EIGHTEEN

I knew Donna Nast had left the police force, but I’d come upon the knowledge by accident. What I’d never gotten were details. I doubted she would have given them if I’d asked. Circumstances at the time had given me a sort of tunnel vision. Nasty and I were never going to be friends, but more than once we’d been on the same side of a critical situation. I didn’t like her one bit, but I’d never seen her be unethical. If pressed to guess, I would have suspected her break-up with Tex had made employee relations more difficult. The knowledge that she’d quit over an infraction came as a surprise. It also hinted at a more vulnerable side of Nasty, one I hadn’t been expecting.

She turned to me. “Don’t get any ideas, Madison. I quit for a hundred different reasons and my life has never been better. I own my own company. There are no office politics at Big Bro. My staff knows I’m the boss. We get the job done, and I make twice what I made on the force. I sleep very well at night.”

Garcia returned. “The Deputy Inspector wants to talk to you,” he said to Tex.

“You wait here and keep them company.” Tex looked back and forth between Nasty and me like he wasn’t sure what he’d find when he returned. Rocky sat in one of the chairs by the front door. No way was it as comfortable as the ball chair he slept in at Mad for Mod. In his own way, he’d had a pretty stressful day, and I felt sorry for him.

And then I remembered Connie and her girls’ night in. I’d completely forgotten to call her to let her know I wouldn’t be there. No wonder I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends.

“Excuse me,” I said. I walked out of earshot and called. “Connie, it’s Madison. I’m at the police station.”

“Are you okay? I saw something on the news about the pajama factory and the lawyer’s office—”

“I’m fine. Everything is fine. It’s just—this day is never going to end, and I forgot about movie night. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry. I called it off when I saw the news. Joanie’s here. She’s helping me with my record sleeves. She’s a genius. She brought a box of Archie comics from her store, and we’re making the sleeves out of them. We’re going to make a killing.”

I was happy to hear Connie excited about her new project but had serious doubts about the potential profit structure to a business that relied on the gang from Riverdale.

“You’re still coming to Mad for Mod tomorrow, right? I’ll bring you a sample,” she added.

“Right. See you then.”

I hung up and turned around. Nasty stood by the door staring at me. “I missed girls’ night,” I said.

“And I wasn’t invited? Darn. I’m due to have my hair braided.”

Something about her flip tone, minutes after confessing she’d left her job here at the precinct over an infraction, made me laugh. I didn’t want to, but the exhaustion, confusion, and hunger hit me, and it was all I could do. I clamped a hand over my mouth, too late.

Surprisingly, Nasty laughed too. “I don’t know what it is about you, Madison, but you tap into my inner mean girl.”

“I don’t think I have an inner mean girl,” I said.

“Really?” She stood right in front of me and turned around, so her perky backside in skin-tight jeans was facing me. She draped her long, streaked hair to one side and looked at me over her shoulder. “What do you think of these jeans?” she asked.

“Those are jeans? I thought they were a tattoo.”

She turned back to face me. “There’s hope for you yet.” She walked behind the front desk and unfolded the top of the bag Tex had brought. Whatever was inside caused her expression to change. She pushed the bag away and opened a small refrigerator. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “There’s nothing in here except yogurt, and I’m pretty sure that was mine before I quit.” She shut the door.

Garcia opened a drawer to his desk and pulled out a box of protein bars. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

Nasty reached in and pulled out two, and then came to the table and offered me one. I took it. She moved to the coffee pot in the corner and filled two cups.

“That’s not fresh,” Garcia said.

“Do I look like I care?” Nasty answered. She came back and handed me a cup. “You’re not a suspect in anything. You know that, right? If Tex thought you did something, you’d be in holding. For him, the job comes first. Period.”

“I know,” I said. I stared in the direction of the hallway. “There were some questions about a gun used in a homicide today, and I voluntarily had my prints scanned so they could be checked against the evidence.”

“There had to be something connecting you to the gun. People don’t just walk in and say, ‘scan my prints to see if they match evidence in a homicide.’ Even people like you.”

“I resent the inference.”

“I didn’t know I made one.”

I turned to look at her. Even when she was trying to be nice, she rubbed me the wrong way. “Alice Sweet asked her grandson, John, to draw up her will. She left me the pajama factory and gave John a sealed envelope that we thought might explain her motive. Inside was a letter and a key to a unit at Hernando’s Hide-It-Away.”

“Hernando’s,” she repeated. “That place is shady. I think they rent units by the hour, not the month.”

“I found a gun in the storage unit. Until recently, I had every reason to believe the letter, the box, and the gun had been left to me just like the pajama factory. The murder took place at the pajama factory. You said you saw it on the news, remember? It wasn’t a stretch for Captain Allen, or anybody, to place me in the middle of this investigation. Scanning my prints was an easy way to take me out.”

