everything was normal, even though it seemed a little strange. It was just...off.”

“A lot of people, but there were three that were in there more than most. I figured they were pressuring him to get the bid for the Looking Glass Condos.”

I felt a small thrill go through me. I might not have been right, but at least someone else saw a problem there. “Who were the three?”

She shrugged. “I forget the names. I just remember the faces for the most part.”

I gave her a disbelieving look. She was a councilman’s secretary. She didn’t forget names. This was her stalling until she decided whether or not to trust me all the way.

She was looking down at her fingers again. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone.”

She shrugged absently. “He was a good boss. He gave me job when I was having a hard time getting one. He treated me like a person, not a secretary. But close?” She shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

I was quiet for a few moments. Then I asked, “Why did the meetings with the developers seem fishy to you?”

“It was a different kind of deal,” she explained. “Most government bids, you simply take the lowest bid out of all the qualified bidding companies. But this was the opposite. The committee was going to select the best bid.”

“Probably, but not necessarily. Technically, they were charged with choosing the bid that was the best overall package. But being the high bid put that company in a strong position.”

I thought about that for a moment. “So if you were the bidding company, you’d want to make sure you had the highest bid—”

“Because every extra dollar you bid that you didn’t have to was dollars you didn’t have to spend.”

I thought about it for another minute. Then I asked, “How much money are we talking?”

Lara looked me straight in the eye. “Enough to kill someone over, you mean?”

We sat in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. Then I reached out slowly touched her softly on the shoulder. She jumped slightly, but then looked over at me.

“Lara, I need to see anything about these bids that you still have at the office.”

“I know that. But if I’m going to figure this out, I need more information.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Talking is one thing, but if those get out, it’s a crime. There are regulations, and –”

“Everything is going to come out eventually,” I interrupted her. “The part about him being gay isn’t going to stay secret long. That will be what people remember about him. But if I’m right and he was murdered, especially over something like this, then at least he will be something more of a victim in the people’s minds. He’ll never be a martyr, but he won’t get dragged through the mud quite the same way, either.”

“There’s something else, too,” I pressed. “It’s one thing if someone decides to take their own life. But it’s something else to have it taken from them. You can help me find out who killed Tate. Maybe we can hold them accountable for what they did.”

Tears sprang up in her eyes. She had stopped shaking her head and was staring at me. “Do you even really care?” she whispered. “Or is this just about money for you, too?”

I thought about Rolo and the six months’ worth of rent he’d given me. I thought about Tate and how the paper was going to thrill in this revelation. Mostly, though, I thought of Monique lying unconscious up at the hospital.

“I care,” I said, my voice low and a little choked. “I actually do care.”

Lara watched me for a few more moments. Then she said, “Let me think about it. If I decide to help you, then I’ll meet you at Roper’s. Seven o’clock.”

She stared at me for another moment, then stood up without a word and walked away.

Roper’s was a low key sports bar. I grabbed a booth in the corner and nursed a Kokanee. There were several TVs on, showing basketball games. I stared at them without really following the play, thinking.

I wondered if I was getting into something bigger than I could handle. Maybe I should give it all to Adam and let him pass it on to Detective Browning. He was a good detective, and would be able to put it all together. He could follow the money, probably faster than I could. More importantly, he had the authority to do something with whatever he found.

I sipped my Kokanee. For all the mental gymnastics my mind was going through, I knew good and well that I wasn’t going to hand this over to anyone. At least not yet. And it wasn’t because Rolo paid me, though that was part of it.

I just couldn’t let it go. Plain and simple. I had my teeth in it, and I was going to see it through.

Of course, my grandmother would have probably had another old saying from her native Czechoslovakia for this situation. One involving a blázen. A fool.

A short while later, Lara Monroe came through the door. She looked around the place, saw me and approached the table. She’d changed into a pair of jeans and a casual red blouse. I tried to read her expression, but it seemed to be a mix of worry and relief. She carried a thin manila envelope tucked under her arm.

She sat down hurriedly, dropping her purse and the envelope onto the bench seat next to her. “I almost didn’t.”

“That’s what I figured. I’ll ride this out and see what you come up with. But then we take it to the police. Right?”

She stared at me for a long moment as if she were trying to decide whether or not to believe me. I stared back, hoping she saw what she was looking for.

I shook my head. “Nothing. Just thinking about people. About how we judge each other.”

I felt foolish. I’d spent all this time talking with Monique and following the money, I hadn’t even considered this possibility. And it was so basic, I was a fool to have overlooked it.

But Lara shook her head. “No, no one. At least not here in River City. A few years ago, he had a scare when a policeman caught him at an adult theater, so he didn’t do anything here.

“It did,” I said. “I only heard about it recently. The cop that came across him at that theater kept it to himself.”

“Duty,” I said. As much as I hated to give Glen Bates credit, I knew that’s what it was. “Cops come across information all that time that is sensitive, or can’t be made public for one reason or another. Being trustworthy is part of the job.”

I shrugged. “When someone dies and their death is being investigated, everything has to be looked at. He’d be remiss to keep it to himself at this point.”

She seemed to accept that. “Well, after that I think he may have had affairs when he was out of town, but nothing her in River City.”

She nodded but didn’t reach for the envelope. I waited, watching her. After a short while, she slowly lifted it from the seat beside her and slid it across the table to me.

“Contractors. There were a whole bunch of them at first, but then after the first round of bids, the committee narrowed it to three. Then they bid again.”

She shook her head, then shrugged. “Technically, the best bid. But all of the criteria outside of the bid amount is pretty standard. Licensed, bonded, established business history, that kind of stuff. All three had that, so yes, high bid was what mattered.”

“The committee was supposed to meet two days from now, but I don’t know if they will or not. I suppose they’ll have to assign another council member to take Mr. Tate’s chair.” She paused, a flash of grief crossing her face. “Things must go on, right?”

She dabbed at her eyes with a napkin, and continued. “The committee will review the bids and make their recommendation to full council. The information will be in the advance agenda. I can get a look at that before it goes out to the public.”

“Good. In the meantime—” I held up the envelope, “—I’ll talk to our friends.”

She sighed and nodded, dabbing at her eyes some more. “You should be careful,” she said.

She shook her head. “No, because any one of them could have. And I don’t want you to screw this up. My ass is on the line.”

I went home and spread the contents of the envelope on my kitchen table. There wasn’t much. Three packets with a few sheets in each. I studied each of the three contractors who were in the final bid process for the Looking Glass condos.

Don Markham owned Markham & Son. I reviewed the data sheet about him and his company. It made for dry reading. He had all his permits, licenses and proper insurance. That was no surprise. I’m sure they all did.

The second contractor was Twin City Construction, owned by Lyle Beurkens. His company had the same bona fides as Markham. The only difference I could see was that Beurkens was licensed to operate in Idaho, too. His letterhead showed a second office address just across the state line in Coeur d’Alene.

Last came Memphis Rossiter, whose Caroline Contracting showed the same legitimacy as the other two. The only thing different that I saw in his paperwork was a notation that read “MBID.”

There was nothing else. Nothing to point me in a direction, other than at least now I knew who to talk to. For all the good that might do me.

I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. How should I approach things? I couldn’t just waltz in and start asking questions. I had no authority. And if I passed myself off as a private investigator, I was likely to end up in jail.

“Take a step back,” I whispered, remembering one of the few detective lessons I’d learned when I was a police officer over a decade ago. Ironically, this lesson came from Browning, the very same detective working the Tate suicide.

That gave me pause. Was he really working it? From my experience, most cops wouldn’t work it that hard. A man has a secret that is in danger of being exposed or that he can’t live with, so he commits suicide. The cops come and check things over but unless something leaps out at them that suggests it wasn’t what it looks like, the case is closed as a suicide. And that is that.

For all I knew, Browning had already closed the case and moved on. There were plenty of other cases for a Major Crimes detective to work on.

I frowned doubtfully. If Ray Browning was half the detective he was eleven years ago, he’d still be poking and prying, even if it was just between other more pressing cases. He’d want to figure out if those sleeping pills in Tate’s stomach were insurance against chickening out in the garage or not.

Or hell, maybe not. Maybe he was cruising into retirement and was willing to take things at face value. How was I supposed to know? I’d have to ask Adam next time.

I turned back to my case. Tate didn’t kill himself. He was murdered. I started with that assumption, because if that weren’t true, then I was wasting my time with these contractors.

So why would someone want to kill him? Did he have a secret lover that Lara was unaware of? Someone besides Monique? Or was it about money? And if it was about money, how?

I thought about the exchange Adam and I had watched at the Rocket Bakery. More and more, I believed that money was involved. Who was the white-haired guy with the red caddy? What was the money for? Tate’s vote and influence on the committee?

I returned to that thought. It seemed plausible. Simple, straightforward corruption. Pay the councilman, get the lucrative government contract. But that wasn’t quite enough, was it? Tate couldn’t deliver the entire package, because there were two other committee members. He’d have to convince at least one of them to follow his lead because if he wanted his choice to sail through full council, he’d need at least two votes.

I opened my tired eyes and stared down at the three thin packets of paper on my table. How on earth was I supposed to get anything from any one of these guys? I was a busted up, ex-cop with no authority and nothing to go on.

Things didn’t look any brighter to me the next morning. Nor did inspiration strike in my dreams. So I did the only thing to do in situations like that. I put on my clothes, got in my car and drove.

I lacked any good ideas on which contractor to talk to first, so I decided to let Fate take a hand and see them in the order they’d come out of Lara’s envelope. That meant Markham & Son was first up.

Their offices were located in a trendy new business park just north of downtown. The lobby had cathedral ceilings and a small water fountain that appeared to flow down the long wall from the second floor. I could feel the coolness of the water and the creek-like sound was elegant and soothing.

I took the elevator to the third floor and found that Markham & Son occupied the entire floor. An attractive young woman sat at a large, ornate reception desk. She looked bored, but a mask of friendliness went up as soon as she saw me.

I’d already decided to leave my request vague, even to the point of who to talk to. If she asked me if I wanted to talk to the father or the son, I figured I’d take the son. He might be easier to crack, even if he wasn’t in charge.

She consulted the computer screen in front of her. “I don’t show an appointment, sir.”

I shrugged. “My secretary must have screwed up, then. Is he available? I drove in from the work site and I don’t want to waste a trip.” I smiled at her thinly. “Time is money, right?”

She gave me an appraising look. I knew I didn’t look like a businessman, but I hoped I was scruffy enough to at least not look out of place on a construction site. “What is this concerning?” she asked.

Maya’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t reply. Instead, she consulted her screen again, then picked up the phone. A moment later, she said, “Sir? There’s a Mr. Kopriva to see you.” There was a pause. “No, sir, he doesn’t.” Another pause. “He won’t say, sir.” Then, “Yes, sir.”

She hung up the phone and stood. “If you’ll follow me,” she said, and strode away from the desk.

I followed. It was hard not to notice the way her skirt clung to her hips and how shapely her legs were. She walked with a purpose down a wide hall to the corner office. Once there, she rapped twice on the door, waited a moment, then opened it and stepped aside for me to enter.

I saw immediately that the man behind the massive mahogany desk was not the same man I’d seen in the Rocket Bakery with Monique. This man was a little older than I, with a touch of gray in his sideburns. He had a face that had probably been chiseled at one time but had grown soft in recent years. I had a vision of him still playing racquetball or some other manly endeavor, though. His hard eyes confirmed that.

He rose and extended his hand. I walked forward and took it. He offered one of those overly firm handshakes that are meant to intimidate but are not so crushing as to be flat out rude.

He smiled, and I guessed that many years ago, he’d been the high school quarterback, or the student body president, or king of the prom. Probably all three.

“Stefan Kopriva,” I answered. When I pulled my hand away, he let go of it but remained standing.

He glanced at the chair, then back of me. “Oh, yes. By all means.” He sat back down in his own high backed chair and regarded me studiously. “What is it I can do for you, Mr. Kopriva?”

I glanced around his office. It was adorned with various pieces of art. Some were framed prints, others were objects that looked ancient, at least to me. The entire room had an air of power and money and legacy.

He eyed me for a long moment, then shrugged. “I guess I’m the son. My father founded the company in the 1960s. I joined after college.”

Markham’s jaw set. “Seeing as how my father’s been dead for ten years, you could say that. What’s this about?”

I watched him for a reaction. Only he didn’t have one. He just stared at me, his face a blank slate. Then he asked, “Who exactly are you, Mr. Kopriva?”

“Just someone who’s being paid to ask some questions,” I answered vaguely.

I shrugged. “I’m not at liberty to disclose my client or my role, Mr. Markham. All I can say is that it is important that I find out all I can about the truth of what happened.”

“The truth of what? The councilman killed himself. How does that have anything to do with me or my company?”

“You’re one of the top three bidders for the new condo development down in the valley.”

“Councilman Tate chaired the committee that makes recommendations on those bids.”

“Relationship?” He shook his head at me. “I hardly knew the man, outside of the few meetings we had at his offices about the bid process.”

He fixed me with a steely gaze. “Mr. Kopriva, I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know what, if any, authority you have to ask these questions. So excuse me if I politely refuse and ask you to leave.”

“What harm can there be in answering a few questions?” I asked, not moving from my seat.

“There’s always harm in sharing information needlessly,” he said, his tone sharpening. “Now are you going to leave, or shall I call for security?”

I caught him at a work site on the short side of the South Hill. His crew was refurbishing a hundred and fifty year old residence that bordered between a house and a mansion. I knew who he was immediately, not so much because he was the only one wearing a white construction helmet, but because of the force of his presence.

“No!” He screamed at one of his workers who held a coil of wire. “You hook that up to those old switches and they’ll burst into fucking flame.”

The employee cringed under the barrage. “So I should replace the switches, then?”

The employee stared at him, cringing some more. “But I thought you said – ”

“So leave the goddamn original switches and use the right goddamn wire,” Beurkens finished. “Get the right stuff from Dan’s truck. Now!”

Beurkens shook his head after him. “Moron,” he muttered, then turned to see me standing a few feet away. He sized me up for a moment, then growled, “What the fuck do you want?”

After Beurkens threw me off his worksite without even asking my name, I traveled crosstown to visit Memphis Rossiter.

