They put me in the backseat of a patrol car, the perp seat. No handcuffs at least. The EMTs were long gone, having hustled Brenda onto a gurney and into an ambulance, an oxygen mask obscuring her features. Only crime scene commotion remained—blue lights, murmured conversations, the chirp and hiccup of police radios.
Trey was deep in an interview with the uniformed officer who’d reached me first. From my viewpoint, it was hard to tell who was interviewing whom. I knew his goal was as clear and specific as a bull’s-eye—find and take down the bad guy—and his frustration at being unable to do so was showing. Any second now, the pacing would start, the restless relentless energy that he couldn’t dissipate, could only channel. But there was no channel for him now.
I took another swig of coffee. Two hours ago, he’d been a different man—surrender sharpening to demand then softening again to tenderness. Now he was a laser, an arrow unloosed. Once he’d determined that I was indeed alive and unharmed, he’d left me in the custody of one of Kennesaw’s finest and unleashed the protocol on the rest of the team.
Detective Perez joined me. She had her own cup of coffee now that she’d cleared what was officially a crime scene. “EMTs trash everything. Good for Ms. Lovejoy-Burlington, but a major pile of suck for me.”
I huddled deeper in the borrowed jacket. “Is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. Not my field.” Perez nodded Trey’s way. “Your boyfriend is being somewhat…overintense right now.”
“Perseveration.” I tapped my right temple. “Artifact of his brain rearrangement.”
“Ah.” Perez stuck her coffee on top of the car and pulled out a piece of yellow paper, covered with Trey’s neat angular handwriting. “He is hammering home a good point, though, about the security system. He says the same thing you did, that it malfunctioned. Someone switched off your electricity at the fuse box, then shot out your back camera—”
“From the alley. Where it’s dark and there’s a blind spot, vulnerabilities even the most inexperienced perp could notice.”
“Correct. So no video of our suspect in action. Regardless, there should have been an alarm because…” She read from the paper. “There was a redundant wireless system, with battery backup, that also malfunctioned, and your boyfriend says the only way this could have happened was if it were disabled too. But it’s not disabled, he says. Working fine, he says.” She looked up from the paper. “Sure seems convenient, doesn’t it? Blind spots? Busted cameras? Mysterious malfunctions that kept the police from responding?”
A curl of ice-laced wind nipped at my ankles, and I pulled my legs under me. “No, it’s the opposite of convenient, because video footage would prove that things happened exactly the way I say they did.”
“Unless it would prove otherwise.”
I put my coffee down on the floorboard. “Didn’t you get Trey’s statement? Where he corroborated my version of events down to the last detail?”
“I did.” She flipped backward through her notes, tilting her head as if in deep thought. “I also took down where he said that you and Brenda had been arguing for several weeks now about the back parking space, and that this very afternoon you threatened her with bodily harm if she touched your car.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my fingers, but the headache came anyway. “Yes, I said that, and yes, we had been arguing. It’s no secret. But even if it were a secret, Trey would have told you. You can ask him anything, and the answer will fall right out of his mouth most of the time. That frontal lobe damage again. But that also means he’s telling you the truth about what happened tonight—”
“What you told him happened tonight.”
“What he himself heard happening on the phone,” I corrected. “The man’s brain is a justice machine. There’s no room for mercy in it. If I were guilty, he’d hand me over on a silver platter. He’d be upset about it—maybe even devastated—but he’d do it.”
Trey now had his hands on his hips. He took two steps to the left, then two to the right. I kept one eye on him as I continued with Perez.
“Look,” I said, “I know you have to give me a hard time. That’s your job. But you know I didn’t do it. The GSR test came back clean—I haven’t fired a gun.”
She shook her head. “Easy to fool that test. Wash off the residue with soap and water. You have those, I’m sure.”
“Except that you’ve got my gun. So you know that it hasn’t been fired recently, and I know that it’s not going to match any ballistics test you run.”
“You’ve got an entire shop full of weapons to choose from.”
“None of which have been fired tonight. Go ahead. Check. You can look in my scrupulous log book for a list of every firearm in the place.”
She didn’t say anything, and I wondered if they were already doing that very thing, checking out all the weapons in the shop, sniffing for gunpowder, shining flashlights down into the barrels.
“What was Brenda doing out back at night?”
“My best guess? She was probably writing a nasty note to somebody parked there. She’s done it dozens of times, and not just to me.”
Perez pointed toward the shattered camera. “She’d come over here at night? By herself? After hearing a gun go off?”
“She’s done it before, on Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Ask Raymond Junior if you don’t believe me.” Then I remembered. “Have you checked her cell phone records?”
“For what?”
“To see if she was calling a tow truck. That’s what she’d threatened to do. And I saw her phone lying next to her, smashed like somebody stepped on it.”
Perez looked interested. She could see it as clearly as I could. Brenda charging over, calling the tow truck. Being surprised by someone who wasn’t me, who wasn’t one of my friends. Someone murderous.
But Perez wasn’t bending. “Maybe you were the one she was calling to have towed?”
“I wasn’t. But it doesn’t matter. Because you know as well as I do that if I’d been the one to shoot her, I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to save her. I would have let her bleed out on that pavement.”
Perez shrugged slightly, kept her face blank.
“Come on, you know I didn’t do it. In your gut, where it counts. So stop treating me like a suspect and start treating me like what I am—an eyewitness, your very best hope for catching a very bad person.”
She rolled her tongue behind her teeth. “So let’s say you didn’t shoot her.”
“I did not.”
“And she didn’t shoot herself.”
“She did not.”
“Then who did?”
“Now that is the question.”
Perez slipped the yellow paper back into her jacket and retrieved her coffee. “Because I could do the usual detective thing and start trying to figure out who wanted her dead. Besides you, of course.”
I scowled. “I did not—”
“And I will. Due diligence and all that. But I’m thinking whoever shot her didn’t come here to shoot her. I’m thinking they came here to shoot you. So now the question becomes, who wants you dead?”
I gave a mirthless laugh. “You’re gonna need a bigger notebook, Detective.”
“I’m getting that feeling.” Perez pulled out her tablet computer, and with one swipe, flared it to life. “So here’s what I need, Tai—you said I could call you Tai, right? I need you to tell me everything you’ve done, everybody you’ve talked to, everything you’ve found, and everyone you’ve pissed off, starting with the day you found that skull. Lucius was a lowlife. But Brenda Lovejoy-Burlington is a citizen. I’m going to find out who did this to her, and you are going to help me do it.”