“Did your prints hit?”

“No.”

“Why not? They should have.”

“I never touched the gun.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I found the gun. It seemed like an odd thing to find in a storage unit I didn’t know I had, so I called Captain Allen. He joined me and took possession of it. When he told Garcia to scan my prints, he probably thought I’d picked it up at some point.”

She smiled slowly. “You didn’t, but he did. And when he ran his prints to show off for Erin, they came back with a hit. And now he’s on the phone with the deputy inspector trying to explain why. I would love to be a fly on that wall.” Her smile grew wider, showing off teeth that could only be that white by using Crest Whitestrips more frequently than recommended. My inner mean girl bit back a comment about them glowing under a black light.

I sipped at the stale coffee. There was no way anyone would believe Tex had something to do with the crimes today. His phone call was probably a technicality, and now he was communicating details of the case, maybe even soliciting another professional opinion. But the longer we sat out front, the more curious I became about Nasty’s history.

“What happened here?” I asked her. “When you left the force. Captain Allen said it wasn’t a fireable offense. Why’d you leave?”

“That’s none of your business,” she said. “I don’t live in the past like you. It happened, I made a choice, and now my life is better. I cut a lot of dead weight when I left. That stupid mistake was probably my subconscious giving me an out.”

“You think I live in the past?” I asked.

“Your whole life is the past. The clothes you wear, the houses you decorate, the movies you watch. It’s all about what was, not what can be. I’m no shrink, but sure seems to me you’re trying to live in a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

That was it. I jumped up from the table and Rocky, who’d been curled up at my feet, jumped too. The sudden movement made the table bounce, and my cup of stale coffee splashed onto the splintered surface.

“You know nothing about me,” I said. “Decorating and clothes, those are interests. Everybody has interests.”

She remained seated and seemed amused at my reaction. “You take ‘interests’ to a whole other level.”

“How many times since you walked in that door have you mentioned that you own your own business? I own my own business too. I moved to Texas with a car filled with my most valued possessions and nothing else. Everything I have is because I cut ties from my past and moved on. If I lived in the past, I’d still be in Pennsylvania.”

Just thinking about those days left me shaking. I’d moved from Pennsylvania to Texas to start fresh. I’d bought an apartment building, adopted Rocky, and started Mad for Mod. I’d taken up swimming to stay active and threw myself into volunteer work at the Mummy so I wouldn’t have time to think about what I’d left behind. In time, the memories had faded. I thought I’d moved on, but I hadn’t. I hated Nasty for bringing it all back to the surface.

She pulled a bunch of napkins out of a wicker basket that sat on the end of the table and sopped up the coffee spill. In my eagerness to deflect what she said, I’d given her plenty of fodder for more verbal jabs. She wadded up the napkins and tossed them across the room into a small metal wastepaper basket. Garcia sat at the desk, staring at his screen and clicking his mouse. He was either more engrossed in Solitaire than anyone I’d ever seen before, or he was doing his best to pretend he, or we, weren’t all in the same room.

Nasty sat back and put her hands on the arms of her chair. “Garcia,” she said. “Can you give me and Madison some privacy?”

He looked up. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Both of our prints are in your database. If one of us kills the other one, it’ll be a nice, neat case.” She raised her hand from the arm of her chair and made a shoo motion. “Go file something. We’ll be fine.”

It was late at night and, aside from us, the precinct had been quiet. I had my doubts about Officer Garcia’s future, but that wasn’t my concern. Garcia stood up and said, “I’m going to the evidence closet, but I can still see you from the cameras back there.”

“Great. Not sure what you’re hoping to see, but let me be clear. Madison isn’t my type.”

Garcia had the decency to blush. He carried a clipboard and a set of keys to a closet behind the counter, unlocked the door, and then went inside.

“So stupid,” Nasty said. “No way he’s watching us while we’re out here.” She stood up and went behind the counter. “I could hack into their system in two minutes. See their open cases and suspect lists.” Her eyes danced over the files in the tray next to her desk. “I won’t, but I could.”

“Why’d you quit?” I asked again, this time more gently.

“I left for a hundred different reasons: rampant sexism. My history with Tex. The polyester uniforms.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder and glanced up at me as if checking my reaction. I focused on putting out a non-judgmental vibe. “I saw a chance to start over and be the one in charge and I took it.”

“I get all that, but you could have left anytime you wanted. Why did it take an infraction to motivate you?”

“Because the price of my error was too high.”

“People make mistakes, Donna. Even Captain Allen said that.”

“Yes, but the mistakes people make don’t usually drive others to suicide.”