Caroline Construction was in a much more modest office space than Markham and Son, but somehow it seemed richer to me. The furniture was nicer. There were more people working there, too.

Anyone who says they don’t notice race or skin color is lying. It impacts everyone differently, but everyone notices. Especially living in the inland Pacific Northwest. Portland and Seattle might be melting pots, but east of the Cascades, the population is pretty largely white. As a result, people of color stand out here a little more than might somewhere else.

Walking into Caroline Construction, I saw one or two white faces and that was about it. Everyone else was darker skinned.

If someone had asked me before I walked in to that office if that would have had any effect on me whatsoever, my answer would have been an easy ‘no.’ I might have even taken offense at the idea. I had been a cop. I worked around people of all kinds. Some were on my side of the law, some on the other. Some of those people, on both sides, were black. What did I care?

Well, yeah. I was right about that. People are people everywhere. Unfortunately, people everywhere tend to be hyper aware of skin color. Walking into Caroline Construction, I suddenly was. And so was everyone who looked at me.

“And who may I say is inquiring?” Her voice had a slight sing-song quality to it.

She relayed my request, then gestured silently to the waiting area. I took a seat.

It was a full twenty or thirty minutes before Memphis Rossiter emerged from a nearby office and approached me. He wore a medium brown suit with a subtle weave of green stitching. The brown made his skin seem darker than it probably was. “Mr. Kopriva?” he asked, his voice professionally pleasant.

“Come on back,” he said. He turned around and headed back the way he’d come. I followed.

Once we were in his office, he motioned to the chair in front of his desk. The office was not as opulent or as decorated as Markham’s but it had more dignity to it. Both men seemed to want the person entering the office to be impressed with the man who sat behind the desk. Markham’s décor tried to grab you by the lapel and force you to agree with the idea. Rossiter’s took a more subtle approach, as if turning up his hands and saying, “So, you can see how impressive I am, can you not?” I didn’t get a chance to see Beurkens actual office, but somehow I guessed it would be more like Markham’s, only even more direct, like a punch in the nose.

I sat and so did Rossiter. His trimmed beard had wisps of gray in it. So did his sideburns. His glasses were frameless. His eyes took me in but reflected nothing.

I shook my head, but smiled slightly. It seemed to be impossible to shake that mantle, even more than a decade after I stopped carrying a badge.

“I imagine you do. So if you’re not with the police, who are you? And why are you here?”

Rossiter didn’t react, other than to press his lips together slightly. “That project is still in the bidding phase.”

Rossiter’s smile broadened. “That’s a choice way to put it. Varying degrees.” He chuckled. “Asking a businessman about business, you might as well be asking Coca-Cola about their recipe.”

“Maybe if I knew who you represented, I’d be more willing to talk about this subject,” Rossiter interrupted.

He raised his hand to cut me off. “Mr. Kopriva, please. Don’t mistake my politeness for weakness. I grew up in East Central. I know other ways to ask you to leave, and ways to make it happen if you don’t feel like honoring my request. I’m just being a gentleman about it.”

I shrugged at his question. “Nothing’s ever a total waste. But it wasn’t very productive.”

“Markham’s arrogant old money. Beurkens is a blue collar prick. And Rossiter is cool new money.”

“That’s the key,” Clell said, nodding his head with certainty. “Everything comes down to love or money. And I don’t see a whole lot of love going on in this situation, so it must be money.”

“Nobody,” I agreed. I took a swallow of beer. “I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I waltz in with no credentials and start asking them about their business. Why would they talk?”

“I don’t know who I’m fooling,” I said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to figure out this mess. Not for Monique, and not for Rolo.” I let out a small snort. “Who will probably beat the shit out of me again for my trouble.”

“I mean, I feel like I’m just floating around, not accomplishing anything. I’m like a piece of wreckage from a ship that the ocean is tossing around.” I shook my head. “The broken wreckage has no impact at all on the ocean. In fact, the ocean probably isn’t even aware that it’s there.”

I sighed. Leave it to Clell to be direct. But goddamn if he wasn’t usually dead on with his observations.

“I’m just saying I feel a little lost on this one,” I told him. “I don’t know how to proceed.”

I shook my head. “That was over a decade ago. Besides, I was never a detective.”

“But...” Clell paused. Then he said, “I thought you worked with Detective Browning. The one you said has the Tate case?” He looked me directly in the face. “When you worked on the case with the little girl, I mean.”

I didn’t answer him right away. I’d more or less dealt with the whole Amy Dugger baggage over the past ten, eleven years. Maybe I had come to terms with my own mistake in that case, even if it did cause the death of that beautiful six-year-old girl. I wasn’t wracked by guilt every moment of the day anymore. Or lost in a haze of booze and prescription drugs. Or thinking of eating my gun.

But that didn’t mean that I was over it. It still hurt. Not a dull ache, either. A sharp, ripping tear.

"I got shot. While I was recovering, they put me on light duty in the investigative division. I did paperwork and made phone calls to help out the detectives.”

“No. But when Amy Dugger was kidnapped, it was all hands on deck. That’s how I ended up going to her grandmother’s house. It was to follow up a lead. At the time, everyone thought it was a weak lead, just a loose end that needed to be sewn up so that the case file was squared away.”

I gritted my teeth together. “No. It ended up being the end of my career.” I stopped for a moment, feeling the bile roil in my stomach. Like I said, it still hurt.

I glanced over at Clell, my expression hard. Finally, I said, “So I wasn’t a detective. I was just a patrol cop.”

“No, I did. All the time, in fact. But on patrol, it’s usually happening right now. It’s an emergency. It’s raw. You follow a blood trail that’s still fresh. Not like this.”

“This...it’s more like detective work. Slow and methodical. Run down every lead. Except I’ve got none of the tools, no authority and no experience.”

I shrugged. “Okay. Only a little. Two cases don’t make you a detective. Besides, both of those were different.”

Clell smiled just a little. “That pro hockey player wasn’t so low profile.”

“My point is, maybe this is just the same as the other two. It’s just different, is all.”

“Never mind,” I said. I was starting to remember those few years on the job more vividly.

Clell shrugged. “Okay. Tell me this then. How’d you work on those cases you investigated in patrol?”

“I don’t mean in court or in a report,” I said. “I mean on the streets.”

“Look,” I said, “it’s not like you can just outright lie. But you can deceive a criminal as long as it isn’t something that would shock the conscience of a jury or compel an innocent person to admit to something they didn’t do.”

“Like one time, I called a woman looking for her son, who had a stack of warrants. Some guy answered. I figured it was him, but used a ruse to get him to admit it and not be spooked. I didn’t want him to bail before I could get to the house and arrest him.”

“I pretended I was from the post office, chasing lost mail and forwarding addresses.”

I remembered right. I remembered that I’d been with Katie on that call, like so many others. That was before we’d gotten together. Before I screwed that up, too.

Memory Lane sucked. There were too many bombed out and boarded up houses along that street.

“All right,” Clell said. “So you want to start lying to people in this case?”

I let the answer hang in the air, not answering for a little while. Clell waited patiently. Finally I shook my head. “No. I don’t see it working. I’ve already shown my cards to too many people. I don’t see how a ruse would work at this point.”

“Good,” Clell said. “Because no matter what you call it, lying is wrong.”

He was probably right. But so far, telling the truth hasn’t yielded me much, either. Monique and Lara helped me based on hearing the truth, but everyone else has either shut me down or I’ve had to lie to get what I needed. I thought of the most recent instance – the nurses at the hospital.

“If they won’t talk to me when I tell the truth and I can’t or won’t lie, what does that leave? How do I get anywhere on this case?”

I had coffee with Adam the next morning. When he walked in and ordered, Ani the barista refused his money. She pointed over to me. Adam frowned and let out a sigh.

I told him everything. The thing about Adam that I liked was that he listened. He listened better than just about anyone I’d ever known, with the possible exception of Clell. He didn’t interrupt and I could almost see the gears turning behind his eyes as I spoke.

“And,” I said, “I was hoping you could work up some kind of dossier on these three contractors for me.”

“Well, as long as that’s it.” He sat back and said nothing. This time, I caught the sarcasm in his tone.

I stopped. I’d asked Adam to do things that skirted the lines of legality before, but nothing that was outright illegal. “I’m not saying that you should hack into their bank accounts. I’m just asking for public information and...information that you might have access to that I don’t.”

“No. Having this conversation is a policy violation. Giving you information like that is illegal.”

Adam paused. He leaned back in his chair. He took a sip of his coffee. He stared out the window.

Finally, he turned back to me. “The thing is, I don’t have to do this for you. I’ve already done it.”

“For Detective Browning. He asked for a work up on all three contractors. I worked on it all day yesterday.”

“Sure. I didn’t promise Monique I wouldn’t, and it doesn’t compromise what she wants, which is to know the truth. And it sure as hell doesn’t compromise Rolo, because all he cares about is who beat up Monique. So I can give Browning anything I find on a silver platter.”

“Maybe,” Adam said, thinking. “But if you go poking around, talking to people, you might screw up his interviews.”

I didn’t answer. He was right. We sat in silence, sipping our coffee. I waited him out.

“The thing is, I just don’t know,” he said after a full minute. “Maybe Browning will never use any of it. But if he does, and you’ve gone and muddied the waters...”

“No. You still have a career. And you don’t owe me anything.” I pointed at his cup of coffee. “Except for that. Two-fifty. Cough it up.”

Adam chuckled at that. Then he shrugged. “I can give you the background, if you want. Nothing in writing, though. And you can’t go bothering any of these guys until I’m sure Browning is off the case, okay?”

He was right. It was a lot of work. As he told me about the three contractors, I was amazed at the level of detail he had learned and how he was able to recall it so easily for me.

“He inherited a ton of money from his dad,” Adam said. “But he isn’t quite the same caliber of businessman as his father was. Not even close, from what I can see. He lost almost the entire fortune speculating on Internet stocks. When the dot com bubble burst, he went from flush to just about broke.”

“That would explain what I saw in his offices. They seemed empty. Gave me the feeling of a factory without enough workers.”

“Well,” Adam said, “from what I can see, his company is deep in the red. This development deal with the city probably represented his best opportunity to get back into the black.”

I nodded. “Imagine that he was counting on getting the bid for this job. And counting on Tate to give it to him. If Tate didn’t come through, he knows he’ll lose his company. That’s motive for murder.”

Adam shrugged. “That’s a stretch. Besides, how would he know he didn’t get the bid? It wasn’t resolved yet when Tate died. It still isn’t.”

“If you want to speculate like that, there’s a thousand motives out there.”

“So, now you’re taking advice from a third rate security guard from North Dakota?”

Adam shrugged. “Whatever you say. Anyway, where Markham’s concerned, I think you can throw pride into the mix, too.”

“It’s a fairly recent development,” Adam explained. “Dominic Bracco. He's a transplant from New Jersey. He’s Angelo Bracco's nephew. Angelo's a pretty heavy hitter.”

I leaned back and turned up my palms. “Well, that could be it. I mean, that’s the simplest explanation. Beurkens was fronting for the mob. Tate double-crossed them and so they hit him.”

“And as far as we can tell, Bracco is pretty clean here. What little he is up to doesn’t even put him on the map as far as our gang guys are concerned. They were more concerned with the Russians, but now it’s back to the blacks and the Hispanics. The West Side Diablos and the West Side Crips have been sniping at each other for almost a year.”

Adam chuckled. “What else? Territory. The point is that no one has time to go after Bracco for his illegal gambling. It’s a victimless crime.”

Adam shrugged. “Either way, Bracco’s not such a big fish. In fact, when I called back east to New Jersey and talked to their OCB guys, they said our Bracco was a joke. That Angelo kicked him out of New Jersey for some kind of screw up, and he’s here in River City paying penance or something.”

“They didn’t know. Or they wouldn’t say. I guess the point is that while he looks good at first, the shine fades when you take a closer look.”

Adam nodded. “Yeah. I think it’s a way to launder his money, but I can’t prove it. At least, not the kind of proof a judge and jury would need.”

“Okay, so we’ve got a wannabe tycoon in Markham and a guy backed by a wannabe gangster in Beurkens. What about Rossiter?”

“Well, first off, he’s the cleanest one of the three. I didn’t see anything about him that looked shady. Plus, he’s active in the community, giving money to the rec center and funding youth sports teams. All kinds of stuff like that.”

“Probably nothing. He just strikes me as a pretty hardcore businessman, that’s all.”

“Lots of reasons, but I suppose the one that stands out the most to me is minority contracts.”

“Exactly. The idea is the same. It’s Uncle Sam’s way of trying to level the playing field.”

“I don’t know. I’m a technician, not a sociologist. But what I do know is that Rossiter applies for every minority designated contract there is. And almost every time, his company gets it. On top of that, he presses the minority status of his company every time he makes a general bid, too.”

“So what?” I asked. “The way I see it, he’s just using every advantage he has. That’s smart business.”

“There isn’t one. I just think it makes him pretty hardcore. Maybe even ruthless. Rossiter's company is in the top ten percent in the city. No matter how you want to figure it – gross income, profit, assets – he’s there.”

“Very. And not exactly why those minority bids were put into place, either.”

“I think anyone who makes that kind of money is hardcore, and anyone willing to use minority status once you’re already in the top ten percent is probably ruthless.”

I sat and thought for a moment. “The way I see it, any of these three could be desperate enough or ruthless enough to kill Tate if he double-crossed them.”

“Hey, if you ask me, you just spent the past half hour telling me about three guys who are perfectly capable of it.”

“No, I didn’t. I told you about three businessman in this city who are all probably less than scrupulous. If I went out and grabbed three more at random, at least one of them would be just as tainted. It doesn’t mean they’d kill someone, least of all a public official.”

“It’s not a who,” Adam said. “It’s a what. Occam’s razor is a concept. I won’t bore you with the Latin or the scientific version of it. What it comes down to is this – most often, the simplest explanation is the correct one.”

“I’m saying that Lee Harvey Oswald probably killed JFK all by himself. I’m saying that Area 51 is where the Air Force conducts test flights for their leading edge aircraft. I’m saying that Amelia Earhart crashed somewhere and D.B. Cooper is hanging from some tree and we just haven’t found the bodies. I’m saying that Marilyn Monroe was depressed and she overdosed on pills. I’m saying...”

