chapter eleven

“You know what we can do,” I told Greer politely when we had the illusion of privacy. “You know we succeed—perhaps in spite of ourselves. No one wants to hoard leads. My partner and I do not care about the credit.” George opened his mouth, but I pressed my thumb and index nails together and he closed it so fast I heard his teeth click. “Our bosses want the win for their own reasons”—budget, budget, and budget—“but we want the killer caught and stopped. So let the bosses fret the paperwork and the numbers, while the field agents do what they do. What we do.”

“Yeah.” Greer rubbed his chin, which was wide and blue with stubble. He looked like a cartoon character. “Yeah, caught and stopped is good. Lettin’ somebody else fret the paperwork is also good.” He squinted at me. “You’re different from before.”

No doubt.

George snorted. “You’ve got no idea. Sag here is what we call the woman with many faces.”

I was impressed that he had been restraining himself with only a mild threat of violence, but occasionally George could see the big picture: an interdepartmental squabble made us all look bad, left unsightly marks on our records, and inadvertently aided the killer. Agent George Pinkman would not be able to achieve his dream of beating a suspect to death if we could not play nicely long enough to find said suspect.

“Are you doin’ that thing where you’re different people?”

“All the time,” I assured him.

“Yeah, okay.” Anyone in law enforcement dealt with the odd and unusual. You adapted—quickly—or found a new line of work. Greer had been at this a long time. “You made some good points when we talked last. And you got that JBJ freak.”

JBJ freak = the June Boy Job killer. Small wonder it kept coming up. The Twin Cities wasn’t known for its plethora of serial killers, and JBJ had been active up until a few weeks ago. A family’s legacy of racism and murder led to the serial killings of blameless teenage boys over the course of decades. Catching the killer had not been as satisfying as I’d hoped. In the end, only the wrong people got hurt. As they often do. In the end, I was only tired. Oh, and shot. That was when I realized how much I wanted Dr. Gallo … and how much Cadence did not.

(We have the baker; Dr. Gallo is a fantasy. A fantasy getting entirely too cozy with Officer Rivers, I suspect. Why did I insist we have this insipid chat by the soda machine?)

Greer was looking from me to George, and from George to me. “Okay. I shouldn’t have mouthed off like that. But I was surprised to see you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ Come on, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

What is going on here? “I have never subscribed to the notion of bullshitting a bullshitter.”

“C’mon. You know. My boss sent me down here because you guys weren’t supposed to get the squeal.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” Greer looked around as if making sure a tech wasn’t sneaking up on us, ears cocked to eavesdrop. “I don’t blame you for coming down—there’ve been times I showed up places I wasn’t supposed to be. But you better check with your boss.”

“Sound advice. We shall obey. Thank you”—I held out my hand, and saw it swallowed by Greer’s paw—“for your time and courtesy.”

“Real different,” Greer added, and shambled back toward the scene.

George and I looked at each other.

“Okay, what the fuck? We’re only here because Gallo called me? Michaela didn’t send us?”

“Excellent questions.”

“Paperwork fuckup?”

“Such things happen. And the apartment was too neat. And it’s strange having Dr. Gallo there.”

“Uh, okay, at least you’re making perfect sense. You heard my subtle sarcasm, right? You picked up on that?”

“I have to think about this,” I told him.