I was glad to be away from Angela London. Not least because I was spoken for and didn’t enjoy being pawed at. But mostly, she was…unnerving. Of course she’d also been so falling-down drunk that it’d made any sort of serious discussion a lost cause. Except for the acknowledgment of the Cope skull. Angela had said she didn’t take it. That didn’t mean she didn’t at leastwantit.
I stared at my phone’s screen as I recounted that haphazard dialogue. Automatically, I found myself pressing the text icon and choosing Calvin’s name out of the list of ongoing messages. It was an involuntary motion—to check in, to say hello. I scrolled through older conversations and smiled. A lot of I-like-yous and see-you-tonights. Written promises. Vows of safety. Assurances of dinner dates and errands run. Everything I could ever wish for—hope for—in a lifelong partner.
I dipped my chin and pressed my scarf to my nose as it started to run with the threat of tears.
“Come on,” I said to myself in a firm voice, forcing the tightness in my throat to ease. “Stop.” I clicked off the screen, but then it lit up and started vibrating with an incoming call. No one I knew, but the area code was local. A startling fear punched me right in the chest. What if this was the Collector? I answered with a rushed “Hello?”
“Sebastian Snow?”
“Yes?”
“This is Detective Alex Wainwright. I work in Major Cases for the NYPD.”
“O-oh. Uhm, hi.”
“I’d like to meet with you and discuss your fiancé, Detective Calvin Winter.”
“What? Why?”
“Are you busy?” he asked with a bit of an accusatory tone.
Yes, technically. I had the keys to Frank Newell’s apartment and was going to… uh, well, what, exactly? Let myself in and poke about? Hope to uncover a clue Calvin overlooked after Frank had been reported missing, when Calvin would have already thoroughly scoped out the paleontologist’s home first and foremost? I needed to speak with Neil. And Quinn. I had to know if the intern had come up in their initial investigation. Daniel was my next stop in the ongoing adventure of Where in the World is Edward Cope? Iknewit.
“I’m not—no. But this morning the NYPD told me to get lost.”
“And now I’m telling you tounlose yourself,” Wainwright replied, firm but polite. “Why don’t you come downtown to 1PP?”
One Police Plaza.
“Or should I send a car?” he asked.
I craned my head and could barely make out stairs to the Downtown 6 across the street. “No,” I answered. “I’m only a few subway stops away.”
I WASput in a room for questioning. As if I was a suspect.
I mean, look to the spouse. That was policing 101. And being gay didn’t seem to make a difference in that angle of approach.
But Calvinwasn’tdead.
So I was pretty goddamn offended. Not that anyone bothered to ask me.
“I was under the assumption these rooms had more space to stretch out,” I said as the door opened and a well-built middle-aged man with what I guessed was salt-and-pepper hair stepped inside. He pulled it off well. In fact, he probably looked sexier now than he did at twenty-five.
He smiled, bemused. “You must be Sebastian Snow.” He sat at the table with me. “Detective Wainwright.”
“The production value of real life is always a bit of a letdown after comparing it to the movies,” I continued.
Wainwright opened the file he slapped down on the tabletop. “What do you say we skip the bullshit, hmm?”
“That’d be preferable,” I said.
Wainwright motioned to his own face, as if he were wearing glasses. “Take them off.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have a light sensitivity.” I motioned upward. “And fluorescents give me headaches without sunglasses.”