“I’m saying that Councilman Tate killed himself,” Adam said anyway. “Probably because everyone was going to find out he was gay.”

“It’s the simplest explanation. It’s the most likely. That’s Occam’s razor.”

“But thank you,” I added quickly, and pointed to his coffee. “That’s still on me.”

Adam had a point. Theories like Occam's razor only fit usual situations. And this is not a usual situation.

That afternoon, I went back up to the hospital to see Monique. I was more than a little irritated that they hadn’t called me about her condition, but I kept it to myself. My status as stepbrother was tenuous enough as it was. I didn’t need to push things.

She was back in the same room. There seemed to be more tubes attached to her than before. A huge bandage covered the side and rear of her head. I went through some major surgery after being shot, but I couldn’t remember that many tubes or bandages.

I stayed for an hour, talking to her quietly about the case. I knew it was unlikely that she could hear me but it made me feel better. And I liked the thought that she just might be able to comprehend my words. Maybe they offered her some comfort in her dark, deep sleep.

One of the things that had been nagging at me was the exchange Adam and I had witnessed that first day I saw Monique. I’d been so focused on the fact that Tate had been there that I’d momentarily forgotten about the older man who had walked to his red Cadillac with her.

After getting Adam to tell me what he knew, I was reluctant to return and ask any of the three contractors if they knew anyone in a red Caddy. Besides, my guess is that two of them wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about and the third one would lie.

Of course, that was if one of them was even involved. For all I knew, Tate had some other gig going on and the exchange at the Rocket had to do with that.

I returned home and planned to review my notes once more before deciding my next move. As soon as I stepped through the main doors of the apartment building, someone grabbed me. Suddenly, I was flying down the hallway without moving my legs.

I flailed my hands and feet, but had no strength or balance. Then, just as suddenly, my face was rammed into my apartment door. Pain exploded on my left cheek and eye.

I fumbled with my keys and got the door open. Leon shoved me through, letting go of me as I staggered into the living room. He stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind himself.

I hesitated, considering my options. I didn’t see any, so I did what he said. I sat my ass down.

Leon pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed and said, “We’re here.” Then he hung up.

The big pimp moved with surprising grace for a man his size. He strolled in, slid out the only other chair in my small kitchen from the table and sat down lightly. He twirled his cane absently between his long, thick fingers. I watched the brass cap spin and wondered how many times he’d cracked someone in the skull with it.

He shook his head. “No, man, there is. Far as I can tell, you ain’t been doing shit to find the fool laid hands on my girl. Word I got is you only been up to the hospital a coupla times.”

“It ain’t,” he said, spinning the cane and stopping it suddenly at the last word. “It’s simple. Monique knows who smacked up on her, or she knows whoever ordered it. She’s got her list and can translate it. So what I want to know is why your narrow ass is not at her bedside, pen in hand, waiting for that important information. Somehow you got something better to do?”

“No,” I said. “But, she’s been in a coma part of the time. And like I said, it’s complicated.”

He spun the cane again, glaring at me. “See, I hear you say complicated, but I worry that what you’re really saying is that a nigger can’t understand.”

Shards of ice shot from my shoulder blades down into my gut. I raised my hands up to placate him. “That’s not it at all.”

“He was a client of Monique’s. Before she fell into a coma and had surgery, she said she didn’t think he killed himself. She thinks he was murdered for something he was into. I think she may have helped him with that something without knowing it.”

Rolo leaned back. He spun his cane and stared at it thoughtfully. “You saying this dude used her as a mule?”

“And so maybe the party on the other end of that transaction wanted to shut her up, too?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they thought that since she was a call girl, a beating is all it would take to keep her quiet.”

“Trying to figure out if she’s right about Tate’s death. And if she is, who did it. Which is the same thing you hired me to do.”

Rolo shot me an amused look, then smiled and shook his head. “Man, you sure do have a bold streak, don’t you? Talkin’ back to me like that. How you know I won’t tell Leon here to whup your ass?”

“That’s right. You don’t.” He pointed at me with the knob of his cane. “You might be remembering that.”

Rolo eyed me once more, then gave me a short nod. “You keep me updated. Not like the post office updated, neither. I want updates like Sportscenter. You feel me?”

“Ain’t nothing free,” Rolo said. Then he turned and strode out of my apartment. Leon trailed behind, casting me a dark look.

After Rolo left, I dug an old T-shirt out of my drawer and wrapped some ice cubes in it. I pressed the ice to my left eye. Then I sat and thought about the whole case some more. It seemed as though I was painted into a bit of a corner.

I remembered how Clell liked the idea of me working harder, continuing to dig. Keep turning over rocks, as we used to say on the job. But as I sat at my kitchen table, the cold ice stinging against my face, I couldn’t think of any rocks left to turn over.

I couldn’t go to any of the contractors without betraying Adam. Lara Monroe had done everything she could for me. And Monique was still unconscious, recovering. Who else?

What about one of the secretaries that worked for the contractors? I rejected that idea almost as soon as it formed. There was too much loyalty there. Besides, that would be the same thing as going to the contractors themselves, at least in spirit. And that would screw Adam.

And then it hit me. A place where I could still ply some bullshit. Where it might work.

I went to my closet and looked at what was hanging there. A few collared shirts, a windbreaker and one decent suit. The suit was about the only piece of clothing that remained from my days as a cop. I bought it for my swearing in ceremony, and hung onto it for court purposes. The dark blue, classic cut never went out of style.

I dressed slowly, pulling on the pants and a pair of dress shoes. I had two white shirts, but one had some kind of blotching on the collar, so I wore the other. When I brushed off the jacket and slipped it on, I stepped in front of the mirror and checked myself out.

I took off the jacket, went into the bathroom and shaved off two days’ worth of beard, put some water in my hair and combed in the most conservative style I could think of. Then I put the jacket on again, checked the mirror and decided that except for the redness around my left eye, I definitely looked the part.

The drive was only ten minutes long. I rang the doorbell to the huge house and got myself into character.

Paula Tate answered the door. She wasn’t as disheveled as the last time I saw her, but she still had a drink in her hand. Her eyes were much more focused than before, too, and they narrowed when she recognized me.

“I’m sorry about that, ma’am. Can I come in to speak with you? It’s about your settlement.”

She sized me up and down, then shrugged and opened the door, allowing me to enter.

“Of course,” she muttered in a mildly sarcastic tone. “Who drinks this early in the day?”

I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was after five. She obviously wasn’t keep track of time. That could be a good thing for me.

When she’d freshened her own drink and sat, we were quiet at first. Then she waved her drink toward my head. “What happened to your eye?”

“I know.” I shrugged. “I don’t always play by the rules.” Then I played my hand. “Mrs. Tate, here’s the thing. Our lawyers have been over the policy and we’ve discovered a mistake.”

I waited, because if the real insurance company agents had been in touch with her, my ruse was going to flop. But her eyebrows went up slightly and she leaned forward with interest.

“Well, it operates on several levels. For one, it addresses manner of death.”

I shook my head. “No, actually we are. The inclusivity clause includes any manner of death whatsoever. Even the normal exceptions such as skydiving and other dangerous activities are included.”

She leaned back “You guys don’t show up to deliver that kind of new. Why are you here?”

She scowled slightly. “Why would you think that? It’s your job to keep the company from paying off.”

I shook my head. “No ma’am. It’s my job to make sure the company pays off correctly. Sure, avoiding overpayment or improper payment is what makes the bosses happy, but my responsibility is proper payment. That’s why I’m a salaried employee, not commissioned.”

I leaned forward. “Mrs. Tate, while your husband was our insured, you are his beneficiary. That makes you my client. And due to the manner of your husband’s death and the inclusivity clause in the policy, there are a couple of unique matters we need to cover.”

“Suicide is recognized by the American Medical Association as being an action taken by someone with a mental disorder or depression. We base our decisions on AMA accepted findings. One of the indicators of suicidal tendencies, in addition to saying farewell to friends and family members, is unusual gifting.”

“Gifting?” She stared at me over the rim of her glass. I could tell that she was only half following me. I was counting on that.

“Frequently, when someone is contemplating suicide, he will give away cherished possessions, or sums of money. It’s similar to bequeathing these items in a will, only he does it before his death. Does that make sense?”

“Because of the medical reasons for these actions, the inclusivity clause allows the beneficiary to add the value of these items to the claim.”

She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know about him giving anything away.”

She took another drink and then met my eye. “Lawrence saved every dollar he could. Did I tell you that before?”

“Well, he did. And he didn’t trust the banks. He didn’t want to deal with financial statements for campaigning, either. So he kept it in cash.”

“And how is this related to his death?” I asked. “Because if there’s money in the safe, that’s clearly yours.”

She nodded. “We had almost a hundred thousand in there. It was our emergency cash. Our rainy day fund. Then, just a couple of days before he died, I found three hundred fifty thousand dollars in there.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Is that unusual? I mean, how often do you check the safe?”

She didn’t seem to hear my question. “The extra money must have come from investments or something. It was all legitimate, I’m certain. Lawrence was a very honest man.”

“Right.” She started to speak, then stopped and stared at me. “Are you being sarcastic?”

She continued staring at me in silence. I hoped I looked honest enough to finish off this charade, even with the bruise forming on my eye.

After a few more seconds, she shrugged and tossed back the remainder of her drink. “Well, good. Because that money was there, and it was legit.”

She rose and walked toward the miniature wet bar. Her steps were heavy. “Lawrence was clearly not happy with me. He must have done it to spite me.”

When she came back to the couch, she dropped heavily onto the cushion. “So what now?”

“Are you willing to sign an affidavit that your husband had three hundred fifty thousand dollars in your safe just two days before he died?”

“If it were possessions, we could look at photographic evidence, or take testimony from the recipient. With cash, we’ll definitely need an affidavit.”

“Do you believe that your husband was of sound mind when he gave that money away?”

“All right.” I stood up. “You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Tate. We’ll be in touch with the paperwork.”

Back when I was on the job, I always felt good after pulling off a ruse. Every time it felt like I’d somehow beaten the crooks at their own game. The end result was justice, even if I’d used deception to make it happen. It could also be that making a criminal look or feel foolish added a bit of poetic justice to the equation.

Either way, driving north on Division after my encounter with Paula Tate, I didn’t feel as good. Maybe it was because I knew that no matter how you sliced it, Paula Tate was a victim. She didn’t do anything wrong in this situation. Sure, she was a drunk. Maybe she was hell to be married to. But she probably wasn’t a criminal.

And yet, I also got what I needed. It might not hold up in court, but her statement told me that I was right. Tate was dirty, and he took at least one bribe. A big one, too. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. And I was pretty sure that could only mean one thing.

I drove to the north side of River City and pulled into the parking lot of Angelo’s restaurant. It was early yet and the lot was only half full. I sat in my car and got my thoughts straight.

I couldn’t hit up any of the contractors. But maybe I could get Dominic Bracco to admit to backing Beurkens. Or something more. But this wasn’t going to be as easy as fooling a half-looped socialite with greedy eyes. I was going to have to be on my game.

The danger was obvious. The guy was connected to the Mafia. But if Adam was right, he wasn’t too scary. He was likely trying to keep a low profile in River City. And it wasn’t like he was going to whack me in the middle of a nice Italian restaurant at four in the afternoon. That would be bad for business.

I found a hostess right inside. She was good-looking, and wore a tight, stylish skirt white dress shirt. Her breasts strained against the buttons. “Mr. Bracco’s not available,” she told me.

“Oh,” she said. For a moment, she looked confused. Finally, she said, “Then I guess it’s okay. He’s in the back office.” She pointed.

The door opened almost immediately. A pair of hard blue eyes stared at me, a scar the shape of a fish hook under the left one. He had a flat boxer’s nose and still maintained the physique of a middleweight.

“No?” He looked me up and down. “Well, then delivery orders in the back. Dan will sign the requisition order.”

He started to answer, then the door opened further. A large, obviously Italian man stood behind him.

Joe didn’t turn away from me. “Guy says he’s from the city or something.”

He considered, then waved me into the office. Joe stepped aside, but just barely enough to let me pass. My shoulder brushed across his chest and he sniffed disdainfully as I passed.

The office was cramped. Bracco turned and lumbered back to his desk. He motioned to the only chair besides his. I took a seat and so did he. Joe closed the door and stood in front of it.

Bracco steepled his fingers in front of his face. His thick brow and paunchy face had a sinister, animal cunning to them. He looked me over once more. “Who did you say you were?”

“Yeah, huh? Well, excuse me for asking, Mr. City Ethics Investigator, but what the fuck do you want?”

He shrugged. “Not much in this town I don’t know about.” He smiled tightly. “Mr. Pearce.”

I probably should have known the gig was up right then, but I didn’t have any choice but to forge ahead. Joe was standing in front of the door and if I’d tried to leave right then, all façades would drop.

“Well, actually, it’s not that aspect of the late councilman’s life that I’m interested in. It’s his financials.”

I went on. “He came into a large sum of money shortly before his death. We believe we have traced that money back to its source.”

The words hung in small room. Joe shifted from a casual stance into a menacing one. Bracco’s glare was unmistakable. I forced myself not to blink or swallow. My palms itched. How the hell was I going to get out of this?

“Yes, sir.” I leaned forward slightly. “I’m not looking to cause problems for you, Mr. Bracco. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Right. Most people don’t. The thing is, we have a policy that covers up to a million dollars in damages. After that, it comes out of the city coffers.”

“So, my staff and I have discovered that Councilman Tate was taking bribes. You probably weren’t aware that your investment money was being used for that purpose, but it was. And as soon as the other contractors involved in the bid for the Looking Glass Condos discover this, there will be a lawsuit. Probably several. And we’ll lose them all. It will definitely cost the city more than a million dollars.”

“Well, it does, actually,” I said. “I’d like to get a statement from you that your money was supposed to be an investment in the project itself, if the bid was won by Mr. Beurkens. But if I can’t get that from you, then the assumption will be that the money was for the purpose of a bribe. Your business license will be revoked and any existing businesses will be audited. That could cause you difficulties, to say the least.”

“No,” I said. “I just want to insulate the city as much as possible. The more I can show the corruption existed between two people, Mr. Beurkens and Councilman Tate, and only those two people, the less culpable we’ll be. We may pay out, but we hope it will be under the million dollar cap.”

