chapter thirty-one

Leaving the See Cave, I took the stairs two at a time back down to the third floor and HSS. I tried not to think about the possibility of the Department brass moving me out of Homicide Special, but the tick-tock was palpable. How long would I have to find out who’d killed Frank, Britney, and Dr. Lee?

This time the gauntlet of detectives as I walked to my desk was a series of nodding heads and tentative smiles.

Shin wasn’t back yet. He’d taken the search warrant to the Lees’ Palisades’ home. Once I’d logged the flash dot with the security footage from the Clara Vista Casino in as evidence, I sat down at my desk across from Shin’s empty seat and started to slog through the footage.

An hour later I’d finished scanning one disk when the clatter from the hallway announced Shin’s return.

“How’d it go?” he asked, laying his suit jacket over his chair.

“My bank account’s lighter by four more deployment periods, but you have your partner back. For now.” We knuckle-bumped over the desks, and I explained the fallout from the hearing. “They may move me to Traffic by 2042.”

“That’ll never happen,” Shin said. “Anybody who’s seen you drive knows you’d be a menace in Traffic.”

“That’s reassuring. Anything turn up on the search of Lee’s place?”

“We found this.” Shin reached down and pulled an evidence bag from his jacket pocket with a flourish worthy of a Las Vegas magician. The bag was filled with green ice, the same drug that had killed Britney Devonshire. “And these.” Shin held up another bag filled with syringes still in their packaging. “We’re running a check on all phones and phablets.”

Until we found another copy of Lee’s work on a home machine, the flashdot I’d lifted from Lee’s trash in Clara Vista and left with Denver had just tripled its value.

“We’re a long way from proving Mrs. Lee’s involvement, let alone a murder charge. Still, between the drugs,” Shin continued, waving the bag of ice, “Lee’s bacterial cloud and the print we found at the Devonshire girl’s, we have cause for a formal interview with Mrs. Lee about her deceased husband.”

The casino footage continued to play as Shin spoke. What I saw out of the corner of my eye made my shoulders slump. I let out a low hiss.

“What?” Shin ambled over and stood at my shoulder.

The feed from Camera Three of the Clara Vista Casino parking lot focused on the area where Lee’s Lexus had stood. Camera Four featured the area where Frank sat on stakeout outside the casino—in the car he’d died in.

There was Frank, huffing and puffing as he walked back to his Toyota to wait.

At the sight of my old partner sitting himself down in his own car like it was any ordinary day, I felt icy invisible hands grab hold of my guts and twist.

Before long, Frank’s head bobbed.

“So you were right about Frank nodding off,” Shin said. “How long until you show on the vid?”

“My call woke him up here.” I fast-forwarded to the point on the dot where Frank woke. “I pulled into the lot about ten minutes later,” I said, noting the time code into the record. “Let’s see what happened during that ten minute gap.”

I toggled back to Camera Three. As if on cue, a skinny guy wearing Nike-3000’s, jeans, and a hoodie entered from the left side of the screen. Under the hoodie he wore a Dodgers baseball cap pulled low over his face. Hello, hello.

“Do you have a closer angle on him we can run through facial recognition?” Shin said.

“No need.” Baseball cap or no, it was a face I recognized. “His name’s Harvey Pink. He’s an addict and an agitator at Genesys where Lee worked. I saw him there myself.” I filled Shin in on what the Genesys CEO had said about Pink’s history with that company.

Shin read my mind. “If he’s an agitator, maybe this could be tied to their cause.”

“Activists don’t hide their actions,” I said, “and make them look like accidents. They want credit to advance the cause.”

“Depends on the action,” Shin said.

On the vid, Pink held a brown paper bag with something rectangular-shaped inside. Shin and I watched as Pink approached Lee’s Lexus. He had a slight twitch to his step, and his tense shoulders were hunched up near his ears. Pink walked round the car, stopping near the rear passenger door on the driver’s side—next to the gas tank. He knelt suddenly as if to tie his shoe, but Nike 3000’s fastened with Velcro, not laces. He reached under the car.

“There.” I froze the frame and printed it.

We couldn’t see what Pink had put under the chassis. His angled body blocked the view, but there was no doubt he’d tampered with Lee’s car. When he stood back up, the paper bag in Pink’s hands was empty. Asleep, Frank had missed it. And that tiny lapse had cost my partner his life.

“Well,” Shin said. “That’s solid evidence Lee’s death wasn’t an accident. But it blows a hole in your theory that Mrs. Lee was behind her husband’s death.”

“Unless she hired Pink,” I said. “According to Lee’s boss, he had it in for Lee. She might have met him outside Genesys. Let’s see what Pink has to say before we talk to the widow.”