“Well, baby, like you said, you’ve got a nasty habit of allowing your curiosity to take you over the line.”
“Nastyhabit?”
“How many crime scenes have there been?”
I glanced down at my hands and silently began ticking off each event that came to mind.
“Seb.”
“I’m counting,” I protested.
“It was rhetorical.” Calvin turned on the bedside lamp and got to his feet. “Never mind withholding evidence.”
“I didn’t—”
“Breaking and entering.”
“That was only twice. I think.”
Calvin removed a button-down shirt from the closet and was already pulling his arms through the sleeves as he made for the bathroom on the far right. The tap turned on, and I listened to Calvin brush his teeth and wash his face. The snap of his deodorant lid, a spritz of that spicy, ginger-esque cologne, and Calvin returned to the bedroom while finger-combing his hair. “Well?” he asked. “Are you coming?”
New York is known as The City That Never Sleeps, although in 1898, Jacob Riis was actually talking about The Bowery having never slept—I digress—but I feel like most folks who use that nickname today haven’t seen Manhattan at 3:00 a.m. on a Thursday.
Because it’s pretty sleepy.
I laid my head against the passenger window, watching the streetlamps pass overhead, the tails of tungsten lingering a second too long, courtesy of the astigmatism in my left eye. I shifted my gaze to the shuttered storefronts, empty sidewalks, and one couple drunk-stumbling from the doors of what was lit like a swanky club, the two holding each other up and laughing. The interior of the car was quiet but for the AC blowing on the lowest setting and Calvin’s hands shifting now and then on the wheel.
I straightened and looked at Calvin’s profile. “Are you mad?”
He glanced at me and shook his head. “No, baby.” Calvin put a hand on my thigh and squeezed. “I’m frustrated, because I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I feel like I got called into the principal’s office of a school I don’t even attend.”
Calvin didn’t say anything else as he returned his hold to the wheel. He drove a few more blocks downtown on Second Avenue, passed the turnoff for West Houston, a strip of greenery with a basketball court and playground along the east side of Chrystie Street, then turned onto a little one-way that was home to walk-up apartment buildings with the shadows of fire escapes looming overhead like iron monsters blacker than the black of night. The swatch of light that interrupted the darkness belonged to the twin lanterns marking the doors of Calvin’s precinct. He parallel parked in a spot likely meant for a cruiser, because after turning the ignition off, Calvin slapped his NYPD parking permit on the dash.
We both got out and Calvin took the lead. The summer heat wave hadn’t let up, even in the middle of the night, and the combination of oppressive heat, dead air, and fetid moldering trash awaiting morning pickup was enough to make me gag on every breath.
Inside the precinct, Calvin offered a quiet hello to the officer on desk duty, then led the way to the elevator. We rode to the third floor before entering the Homicide Squad bullpen. There were a dozen desks in the open floor plan, all piled high with paperwork and cluttered with coffee cups, framed photos of family that police didn’t see nearly enough with the hours kept, and those weird tchotchkes that have a way of accumulating on desktops over the years: stress balls, dying plants, art projects from children that are kind of ugly but, hey, they’ll only be five once, and notes left for other detectives, ranging from polite reminders to outright obnoxiousness. One of these I could make out as we walked by—a printout in all caps, in what might very well have been Comic Sans, was taped to a shelf beside an industrial office copier:Which of you nutfucks keeps changing the printer default to A4?
Someone, another detective, had taken a Sharpie to the notice and drawn two Mr. Peanuts in a compromising position with a speech bubble that said:I’m nutting!Turns out, I was intimately familiar with that handwriting, but I declined to comment on my husband’s apparent cartooning skills because he was still a touch grouchy at being dragged out of bed at half past three, especially with me tagging along for reasons still unknown.
The details to the rest of the bullpen were washed out by the overhead fluorescents. I stopped walking long enough to dig my sunglasses from the messenger bag tossed over my shoulder, and when I looked up, I realized Calvin had been leading us toward a coffee station in the back left corner, where three other cops were actually present.
There was Ferguson, of course, wearing the same rumpled button-down and trousers from that morning, chewing the filter of another cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth. The other man I didn’t know. I suspected he was my age, but with the additive that he knew how to wear, and could nicely fill out, a suit. His hair was light—blond, I assumed—and styled. So either he hadn’t been to bed yet, or was particularly adept at pulling himself together in the middle of the night. In contrast, I’d expelled all my energy wiggling into too-tight-but-it’s-fashion-I-guess jeans, and yanked on a shirt Max had bought me for my thirty-fifth birthday that said:Smartass With a Great Ass. I’d also not bothered to comb my hair. The woman attending this sausagefest was Quinn Lancaster—a tiny thing with a pixie haircut, shoulder holster, penchant for vanilla cigarillos, and who had put the fear of God in me after Calvin and I had officially tied the knot by reminding me, in no uncertain terms, that if I ever did something to hurt him, she knew how to make a body disappear.
“Sebastian,” she said in greeting before taking a sip from a coffee mug held in one hand.
“Quinn.”
“What’d you do?”
“I wish I knew.”
Ferguson took the gnarled cigarette from his mouth and used it as a pointer, saying, “Obviously, you know Lancaster.”
Obviously.
Not only was she Calvin’s partner and best friend, but no way had Ferguson forgotten when she’d been sidelined during the Bones case and risked her career to help me break into a dead man’s apartment to find the lost skull of a racist paleontologist in order to save Calvin’s life.