Bracco nodded his head like he was listening, but when I finished my sentence, he looked over at Joe. “Throw this piece of shit out of my restaurant.”

Joe shuffled toward me like a striking snake and threw a short uppercut into my stomach. Air whooshed out of my lungs and I crumpled. He grabbed me by the hair and pulled my head back. His fist was cocked.

“No,” Bracco said, almost gently. “Not in here. In fact, not at all. Just toss him out the back.”

Joe’s fist lowered. Behind it, I could see a disappointed scowl. He pulled me to my feet.

Joe ran his free hand over my body roughly, pressing and grabbing at all the obvious locations.

Bracco wagged a finger at me. “Listen, small time. I don’t know what you’re up to. I don’t know what you think you know or who’s telling you what kind of bullshit. But I will tell you this. You don’t know who you’re fucking with here. And if I see your face again, and I mean ever, I will crush you like a bug. I don’t care if we bump into each other at the grocery store or at a goddamn parade. I see you, you’re fucking dead. You get it?”

Joe hauled me out the door and through the kitchen. I had to walk fast and even hop along to keep up with him. Men and women clad in white kitchen garb studiously ignored us both.

When we burst out the back door of the restaurant, he shoved me into the side of the green dumpster. My shoulder rammed into it and I fell to a knee.

“You’re lucky this is the boss’s home base,” he said in a low, deadly tone. “Or this kind of bullshit would have a higher price tag.”

“You better hope you do.” He regarded me for a second. “I’m gonna hit you now,” he said. “You can try to stop me if you want.”

I started to raise my hands. He lashed out with his left, catching me in the right eye. I saw stars. Another explosion of pain came from my mid-section. I stumbled forward into him and slid to my knees.

That evening, I went back to the hospital. The charge nurse gave me a funny look when I walked in and checked to see if Monique was still in the same room as before. I realized that my face probably looked like I needed to be in a room and not visiting one.

Truth was, my pride hurt more than my face or my gut. When I was on the job, I never lost a fight. But when I examined that thought further, I realized that it was a totally different world. I was an authority figure, with the weight of the state behind me. I had tools on my belt. I had back up officers coming. Most of the guys I fought were trying to get away more than they were trying to hurt me.

Now, I was just another guy. And I was a decade older, too. Bracco’s thug, Joe? He obviously had some professional training. The way he moved, the force of his blows, those don’t happen on accident. Every red-blooded American male thinks he can fight. He thinks fighting ability is issued right along with his Y chromosome. The older I get, the more I think that it’s aggression, not ability, that comes issued stock. Ability is earned, and Joe had it. More so than me.

I ran all this through my head, feeling more than a little sorry for myself, while I sat next to Monique’s still form. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like she had fewer tubes going into her, and she didn’t look as weak to me, either. But I was no doctor.

I sat next to her, and at some point, I took her hand. Later, I dozed off in the chair.

I rubbed my eyes. “I know you’ve got rules, but this is my sister. I really...I need to stay.”

“We have rules in place for a reason, sir. For the best interests of all our patients.”

I pointed toward Monique. “I think having family close is in her best interest. Don’t you?”

She hesitated, but I got the impression that she wasn’t weighing whether or not to let me stay. She was weighing whether or not to keep arguing with me or to call security.

The voice came in a croaking, rasping whisper. Both the nurse and I turned in surprise toward Monique.

Her deep brown eyes stared up at me, then at the nurse. “Can I have some water?”

The nurse filled a small cup and helped her drink. Then she took the clipboard from her bedside and started asking her questions. Monique answered, her voice still fluttering and weak. After a while, the nurse finished with her questions and checked the readouts on the instruments Monique was hooked into. She double-checked her IV, then turned to us both.

“Thirty minutes,” she said, then fixed her eyes on me. “But then you have to go.”

I pulled my chair closer to Monique’s bedside. “How do you feel?” I asked.

We sat in silence for a short time. I reached out and took her hand again, surprised at the emotion coursing between us. I felt almost as if I really were her brother. A lump rose in my throat. I tried to swallow past it.

She must have read something in my eyes, because she smiled weakly at me. “You have a good heart, Stef. It’s full of guilt and shame and I don’t know what else. But it’s a good heart. You should let it sing.”

“Did you get this insight while you were under general anesthesia? Because...”

We sat for another few moments, then she made a strange sound. I watched her for a second. Then I realized she was laughing softly.

I put my hands to my face. Then I shook my head and sighed ruefully. “The worst part is, somebody different is responsible for each eye.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t been in a hospital, fighting for my life. You had it much worse.”

I sighed again, this time longer and deeper. “Basically, I’ve been stumbling around, making a huge mess of everything.”

When I’d finished, I figured the time the nurse gave us was pretty close to over. Monique sat quietly, thinking. I’d given her several sips of water during my retelling of events and she asked for another one now. I held the small cup to her lips and she sipped.

She smiled tiredly. “You think it’s that simple, huh? Gay or straight? Boys or girls?”

She gave me a long look, then shrugged. “It is for some people. For others, it’s less rigid. It’s more of a spectrum.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “In the beginning, he said he wanted me to cure him. Somewhere along the line, I think he figured out that he didn’t need to be cured of anything.”

“What did it matter? He wasn’t killed because of who he loved or slept with.”

I dropped the issue. Instead, I said, “The guy at the restaurant had straight blond hair to his collar. Flattened nose. A fishhook-shaped scar under the eye.”

Before I could answer, the door swung open. “Time for you to leave,” the nurse told me.

“No,” she said, her voice firm. “I’ve already made an exception. She needs her rest. It’s time for you to go.”

I thought about pointing out that Monique had been sleeping for days, but one look at the nurse told me there was no more room for negotiation. Besides, when I glanced back at Monique, the weariness was plain in her face. She would probably be asleep minutes after I left.

One thing was certain. My work for Rolo was done. I knew who beat Monique, and why. Bracco sent his goon to shut her up about Tate. That connected Bracco to Tate, and the most likely connection was through Beurkens. He had to be the one bribing Tate.

The truth was, though, I didn’t know for sure was whether Tate was really murdered, and if so, who actually killed him. I couldn’t put Monique’s questions to rest, even if I was finished with Rolo’s job. I could go and tell the big pimp what he needed to know, but my business with this case wasn’t done.

Unfinished business didn’t sit well with me. Or maybe I just didn’t know when the hell to leave well enough alone.

Either way, I stopped by my apartment and picked up something I needed. Then I looked up an address and headed that way.

It was something that Clell had said that gave me the idea. Last year, I’d done a job for a hockey player. It didn’t turn out so well for either of us, but I solved my part of the problem with a miniature tape recorder. On my drive over to Lyle Beurkens’ house, I tested it.

My plan was simple. I would talk to Beurkens. I’d press, goad, accuse, whatever it took to get him to admit to his association with Bracco. That, coupled with Lara Monroe and Monique’s testimony, ought to be enough to break the case wide open. I could take it to Detective Browning on a silver platter.

Beurkens lived on the South Hill. I wasn’t surprised. That was where money lived in River City, though usually older money. But Beurkens didn’t live in the palatial mansions district of the South Hill. He lived in the older section, where the houses were large and well built, but still four and five to a city block. Beurkens hadn’t completely outgrown his blue collar roots.

I cut my headlights around the corner from his house. I turned the corner and slid to the curb half a block away. The night was dark, but the street was well lit. I killed my engine and looked down the street, figuring out which house belonged to Beurkens.

His house was the largest one on the block, on the corner. The porch light was on, but most of the lights inside were off. I glanced at my watch. One thirty in the morning. Most of the houses on the block were just as shut down for the night.

I reached for the door handle, then stopped. The front door to Beurkens’ house opened and a solitary figure exited. The man didn’t look left or right. He casually closed the front door, stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and strode down the walkway. I couldn’t see his face, but his easy, confident stride made me think of someone.

My pulse quickened. What was he doing here at this time of night? I guess he could have been delivering something for Bracco, or picking something up. There was plenty of room under that bulky jacket for a small package.

Joe turned right at the end of the walk and started down the sidewalk, headed away from me.

My next thought was that I should call the police. But what was I supposed to tell them? Some thug ex-boxer that works for a mobster just left a respected contractor’s house?

Yeah, I’m sure they’d run lights and siren. Maybe even call out Major Crimes.

I waited until Joe was out of sight. Then I got out of my car and walked toward Beurkens’ house. My shoes padded lightly on the sidewalk. When I reached the front door, I rang the bell. My right hand gripped the recorder inside my pocket. When he answered the door, I’d turn it on. Then we’d see what we could see.

I stood there for a moment, waiting. But in the end, I knew what I had to do. I’d come this far, and even though I knew something bad had happened, I didn’t know for sure.

Light from the front porch and the streetlights streamed in through the breaks in the curtains, but the living room was full of shadows. I thought about turning on a light, but rejected the idea. Nothing like announcing a burglary like turning on lights.

I guess what I was doing was technically trespassing more than burglary, but I’ve seen more than a few trespasses stretched into a burg in my time on the job. And someone like Beurkens had enough status in this city to make sure that happened.

Besides, how many cops were still on patrol who knew me? And of those that did, how many would enjoy the opportunity to slap cuffs on me, after everything that happened?

Maybe Beurkens had gone to bed. But if Joe’s visit was a legitimate one, there was no way he’d be asleep yet.

If everything was legit, and I called out, I was probably going to jail. But if I got caught skulking around this guy’s house, I was definitely going to jail. Or getting shot. Beurkens seemed like enough of a hothead to shoot first and maybe ask questions about it afterward.

I opened my mouth to call out, then changed my mind. Something in my gut made me stop, and the times I haven’t listened to my gut are the times I’ve gotten hurt the worst.

I shuffled across the dim living room, through a door and into the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a dining room and a great room. All empty.

I came upon a closed door at the back of the house with a strip of light showing underneath. An office or a library, I figured. Maybe Beurkens was in there, poring over his ledgers. If he was, when I burst in, the situation was going to get ugly fast. I’d have to get him talking, and hope he didn’t just call the police. Or shoot me.

Empty. The walls were lined with pictures of Beurkens catching fish and killing game. There was one small section with a few books. A large desk sat in the middle of the room with a laptop computer.

I thought about stealing a glance at his computer files, but I was no Adam. As soon as I hit the first password request, I’d be done. Besides, there was still house left to search.

Something about one of the pictures on the wall brought me back to it. As soon as I took a few seconds to look at the shot of Beurkens and a companion next to a Marlin as tall as he was, I realized what had caught my attention.

Standing next to him was the man from the Rocket Bakery. The missing part of the exchange between Beurkens and Tate. He smiled out of the picture as the two of them stood next to the trophy fish with the easy stance of a long friendship.

The stairs to the second floor were wide and sweeping and just off the main entry. Upstairs there were three bedrooms. The first two had probably been children’s rooms at one time, but were obviously guest rooms now. The third bedroom was the master.

The light was on. The bed was unmade. A wallet and a large-faced watch were on the single nightstand next to the clock. The plasma television hanging across the room on the wall was on ESPN with the sound muted.

I left the bedroom and headed back downstairs, looking for a basement door. I found it off the great room and took the stairs down into the pitch black. Steeling myself, I turned on the light.

I checked the doors off the main room, but only found a laundry room and a television room with a massive TV and surround speakers hanging on the walls.

Nothing to do with a woman in the entire house. No female touch to the décor. This was a bachelor’s home and had been for some time. Was Beurkens divorced? Never married?

Maybe he was a client of Rolo’s, I thought wildly. Or he used one of Rhonda’s girls. How would that be for six degrees of separation? Or maybe he was gay.

Beurkens’ living situation didn’t matter. No wife or kids in the house made this easier, anyway. No loose ends. Just him and me, talking, man to man.

I went back upstairs and walked around some more. Without turning on the lights, it was more difficult to figure out where another door might be, but after a while I found it just down a short hallway from the kitchen.

I tried to remember how the garage door faced the street. This was a corner lot. Did the garage door open onto the street I’d parked on, or the other? Could he have met with Joe, then jumped in his car right away and driven away without me noticing?

Maybe. He could have pulled out onto the other street and taken a right. I would only have been able to see the reflection of lights leaving. I didn’t remember seeing that, or hearing a car, but I was more focused on the house. I could have missed it.

I swung the door open slowly. The heavy metal creaked on its hinges, almost screeching my arrival. It was pitch dark in the garage, too. I fumbled around for a light switch to the side of the door and found it. I flipped it on.

Lyle Beurkens hung from a rope against the wall. His face was a deep purple and blood coated his lips. His engorged tongue stuck out his mouth. He did not move.

I walked slowly toward the body. The rope was attached to a large hook mounted in the wall. There were several others. He’d probably used them for storing skis or his kayaks or fishing poles.

The stench of him hit me after just a few steps. It wasn’t rot. He’d lost controls of his bowels and bladder and the smell of his waste filled the air. My stomach clenched, threatening to bring up my last meal, but I fought it down. This would be a crime scene soon. The last thing I needed to do was leave my DNA all over the place.

Beurkens hung limply, his hands dangling at his side. Urine dripped from the cuffs of his pajama bottoms and dripped onto the overturned step ladder beneath him. His bulging eyes stared straight ahead vacantly.

His visitor had something to do with this. Hell, my bet was that he had everything to do with this. Bracco was closing down loose ends.

I turned away from the grotesque form of Lyle Beurkens and headed out of the garage. A sense of urgency coursed through my system. I closed the door behind me and walked down the short hallway toward the kitchen.

I had to get to the hospital. If Bracco was willing to send his goon here to kill Beurkens, he’d have no hesitation sending him up to—

I turned slowly, keeping my hands high. I could hear the tramp of boot steps and the creak of leather. A second beam washed over me, then a third.

I lowered myself onto my good knee, then shifted slowly to put my bad one on the ground. Before I’d even settled it, the voice yelled at me again. “Now onto your belly! Fall forward and catch yourself.”

I did as he said. A sense of déjà vu came over me. I remembered training on these techniques on the mats in the police academy gym.

I anticipated each command and obeyed before he was even finished ordering it. Once I was in position, there was another tramp of feet. I braced myself for what was coming next.

The crushing weight of a knee across the back of my neck pressed me flat to the tile floor. My cheekbone felt like it would snap against the hard surface. Two sets of hands reefed on each of my arms, forcing my hands to the small of my back.

I cried out involuntarily. “Easy,” I grunted into the cold tile. “My left shoulder’s bad.”

Neither cop answered me as they snapped the handcuffs into place. Cold metal bit into my wrists. Only then did the knee across my neck lighten up.

“Where’s your friend?” asked a different voice than the one that ordered me to the ground. He ran his hands around my belt line, checking for weapons. “Where’s he hiding?”

He finished his search, then rolled me onto my side and up to a sitting position. “Get your feet underneath you.”

I tucked in my feet and pushed up. He provided counter ballast and got me to a standing position.

“Let’s take him to the car,” the first voice ordered. “Stuff him and then we’ll hold the perimeter for the K-9.”

At least that was something. The rough cuffing I got was nothing compared to getting bit by a hundred pound German shepherd.

Two of them escorted me out the front door, down the walk and halfway up the block to a waiting patrol car. They did another search, removing all my possessions and putting them into a plastic bag on the trunk of the car.

“What’s this?” The cop who didn’t believe I was alone held up the mini tape recorder.

He finished searching me and stuffed me unceremoniously into the back seat of the patrol car. I adjusted so that I was sitting sideways on the plastic coated seat. The cuffs hurt bad enough as it was, but at least this way I wasn’t putting additional pressure on them.

More cars arrived. They had given up all sense of stealth and now were merely keeping the house contained, waiting for the K9. It would be a great plan if there was someone else left in the house.

I took a deep breath. The stench of past prisoners filled my nostrils. I let it out.

A K9 officer arrived a minute or two later. I recognized him as soon as he got out of the car. He’d been on the K9 unit even when I was on the job. Shane was his name. His last name was something Hispanic, but I couldn’t remember it exactly.

He opened the back door and leashed up a small brown shepherd. I’d expected to see the huge black shepherd named Čert, a devil dog if ever there was one. But that was what? Eleven years ago? Even if that dog was still alive, he’d be long retired by now. Hell, this might even be Gomez’s second dog since Čert.

I watched as they approached the house. Gomez made a loud announcement at the front door about how the premises were about to be searched by a police dog. He warned the bad guys inside that if the dog found them, he would bite them. In my experience, very few believed him, and they were always proven wrong.

The K9 search took about ten minutes once they released the dog into the house. When he finally came back to the handler, Gomez put him on a leash and went in with several cover officers. Lights went on throughout Beurkens’ home as they searched it.

Twenty minutes later, the search complete, the officers huddled outside the front door, talking and gesturing with animation. They pointed at me a couple of times. Finally, a sergeant’s car rolled up. I couldn’t recognize who it was, but he joined the gaggle at the front door. After a bit, he went inside. When he came back out a few minutes later, it was clear he was giving directions. The uniformed officers scattered to carry out his orders, leaving one stationed at the front door.

The cop who didn’t believe me returned to the car and got in without a word. He started the car, typed something quickly on his mobile data computer and put the car into Drive.

The trip to the station took about ten minutes. It would’ve taken twice as long in the daytime. All the way down the hill and through downtown, the cop in the driver’s seat studiously ignored me. He didn’t try to engage me in any sort of conversation at all. He certainly didn’t read me my Miranda rights.

And that worried me. It meant that the sergeant told him not to. And the sergeant would only have told him not to talk to me if he was worried that the case would somehow get screwed up if he did. And that kind of caution only came into play in big cases.

I stole a glance at the cop’s nametag when he pulled me out of the car in the basement of the police station. I didn’t recognize it. Without a word, he took me up the elevator to the investigator’s floor. We walked down the empty hallway until we passed under a hanging sign that read “Major Crimes.”

I turned to the right before he even directed me, and then left again toward the interview rooms.

“You been here before?” he asked, a little bit of honest surprise in his tone.

He put me in interview room one, took off the handcuffs and locked the door behind him. Even though I couldn’t see him through the small square window in the door, I knew he was there, standing guard.

The one good thing about waiting for a detective to show up was it gave me time to think.

Obviously, I knew Bracco had Beurkens killed. There was no way the contractor killed himself. I saw Bracco’s thug leave just within an hour of his death. The urine hadn’t even had time to dry yet when I’d found him. Beurkens was murdered, and Bracco was behind it.

So I could just tell that to the detective, right? Offer to witness on the case?

I shook my head. And then what? Wait around for Bracco or one of his thugs to visit me sometime before trial? It wasn’t like River City PD was going to put me into a witness protection program.

So what were my other options? Dummy up? If I did that, I’d take a burglary hit for sure, which was a felony. And that was best case. If I didn’t say a word, it wouldn’t be very difficult for them to pin Beurkens’ murder on me.

I wondered for a second if they’d decide it was a suicide. Maybe the way Bracco’s goon did it left no evidence. He could have pointed a gun at Beurkens and walked him through every act, then kicked the step ladder out from under the contractor.

Somehow I doubted it. I didn’t see the fiery Beurkens going gently into the good night.

I thought about it some more, wondering what I could say. I couldn’t tell them about Rolo. But what about Monique? What if I said I was working for her? That was true, in more ways than one. And if my working for her led me to Beurkens...

What I really should do was call a lawyer. The only other time I needed a lawyer, I called Joel Harrity. He is probably the best one in the city, at least when it comes to criminal defense. He didn’t make my problem go away, but he walked me through it, he listened to me, and he told me the straight up truth of the situation. He helped me.

She stood across from me, her expression a mixture of professionalism, anger and disgust. I wondered how much of it was real and how much was simply how she had decided to play it with me.

A dozen images of her flashed through my mind all in a brief second. Us as friends. Lovers. Torn apart. My fault.

She sat in the chair across from me. The hard scowl on her face made her look much older than she was, but no less beautiful. “I don’t know why,” she said.

I paused, considering. Could I still trust her? After the way I treated her when I left the job and then how I ended up sitting in this room last year, I wondered. How deep did old bonds really go?

She pressed her lips together, her hard stare cutting into me. I felt a small flutter in the pit of my stomach. She’d looked at me much differently, once upon a time.

“Friends?” She shook her head. “You’ve got a messed up idea of friendship, Stef.”

I didn’t reply, because she was right. Friends don’t treat each other the way I’ve treated her. “I’m...I’m sorry, Katie.”

“Sorry is yesterday’s news,” Katie said, her tone cold. “Today is about reality.”

She leaned back and crossed her arms, staring across the table at me. The corners of her mouth turned down in a frown. “A Major Crimes detective has a suspect detained for burglary and murder. Suspect has a history of—“

“You’re in Major Crimes now?” I asked. “That must have just happened recently.”

She ignored me. “A history of burglary, assault, child pornography, illicit—”

I stared back at her, the fluttering in my stomach turning to a small fire of anger. “Do you really think so little of me, Katie? That you would believe the shit that Jack Stone was flinging around?”

I shook my head. “Believe what you want, Katie. I wasn’t involved in any of that other shit. I was looking for someone. I was helping a friend.”

I thought about Matt Sinderling for a moment, and how things eventually worked out between us. Maybe she had a point. But that didn’t mean I had to put up with this shit.

“Why don’t you just do what you need to do,” I said quietly. “And we’ll get it over with.”

She eyed me for another moment, then recited, “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, and to have that attorney present during any questioning. Do you understand these rights?”

She stared at me, trying to work it out in her head, but I could tell she was out of her depth. A small piece of me was glad to see it.

“You don’t get to pick and choose which detective you talk to,” she said. “That’s not how it works.”

“Well,” I snapped, “if we were friends, I might give a fuck how it works. But seeing as how we’re not, you can get me Ray Browning or get me a lawyer.”

She leaned forward, seething. “Do you know that people around here still put us together? They still judge me by you? No matter what I do?”

“It doesn’t seem to have stunted your career much,” I said. “Major Crimes is the top of the detective pyramid.”

“No. You really can’t. When things get difficult or messy, you just walk away.”

We sat in silence for a little while, staring at each other across a small table that might as well have been the Gulf of Mexico. I searched her eyes for some vestige of what we once were, but as hard as I looked, I couldn’t find anything.

She kept looking at me, her poker face falling away. Even a decade further on down the road, I still knew her well enough to see those emotions playing in her eyes. Anger. Surprise. Confusion.

Unfortunately, I was used to seeing that in her eyes. An edgy, dull pang went through my chest.

Waiting for Ray Browning took another hour, which I expected. Once, a uniformed officer opened the door, and I thought for sure that he was going to cuff me and take me over to the jail. I was certain that Katie wasn’t interested in what I had to say and was going to slap the burg and the murder on me and let everything come out in the wash.

He just asked me if I had to go to the restroom, though. I did. He escorted me there and back, gave me a bottle of water, and locked the door behind himself when he left the tiny interview room.

I should have known better. Katie was too good a cop to blow the opportunity to get a suspect talking.

Detective Ray Browning walked into the room dressed in a suit and tie, a folder under his arm. The suit didn’t surprise me. Part of it was psychological. Show up to interview a suspect at four in the morning dressed like a professional and it has impact. Makes the bad guy wonder what kind of supercop he’s up against.

He looked older than I remembered, but then again, we all did. There was a touch of gray at the temples of his short afro and scattered throughout his goatee. His skin was always a dark cocoa but now seemed a little bit stretched and washed out. But there were no wrinkles, and his eyes were as sharp as ever.

I wondered for a moment if he’d become religious or if he was merely being philosophical. Then I shrugged, because it really didn’t matter.

“And being a former police officer, may I assume you understood those rights?”

“And since you asked for me, may I also assume that you agree to waive those rights and answer my questions?”

He opened the file, took a pen from inside his jacket and scratched on a three by five card. Then he looked at his watch and wrote the time before pushing the card and the pen across the table to me.

I didn’t need to look down. I knew what it was. I was signing an acknowledgement of my rights and a waiver. I didn’t care. I could invoke any of my constitutional rights at any time. This was a formality.

Browning put his pen away and attached the card to the inside of the file with a paper clip. Then he closed the file and placed a small digital recorder between us. He raised his eyebrows at me, his finger poised over the red button.

Browning pressed the button. The small red light winked on. “This is Detective Ray Browning, badge number one zero three. I’m with Mr. Stefan Kopriva. Mr. Kopriva, do I have your permission to record this interview?”

Browning folded his hands and looked at me. “We have a bit of a problem here tonight,” he said.

I thought about telling him it was because of how he’d treated me way back when I was on the job and recovering from being shot. A young patrol cop working light duty for investigators is pretty low on the totem pole in cop land. But Browning was kind to me and he even tried to tutor me some.

The problem was, even though that was true, he would know it wasn’t the reason I asked for him.

“No, not really. But I do some freelance work once in a while. Nothing official.”

Browning leaned back and regarded me, stroking his goatee thoughtfully. Then he said, “Why would you talk to Beurkens in connection with the councilman’s death?”

“He was one of three contractors bidding for the development deal by the river. Tate was the chair of the contracts committee. And he was probably dirty.”

I smiled tightly. “I may not have all of the resources you do, Ray, but I do have a library card.”

“And the ability to trample all over an official investigation,” Browning added. “Did you talk to all three contractors?”

“And was that what you were doing inside Lyle Beurkens’ house at one o’clock in the morning?”

I shook my head. “Take a look in the plastic bag that patrol put my stuff into. You’ll see a mini-recorder.”

“So my intent was to get Beurkens talking about the Tate situation, maybe admit to the bribe.”

I thought about sharing what Paula Tate saw in their safe, but my gut told me to hold onto that information a little while longer. “He didn’t know that. I could have used a ruse.”

“So what exactly is your theory here? That Lyle Beurkens bribed the councilman?”

“The obvious one. To get the high bid, and Tate’s support in the committee.”

“And while the police are looking into his death and his dealings, you step all over things in an unsanctioned, freelance operation that somehow puts you in a man’s house at one o’clock in the morning while he’s hanging dead in his garage.” His voice lowered as he spoke, and for the first time, I heard an edge in it.

Browning shrugged. “Time of death is an inexact science when it comes to minutes. Best estimates are plus or minus an hour or more. So I guess it could have been shortly before you arrived. Or it could have been after.”

Browning nodded and stroked his goatee again. “Forensics is still processing the scene,” he said, “but I’d like to share with you one thing that we’ve found.”

“Gwen Jackson found residual amounts of adhesive and fibers from duct tape on both of his wrists.” Browning watched me as he spoke. “He didn’t kill himself. Someone bound his wrists with duct tape and faked the suicide. This was a murder.”

Joel Harrity arrived over an hour later. He was dressed even more impeccably than Ray Browning, which gave me a curious sense of optimism. I’d sat sipping a cup of coffee that Browning brought in for me, and wondered how I was going to unsnarl this mess.

Harrity waited until the uniform cop closed the door behind him before speaking. “Good morning,” he said, putting his briefcase on the table and sitting across from me. He pointed at the coffee and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

He nodded. “The cops keep getting smarter,” he said. “It used to be they’d only provide a beverage to entice a statement. Now they bring you coffee when you don’t say a word and call your lawyer right away.”

Harrity smiled humorlessly. “I thought not.” He opened his briefcase, took out a digital recorder, pressed a button and put it on the table in front of me. “Tell me everything.”

When I was finished, my Styrofoam coffee cup was empty and so was my head. Harrity had listened attentively, only interrupting to clarify a small point or two. He made no notes, but I guess that’s what the recorder was for.

Harrity leaned back and crossed his arms. “As I see it, you have two separate problems. The police and Mr. Bracco. I can help you with the first problem, but not the second.”

“No.” He shook his head. “The only way I intend to ever cross paths with Dominic Bracco is if he calls me to defend him after an arrest. You’re on your own with that situation.”

“What if I told the cops everything?” I asked. “Shoot for witness relocation? If Bracco is really connect to the New Jersey mob, the feds might be interested.”

“For starters, yes.” Harrity drummed his fingers on his briefcase. “And then they would have to know who this thug is.”

“That’s easy enough. I’m sure they have a file on Bracco and his associates, even if they’re not high on the RCPD radar.”

Harrity didn’t reply right away. My mind whirred through the rest of the cards that had to fall.

“It is,” I said. “But getting him to believe it might not be easy. And then he’s got to take it to his boss and convince him.”

I frowned. Crawford was a legendary asshole. “Yeah, that could be a problem.”

“Even if it isn’t, both of them would have to be willing to take it to a prosecutor, who would likewise have to believe your version of events. That could take a few days, at best.”

He was right. The wheels of justice did not turn swiftly. “And while all of this is going on, my shit is in the wind.”

“You would likely be in protective custody if things reached that point. Or simply booked on the probable cause and kept separate at jail, which amounts to the same thing.”

Harrity shrugged. “Who can say? The prosecutor would have to contact his colleagues on the federal level. Those prosecutors would have to care enough about Dominic Bracco on a national level to even consider taking on the case.”

“Most likely, yes. You’d remain there while they conduct their investigation and during trial. If all of that goes satisfactorily, then the federal prosecutor would have to agree to place you into the witness protection and relocation program.”

“It is,” Harrity agreed. “We can try it, but all of those things must go our way for it to work out. Only of those things has to go wrong for it not to work. The odds are very poor.”

“It would. It is something of an all or nothing proposition, though. If you take the problems separately, you might be able to solve them both through separate means.”

“I will do what I can on the criminal side. You need to figure out how to deal with the other side. If you mix the two, your exposure is greater for both problems. Your odds of going to prison for life or being sentenced to death go up. And I don’t have to tell you what could happen on the other thing.”

“First things first,” he said. “Here’s how we handle the murder charge.”

Browning listened to Harrity’s explanation and our request with a placid expression, so there was no way to know what he was thinking. After Harrity finished, he sat in thought for a time. Finally, he said, “It’s not up to me to decide if your client is a flight risk, counselor. That’s a judge’s decision.”

Harrity nodded. “Sure, it is. If you make an arrest and book someone. But it is your discretion whether or not to make that arrest.”

“I am aware of the allegation that Mr. Beurkens was murdered, although it sounds like it may have possibly been a suicide as well. Even so, you have no real evidence against my client.”

Browning smirked in slight annoyance. “We caught him at the scene within minutes of the man’s death. That is pretty powerful evidence.”

“Mr. Kopriva has explained that,” Harrity said. “He saw a man leave prior to his own entry into the Beurkens residence. That individual may be the culprit.”

“My client provided you with his first name,” Harrity said. “And a criminal associate. I have every confidence in your investigative skills in finding out the rest, detective.”

Browning shook his head. “On the one hand, I’ve got your client’s testimony that it was someone else and he’s the only witness to that. Not very strong evidence. And then, on the other hand, I have your client captured dead to rights inside the victim’s residence contemporaneous to the man’s murder. My witnesses there are police officers, and his own admission. That’s pretty compelling evidence.”

“It is circumstantial evidence, detective, and you know it. If you ever tried to charge off that piece alone, I’d get the case dismissed upon summary judgment for lack of evidence. What’s more, my client would have a malicious prosecution lawsuit readymade.”

“Malicious prosecution?” Browning shook his head. “Only a defense attorney could come into the police station in a case like this and make a threat like that.”

“I’m not threatening anyone,” Harrity said. “I’m stating the facts.”

“The fact is that your client was apprehended at the scene of a murder within minutes of the murder.”

“Mere presence does not prove guilt. Do you have his fingerprints on any pieces of evidence? Any DNA evidence linking him to the victim? Witnesses?”

“You don’t,” Harrity said, “and you won’t, because the only thing my client did was show up at that house with noble intentions and at very much the wrong time.”

“Maybe not, but juries do like me,” Harrity said. “And we both know that as the evidence stands, I will destroy this case before it even gets to a jury.”

Harrity raised his hand to stop me. Then he turned back to Browning. “One, because he’s not guilty. Two, because I am telling you he won’t.”

“Which my client would surely raise and get out anyway, benefitting no one but the bail bondsman. Detective, I realize you don’t care for me, and I fully understand the reason why that is. I represent scum, at least by the estimation of most officers of the law. But if you stop to think about it, you will recognize that I am, and have always been, honest about it.”

“So,” Harrity went on, “release my client on the terms we discussed. You can always charge him later if your investigation leads to it.”

Browning sat for another minute, looking first at Harrity, then at me. Then he stood and left the room without a word.

He was. Fifteen minutes later, he walked in with a full page photo that he placed in front of me without a word. I looked down at the face. The flat nose and fish hook scar were unmistakable.

“Joe Bassen,” Browning said. “Former professional boxer. Minor league criminal since he came back to River City. Associate of Dominic Bracco, according to our crime intelligence analysts.” He cast me a quick glance. “Like you said.”

Browning shrugged. “Maybe. All you’ve given me is a name and an accusation. I don’t have any proof this man was anywhere near the crime scene.”

“That could have come from anywhere,” Browning said. “But I have you at the crime scene, with cops as witnesses. Way more compelling evidence.”

“You haven’t even finished processing the scene yet,” I told him. “You might find something that links him there.”

“If he works for a mobster, I’m guessing he’s smart enough to wear gloves and take other precautions.”

“You’ve got me chasing ghosts here, Stef. And all to clear your own name.” Browning pressed his lips together and shook his head. “It looks shaky to me.”

It was the first time he’d used my name since he walked into the interview room hours ago. I took it for a good sign.

“Have you ever known me not to carry my own water, Ray? Even back when I was on the job? Karl Winter? Or Amy Dugger? Did I try to pass off any of those things onto anyone else?”

Browning shrugged. “Let’s say I believe you. Without evidence, the only way I get anywhere with the suspect you’re talking about is from a confession. And for that, I need a lever.”

Monique was awake when we got there. She listened to me explain the situation while Browning waited outside. Harrity had excused himself after getting assurances from Browning that I wouldn’t be booked if she cooperated.

Browning nodded his understanding. We went into Monique’s room and I introduced him to her. Browning wasted no time putting the photo montage in front of her. She took all of two seconds to identify Joe Bassen.

“That’s the man,” she told Browning. “That’s the man who assaulted me.”

Browning had her circle the number below Bassen’s photo, initial it and sign the bottom of the montage. He slipped it into a case folder.

I heaved a sigh of relief once he was out of the room, sinking into the chair next to Monique’s bed. She asked me for some water, and I poured her a cup. She sipped, then asked me weakly, “Now what?”

“Exactly,” I said, and we both smiled in spite of everything. She kept looking at me, though, so I answered her question. “Now he’ll pick Bassen up on suspicion of assault, based on your statement. He’ll work him for a little while on the assault, then slide over to the Beurkens murder. Try to shake him. See if he goes for it.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Browning is very good. Maybe they’ll turn up a witness or some physical evidence to make it more difficult for him to deny.”

“Then I think Browning will probably charge me. After that, it’ll be up to my lawyer.”

“But it is. I asked for your help. That’s why you’re in this situation.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know it was going to happen, or believe me, I would’ve taken a different approach.” I gave her a meaningful look, and took her hand. “Listen,” I said, squeezing her hand, “with Bracco tying up loose ends, you need to be extra careful, okay? If they release you, don’t go home. At least not until this is wrapped up. Even then, you should move.”

We sat quietly for a while. The weariness of the previous night and the post-adrenaline crash weighed heavily on me. I drifted in and out of sleep in the chair, finally dropping off entirely.

I woke when they brought in Monique’s food. The smell of the soup made my stomach rumble.

I glanced at the bandage on her head. “You seem better. The procedure must have worked.”

“The doctor said it was a success,” she said. “Now I just have to recover.”

I sat, holding her hand for a few minutes. Then I rose to my feet. “You should try to eat,” I told her.

On the way out of the hospital, I paused at the newsstand. I bought a copy of the paper and took it to the cafeteria. There I ordered some of the same soup Monique was eating upstairs, along with a grilled cheese sandwich and some more coffee.

I took my time scanning the paper. The story about Beurkens wasn’t front page news but it made the front of the regional section. Typically, Lieutenant Crawford of the Major Crimes unit had little to say about what the reporter described as a probable suicide. There was no mention of me having been taken into custody. I wondered how long that little nugget would stay secret. I wondered how much hell Browning was going to pay when Crawford found out he didn’t book me. More than both of those concerns, I wondered how his interview with Bassen would go.

I found the other piece of news I was looking for in the business section, which shares a section with the Sports in the ever-shrinking River City Herald.

Local minority contractor wins development bid. Below the headline was a picture of Memphis Rossiter shaking hands with the mayor. I read the details, but there was nothing interesting until the second to the last paragraph.

The purchase offer (or bid) process was very thorough, said Councilwoman Ellen Stark, acting chair of the Contracts Committee. “After we narrowed it to the three best, we listened to one final presentation from each of them. Then we placed our individual votes into a sealed envelope for the Council President to open.” The vote for Caroline Construction, owned by Rossiter, was reportedly by a 2-1 margin, with the late Councilman Lawrence Tate being the lone vote against.

I shook my head. The poor son of a bitch. He’d made promises he wasn’t able to deliver. He couldn’t swing the votes of his fellow politicians. And it cost him his life.

Had he called Bracco to tell him? Tried to return the money? Or was he going to take the money and run anyway?

Those were questions I don’t think I could ever answer. But I knew everything I needed to know. Tate took the bribe and couldn’t deliver the goods. Bracco sent Bassen, who did the mobster’s dirty work for him. He got back Bracco’s money, and probably took Tate’s hundred thousand, too. He probably would have gotten away with it clean, too, if it weren’t for Paula Tate checking the wall safe.

I frowned. After Tate, Joe Bassen had visited Monique, and put her in the hospital.

Since the police had impounded my car as evidence, I took a taxi out to The Hole. Browning might be willing to pursue possible leads, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with potential evidence, either.

When I walked in, I waited the second or two it took to adjust to the lighting. The clear advantage to this for Rolo didn’t escape me. The gangster was always facing the door and can see everyone who enters before their eyes can adjust. He can prepare his thoughts, take action or just disappear out the back door before anyone even knows he’s here.

But Rolo didn’t do any of those things. He sat in the corner booth, his head tipped back, hands clasped behind his neck, his eyes closed. Music played low on the jukebox, something with a slow beat, heavy on the bass.

When the music trailed off, he spoke with eyes still closed. “Shee-it,” he said. “It’s Dan Patrick.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me without surprise. “Sportscenter, dude. Sit down.”

“Man, I love it when they do that,” he said. “Take them old gospel tunes and re-work them into something relevant to-day.”

I didn’t answer. We’d talk when he was ready to start. I’d figured that out a while ago.

“Now this one here?” he continued. “This one by a white boy, but even he knows how to make that old song work new magic. You hearing that?”

“He the man that sung Stairway to Heaven. You believe that? That’s some versatile shit right there.”

We listened in silence for a few moments longer, than Rolo shrugged. “I can see you ain’t no kind of music aficionado. So you here to tell me what I need to hear?”

I told him everything. The experience was strangely similar to when I unloaded the whole story to Harrity, only then I was sure that the guy listening to me was going to try to help me after I was finished talking. With Rolo, I couldn’t say.

When I’d finished, Rolo sighed and waved the bartender over. “Beer and a shot,” he said, then glanced over at me. “Make it two.”

We were both quiet until the bartender brought the order to the table. Then Rolo raised the shot glass and motioned for me to do the same.

“You look like shit,” he said. “Like some kind of raccoon or somethin’. You do realize that, I hope.”

“Wouldn’t be good for a man to be walking around unaware of how god-awful he look.”

We sat for a while longer, sipping the beer and watching each other. Then Rolo said, “So the Italian sends his boy to beat up on my girl, just like you thought, huh?”

“So what you want from me? I done paid you, and far as I can see, you earned it. So we even.”

“No. You can’t let this stand. If word gets out on the street that one of your girls got beat and nothing happened, that can cause you trouble, right?”

Rolo shrugged. “Could be. Man can’t protect what’s his, people start to wonder all sorts of things.”

“What? You want to get worse than those two black eyes or something?” He shook his head. “Crazy ass cracker.”

“I’m not kidding,” I said. “Like I told you, his muscle is sitting downtown with a detective right now, sweating his balls off. If Bracco knows that, and I’m sure he does, he’s sweating it, too. My presence will only amp that up, which will give you an advantage.”

Rolo’s frown melted into a laugh. “Motherfucker, it ain’t like we business partners.”

“No, but we’ve done business. This time, and once before. And you know I’m good to my word. That’s the reason you came to me this time.”

Rolo gave it some thought. Finally, he said, “Aw’right. We’ll see how it go.”

My suggestion was to go to Angelo’s and talk to Bracco there, but Rolo shook his head. “A meet like this got to be on neutral territory,” he said. “Otherwise, someone got the advantage.”

He made a call from a payphone two blocks away from The Hole. His conversation was brief, but pointed. I got the impression Bracco was reluctant to meet him, but Rolo said, “How many dirty ass street niggers you want coming into your establishment every motherfucking night?” A moment or two later, he hung up, then picked up the phone again and called a taxi.

We rode in the back seat in silence. I didn’t feel that familiar buzz of adrenaline and realized it was because I was exhausted. A few hours of sleep in Monique’s room had barely taken the edge off for me. I dozed on the ride south and while I waited for Rolo outside Rhonda’s house. Rolo emerged with a manila envelope. Then we turned north, and I dozed some more.

The taxi stopped at a park just off Division Street. Rolo paid the driver and we walked slowly to a large, empty gazebo. Once under the huge roof, we both took a seat at one of the picnic tables.

I had to admire Rolo’s strategy. The gazebo was in the middle of the park. Large swaths of grass were on either side. Short of a sniper armed with a rifle, it would be impossible for Bracco to bring along any muscle without Rolo seeing them arrive. Coming into the middle of the park also gave Bracco the opportunity to scope out the situation before deciding to approach. It was win/win for both sides.

Bracco arrived late. He got out of the car, slammed the door and walked toward the gazebo without a single look around. My guess was that he parked off and watched the situation for a little while before pulling into the parking lot.

When he reached the gazebo, he stood across the picnic table from Rolo and me, staring at Rolo. It occurred to me that he could just pull out a pistol and shoot us both. Sure, it wasn’t a very private place for an execution, but that wouldn’t be much consolation to me once I was dead.

I had definitely watched too many Mafia movies. It didn’t help that Bracco looked like an extra from any one of them.

He fixed his eyes on me, a small, cruel smile playing on his lips. “You. I thought we had an agreement. I never see you again. You get to live. I guess that’s off the table now, huh?”

“Wassamatta?” He asked, then motioned to Rolo. “Mulignon got your tongue?”

Bracco looked back and forth between the two of us, then shrugged and motioned for Rolo to talk. “Go ahead. You called this little party.”

“I’m going to reach into my jacket,” Rolo said. “It ain’t nothing for you to be worrying about.”

Rolo took the manila envelope from inside his jacket. He pulled out a 5x7 photograph and placed it in front of Bracco. Even upside down, I could see that it was a glamour shot of Monique.

Bracco glanced at the picture, then back at Rolo. “Sorry. I’m not into splitting black oak.”

“That don’t surprise me none,” Rolo said. “Seeing how you is ignorant. But this here is the girl you sent your boy to tune up back a week ago. She still up in the hospital behind that shit.”

“What can I say? Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Only God knows why.”

“She pointed out your boy to the police,” Rolo said. “He sittin’ in the box right now, being worked on.”

Rolo stared at him hard. “This here is a parley, you goombah motherfucker. We are gonna come to an understanding, or it’s gonna get ugly.”

“I do. I surely do. And I know you know who you’re talking to. So now that we got that bullshit out the way, how we gonna solve our predicament?”

Bracco leaned forward. “There ain’t nothing to solve. Your whore got into shit she had no part being into. She got warned to shut her clam. Obviously, she didn’t listen, which was pretty stupid on her part, don’t you think?”

“You gonna leave that girl be,” Rolo said. “And then some. That’s the tax.”

“You’re taxing me?” Bracco leaned back and laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. Really rich.”

“So, I figure maybe things work different back there on the East Coast. We got ourselves a unique situation here. One that’s more delicate.”

“We ain’t as big here,” Rolo explained. “There ain’t as much pie for all of us to slice. So we got to be more careful not to step in each other’s business.”

“Yeah, well, that’s on you. You knew she was a working girl, so you shoulda thunk to find out who she was with. Then we coulda talked about this like businessmen.”

“Water under the bridge now,” Bracco said. “Whaddaya want, you know? Fuck it.”

“Yeah, I went to high school. Where I come from, only the jigs dropped out.”

“See, I had Biology with this Japanese teacher by the name of Mr. Watanabe. He was one slick dude. And he took the time to explain to all us knuckleheads what an ecosystem was. Spent the entire year making us understand. How all the different parts worked together, depended on each other, all that noise.” He sniffed and motioned at Bracco with his chin. “That shit be the same for economic systems, too. All interdependent.”

“I always said the scariest thing in the world is a nigger with an education.”

Rolo chuckled. “I believe it. But maybe you ain’t seeing the picture I’m painting for you here. I run the girls out east, along with a couple escort businesses south. I don’t run much dope and any of that’s wholesale, but I do some dirty with the bikers out east. And I trade girls with the Russians up north, too, just to keep our selection spicy. About the only people in town I don’t have some kind of arrangement with are the skinheads downtown, and who wants to deal with those motherfuckers, anyhow?”

“Oh, I get it. You’re telling me it’s all inter-related, and everyone works together and no man is an island and all of the circle of life shit. That about right?”

Bracco shrugged. “We all got partners. Let’s agree to that. I’m not going to give you my job resume, but if you’re saying your pals can fuck with me, I’m saying my friends can crack skulls, too. What of it?”

“You’re forgetting one thing. Your boy smacked on my girl. Everyone knows it. You didn’t check your shit out before you sent him, so you at fault.” He pointed at Bracco. “And I am owed. That’s the fact.”

Bracco took a deep breath and let it out. “This is some small time bullshit,” he sighed. “Back in Jersey, some puttana getting her ass kicked wouldn’t even register.”

Bracco looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “No, this little prick and I have some things to work out.”

Bracco stared at me, then shook his head again. “No, too many loose ends. I can’t do it.”

“He won’t say shit,” Rolo repeated. “Look, we had something go down last year. He coulda gave me up and saved himself jail time. ‘Stead, he dummied up and took his lumps.”

“He won’t say shit,“ Rolo said a third time, “because if he do, I will personally smoke his ass.”

Bracco sat, considering. Finally, he said, “So we’re quits on anything in play before this sit-down?”

I thought that was a strange way for him to say it, but between the two of them, the slang was pretty thick. They seemed to understand each other, but I hoped they were talking about the same thing. After all, my life was at stake.

Bracco was still staring at Rolo, his brows arched questioningly. The pimp nodded. “Completely.”

“Maybe he beat the rap.” Rolo shrugged. “If not, muscle in this town’s the easiest thing to find. You be good.”

He stood. Rolo and I stood with him. He held out his hand and Rolo took it. They shook once, firmly. Then Bracco turned around, ignoring me completely, and walked away.

When he was out of earshot, Rolo muttered, “That motherfucker gonna be a problem someday.”

The taxi dropped me at my apartment. I went inside, locked the door behind me and crashed onto the bed. If I wasn’t asleep when I hit the mattress, it was only a second or two later.

I woke to pounding on my door. The apartment was dark. I flipped on a light and staggered through the small living room to my door. “Who is it?”

I turned the deadbolt and twisted the knob. The door burst inward as if it had come alive. The first man through the door was dressed all in black, complete with a tactical helmet. He drove the palm of his left hand into my chest and stiff-armed me straight backward into the chair. His right hand held a pistol, which he pointed directly at me.

I put my hands on my lap and didn’t move. Behind him, more black clad figures streamed into the apartment, hitching and lurching past the doorway to the bedroom and the bathroom. It only took thirty seconds before shouts of “clear” rang out through the apartment.

Ray Browning and Katie MacLeod trailed the SWAT entry team. Both wore raid vests, but had holstered their pistols.

He ignored me, talking to the squad leader. “Send up the two uniforms holding the perimeter. I need one for the door and one to watch him while we search.”

Browning pulled a small packet of paperwork folded length-wise from inside his vest. He dropped it on the small coffee table in front of me. “That’s a signed search warrant.”

I picked up the document and looked it over. He wasn’t bluffing. The warrant had been signed earlier in the day by Judge Petalski. Items to be seized, if found, including duct tape, tranquilizers, handguns or anything else linked to the deaths of Lawrence Tate or Lyle Beurkens.

Browning didn’t answer. He removed a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket and slipped them on.

I frowned. “I thought you had more game than that, Ray. I’m disappointed.”

Browning squatted down next to the table so that we were eye to eye. “I am going to search your apartment, Kopriva,” he said, “and then you’re going to jail.”

“And don’t call me Ray,” Browning said. “I am a police detective with the RCPD. You can call me by that.”

“Oh, Christ.” I looked at Katie, but found her gaze to be even harder than Browning’s. “You people really do think I did it.”

A uniformed officer stood near my chair while Katie and Browning commenced their search. They were slow, and methodical. I mostly watched Katie while they tossed my living room and kitchen. She moved with confidence, like an athlete at the top of her game. It seemed strange to describe her actions as graceful, but they were. I felt a tinge of shame as she went through my things. I was ashamed at how modest my home was, and how far I’d fallen. I was ashamed that she would think so little of me that she’d believe I’d murdered one, perhaps two people. A lump rose in my throat. Over time, I slowly swallowed that lump, and it became a slow burning anger in the pit of my stomach.

When Katie moved to search my bedroom, the ashamed lump came back. Once upon a time, she’d shared my bed. Now she was in my bedroom, and she had to be thinking of that herself. What was she feeling? Regret? Sadness? Disgust?

She walked out of the room a few minutes later, holding my .45 with a pen through the trigger guard.

“Bingo,” she said, putting it on the kitchen table near where Browning was searching.

He looked at it and nodded to her. “Nice work.” Then he glanced over at me. “I trust you have a permit for that?”

“I don’t need one,” I said. “It’s in my home, and I’m not carrying it concealed. You might want to Google Washington State law.”

Browning smiled tightly. “That’s right. And your prior conviction is a misdemeanor, so you’re okay there, too.”

Ten minutes later, Katie walked out of the bedroom again. In her left hand, she held a brown prescription bottle without a label. In her right was a half-used roll of duct tape.

I thought about accusing her of planting them, but I knew she’d never do anything like that. Hardly anyone would, even back when I was on the job. Maybe an asshole like Stone, but that was about it.

I thought back on his conversation with Rolo. There was one thing he said that seemed funny to me at the time, but now I understood.

The slick son of a bitch. He’d already planted the tape and the pills before he ever met with Rolo.

Getting booked into jail that first time had not been a fun experience. There’d been a couple of familiar faces on the jail staff in the intake area, for one thing. They all knew I’d been a police officer, because they cleared out the entire area before I was processed through booking. Then I spent the entire fifteen days in solitary.

I guess that sort of treatment is a one shot thing, because this time around, Browning walked me in without so much as a call ahead. We stood in the intake area, waiting for the booking officer, along with two other cops and some guy in his boxer shorts who reeked of alcohol. He mumbled about how somebody was a “bitch,” so it didn’t take much for me to guess he was in on a domestic violence charge.

I didn’t make eye contact with either of the other officers, but one of them kept staring at me. I saw him in my peripheral vision the entire time we waited our turn. Finally, I turned to him and returned his stare. That’s when I recognized him.

My gaze faltered. He’d been a rookie when I was on the job. And on one very bad day, he’d tried hard to get me to do the right thing, the smart thing, but I didn’t listen. I’d been too pissed off and too arrogant. The cost of my mistake had been high, to Amy Dugger and to the department. I’m sure that it had an impact on him. But I was too wrapped up in my own troubles to even consider that.

I realized then that I’d never apologized to him. He’d been right, and if I’d listened to him—

“Kopriva,” he said, shaking his head. “Wow. You turned out to be a real piece of shit, huh?”

The booking officer booked me in quickly and efficiently. When he asked Browning for the charge, the detective glanced at me and said, “Burglary. For now.”

The booking officer jotted down the charge, then asked me a slew of questions about my medical health. Was I addicted to any controlled substances? Was I suicidal?

Harrity had me out of jail within a few hours of the completion of my booking. Bail on property crimes is ridiculously low, and I couldn’t remember ever thinking that was a good thing, until now.

I walked out of the jail into the darkness of the parking lot with my possessions in a plastic bag. Harrity walked with me as far as the corner, then stopped.

I thought he might offer me a ride, but he stood there, saying nothing. That was when I realized we weren’t friends. I was a client, and you don’t let clients into your house or your car.

“I’m going to walk down the street and get some food,” I said. “Or some coffee.”

“Wait,” I said. He stopped and turned back to face me. “What happens now?” I asked.

“They’ll charge you,” he said. “They have to, now that they’ve booked you.”

“Not a real rule,” he said. “It’s what we call a face rule. They’ll charge you to save face. Because they arrested you.”

“I imagine the judge will see it the same way,” Harrity said, “when I make a motion for dismissal based upon insufficient probable cause.”

Harrity shrugged. “I don’t know if they ever did. I know they brought him in, and they let him go.”

I scratched the stubble on my chin. “It’s him that put the tape and the pills in my apartment. It had to be.”

Harrity nodded noncommittally. “We can theorize all we want. The cops will charge off of evidence. I can attack the duct tape as long as they can’t prove it’s the same roll that was used on Beurkens. The pills are another matter. They didn’t book you for it, but that’s another felony they will charge. Illegal Possession of a Prescription Drug.”

I shook my head slowly. “I can’t believe this. All I did was try to help someone.”

“The murder charge won’t stick. I suppose they may take it to trial, but if they do and lose, they risk losing all of the corresponding charges. Juries get a little pissed when they think someone is being railroaded.”

“The burglary is shaky. I think it’ll get pled to a trespass or they lose it at trial. Which really only leaves the pills. Have you ever had a prescription for these pills?”

I shook my head. “Mine were straight pain pills. I never told my doctors about anything going on inside my head, so they never knew to prescribe something like that.”

“Then they can push the felony possession if they want. I can attack the search warrant, the process, and maybe we get lucky. But that’s the charge that has the most danger for us.”

I passed the first diner I came to and walked an extra five blocks to the second one. Along the way, I put my possessions back in my pockets and threw the plastic bag in the trash. People in this part of town see enough of the jailbird shuffle. I didn’t want to labeled as one of them.

I ate some breakfast, even though it was dinner time. The eggs were scrambled but runny and the bacon so limp that I wondered if it had been cooked at all, but I wolfed it down, along with my toast and two cups of coffee. I sat sipping the third cup, and thinking. I sat there long enough for the first two cups to go through me, so I got up and hit the restroom. Then I left a generous tip, paid my bill, and left.

I walked to the downtown library, and caught the door with twenty minutes left to closing. I only needed ten of those minutes on the computer. Washed up boxers don’t rate much Internet space. Then I caught a cab. The ride went quick. The cab zipped up Division at a few miles above the speed limit, and dropped me off in front of Angelo’s in less than fifteen minutes.

I drew in a deep breath to steady myself. The enticing odor of garlic bread floated on the air. I exhaled, and ignored the smell.

Inside, the restaurant was still moderately busy with late dinner traffic. A hostess tried to take my name, but I waved her away. “I’m here to see Joe,” I said. She stepped aside with a knowing look.

I decided not to go to the office. That would involve Bracco, too, which I wanted to avoid if I could. Instead, I took a seat at the bar and ordered a Kokanee. When the bartender brought the bottle, I waved him in close.

The bartender, who looked like he should be playing college baseball, nodded, then pointed around the corner. “He’s usually in the office.”

The barkeep blinked. Then it registered. “Oh. Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

I spent some time people watching while I waited. It passed the time, but more important, it allowed me to make sure I saw Bassen coming. I sat and watched the raucous men in the corner booth with their loud laughter and juvenile trash talk. The moody guy in the opposite corner, mulling over his drink, after the table of pretty women sent him packing. Those same pretty girls flipping their hair for the benefit of the guys in the corner. Except for one, who clearly had eyes for the bartender. Then there were the two girlfriends who were clearly not interested in anything except whatever important topic they were discussing, despite the best efforts of the guys in the corner to get their attention. After a while, the guys gave up and focused on the hair flippers, which I would have guessed should have been their first, best target.

I watched them all, each true to some aspect of human nature, and it reminded me how predictable, stupid and disgusting a race we were.

After forty minutes, Bassen finally appeared. I drained the last of my beer, now slightly warm, and stood to meet him.

He approached and stood uncomfortably close to me. He was a couple of inches taller and stared down at me with boxer’s pre-fight glare. “You got a lot of balls coming here. What the fuck do you want?”

“Not here,” I said. “Don’t we usually do our talking out back?” I gave him a sarcastic smile.

He smiled knowingly. Without a word, he turned and walked away. I followed. We went down the hall and through the kitchen. The same kitchen staff as before did the same stand up job of ignoring us as we walked past on our way to the back door.

The aroma of good food and hot bread gave way to the acrid smell of garbage as soon as he opened the door and stepped into the area next to the dumpsters. There was one on each side of the door, with some recycling containers next to them. A small wall enclosed three quarters of the area, leaving a single, large opening to serve as an exit.

He turned to face me. The light bulb over the top of the rear door filled the enclave with a glaring light. “All right,” he said. “You’re stupid enough to show your face here, so now I kick your ass again.” Then he noticed my hand in my pocket. His eyes narrowed. “You brought a fucking gun?” he snarled.

“I’m talking about Beurkens. And Tate. And the bribe for the Looking Glass Condos development.”

I shrugged. “You might not know about the condos. But I saw you at Beurkens’ house, right before I went inside. I saw you leave.”

“No one,” I said. “Especially not after the shit you planted in my bedroom.”

“You killed Tate, too,” I said. “That’s why you planted the drugs along with the duct tape. The duct tape was from Beurkens, but the pills were from Tate.”

“What is this, some Sherlock Holmes shit? You’re like the master detective who spells it all out before you point out the big, bad murderer?”

“No,” I said. “It won’t do any good. There’s no evidence you did it, and the cops caught me at the scene. Then they found the tape and the pills you put in my bedroom. Pointing at you didn’t do any good before, and it won’t do any good now.”

“My goose is cooked,” I said. “They’re going to charge me and the best criminal defense attorney in the city is pretty sure I’ll take the fall for at least some of it.”

“Boo-hoo. Don’t go sticking your nose where it don’t belong and shit like this won’t happen.”

He shook his head, and turned up his hands. “So, what then? When you said you want to come out here, I thought you were nutting up. We coulda had this conversation at the bar.”

“I should be congratulating you. Number fourteen in the world? That’s impressive.”

“Of course, it was only with the one federation that you were ranked that high.”

“Not the big ones, either. It was one of the smaller federations that no one really ever pays attention to.”

He waded in, but this time I had a chance to raise my hands defensively. I took a bladed stance and crouched slightly. As he drew near, I loaded up my weight on my back leg, giving my bad left knee some cushion and coiling up for one punch. I figured that was all I’d get.

He didn’t come close enough to hit. Instead, he circled, his hands at shoulder height, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, sizing me up. “You train?”

“Not boxing,” he said, rolling his shoulders forward several times, then backwards. He stretched his neck to left and right in short snaps. “Karate or some shit.”

He smiled and stepped in. His left jab snapped out once, twice, a third time. Bassen let out a sharp exhale with each punch. I swept away all three punches with my own left, but the third one caught the meaty part of my forearm. The strength of the blow sent shock waves up and down my arm.

Bassen stepped back, out of range, a cocky, vicious grin on his face. “You made a big mistake coming here,” he said.

He scowled. Then he feinted to the left and stepped straight into me. His jab flashed out. I moved my head to the side and threw a straight right directly into his mid-section. My punch landed solidly as he exhaled. He stepped to the side, moving as if I hadn’t even touched him. A moment later, he whipped a left hook over the top of my right hand. His fist caught my jaw flush, and I saw stars against a black field.

I don’t know what he hit me with next, only that something landed in the pit of my gut, then my forehead, then my chin. The next thing I knew, something huge slammed into my whole side, from ankle to crown.

I wanted to shake my head to clear it, but I couldn’t make my body move. I was frozen, stunned.

A second or two later, I realized the last blow came from me hitting the ground.

Another second and I could finally shake my head like I wanted to. It didn’t have the desired effect. Instead, vertigo and nausea washed over me. My stomach clenched and I heaved. Eggs and bacon exploded out of my mouth and onto the concrete beside me. The smell of vomit, mixed with the pervasive odor of garbage, made me retch a second time. Almost nothing came up.

I blinked, and pushed myself into a sitting position. Bassen stood by the back door. The bright light above the door silhouetted him so that all I saw was form and shadow.

“Don’t bother,” he sneered. “Ten count’s already come and gone.” He let out a derisive bark of laughter. “There’s your puncher’s chance.”

I spit a mouthful of saliva and leftover vomit onto the concrete. Then I wiped my mouth with my jacket sleeve. My head was pounding and I was short of breath.

“We were done before we even got started,” he said. “You just didn’t know it.”

He shook his head in disgust, spat on the ground near me, turned around and went back into the restaurant.

I watched him go. When the door slammed behind him, I reached into my pocket with a shaking hand. I pulled out the small tape recorder. The red light was still on.

“You got that right,” I whispered. Then I shut off the recorder, and spit again. I struggled to my feet and walked in a slow, shuffling gait to the nearest pay phone.

Just in case, I stayed with Clell that night. Three aspirin and a hot shower did wonders for me, and I felt almost human again. Clell loaned me a T-shirt and a pair of his sweats while my clothes were in the washer. They were about three sizes too large. But even though I swam in both, it felt good to be clean.

I figured I’d be amped up and wanting to talk about everything, even though I knew Clell wouldn’t necessarily approve of every decision I made. But between the shower, the lack of sleep and the beating I took from Bassen, my body was just about ready to give out. I crashed on Clell’s couch and slept through the night without a dream.

The next morning, Clell dropped me at Harrity’s office on his way to his bank job. I noticed an unmarked Crown Victoria with a large radio antenna poking out of the trunk lid parked nearby. Hard to miss a detective’s police issue cruiser.

Harrity’s secretary brought me a cup of coffee and chit-chatted about the weather for a few minutes until the lawyer was ready for me.

I wasn’t surprised to find Ray Browning sitting across from Harrity. The detective was dressed almost as nicely as my lawyer and with a little more flair. His expression was flat, but not nearly as angry as I remembered it being during the execution of the search warrant at my place.

“Detective Browning,” I said, purposefully avoiding the use of his first name.

“Well,” Harrity said, “everyone knows why we’re here. Let’s not waste any time.”

I removed the recorder from my pocket, placed it on Harrity’s desk, and pressed play. Browning listened, not reacting to any of it. When it was over, I pushed stop.

Harrity leaned back, steepling his fingers. “I’d say that’s exculpatory evidence, wouldn’t you, detective?”

“To a philosopher, perhaps. But not to a judge or a jury. Mr. Bassen clearly admits to being at the Beurkens home, and to planting the items you seized at Mr. Kopriva’s apartment. One could even argue that he makes a tacit admission to killing both Mr. Beurkens and Councilman Tate.”

“Maybe you heard that. Maybe other people would, too. But I can’t use any of it.”

“I can’t use it,” Browning repeated. “This is a two-party consent state. You can’t record someone without their consent.”

Browning gave me an annoyed look. “We get a court order, signed by a judge.”

“But I wasn’t acting as an agent of law enforcement,” I said. “I did this on my own.”

“Which is technically a crime,” Browning said. “Another crime. And I still can’t use it.”

“It may not be admissible in a trial charging Mr. Bassen,” Harrity said, “but it would not be precluded from evidence if you went to trial on charges against my client. In fact, I think it would be rather compelling evidence of his innocence.”

“Innocence?” Browning raised his eyebrows. “You call what he’s been up to innocent?”

Harrity waved away the question. “We can discuss degrees of moral behavior in a society of laws at the next conference we both end up at, Detective. Let’s stick to the factual matter of this case.”

“The fact is we caught him in the house. And Beurkens was murdered. Probably Tate, too.”

“Yes,” Harrity said. “And now you have proof that my client was not culpable.”

“It’s simple enough, Detective,” Harrity continued. “You’ve got evidence that you are obligated to use to exonerate my client. The fact that the same evidence is not going to be admissible in charging another suspect doesn’t make it any less exculpatory for my client.”

Browning shook his head. “I don’t even know if that’s a true recording. He could have faked the whole thing.”

“Does his face look faked?” Harrity asked. “You have a booking photo. Unless those additional injuries happened while he was in custody, I’d say it’s reasonable to assume he was assaulted as he described. And by Mr. Bassen.”

“He made several identifying statements,” Harrity said. “I’m sure witnesses saw them together last night at the restaurant. And I will have a copy of the recording sent to your office for voice analysis. That should remove almost all doubt.”

Browning jerked his thumb toward me. “I want him to take a polygraph on this.”

Harrity shook his head. “No. But you will drop the charges against him today, Detective. Or I will refer him to the best civil rights attorney I know.”

Browning stared at Harrity, bristling. Then he stood without a word and left the office. He didn’t slam the door, but I could still sense the anger in the air.

Harrity opened his hands to me. “There you go. Say goodbye to the murder charge and the drug possession charge.”

“Trespass at most. And if they elect to go forward with that, I’ll move for dismissal. You had no criminal intent when you went in that house. If they charge you with trespass, I’ll argue that fact and that they are being retaliatory.”

“Nothing’s for sure, but I’m pretty confident it will be dropped by the prosecutor or dismissed by a judge. Or maybe the detective will withdraw the complaint.”

Harrity shrugged. “You can probably count him out when you’re making a list of your friends down at the police department.”

“Still, I’ve not known Detective Browning to be vindictive. He may make it easy on all of us and just pull the case.”

“If it’s his decision at all. The lieutenant down there at Major Crimes hates me.”

There was a sense of vibrancy in Monique that I hadn’t seen before. I’m sure it was the way she was in her everyday life, but I’d only ever seen her in this hospital bed with bandages and tubes. Now, she sat up in the bed. The only tube was the IV. The bandage on her head was smaller than it had been a couple of days ago. There was strength in her eyes and energy in her smile.

“I’ve avoided looking in a mirror for that very reason,” I said. But that was a lie. I’d stolen a glance after my shower that morning. In addition to the purpling of both black eyes, Bassen had added deep bruises on my jaw, forehead and chin. I looked like I’d gone twelve rounds with the champ. Or more accurately, I looked like a guy who couldn’t pay Bracco the vig. On top of that, my stomach hurt like I’d done a thousand sit-ups.

I nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Either over or at a stalemate. You’re safe from Bracco. Rolo took care of that.”

“But nothing happens to the man, the boxer? He gets nothing for what he did to me?”

“It seems like you and I are the only ones who paid anything in all of this.”

“I don’t know. Bracco lost his front man in the contractor business. Beurkens and Tate lost their lives. I think we came out considerably ahead of the two of them.”

“Rolo,” I said. “That’s where all of this started for me. Him paying me to find out who attacked you.”

She smiled sadly. “I was. With him. But that was just a dream, wasn’t it?”

She shrugged. “Dreams don’t have any value unless they can seem real to us while we’re dreaming them.”

“With what money? And with whom?” She shook her head. “No. Everything I have now is here.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked, but I could see in her eyes that she knew.

Part of me was frustrated with the fact that she was going to pick up right where she left off. She wasn’t going to take a chance on a fresh start. But another part of me railed against the first part, calling bullshit on everything I said. If a fresh start was such a grand thing, why was I still in River City after everything that has happened to me here? I was being hypocritical.

Another part of me had a fleeting fantasy of the two of us taking a train to Montreal as soon as she got out of the hospital, but that one died on the vine.

The Rocket Bakery was full. Dishes clattered, the espresso machine hissed and the hum of conversation filled the air. It wasn’t exactly optimal conditions for chess playing, but that didn’t seem to bother Adam. He made short work of my defenses and ten minutes into the game, I was already on the run.

“Your face looks better,” he said after he took my bishop, almost as an apology.

“It doesn’t help when you make faces, either,” I said. “Just so you know.”

I smiled in spite of everything. “It’s a new strategy I’m going to try out.”

I moved my king one space to the right, but it was in vain. Once you start moving your king around, you might as well concede the game. At least, that’s how it was playing Adam.

He chuckled absently. “If Browning didn’t have a clue, how far from one do you think the lieutenant was?”

That made me smile slightly. One things cops loved to do was run down the brass. Of course, most of them probably deserved it.

I watched Adam as he stared down at the pieces in front of us. Then I asked him quietly, “Why are you still my friend, Adam?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess because, for me, friendship isn’t about what’s happened.”

He fixed me with a look that said I’d just asked the dumbest question in the history of mankind. “It’s about who you are.”

“Duh. What do you think’s been happening since you left the job?” He slid his rook half the length of the board and took a pawn.

There was nothing more to say, so I turned my attention back to the board. Right away, I reached for my other bishop, which was parked at an angle right next to his rook. Then I spotted the little smile at the corner of his lips. I scanned the board, and found his queen protecting the rook.

After a few moments, I wasn’t really seeing it, or the pieces on it. Instead, I was thinking of the past couple of weeks and all that had transpired. All the work I did, the danger, the pain, the near misses, and for what? A few months’ worth of rent?

That was nothing compared to what Rossiter would make on the development deal. Maybe he got it on the level, but somehow I doubted it. And then there was Bracco, who got a free bite at the corruption apple. If Tate had been able to swing the deal for them, Bracco and Beurkens would’ve made a killing. And all of it legitimate money, too. As it was, he probably even got his bribe money back from Tate’s safe, if my guess was right.

Katie is disgusted with me. There’ll be no fixing that relationship. Not ever.

All this, and I was barely richer for it, probably no wiser, and the world was loaded with more dangers for me in the future, thanks to the enemies I made.

“You’re kinda pushy,” I said. “I’m sure that’s against the rules.”

I glanced at the pieces. The scenario was futile. I’m sure he already saw six moves ahead, including the checkmate. I should just tip my king over and offer my hand. Hell, it’s only a friendly game, and Adam has stayed my friend despite every reason not to.

Instead, I reached out and grabbed my knight by his horse head and went on the attack with everything I had.